Notes

Series Preface

1. John Wesley, Sermon 39, “Catholic Spirit,” §III.4, in Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 2:79–95. We know, however, that his public ties with Anglicanism were at some points in his life anything but tender and close.

Chapter 1 The Old Testament Is Dying

1. I make no claims about Christianity elsewhere; perhaps other places on the planet are doing better. For the similarities and differences between Judaism and Christianity with reference to my diagnosis, see note 43 below.

2. As one example, I mention a church near my home whose sign reads “The Praise Center: A New Testament Church for the 21st Century.” So-called New Testament churches of various sorts (typically of the low-church or free-church variety) are not uncommon in the United States; by contrast, I have never once seen an “Old Testament Church.” Regardless, the root problem is not restricted to more conservative-evangelical wings of Christianity and may be even more pronounced outside such circles. Ellen F. Davis tracks the same trend in mainline Christianity: “The Old Testament is ceasing to function as Scripture in the European-American mainstream church” (“Losing a Friend,” 83).

3. For the “God is dead” controversy, see Elson, “Theology: Toward a Hidden God,” beginning on 82. The stark black-and-white cover of that issue of Time has “Is God Dead?” in red (http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19660408,00.html). Note also the slightly earlier treatment in Elson, “God Is Dead Movement”; the letters responding to “Theology: Toward a Hidden God” in Time, April 15, 1966, 13; April 22, 1966, 9; April 29, 1966, 19; and May 6, 1966, 9; and the publisher’s letter on May 20, 1966, 23. The God-is-dead idea and Thomas J. J. Altizer, one of the theologians with whom it is inextricably linked, are also mentioned in the unsigned article by Elson, “Changing Theologies for a Changing World,” 42–43; cf. the cover story in that issue, “Is God Coming Back to Life?,” beginning on 40. More recently, see the autumn 2006 issue of Emory Magazine. In 1966, Anthony Towne wrote an entertaining obituary for God for the New York Times (“‘Obituary’ for God”): “God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the world’s Jews, ultimate reality of Christians, and most eminent of all divinities, died late yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing influence.” Long before Altizer et al., there was Nietzsche, Gay Science, esp. 181. Cf. R. Morgan with J. Barton, Biblical Interpretation, 60.

4. See, e.g., Booth, Colomb, and J. Williams, Craft of Research, 120–29.

5. Cf. McKibben, End of Nature, xxiv (on environmental issues).

6. To be sure, anecdotes aren’t all bad and comprise part of the arsenal in the New Historicism (see Hens-Piazza, New Historicism). Note also Prothero’s instructive use of both hard data and anecdotes in his Religious Literacy. See chap. 2 below for some (semi)empirical data to support the diagnosis offered here.

7. See Bergen, Twisted Cross, 143–54; and chap. 5 below.

8. Hebrew fragments of some apocryphal books were found at Qumran—notably Sirach, Tobit, Psalm 151, and the Letter of Jeremiah. See Collins, “Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha”; and chap. 7 below.

9. Similarly, neither does simply reading the Bible guarantee some sort of “faithful” engagement or response. See, anecdotally, Plotz, Good Book; and chaps. 2, 4–6 below. Some studies on correlations between Scripture reading and various ethical activities show this as an area that is at least theoretically open to social-scientific analysis. See, e.g., Fawcett and Linkletter, “Bible Reading and Adolescents’ Attitudes.”

10. Brueggemann, “Preaching a Sub-Version,” 197.

11. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 71–72.

12. Bly puts it memorably in Eight Stages of Translation, 15–16: “As we read the literal [translation of the poem], our first reaction is: What happened to the poem? Where did it go? So we read the original again and it’s still marvelous; so evidently something has been left out [of the translation]—probably the meaning.”

13. These, too, don’t guarantee much of anything. See at note 9 above and chaps. 8–9 below.

14. For literature more generally, see Booth, Company We Keep, esp. his chapters on figurative language (293–373). For the “livability” of metaphor, see also Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

15. John Calvin puts things similarly, though using a visual metaphor: “Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:70 [1.6.1]).

16. Berger and Luckman, Social Construction of Reality.

17. Cf. the following works, some of which are in debate: Deutscher, Through the Language Glass; McWhorter, Language Hoax; and Pinker, Stuff of Thought.

18. Cf., e.g., D. Morgan, Visual Piety, esp. 1–20.

19. See Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 63–66; M. Smith, “The Heart and Innards.”

20. See Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 88; and Wyatt, “Vocabulary and Neurology of Orientation”; reprinted in Wyatt, Mythic Mind, 125–50.

21. For the dialogical complexity within Job, see, e.g., Newsom, Book of Job.

22. See further chaps. 3–7 below.

23. See Jacobs, Year of Living Biblically. Note also R. Evans, Year of Biblical Womanhood; B. Cohen, My Jesus Year; within the same orbit, Plotz, Good Book.

24. See L. Johnson, “Imagining the World Scripture Imagines.” See also, inter alia, Brueggemann, Book That Breathes New Life, xv–xvi; Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text, 13–14; and more generally, Kort, “Take, Read.”

25. Cf. Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 4; also chaps. 4–5 below on figural reading.

26. Booth, Company We Keep, is helpful on this point: such formation is neither automatic nor invariably “positive.” Rather, readers are always making judgments about what they read, which, for Booth, ultimately comes down to a decision regarding whether or not the reader will choose to keep company with this or that piece of literature, deeming it a close friend, a distant acquaintance, or a downright enemy. Other useful works include Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor; and Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking.

27. See, e.g., Kaltner and McKenzie, Back Door Introduction to the Bible, 127–28. On the RCL, see chap. 2 below.

28. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, esp. 18–27; also 152–65, with an extensive listing of reviews and secondary treatments of Lindbeck’s work. Among others, note Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology”; Michalson, “Response to Lindbeck”; and reviews by Corner; Raynal; G. Kaufman. See also Marshall, “Introduction: The Nature of Doctrine after 25 Years,” which details many critiques of Lindbeck but also offers Marshall’s own refutation of several of them. An OT scholar’s perspective may be found in Childs, New Testament as Canon, 541–46; and Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 21–22. Lindbeck, in turn, contributed to one of Childs’s Festschriften: “Postcritical Canonical Interpretation.” Two other works that deal with linguistics and cultural factors are Blount, Cultural Interpretation; and Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, esp. 3–25.

29. Lindbeck is explicitly dependent on Clifford Geertz (esp. his essays “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,” and “Religion as a Cultural System”—all in Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures, 1–30, 33–54, 55–86, 87–125, respectively) among others. Lindbeck’s debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein is also notable (seen in the index to Nature of Doctrine, 170). See also the classic study by Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, esp. 31–97. Of course structuralism, which depends heavily on linguistic research and analogues (note Lévi-Strauss’s dependence on Saussure), has also been vigorously debated and critiqued, esp. by thinkers writing from poststructuralist perspectives (including that of deconstruction).

30. Jacobson, “Translator’s Preface,” xii.

31. See, e.g., Rorty, Linguistic Turn.

32. Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God.

33. Borg, Speaking Christian; and Hauerwas, Working with Words.

34. Borg, Speaking Christian, 5–6; in this same context he explicitly cites Lindbeck. Cf. also ibid., 18: “It is the premise of this book that religions are like languages. If we take this seriously, it means that being Christian means speaking Christian. To cease to speak Christian would mean no longer being Christian—just as ceasing to speak French would mean no longer being French. Speaking Christian is essential to being Christian.”

35. Hauerwas, Working with Words, x.

36. Ibid., 86–87, emphasis original.

37. See, e.g., Harrison, Last Speakers; and D. Wheeler, “Death of Languages.” See further chap. 3 below.

38. See Prothero, Religious Literacy.

39. Respectively: Vischer, “Das alte Testament als Gottes Wort,” 386; Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament, 2; Kraeling, Old Testament since the Reformation, 7–8; G. E. Wright, Challenge of Israel’s Faith, v–vi; Buechner, Magnificent Defeat, 110; Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 31.

40. I take the term “happiologists” from Peterson, Primer in Positive Psychology, 7–8, who is careful to say that “happiology” is not the same as authentic happiness, one of the primary foci of Positive Psychology. Peterson does not use the term with reference to prosperity preachers, which is how I am employing it.

41. See OED, s.v. “diagnosis, n.”

42. Ibid.

43. It is not altogether clear to me that the adjective “Old” in “Old Testament” is part of the problem; while it certainly isn’t the whole of it, it may well play into it. Christopher R. Seitz has thought hard about the matters of nomenclature and the two-testament form of the Christian Bible; see his Word without End, esp. 61–74; Seitz, Figured Out, esp. 91–190; and most recently, Seitz, Character of Christian Scripture. In any event, the Christian language I employ here (and throughout) is intentional precisely because what I am discussing is largely a Christian issue. The problem is not evident in quite the same way in Judaism, for several obvious reasons. Even so, Judaism also has a kind of NT analogue, a corpus of postbiblical authoritative literature: the rabbinic material (esp. Mishnah and Talmud). Thus Judaism, too, may not be completely immune from the potential death of Scripture. In this regard, notice Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s critique of rabbinic “supersessionism” in which the rabbis always trump the Bible (“The Emergence of Jewish Biblical Theologies,” in Studies in the Bible and Feminist Criticism, esp. 367–68). At least it seems safe to say that certain portions of the Hebrew Bible are more authoritative than others in many segments of contemporary Judaism, representing small deaths of a kind. See, e.g., Sommer, “Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture”; and the related matters in chaps. 2 and 4–6.

44. Cf. G. Kaufman’s review of Nature of Doctrine, where he makes the point that “no linguistic grammar ever is unchanging in the way in which Lindbeck’s doctrinal ‘grammar’ is supposed to be” (241); Tanner, Theories of Culture, 138–43.

45. See Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh; W. S. Brown and B. D. Strawn, Physical Nature of Christian Life. For the power of poetry to combine thinking and feeling, see chaps. 8–9.

46. This was, of course, a major critique of Lindbeck; see notes 28 and 44 above. The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein is important at this point. See Sluga, “Wittgenstein,” esp. 977–78, 980. Perhaps the most embodied form of language is sign language.

47. Cf. Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 1–4. In several of his works, John McWhorter makes a compelling case against any pure, “blackboard” grammar, and the best proof against that is precisely the historical development of the language in question. See, e.g., McWhorter, Word on the Street; McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing; McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue; McWhorter, “Linguistics from the Left”; McWhorter, What Language Is. Even so, the existence of diachronic development does demonstrate change from earlier forms and thus at times highlights more pristine (at least theoretically) linguistic stages. For more on pidgins and creoles, see chap. 3. On the English language, see Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

48. See, e.g., I. Young, Rezetko, and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts, esp. 1:173–200; Kutscher, Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll, 62–71; Bauer and Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache; Sperber, Historical Grammar of Biblical Hebrew; Rendsburg, “Comprehensive Guide to Israelian Hebrew”; Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew; Miller-Naudé and Zevit, Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew; Day, Recovery of the Ancient Hebrew Language; Sáenz-Badillos, History of the Hebrew Language; Waldman, Recent Study of Hebrew; Schniedewind, Social History of Hebrew; Sawyer, Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts; and more generally, chap. 3 below (with additional bibliography).

49. I mean to avoid, then, giving the impression that “God spoke Hebrew” and also skirt some of the (comparable) critiques raised to Lindbeck’s work (see above). See further chaps. 8–9.

50. Cf., inter alia, Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament.

51. For an example of how the Passion Narratives of the NT depend on the book of Exodus (“deep structure”), see Strawn, “Exodus,” esp. 33–34. “Deep language” alludes to C. S. Lewis’s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; and “universal grammar” alludes to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory.

Chapter 2 Initial Testing

1. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey. The full report is available online.

2. Prothero, Religious Literacy.

3. In addition to the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, cf. the national study “The Bible in American Life” (March 6, 2014), conducted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture; and the National Study of Youth and Religion, conducted by the University of Notre Dame, along with two books that explicate that study: C. Smith with Denton, Soul Searching; and Dean, Almost Christian. Cf. also Kinnaman with Hawkins, You Lost Me. Finally, Beal’s amazing book Rise and Fall of the Bible, while not empirically based, deserves careful consideration.

4. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 4.

5. Ibid., 6.

6. Ibid. The differences among persons of different ethnic backgrounds raise questions about possible cultural bias(es) in the survey, esp. over what “counts” as religious knowledge. See further below.

7. Ibid., 7.

8. Then again, of the 3,412 people surveyed, only 2% answered 29 or more of the 32 questions correctly, and only 8 individuals scored a perfect 32. On the opposite end of the curve, 3% got less than 5 questions right, including 6 people who missed every single question (ibid., 16). For a listing of the Bible questions, see note 13 below.

9. The survey and previous Pew Forum studies reveal high levels of educational attainment for Jewish and atheist/agnostic groups, which “partially explains their performance” (ibid., 10). That granted, even after the survey controlled for levels of education and other demographic traits (race, age, gender, and region), “significant differences in religious knowledge persist among adherents of various faith traditions” with atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Mormons still having the highest levels of religious knowledge, followed by evangelical Protestants (ibid., 11). For more on the LDS church, see Dean, “Mormon Envy,” chap. 3 in Almost Christian, 45–60.

10. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 7–8. Others have put the number closer to 20%. See Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves, “Overreporting Church Attendance in America”; Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show.”

11. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 8.

12. See ibid., 15, on how the survey did not necessarily “reflect the most important things to know about religion,” even as it was not meant “to test mere trivia.” Instead, “the Pew Forum selected questions intended to serve as indicators of how much people know in several areas. . . . The questions included in the survey were intended to be representative of a body of important knowledge about religion; they were not meant to be a list of the most essential facts.”

13. Ibid., 8. The seven Bible questions on the survey are as follows (ibid., 19): (1) What is the first book of the Bible? (an open-ended question); (2) What are the names of the first four books of the New Testament, that is, the four Gospels? (open-ended); (3) Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born? Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth, or Jericho? (multiple choice); (4) Which of these is not in the Ten Commandments? Do unto others . . . , no adultery, no stealing, keep Sabbath? (multiple choice); (5) Which figure is associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering? Job, Elijah, Moses, or Abraham? (multiple choice); (6) Which figure is associated with leading the exodus from Egypt? Moses, Job, Elijah, or Abraham? (multiple choice); (7) Which figure is associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God? Abraham, Job, Moses, or Elijah? (multiple choice).

14. Only 19% of Protestants as a whole got this question right (ibid., 23). Compare the following groups: white evangelical (28%), Mormon (22%), atheist/agnostic (22%), white mainline (14%), Jewish (10%), nothing in particular (10%), Black Protestant (9%), Catholic (9%).

15. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 9, also see 17.

16. Ibid., 8.

17. Ibid., 20. Another troubling statistic: only 47% of the Hispanic Catholics surveyed correctly answered the question about where Jesus was born (ibid., 22).

18. Cf. the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 2003 definition of literacy: “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts” (Aspects of Literacy Assessment, 21). On biblical illiteracy, see above and chaps. 4–6 below. A study of German students also revealed that many thought the Golden Rule belonged to the Decalogue: Beyer and Waltermathe, “Good, the Bad and the Undecided,” esp. 158n1. My point in this book is less about biblical literacy than about the Bible’s mortality.

19. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 10; see further 37–38, 46.

20. Ibid., 10 (see also n. 3 on that page). At this point, given the emphasis on embodied and communal practices, the survey seems to evade many of its critics who have deemed it overly cognitive. See, e.g., Kristof, “Test Your Savvy on Religion”; Douthat, “God and the Details”; Plate, “Why Pollsters Still Don’t Get Religion”; and a blog from the Social Science Research Council, “Surveying Religious Knowledge.” Thanks to Steven M. Tipton for these references.

21. See Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, 38, 40, 50.

22. On the importance of how the OT is present, not just if it is, see chap. 1 above and chaps. 4–6 below.

23. The same could also be said for much Sunday school curricula, at least in adult education formats, where many classes often do not follow published or denominational materials.

24. Newton, Best Sermons 1924; Newton, Best Sermons 1925; Newton, Best Sermons 1926; Newton, Best Sermons, vol. 4 (1927).

25. Butler, Best Sermons: 1944 Selection; Butler, Best Sermons: 1946 Edition; Butler, Best Sermons: 1947–1948 Edition; Butler, Best Sermons: 1949–1950 Edition; Butler, Best Sermons: 1951–1952 Edition; Butler, Best Sermons: 1955 Edition; Butler, Best Sermons, vol. 7, 1959–1960 Protestant Edition; Butler, Best Sermons, vol. 8, 1962 Protestant Edition; Butler, Best Sermons, vol. 9, 1964 Protestant Edition; Butler, Best Sermons, vol. 10, 1966–1968 Protestant Edition. As is clear from the titles, vols. 7–10 are Protestant collections. The earlier volumes are ecumenical and even interfaith insofar as they occasionally include sermons from Jewish rabbis. While most of the authors are North Americans, there are a few from other locations (e.g., Britain, Australia).

26. Cox, Best Sermons, vols. 1–3; Cox, Best Sermons, vols. 4–7.

27. See Butler, Best Sermons: 1947–1948 Edition, xvii.

28. Cox, Best Sermons, 1:ix.

29. Ibid., x. These criteria are repeated in other volumes (as in Cox, Best Sermons, 3:ix).

30. For the beginnings of such an analysis for the Cox series, see Miles, “Proclaiming the Gospel of God,” esp. 113–76.

31. I do not know exactly what to make of the fact that the Newton series has only one (1.1%) no-text sermon, while Butler has 172 (out of 483, or 35.6%) and Cox has 29 (out of 305, or 9.5%) of them. The patterns of the no-text sermons are also curious. Indeed, the 1949–50 volume edited by Butler includes a no-text sermon on Easter Sunday! Guilt for these sermons must be spread around: they are written by Protestants, Jesuits, rabbis, and, in one case at least, by a Quaker Friend. In the latter case, the preached text was a poem by Robert Burns.

32. This is a not infrequently encountered trope, even in books devoted to the exact subject of preaching the Old Testament. See, e.g., Achtemeier, Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel; and Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament.

33. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 157.

34. Even these are often conjoined with NT texts for “combined sermons.”

35. Analogically, this could be seen as a kind of linguistic interference—the OT lection may only have been chosen because of its presence in the NT. See chaps. 3, 7–9.

36. Though Ecclesiastes does not appear in the RCL on Sundays, Eccles. 3:1–13 is the OT lesson for New Year’s Day in all three years.

37. On the latter, see also the textual dexterity (equivalent to linguistic fluency) evident in the sermons collected in Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800.

38. Indeed, it seems safe to say—given the importance of the OT in early Judaism and in the nascent Christianity that emerged from it, not to mention the slow growth, stabilization, and finalization of the NT writings and canon—that for several centuries the OT texts were at least as important if not more important than the NT ones. I am grateful to Anthony Briggman and Ian McFarland for discussions on this matter.

39. See Davis, Wondrous Depth, 5. For the sermons themselves, see Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs.

40. Brueggemann, Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann; Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text; Brueggemann, Threat of Life. Appendix 5 presents sermons from the latter two volumes that are not found in the former—a total of seven and six sermons, respectively.

41. C. Campbell (foreword to Threat of Life, ix) points out that Brueggemann is “generally a lectionary preacher” but frequently of the intertextual sort, combining two or more lectionary texts.

42. Brueggemann’s corpus lacks sermons from Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 2 Samuel, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Haggai, and Zechariah. The fault here may be less Brueggemann’s than the lectionary’s, since, as noted above, he is primarily a lectionary preacher, and because, with the exception of 2 Samuel, these books are severely underrepresented in the RCL (see further below).

43. See apps. 1–3 below.

44. See, e.g., Holladay, “How the Twenty-Third Psalm Became an American Secular Icon.”

45. This might even explain why so many more NT-only sermons were judged “best”—they stem from more familiar texts, after all, ones known better to the preachers, their audiences, and the judges of the competition.

46. See Towner, “‘Without Our Aid.’” Towner defines “psalm-hymn” as a musical representation of a biblical psalm that intends “to convey [the] meaning of the biblical text without being bound by the strict conventions of simple versification or even of paraphrase” (17n1). The five hymnals he examines are Psalter Hymnal (Christian Reformed Church), The United Methodist Hymnal (United Methodist Church), The Presbyterian Hymnal (Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), Rejoice in the Lord (Reformed Church in America), and The New Century Hymnal (United Church of Christ). For a much briefer (and earlier) treatment that supports Towner’s analysis, see Holladay, Psalms through Three Thousand Years, 294.

47. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 19. This re-presentation is accomplished in three ways: (1) via the tunes, which are “suggestive of meaning”; (2) via selectivity; and (3) via the texts of the hymns, which play “the primary interpretive function” (18–19).

48. Ibid., 18. Whether or not this second, sung canon is less authoritative may be doubted. See further below and chap. 7’s discussion of Sheppard’s work (“Canon,” esp. 64–67).

49. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 17.

50. Ibid., 19.

51. Ibid., 20.

52. Ibid., 21.

53. Ibid., 21n8.

54. Ibid., 22.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. See ibid., 25–27.

58. But see Janzen, “Revisiting ‘Forever’ in Psalm 23:6.”

59. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 28.

60. See, e.g., Eco, Experiences in Translation, 13 (“translation is a special case of interpretation”) and 39 (“It is on the basis of interpretive decisions . . . that translators play the game of faithfulness”).

61. See Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 17–18. The classic study on this is by Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.

62. Booth, Company We Keep, 324.

63. For what follows, see Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 28–30.

64. Note that it is found in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer (1979), 45, in the Daily Morning Prayer Rite One, but not in Daily Morning Prayer Rite Two nor in Ps. 100, both of which read “we are his” (83, 729, respectively).

65. A notable exception to this judgment is Janzen, “‘And Not We Ourselves.’”

66. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 30. On this latter point, see Janzen, “‘And Not We Ourselves,’” esp. 126–33.

67. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 30.

68. Ibid., 32.

69. It is not wholly unrelated to speciation. Animals are considered different species when they can no longer interbreed. See further chaps. 3, 6, and 9.

70. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 33.

71. Ibid., 33n34, with reference to Billman and Migliore, Rachel’s Cry; and Brueggemann, “Costly Loss of Lament.”

72. Towner, “‘Without Our Aid,’” 34. See chaps. 1, 3, and 8–9 on the realities and normalcy of language change.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. Cf. chap. 1 on speaking Job or Proverbs or, in this case, the Psalms. I return to matters related to dialectology in chaps. 3, 6, and 7–9.

76. Point of Grace, “Who Am I?,” released August 5, 1998, on Steady On, Word, B00123N74A, released on compact disc July 5, 2005.

77. Cf. Davis, Getting Involved with God, 8–9, who speaks of the Psalms as “a kind of First Amendment for the faithful,” guaranteeing free speech, “even up to its dangerous limits, to the very brink of rebellion.”

78. See Pss. 1, 19, and 119; McCann, Theological Introduction to the Book of Psalms; Wenham, Psalms as Torah.

79. See Brueggemann, “Costly Loss of Lament.”

80. I do not mean to pick on Point of Grace unduly. It is the nature of lyric poetry, including song lyrics, to be episodic. This line I have cited does not reflect the theology of the group’s entire oeuvre. There are also wonderfully substantive lyrics to be found all across contemporary Christian music. The existence of good examples, however, does not eliminate the problems posed by the less good.

81. Cf., on the linguistic side, Harrison, Last Speakers, and chap. 3 below.

82. A few denominations do sing/chant/read through the whole Psalter. An exceptional example was the community of Little Gidding, which flourished in the early seventeenth century. Its thirty people prayed the entire Psalter every day. See Kingsmill, “Psalms: A Monastic Perspective,” esp. 605–6.

83. The RCL is not a solely Protestant phenomenon. Among other things, it depends on preexisting Catholic lectionaries (esp. the 1969 Ordo lectionum Missae), and Catholics participated in the Consultation on Common Texts (CCT) that was responsible for the RCL.

84. H. Allen, “Introduction: Preaching in a Christian Context,” esp. 2.

85. See West, Scripture and Memory.

86. See, e.g., ibid.; Bower, Handbook for the Revised Common Lectionary; Van Harn, Lectionary Commentary; Van Harn and Strawn, Psalms for Preaching and Worship; and Bartlett and Taylor, Feasting on the Word.

87. Note, too, that there is one non-OT responsorial (Luke 1), so the category itself is not exclusively an OT one. Luke 1 appears in the RCL cycle no less than six times: once in Year A (Third Sunday of Advent), twice in Year B (Third Sunday of Advent and Fourth Sunday of Advent), and three times in Year C (Second Sunday of Advent, Fourth Sunday of Advent, and Christ the King). In four of these six it is one of two possibilities that might be chosen (the other being an OT text), but in three of the four it is listed first.

88. Bartlett, “Lectionaries,” esp. 993, though he admits that the Psalms can provide appropriate texts for proclamation. On this point, note that the first three volumes of Van Harn’s Lectionary Commentary did not include exegetical treatment of the Psalms. Such treatment had to await vol. 4, published 8 years later (Van Harn and Strawn, Psalms for Preaching and Worship).

89. See note 78 above.

90. Bartlett, “Lectionaries,” 993.

91. Thomas G. Long (via private communication) informs me that recent decades have witnessed a move from very little lectionary preaching to relatively high use, though that seems to have plateaued and may now be tapering off. Even for churches that follow the RCL, most probably read at most two of the four lessons for the day (one from the OT and one from the NT). Long suspects that the vast majority of lectionary-based sermons (perhaps as high as 85%) focus on only the NT lesson. For more on the OT in the RCL, see Seitz, Word without End, 300–318; Ramshaw, “First Testament in Christian Lectionaries”; Bailey, “Lectionary in Critical Perspective,” esp. 151–52; and Stookey, “Marcion, Typology, and Lectionary Preaching.” Cf. also J. White, “Our Apostasy in Worship.”

92. Note the recent assessment by Callen, Beneath the Surface, 43–44: “While it [the RCL] is understandably Christ-centered, the Foundational Testament [the OT] is significantly disadvantaged by the choice of passages suggested for consideration in Christian worship. Not including the Psalms, this lectionary contains some 435 readings from the last twenty-seven books of the Bible and only about 270 from the first thirty-nine books. . . . Christian worship is thereby impoverished.”

93. The absent psalms are Pss. 3, 6–7, 10–12, 18, 21, 28, 35, 38–39, 44, 49, 53–61, 64, 69–70, 73–76, 83, 87–88, 94, 101–2, 108–9, 113, 115, 117, 120, 129, 134–36, 140–44.

94. The excerpted psalms are Pss. 5, 9, 17, 22, 25, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 40, 45, 50–51, 62–63, 66, 68, 71–72, 77–81, 86, 89–92, 103–7, 112, 116, 118–19, 132, 139, 145, and 147. Four additional psalms that are used more than once appear in both holistic and excerpted fashion: Pss. 27, 85, 96, and 146.

95. Strawn, “Psalms: Types, Functions, and Poetics.” Apart from the two preceding notes, I have excised the footnotes from the original text, but the three quotations come from Holladay, Psalms through Three Thousand Years, 278, 311, and 314, respectively. At the time of Holladay’s writing, the RCL was not yet available (released in 1994), hence his focus on the “Common Lectionary.”

96. There is also a “null curriculum” composed of the psalms completely omitted.

97. The Sunday readings of the RCL omit any lessons from 1–2 Chronicles, Ezra, Ecclesiastes, Obadiah, Nahum, and Zechariah.

98. Leviticus, Numbers, Judges, Esther, Nehemiah, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Joel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Malachi.

99. Bartlett, “Lectionaries,” 993, notes that, by way of contrast, there is no operative assumption “that the epistle text will have any particular thematic connection with the Gospel text for that Sunday.”

100. Ibid.; e.g., in Year A, the OT lessons for the thirteen Sundays after Pentecost are all taken from Genesis in a sequential ordering: (1) Gen. 1:1–2:4a; (2) Gen. 6:9–22; 7:24; 8:14–19; (3) Gen. 12:1–9; (4) Gen. 18:1–15; (21:1–7); (5) Gen. 21:8–21; (6) Gen. 22:1–14; (7) Gen. 24:34–38; (8) Gen. 25:19–34; (9) Gen. 28:10–19a; (10) Gen. 29:15–28; (11) Gen. 32:22–31; (12) Gen. 37:1–4, 12–28; (13) Gen. 45:1–15. Even so, as Fleming Rutledge has noted: “There is no opportunity in the lectionaries currently in use to preach through any Old Testament book” (And God Spoke to Abraham, 12). One might compare the Torah cycle in synagogue reading: the whole Torah (not just parts of it) is covered in one or three years, often with the Haftarot (non-Pentateuchal readings) as well (though the latter are selective).

101. This is tongue-in-cheek, but the more serious correlate is the significance of the readings on the high holy days and during major liturgical seasons.

102. Bartlett, “Lectionaries,” 993.

103. The Feasting on the Word series is published by Westminster John Knox Press. I thank Thomas G. Long for bringing this fact to my attention. The vignette demonstrates that a NT, Gospel-driven lectionary can do only partial justice to the full language of Scripture.

104. Bartlett, “Lectionaries,” 993.

105. Ibid., 994. Bartlett supports his critique with NT data: John is “seriously underrepresented,” and no Gospel or Epistle, save for Philemon, is fully represented in the RCL. So, as per chap. 1, the problems besetting the OT also face the NT, even if not to the same degree.

106. Note J. Smith, “Scriptures and Histories,” esp. 34–35, on lectionaries being “syntagmatically unreadable”—“unreadable serially,” which results in “an unacknowledged fifth gospel,” but one that “in this case . . . [is] heard by more individuals than have ever read the full New Testament text.”

107. West, Scripture and Memory, passim.

108. Cf. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 11: “The Old Testament has fallen into the background and, in some poorly informed circles, has even become suspect. This may or may not be the result of lectionary use, but it has happened concurrently with its widespread adoption”; ibid., 13: “The present lectionary-based system is not improving the knowledge and understanding of the Bible among Christians.”

109. Again, see Harrison, Last Speakers; also D. Wheeler, “Death of Languages”; and further chap. 3.

110. To be sure, the formative power of Christian worship, whether in liturgy, song, or sermon, can be (and has been) doubted. See, e.g., among many others, Hunter, “Ministry—or Magic?”; and Witten, All Is Forgiven. Perhaps people hear (only) what they want to hear in worship, perhaps ministers and songwriters and liturgists don’t care much for (comprehensive) biblical content, and/or maybe people simply don’t change in these ways via these instruments. There is, however, at least some empirical evidence to the contrary. See, inter alia, Fawcett and Linkletter, “Bible Reading and Adolescents’ Attitudes,” whose sample showed “a significant relationship between frequent Bible reading . . . and . . . disapproval of the use of some illicit substances and some sexual activities” (418). Many similar studies are available, but much work remains to be done; such “empirical” studies are hardly foolproof even though social-scientific.

Chapter 3 On Language Growth and Change, Contact and Death

1. For a useful overview, see Aitchison, Language Change.

2. Ibid., 55–130; McWhorter, Power of Babel, 177–215. McWhorter (Language Interrupted, 11) states that all grammars eventually reached “a high degree of complexity. . . . Then, short of an intervention of some kind, all grammars remained highly complex in perpetuo.” Grammatical simplification, in this light, “suggests that there has been an interruption in the regular transformation of the grammar.”

3. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 18–22; Aitchison, Language Change, 84–97. The importance of spoken language cannot be overestimated. Only about 200 of the world’s 6,000 languages are written; hence language is very much a spoken phenomenon far more than it is a written one. Indeed, some claim that if written language was placed on a 24-hour clock, it would fall after 23:07 (i.e., 11:07 p.m.) in the “day” of human language. See, e.g., McWhorter, What Language Is, 145–50.

4. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 50–51.

5. On the phonological level, an example of such memory from Biblical Hebrew is how the original short vowels of the so-called segholates return when these words are suffixed (e.g., melek, “king” > malkî, “my king”). This vowel is not spontaneously generated but is a trace of earlier forms when these words were monosyllabic (*qatl, *qitl, *qutl), if not, at a still earlier period, bisyllabic due to case endings, as one finds in Ugaritic (nominative qatlu, genitive qatli, and accusative qatla). See, e.g., Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 1:242–43 (§88C.a*).

6. For an extensive treatment, see Matras, Language Contact.

7. For more on English, see McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue; and Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

8. For a listing of isolates, see CEL 328–29.

9. Again, see Matras, Language Contact, passim; Aitchison, Language Change, passim.

10. See Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 9, for a discussion of the etymology. Also CEL 336; and Hancock, “On the Origins of the Term Pidgin.”

11. See CEL 336–41; and Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 71–105, for extensive, but still partial, listings of the world’s many pidgin languages. A few are discussed in further detail below. For discussion of contact between languages, pidginization, and related issues in ancient languages, see, among others, Vita, Canaanite Scribes, 1–3.

12. Matras, Language Contact, 275–88.

13. Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 5.

14. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 134–35: “Usually . . . sociohistorical realities are such that one group has its foot on the other’s neck, and the subordinate group is compelled to make do as best it can with the dominant group’s language, rather than the two groups mutually accommodating to each other’s. As such, in most pidgins, the bulk of the vocabulary is drawn from the dominant group’s language.”

15. Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 5.

16. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 132–33. In many cases, pidgins exist solely in oral forms, and spoken language, by definition, tends to be simplified compared to written language (see ibid., 88–92, 235–51).

17. Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 5.

18. Ibid.

19. For more on Tok Pisin, see ibid., 96–101; CEL 336–37. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 140–46, prefers to call Tok Pisin a creole, rather than a pidgin or expanded pidgin, and not without good reason. See further below.

20. See Holm (Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 9) for the etymology of creole: the term goes back to Latin creāre, “to create,” which became Portuguese criar, “to raise (a child),” with the past participle criado meaning “raised; a servant born into a household,” and then crioulu, meaning an African slave born in the New World, in Brazilian use. This term was used of Europeans born in the New World and then of the customs and speech of Africans and Europeans who were born in the New World.

21. Or nativization, a term that highlights how, via the process, the pidgin acquires native speakers (see further below). Creolization/nativization is the exact opposite of pidginization: the former is a process of expansion and the latter one of reduction (ibid., 7).

22. Ibid., 6. In what follows, I leave aside explicit mention of jargons since they are somewhat different from pidgins, though linguists often treat them as equally important progenitors of creoles. I return to jargons briefly in chap. 8.

23. Although debate will no doubt continue, acquisition of native speakers and increased grammatical complexity are the primary ways that a creole differs from an expanded pidgin (Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 7–8). Even so, many linguists prefer to speak of a creole continuum or, even more precisely, creole continua. See, e.g., McWhorter, Power of Babel, 159–67; McWhorter, Language Interrupted, 253–54. For the complexity of creoles, see, inter alia, McWhorter, “Linguistics from the Left,” 187.

24. I am dependent on McWhorter for the language of “starting over,” specifically his course “The Story of Human Language” for the Teaching Company mentioned in the preface. See also the next two notes.

25. The regularity that marks creoles can be illustrated more minutely whenever one creates a new verb like “to Google: to use the search engine Google on the internet.” Thus “I Googled, I Google, and I will Google” is in a fully regular pattern, rather than “I Geegled, I Google, and I will Gogogle.” The latter type of irregularity marks many old languages or, at least, old forms of a language.

26. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 138: “Because as a rule any language spoken on earth traces back to unbroken development from a former full language (or languages), when we see pidgins transformed into creoles we come closest to witnessing the birth of a human language.” See further, ibid., 137–51.

27. Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 527; Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 6; but see 8, on early or abrupt creolization. Also see the next note.

28. See McWhorter, Defining Creole, for an extended discussion of whether the category “creole” is synchronic and not just sociohistorical. If it is, then there are ways to distinguish creole languages from other “full” languages that have not descended from pidginized ancestors. Note also McWhorter’s earlier treatments: Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis; McWhorter, Missing Spanish Creoles.

29. See further below.

30. See CEL 287, who lists the 150,000 number as a plausible middle-of-the-road figure, with conservative estimates being around 30,000, and more radical ones over 500,000.

31. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 253–62; Dorian, Investigating Obsolescence. If human language developed as long as 30,000 years ago (see CEL 290–93), the reduction from 150,000 to 6,000 languages would represent an average loss of 4.8 languages per year. Language death does not happen at a uniform pace, however.

32. See, e.g., Harrison, Last Speakers; D. Wheeler, “Death of Languages”; McWhorter, Power of Babel, 260–61, 280.

33. For both statistics, see Crystal, Language Death, 11–19.

34. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 257; cf. CEL 288–89.

35. See Harrison, Last Speakers, passim; Crystal, Language Death, 27–67; McWhorter, Power of Babel, 281–86; Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 3–10. More briefly, see D. Wheeler, “Death of Languages,” on linguists who, remaining in descriptive modes, refuse to say that language death is tragic or bad: it isn’t necessarily bad, it just is. McWhorter observes scholarly “advocacy as well as curiosity” in the study of creoles (Defining Creole, 4), which is proof that linguistics, no less than other fields, often traffics in the prescriptive even when it prefers or protests not to do so.

36. See, e.g., McWhorter (Power of Babel, 262) for how the once vibrant Native American language Cayuga, by atrophy, retained words for leg, foot, and eye but lost its words for thigh, ankle, and cheek. Similarly, the full language once had a word for “enter,” but it had been forgotten and was no longer used, the verb “go” taking its place. So, instead of “Come into the house,” the reduced Cayuga used “Go into the house.” “The nuance of where the speaker was in relation to the house—determining whether one would say from the porch Come in or say from a hill up yonder Go in—was left to context” (emphasis original). It had to be left to context since the atrophied form of the language had lost that nuance.

37. Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 97–98) rightly notes that a dying language is not exactly the same as a pidgin. The destruction of the former is far more random than the latter: so, e.g., “underusers [of a dying language] often retain elements that have no function or clear meaning, and that are residue, surviving amid the decay of the language. This phenomenon has not been noted in forms of pidgin, where every element responds to a specific function.”

38. This is unlike true pidgins, which are in use among groups for particular purposes and thus spoken and productive, some on their way to expansion if not creolization. See above and cf. Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 97–98.

39. Wheeler, “Death of Languages,” 2; cf. Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 79: “in most known cases, the absence of young speakers can be considered a gloomy prognosis for the survival of the language.”

40. CEL 286; Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 530; cf. Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 92–93.

41. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 271; cf. Crystal, Language Death, 138–41; and note 3 above.

42. Cf., inter alia, McCrum, Globish; Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 106–68.

43. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 271; cf. Aitchison, Language Change, 235–36.

44. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 13.

45. Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 7.

46. Ibid., 74.

47. Harrison, Last Speakers, 49.

48. Ibid., 50–51.

49. I am grateful to Ryan P. Bonfiglio for discussions on these points and what follows in this section.

50. R. Morgan with J. Barton, Biblical Interpretation, 60.

51. Cf. Rutledge, foreword to Miller, Stewards of the Mysteries of God, xi: “The problem remains . . . that without total and continual immersion in ‘the strange new world of the Bible,’ the preacher will only be able to tell stories from his or her personal human perspective, relating them almost incidentally to the readings for the day—thereby failing to transmit the world-overturning, kosmos-re-creating nature of the Voice of God.”

52. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 31.

53. Ibid.

54. Inspired by Barth’s verbiage, Eller, in his somewhat clever but equally odd little book Language of Canaan (48), captures this point: “Unless we first go to the Bible for some language training, there is no chance of the gospel’s being truly spoken or heard among us.” See chaps. 4–6 for more on this general point.

55. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:185, emphasis added.

56. Schökel, Inspired Word, 75.

57. See Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible.

58. See, e.g., Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew; Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 45–55, 70; see also chap. 1 and the works cited there.

59. See North, “Could Hebrew Have Been a Cultic Esperanto?,” which ultimately refutes this “artificial” position.

60. See, e.g., Sáenz-Badillos, History of the Hebrew Language; Waldman, Recent Study of Hebrew; W. Chomsky, Hebrew; and other works cited in chap. 1.

61. See, e.g., Sáenz-Badillos, History of the Hebrew Language, 75, 115, 146; Waldman, Recent Study of Hebrew, 57–61; Mankowski, Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew; and M. Wagner, Die lexikalischen und grammatikalischen Aramaismen.

62. See M. Wagner, Die lexikalischen und grammatikalischen Aramaismen; Sáenz-Badillos, History of the Hebrew Language, 55, 114–15; Waldman, Recent Study of Hebrew, 79–83; Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language; Kutscher, Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll, 23–29. Cf. Schniedewind, “Aramaic, the Death of Written Hebrew.”

63. See Blake, Resurvey of Hebrew Tense; M. Wagner, Die lexikalischen und grammatikalischen Aramaismen; Fassberg and Hurvitz, Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting.

64. See, e.g., Seow, Ecclesiastes, 6–9.

65. See, e.g., Fitzmyer, Gospel according to Luke, 1:114–27.

66. E.g., Winedt, “Case Study in Creole Bible Translation”; Wycliffe Bible Translators, Da Jesus Book; Smit, “On Translation and Transformation.”

67. See Katsh, Biblical Heritage of American Democracy.

68. See, e.g., Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew.

69. Cf. Ilan Stavans’s personal account of forgetting his childhood Hebrew in Resurrecting Hebrew; see further chap. 7 below.

70. Cf. diagram 1 above for the way a creole is two steps removed from the original language. Note also Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 57: “A recognized genetic origin is not sufficient to conclude that the ancestor and descendant are one and the same thing”—quite the opposite!

71. Cf. Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament, 3: “The hermeneutical problem of the Old Testament . . . arises from the very content of the Old Testament itself.”

72. These issues (along with others) have generated a truly massive literature, a small selection of which is cited and discussed in chap. 5.

73. Here one might compare Harry G. Frankfort’s argument, in his book On Bullshit, that bullshit is a greater threat to truth than lying because, while liars intentionally misrepresent the truth, they at least know what the truth is; they agree it exists. Bullshitters, by contrast, don’t care about the truth at all but only about how good they look to others.

Chapter 4 The New Atheism

1. Dawkins, God Delusion, 51.

2. Ibid., 59, 283, and 51, respectively.

3. Ibid., 279.

4. Ibid., 281–82.

5. Ibid., 135. See chap. 5 below on how the same move is anticipated in Marcion already in the second century.

6. Ibid., 284. Cf. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 103, who speaks of “the horrors and cruelties and madnesses of the Old Testament.”

7. Dawkins, God Delusion, 51–52. He defines the “God Hypothesis” as follows: “There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us” (emphasis original).

8. Ibid., 268. Cf., similarly, Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 104, 110 (on the NT).

9. The phrase goes back to Trible’s classic work Texts of Terror. Dawkins himself does not refer to the texts as such, nor does he cite Trible.

10. Dawkins does not call the story “the near sacrifice of Isaac,” but “the infamous tale of the sacrificing of . . . Isaac” (God Delusion, 274). The misnomer is telling. See further below.

11. See ibid., 269–83.

12. Hitchens, God Is Not Great; Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation; Harris, End of Faith; Dennett, Breaking the Spell. Note also Boyer, Religion Explained.

13. See, e.g., Plotz, Good Book, esp. 299–305 and the afterword available only in the paperback ed. (P[ost].S[cript]., 5–11). Plotz himself is Jewish, and his book covers only the OT. Note also Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament.

14. See esp. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution; Hart, Atheist Delusions. Note also Haught, God and the New Atheism; Garrison, New Atheist Crusaders.

15. But see, among others, Haught, God and the New Atheism, esp. 31–33, 100–101; as well as Lamb, God Behaving Badly; Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?; and C. Wright, God I Don’t Understand. Note also Moberly, Theology of the Book of Genesis, 57–65, who has engaged Dawkins’s earlier book River out of Eden.

16. See, e.g., Dawkins, God Delusion, 268–316; Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 97–122. The biblical research that no doubt goes into writing such chapters, thin though it ultimately is (see below), is an example of how atheists can score so well on an instrument like the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey (see chap. 2 above).

17. Eagleton finds Dawkins and Hitchens sufficiently similar that he reduces them “for convenience to the single signifier ‘Ditchkins’” (Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 2).

18. See Dawkins, God Delusion, 272–74.

19. Ibid., 276.

20. Stager, “Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel”; also King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 28–35.

21. See Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 1–46) on how Dawkins’s critique is unfair since it is predicated on the worst examples and an ungenerous reading.

22. To be clear: I can deduce what Dawkins and others think reading “literally” means, but I doubt very much that this is what it really does mean or should mean, which is no small point. See further below and Strawn, “Jonah and Genre.” For an example of “literalism,” note Dennett’s remark: “The Old Testament Jehovah [sic!] is definitely a sort of divine man (not a woman), who sees with eyes and hears with ears—and talks and acts in real time. (God waited to see what Job would do, and then he spoke to him.)” (Breaking the Spell, 9, emphasis original, cf. also 206). While the Bible is certainly full of anthropomorphisms, it is also a good bit more subtle than that. See, inter alia, Sommer, Bodies of God.

23. Cf. Haught, God and the New Atheism, 30–35.

24. Dawkins, God Delusion, 272.

25. In my view, the saving of Lot has more to do with Abraham than with Lot’s own righteousness (see Gen. 18:16–19). That the city is destroyed implies a lack of even ten righteous people (Gen. 18:32) according to the narrative’s perspective. In terms of Lot’s own family, we hear of only four such persons—Lot himself, his wife, and his two daughters—and even they had to be forcibly removed.

26. CEB: “cries of injustice.” For more on this term and its importance in the OT, see Boyce, Cry to God in the Old Testament; and Kim, “‘Outcry.’”

27. Dawkins, God Delusion, 275.

28. See, e.g., Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 325–36, who speaks of the text as a “patriarchal temptation” that has a “unique, unrepeatable quality” (327, cf. 334).

29. Indeed, the verbal syntax of Gen. 22 depends entirely on the main verb of v. 1. Said differently, the narrative sequence—the ordering and meaning of the verbs that follow—does not happen (not in the way that it currently does) without v. 1’s verb, “God tested.” That sets up all that follows, and it is syntactically impossible to read the chapter without v. 1.

30. Another case of sloppy reading: Hitchens characterizes the beginning of the Decalogue as containing “a stern reminder of . . . limitless revenge” (God Is Not Great, 99). Indeed, Exod. 20:5 (cf. Deut. 5:9) may be stern (though how would one know?), but biblical scholars are agreed that this sentiment puts a rather firm limit on punishment (just to “the third and the fourth generation”), esp. in light of the seemingly limitless beneficence promised (“to the thousandth generation,” in Exod. 20:6; Deut. 5:10; see Strawn, “Yhwh’s Poesie”). Not surprisingly, the latter bit goes uncommented on (unnoticed?) by Hitchens, whose offense stems from “the moral and reasonable idea that children are innocent of their parents’ offenses” (ibid.). But Hitchens does not comment on the debate concerning individual retribution evident from Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29–30; and Ezek. 18:1–32; 33:1–20. If by “limitless revenge” Hitchens is speaking of the third commandment (Exod. 20:7; Deut. 5:11) rather than of the second commandment, the adjective limitless may apply, but the noun revenge is surely wrong. One would hope for better accuracy from Hitchens, who made his living as a journalist. Unfortunately, the errors and misrepresentations continue in the pages that follow.

31. See the discussion in Moberly, Theology of the Book of Genesis, 196; depending on Delaney, Abraham on Trial.

32. Dawkins, God Delusion, 275, similarly 298: “The holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.” See further below.

33. E.g., many interpreters have observed that Isaac and Abraham are never portrayed as speaking to each other directly again after Gen. 22. Is this an implicit indication of the long-lasting effects of trauma? Of course, Gen. 22 is among the most (in)famous of texts in the history of biblical interpretation. Among a virtually endless sea of options, see esp. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

34. See Moberly, Theology of the Book of Genesis, 179–99, esp. 196–99; further Moberly, Bible, Theology, and Faith; Levenson, Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son.

35. Dawkins, God Delusion, 284.

36. See Johnson, Writings of the New Testament, 2; more extensively, R. Hays, Echoes of Scripture; E. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism; Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism.

37. See, e.g., Juel, Messianic Exegesis.

38. See, inter alia, Olson, Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses, 62–125; S. Kaufman, “Structure of the Deuteronomic Law”; Braulik, “Sequence of the Laws in Deuteronomy”; and Walton, “Decalogue Structure of the Deuteronomic Law.”

39. Dawkins, God Delusion, 269. Harris’s preferred term is “cherry-picking” (e.g., Letter to a Christian Nation, 18, 105).

40. See Dawkins, God Delusion, 275.

41. Instructive studies include Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel; Kingsmill, Song of Songs and the Eros of God; Dawson, Christian Figural Reading; Seitz, Figured Out, esp. 13–88; Steinmetz, “Superiority of Pre-critical Exegesis”; Stone, “Ethical and Apologetic Tendencies.”

42. Dawkins, God Delusion, 280, emphasis original.

43. For a beginning, see the works cited in note 41 above.

44. The Hebrew Bible never uses the adjective “holy” to describe or modify the noun “war,” a few translations of Joel 3:9 notwithstanding (where a verbal form of the root qdš is employed; cf. CEB: “Prepare a holy war”). See Chapman, “Martial Memory, Peaceable Vision.” Chapman suggests “Yahweh war” or “divine war” as more suitable terms. See also Kang, Divine War in the Old Testament; Smend, Yahweh War and Tribal Confederation.

45. While divine war/warfare imagery is found elsewhere in the OT, outside Deuteronomy–Judges it is not presented via the specific issue of taking land from the Canaanites. See Chapman, “Martial Memory, Peaceable Vision,” 60–61. For more on God as warrior, see Miller, “God the Warrior.” The violent imagery of Revelation or at Qumran in the War Scroll (1QM/4QM) is resolutely eschatological, which actually strengthens the point made above.

46. See, famously, B. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 9–14. For an extensive listing of traces of the exodus theme throughout the Bible, see Houtman, Exodus, 1:190–218.

47. See esp. the excellent treatment by Chapman, “Martial Memory, Peaceable Vision.”

48. Dawkins, God Delusion, 278. Cf., similarly, Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 101.

49. Indeed, the recent literature on this and related points is rather voluminous. See, e.g., (alphabetically) Brueggemann, Divine Presence amid Violence; Chapman, “Martial Memory, Peaceable Vision”; Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?; Cowles, Merrill, Gard, and Longman, Show Them No Mercy; Creach, Violence in Scripture; Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture; Earl, “Deuteronomy 7”; Earl, Joshua Delusion?; Garber, “Amalek and Amalekut”; Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword; Lamb, God Behaving Badly; Moberly, Old Testament Theology, esp. 53–71; Moberly, “Toward an Interpretation of the Shema”; Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior; Seibert, Violence of Scripture; Sparks, Sacred Word, Broken Word; Stone, “Ethical and Apologetic Tendencies”; Strawn, “Canaan and Canaanites”; Strawn, “Teaching the Old Testament”; C. Wright, God I Don’t Understand; plus the essays in Bergmann, Murray, and Rea, Divine Evil?; Thomas, Evans, and Copan, Holy War in the Bible; and Interpretation 66, no. 2 (April 2012), devoted to Joshua. Among others, classic studies include von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel; Craigie, Problem of War in the Old Testament; Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior; and Miller, Divine Warrior. Not all of this literature is of equal value or reflects the same viewpoint, but Dawkins et al. seem entirely ignorant of it, even of the classic studies.

50. I use scare quotes around “bad” and “good” for two reasons: (1) to indicate that these terms are not necessarily the best descriptors; (2) to indicate that the particular items in question may not be simplistically so defined. For more on the “bad” parts, see further on Tertullian in chap. 5.

51. Dawkins, God Delusion, 287–97; Hartung, “Love Thy Neighbor,” plus forum discussion thereon.

52. Dawkins, God Delusion, 287. Dawkins’s delight is at root historicist, yet most scholars would deem his language of “another Jew” to be historically inaccurate before the Greco-Roman period, and perhaps before the end of the second century BCE. See S. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, esp. 69–106. Note also that even (presumably, in Dawkins’s opinion) “benign” and “moral” injunctions like Lev. 19:18 can be lived out or not lived out. For a poignant vignette of how this text and the Golden Rule played out in the death of a neighbor two doors down in an apartment hall, see Jacobs, Year of Living Biblically, 321–25.

53. In 2001 I made this very point myself (Strawn, “Leviticus 19:1–2, 9–18,” esp. 119), well before I read Dawkins’s book (2006), precisely because of the mentions of the immigrant in Lev. 19:10, 34. See also NIDOTTE 3:144–49; TLOT 3:1243–46.

54. For just one example that predates Hartung, see Hartley, Leviticus, 317–18, and the even earlier literature cited there.

55. A similar silliness is found in Hitchens’s (God Is Not Great, 120–22) exposé of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53–8:11 and its secondary textual status, with a little help from the NT scholar Bart Ehrman. Once again, this situation has been known for centuries (note, e.g., Euthymius Zigabenus already in the twelfth century[!] or the many Greek manuscripts that mark the passage as uncertain), has not been covered up, and is hardly deleterious to belief. See, e.g., Barrett, Gospel according to St. John, 589–92; Beasley-Murray, John, 143–47; and R. Brown, Gospel according to John, 1:332–38.

56. Especially given the contrast with אזרח/ʾezrāḥ, “citizen.” See Levine, Leviticus, 134; Hartley, Leviticus, 322; more extensively, NIDOTTE 1:836–39; TLOT 1:307–10.

57. Particularly around the issues of election and covenant, which are frequently railed against in the New Atheist literature. For serious theological treatments of the issue, see Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob; Kaminsky, “New Testament and Rabbinic Views of Election”; and Moberly, Old Testament Theology, 41–74.

58. See Brueggemann, “‘Exodus’ in the Plural (Amos 9:7)”; Strawn, “What Is Cush Doing in Amos 9:7?”

59. See Miller, “God’s Other Stories”; Strawn, “Deuteronomy,” esp. 66–67.

60. See, e.g., Wenham, Book of Leviticus, 269. For the same reasons, Dawkins’s interpretation of the sixth commandment (God Delusion, 288) as applying only to killing other Jews, an exclusivistic interpretation that again depends on Hartung, is to be rejected. Cf., e.g., 2 Sam. 12:9 and Matt. 5:21–22.

61. Cf. Lamb, God Behaving Badly, 17: “Dawkins . . . simply avoids texts that speak of God favorably.”

62. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 33. Cf. Haught, God and the New Atheism, who says of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jürgen Habermas: “At least the atheists on this list had enough understanding of theology to make conversation interesting and productive. In marked contrast, the level of theological discernment by the new atheists is too shallow and inaccurate even to begin such a conversation” (93). Among other things, Haught points out that none of the New Atheists seem “remotely aware of the biblical prophetic tradition” (94), and the same is true for the theme of liberation (100–101).

63. Dawkins, God Delusion, 283. Similarly, Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, passim.

64. The judgment holds true for other New Atheists as well. See Haught, God and the New Atheism, esp. 34: “If biblical truth cannot be reduced to scientific truth [as per the New Atheists], then it does not qualify as truth in any sense”; and 101: “Dawkins . . . wants his readers to join him in reducing the Bible to moral education” (emphases added). Cf. Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?, 23: “In many cases, the New Atheists aren’t all that patient in their attempts to understand a complex text, historical contexts, and the broader biblical canon.” In this regard it is telling that Harris, in his afterword to the 2008 edition of Letter to a Christian Nation, proves himself (1) incapable of distinguishing linguistic dexterity from cherry-picking and/or bowdlerization when it comes to Scripture; and (2) incapable of delineating differences in religious belief systems (or thinkers), as he ultimately lumps what he calls “moderate religion” together with “religious extremism,” on the one hand, and contrasts that with complete disavowal of faith, on the other (104–7). Everything is either this or that. Nothing, it would seem, can be anything other than just one, narrowly defined “simple” thing, largely, or so it seems, because that is how scientific rationality would have it. So then, is light a wave or a particle?

65. Dawkins, God Delusion, 281.

66. See ibid., 271, 288.

67. Cited in ibid., 271.

68. Ibid.

69. John Wesley, “Address to the Clergy,” 491. A highly similar argument can be found still earlier in Martin Luther’s 1524 address “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany.”

70. Within the field of biblical studies proper, one might include Avalos (End of Biblical Studies) and Carroll (Wolf in the Sheepfold), who by dint of their training are obviously far better informed about biblical matters than those who work only in the hard sciences. For an adroit reply to Carroll’s work, see Moberly, Old Testament Theology, 112–16; Brueggemann, “Sometimes Wave, Sometimes Particle.” For a furthering of some of Carroll’s points, see Pyper’s fascinating collection in Unsuitable Book.

71. I do not mean to paint all critiques as identical to Dawkins’s, nor my own brief responses as sufficient to answer all opponents. I leave full treatments to others (esp. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution; and Hart, Atheist Delusions), given the more specific focus of the present study.

72. The English word atheist dates to 1571, with atheism dating to 1587 according to OED (online ed.). For more on these terms and yet others, see Schweizer, Hating God, esp. 6–20.

73. Haught (God and the New Atheism, 102) also links Dawkins and Hitchens to Marcion.

Chapter 5 Marcionites Old and New

1. To the sentiments offered in chap. 4, one might add Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 97: “Since . . . these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory”; and Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 10: the “teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries.”

2. The preceding points come from von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, 60–62, emphases added. See further there for no less than thirty such antitheses. A more extensive treatment appears in von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium, 238*–319*. See also May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” esp. 140–41; Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 523.

3. See chap. 4 for violence; for Marcion on election, see Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 118.

4. Von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel; von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium, esp. apps. on *1–*358. Although I rely heavily on von Harnack’s classic work in what follows, it has been surpassed in many areas. See, e.g., Blackman, Marcion and His Influence; Balás, “Marcion Revisited”; May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views”; Rumscheidt, Harnack: Liberal Theology, 28; Williams, “Reconsidering Marcion’s Gospel”; May and Greschat, Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung, esp. the essays by May, “Marcion ohne Harnack,” and by Kinzig, “Ein Ketzer und sein Konstrukteur”; and most recently, Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion. For reasons that will become clear below, my reliance on von Harnack is less historical than it is theological and rhetorical.

5. Most scholars discount the tradition that Marcion was the son of a bishop who excommunicated him on the grounds of sexual immorality. The term for Marcion’s occupation, nauklēros, which seems reliable, may mean only that he worked for a shipowner (May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 136). In any event, his significant donation to the church at Rome, which May, at least, accepts as historically reliable (ibid., 137), indicates a certain degree of financial success. Many appeal to his later success as proof of a business-savvy individual with excellent organizational skills.

6. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 59.

7. See Clabeaux, “Marcion,” esp. 515, for the possibility that Marcionites outnumbered non-Marcionites in the 160s and 170s. For summaries of the heresiologists mentioned above, see May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 137–43.

8. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 1; also see ix, 1–14, for the Marcionite church’s organization, which included, among other things, catechumens, elders and bishops, worship buildings, and the observation of holy days and sacraments.

9. See ODCC 1033–34; Klassen, “Marcion”; Hall, “Marcion”; Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 515; May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 151; E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:ix; Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 531.

10. See von Harnack, Militia Christi, 46, who writes that by 200 CE “there had already existed within Christianity for several decades an active and widespread movement which declared itself against the Old Testament and rejected the God of Israel because he was warlike and thereby contradicted the gospel.” Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 54–57, tracks the problem of God’s disturbing behavior already in the text of Chronicles, Jubilees, and in the emendations of the scribes (tiqqune sopherim). Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament, 143, notes similar dynamics in the Gospel of John. For more on the problem of the OT in later periods, see ibid., passim; and Kraeling, Old Testament since the Reformation, passim. For discussion of some modern “functional Marcionites,” see Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 67–68.

11. See Blackman (Marcion and His Influence, 103–12) for Marcion’s “Paulinism,” esp. 111: “It must be pointed out that Paulinism is not the Gospel itself, but an interpretation of the Gospel.” Further, cf. Löhr, “Did Marcion Distinguish?,” esp. 144–45. May (“Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 147) speaks of “an ontologizing of the Pauline juxtaposing of old and new, law and grace.” For a pioneering volume in what came to be called the New Perspective on Paul, see E. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism.

12. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 58.

13. But see Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion; von Harnack, Outlines, 71; Hall, “Marcion,” 423; and Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, on Marcion accepting the OT in some ways. “It was possibly the only history book he knew, and he accepted it as a reliable account of the past, of the earliest history of mankind, that is, and of the Jewish race in particular, since the time of Moses” (Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 113).

14. ODCC 1034.

15. Löhr, “Did Marcion Distinguish?,” 145.

16. ODCC 1034. Note Tertullian’s summary of Marcion: The OT god is “a judge, fierce and warlike,” but the God of the NT is “mild and peaceable, solely kind and supremely good” (Against Marcion 1.6; cited in Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 58); and Irenaeus’s summary: Marcion declared God “to be the author of evils, to take delight in war, to be infirm of purpose, and even to be contrary to himself” (Against Heresies 1.27.2; ANF 1:352).

17. Here is proof that the death of the OT also involves the death of the NT. See chap. 1 and further below.

18. See von Harnack, Outlines, 71; Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 527.

19. See, e.g., Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 23–41. For arguments supporting the view that Marcion produced his canon rather than simply received it (the point is debated), see Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 516. See also Grant, “Marcion, Gospel of”; and Clabeaux, “Marcionite Prologues to Paul.”

20. Arguably the most “Jewish” part of Luke. For the relationship between the infancy narratives and the OT, see R. Brown, Birth of the Messiah; also E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:xiii.

21. For Marcion’s version of (what came to be) the NT, see Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 42–60; von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium, *157–*237; and E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:xiii; 2:643–46.

22. See, e.g., J. Barton, “Marcion Revisited.”

23. Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 515.

24. Note, e.g., Gillingham, One Bible, Many Voices; Knohl, Divine Symphony; cf. Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 516: “A conscious step in the direction of diversity was taken by anti-Marcionite Christians of the 2d through 4th centuries.”

25. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27.2 (ANF 1:352).

26. Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 514. Von Harnack (Outlines, 71) describes Marcion’s system as “a Paulinism without dialectics.”

27. Von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, 12, emphasis original. See below for how von Harnack’s assessment of Marcion is colored by his own theology.

28. Though Marcion was unable to eliminate all traces of the OT in the NT, as demonstrated by, among others, Tertullian (see E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:506–7, and further below). Somewhat ironically, this demonstrates the marriage of the Testaments, despite Marcion’s best efforts to divorce them.

29. Hall (“Marcion,” 422–23), e.g., calls the arch-heretic “a radical Biblicist” who encouraged Bible study among his followers; von Harnack (Outlines, 70–74) argues that Marcion should not be classed with the gnostics since he didn’t employ philosophy, “at least not as a main principle,” but rather was guided by “a purely soteriological interest” emphasizing “the pure Gospel” and “the true Pauline Gospel.” But whence comes this purity, truth, and soteriology? Even if it is based on internal data, it is still ruled by an ab extra principle. Cf. May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 129, who queries von Harnack’s portrait as “a modern ideal picture, a projection into history,” and concludes that Marcion’s

philological work, by means of which he wants to free the texts of his Bible from all supposed adulterations, is anything but unbiased. It is based on dogmatic postulates and a totally unhistorical view of early Christianity. Similarly, his exegesis is dependent on massive dogmatic presuppositions. One calls him a biblical theologian only inasmuch as for him his scripture canon represents the only standard of faith. . . . However, the standard theology of the church was in almost every regard closer to the biblical texts than Marcion’s doctrine was. (ibid., 147, and further there)

See also Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 515; and Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 66–97, on Marcion’s dualism and relationship to gnosticism. While Marcion’s dependence on the Syrian gnostic Cerdo continues to be debated, dualistic thinking is more than manifest, as is a docetic and modalist Christology (ibid., 86, and further 98–102). Such positions were not yet “officially” condemned in Marcion’s day (Clabeaux, “Marcion,” 515).

30. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 5. Cf. Grant and Tracy, Interpretation of the Bible, 41: “While Paul was Marcion’s hero, hero worship and comprehension are not the same thing.”

31. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, believes Marcion “started with a plain contrast of good and bad gods” (67) and that this “fundamental dualism,” along with his “literalist” treatment of the Bible, “led him to textual falsification, as the only way to make Scripture in all places support his theories” (86–87). For more on Marcion’s extrabiblical theological principles, see May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 147–49.

32. As John McWhorter asserts, the goal of language is not logic but clarity; see his Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths, 78–87; and his What Language Is, 61–92. Note Hitchens’s odd equation of “biblical consistency or authenticity or ‘inspiration’” (God Is Not Great, 122)!

33. McWhorter, “Linguistics from the Left,” esp. 188.

34. See chap. 3 and McWhorter, Power of Babel, 15–52.

35. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 118.

36. Widely available; see, e.g., Kennedy and Gioia, Introduction to Poetry, 137–38.

37. The version of Tertullian’s work that we now have is the third edition, completed “between April 207 and April 208. . . . The first edition appeared perhaps as early as 198” (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:xviii).

38. E.g., Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.5, 14, 15, 19, 25–26, etc. E. Evans notes that in books 4 and 5, Tertullian argues that Marcion’s edited Gospel and epistles “will not bear the construction put upon them, but present a Christ who is in all respects such a one as the Creator’s law and prophets have given reason to expect” (Tertullian, 1:xvii). Note also Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 119: “Let Marcion be given credit for that insight characteristic of the creative thinker who sees certain truths very clearly. But he can hardly be acquitted of the charge of arbitrariness in refusing to take account of complementary truths. The Catholic Church at that time was less arbitrary and more appreciative of the wealth of its heritage.” More briefly, Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 523: “[Marcion’s] Bible was a mutilated one, and his theology feeble and inconsistent.”

39. Here again are points of contact between Marcion and the New Atheists.

40. Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 527.

41. Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.22 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:60–61). The reference to Tiberius is because Marcion’s Gospel began with Luke 3:1 and the descent of God to Capernaum in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.

42. Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.25 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:68–69).

43. See further below.

44. Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.26 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:72–75, emphasis added).

45. Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.27 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:74–77).

46. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.11–12 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:118–23).

47. Cf. Holmes, “Five Books against Marcion,” esp. 474: “[Tertullian] illuminates the Scriptures and glorifies them as containing the whole system of the Faith.”

48. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.11 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:118–19).

49. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.12 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:120–21).

50. Heschel, Prophets, 358–92.

51. See ibid., 371–74, for a discussion. Note Ps. 7:11 and the rabbinic speculation that the length of time God is angry every day lasts for only 0.06 seconds (b. Ber. 7a). See Patton, Religion of the Gods, 272 and 444n96.

52. Heschel (Prophets, 352–53, 367, 370, 381) uses “instrumental,” “transitive,” and “transient” (but not “stative”). The above sentiments would also hold true about God “being” or “having” love.

53. For God’s happiness, see Fretheim, “God, Creation, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

54. See Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.15 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:128–29).

55. Heschel, Prophets, 365; cf. 367: “The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. . . . For all its intensity, it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger’s sake”; and 374: “The secret of anger is God’s care.” See further ibid., 379–82.

56. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.11 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:120–21).

57. Heschel, Prophets, 365, cf. 392: “His anger is aroused when the cry of the oppressed comes into His ears” (citing Exod. 22:21–24).

58. Even if that is only by holding them together, in tensive juxtaposition—it is exactly such “contradiction” that Marcion and the New Atheists cannot endure. Note Heschel, “The Lord is long-suffering, compassionate, loving, and faithful, but He is also demanding, insistent, terrible, and dangerous” (Prophets, 366). But Heschel also knows about something beyond simple tension: “Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of compassion” (368). On the other side of the equation, Tertullian admits to differences or discontinuities, one could even say antitheses, between the Testaments, “provided that all these differences have reference to one and the same God, that God by whom it is acknowledged that they were ordained and also foretold” (Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.1; E. Evans, Tertullian, 2:256–57). Note also Against Marcion 4.11:

We admit this separation, by way of reformation, of enlargement, or progress. . . . So also the gospel is separated from the law, because it is an advance from out of the law, another thing than the law, though not an alien thing, different, though not opposed. Nor is there in Christ any novel style of discourse. . . . If you had wished to prove a man was of a foreign nation, perhaps you would do so by his idiomatic use of his native speech. (E. Evans, Tertullian, 2:308–11)

Quite apart from the fact of whether one agrees with Tertullian’s argument here, or with his language of “reformation, enlargement, progress, advance,” the point is that his full linguistic system is complex, not simplistic.

59. Heschel (Prophets, 383–92), too, engages Marcion.

60. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.19 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:138–39). Cf. Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 529: Marcion has to ignore all the texts in the OT “in which God promises good things to the poor” in order to “see in this preaching of Jesus the opposite of the preaching of the Demiurge” (cf. Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.14). Further dexterity is on display in book 4, where Tertullian sets out to disprove Marcion by means of the Gospel of Luke alone (with constant reference to the OT), since it was the one that Marcion preserved (portions of). In book 5, Tertullian also counters Marcion with the Epistles of Paul, and for the same reason.

61. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.19 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:140–41).

62. A further observation: Tertullian is aware (also contra Marcion) that Christ, too, has stern attributes (Against Marcion 4.29) and judicial character (4.35, 37; 5.9; also attested in Paul: 5.12), just as the Creator God has plenty of tenderness (4.35) and mercy (5.11). See further below.

63. See von Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:269–70; von Harnack, Outlines, 71; Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 114–15; Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 525–26.

64. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 113.

65. Ibid., 115.

66. Ibid.

67. Tertullian, Against Marcion 3.14 (E. Evans, Tertullian, 1:210–15). A similar passage, with reference to martial imagery in Paul, is found in 5.18 (ibid., 1:622–29).

68. Hall, “Marcion,” 424.

69. See the works cited in chap. 4, note 41.

70. See Steinmetz, “Superiority of Pre-critical Exegesis,” 27–38; also Davis, Wondrous Depth.

71. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 60–61.

72. Cf. ibid., 64, which complains about “lack of controls governing how correlations are made between details in the texts and the meaning assigned to them”; or ibid., 68, which states that figural readings are “too subjective and they fail to deal seriously with the plain meaning of the text.” This sounds much like Dawkins, and in more than one way.

73. As Seibert himself notes, Origen thought difficulties in Scripture “had been placed there intentionally by the Spirit and were meant to lead the mature reader to deeper insights” (ibid., 62).

74. Cf. ibid., 59–64.

75. Trigg, Origen, 60, cited in Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 63.

76. Though certainly not yet in its final canonized order and certainly not yet together with the NT in its final canonical order—developments that took place only later. See McDonald, Biblical Canon. The point is primarily that the church had the full complex, “syncretistic” tradition (von Harnack’s term) that Marcion found so hard to stomach.

77. Note May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 147: “Since the Old Testament is not sufficient for [Marcion’s] theological demands, he traces it back to a God of low rank. The rejection of allegorical interpretation is the consequence, not the presupposition, of criticism” (emphasis added).

78. Even these often feel compelled to include the Psalms!

79. So Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior. I will return to this last matter in chap. 9. For now, note Lamb (God Behaving Badly, 102), who accuses Seibert of “rejecting major sections of the Old Testament, a bit like Marcion.”

80. Von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, ix. May (“Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 129n2) speaks of “Harnack’s personal relationship with Marcion.”

81. Von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, ix.

82. See Rumscheidt, Harnack: Liberal Theology, 28; Rumscheidt, “Harnack, Karl Gustav Adolf von.”

83. Rumscheidt (Harnack: Liberal Theology, 29) calls it “notorious.”

84. Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, 134, emphasis original.

85. Ibid., 138, emphasis original.

86. This is almost exactly how I describe my diagnosis of the OT’s death in chap. 1.

87. Cf. von Harnack (Outlines, 48), stating that the OT contribution to the faith of early Christians comes down largely to the Psalms and “prophetical fragments.”

88. May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 129.

89. Von Harnack, Militia Christi, 47.

90. It is debated if Marcion himself was anti-Semitic. E. Evans (Tertullian, 1:xii) thinks not, but contrast Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 528. See May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” for the possibility that Marcion himself was Jewish.

91. Von Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:148; cf. 1:101: “[Apocalyptic literature] was an evil inheritance which the Christians took over from the Jews.”

92. Von Harnack, Outlines, 42, emphasis added.

93. Ibid., 39–40.

94. Cf. ibid., 74–75, where von Harnack narrowly defines “Jewish-Christianity” as applicable “exclusively to those Christians who really retained, entirely or in the smallest part, the national and political forms of Judaism and insisted upon the observance of the Mosaic Law without modification as essential to Christianity . . . or who indeed rejected these forms, but acknowledged the prerogative of the Jewish people also in Christianity” (emphasis original).

95. Ibid., 48–49.

96. Jenson, Canon and Creed, 6, 19–26.

97. See Grant and Tracy (Interpretation of the Bible, 41) for Barnabas’s closeness to the “heretical Gnosticism of the second century.”

98. Von Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:148–49n1.

99. Ibid., 1:178.

100. Ibid., 1:177.

101. Ibid.

102. Von Harnack, Outlines, 71.

103. See Rumscheidt, Harnack: Liberal Theology, 92–93; for Barth’s response, see ibid., 101–2.

104. Romans 9–11 is among the densest collections of OT citations to be found in the entire NT. See J. Wagner, Heralds of the Good News; cf. also chap. 9 below.

105. Von Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:179; but cf. von Harnack, Outlines, 75, where, by his definition, Paul is a Jewish Christian “because of Romans XI.” This is not a larger comment on the OT or Judaism proper, however.

106. Rumscheidt, “Harnack, Karl Gustav Adolf von,” 506.

107. Cf. Detmers, “Die Interpretation der Israel-Lehre Marcions.”

108. See Delitzsch, Babel and Bible. See, inter alia, Arnold and Weisberg, “Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures”; Arnold and Weisberg, “Babel und Bibel und Bias”; Arnold and Weisberg, “Delitzsch in Context.”

109. Delitzsch, Die grosse Täuschung.

110. Cited in Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 64–65. Marcion, too, had problems with the prophets; contrast von Harnack’s valorization of the same (noted above).

111. Kraeling, Old Testament since the Reformation, 162–63.

112. See, e.g., the critical comments by Jules Lebreton in his review of von Harnack’s second German edition (1924): “Bulletin d’histoire des origines chrétiennes,” esp. 360–61.

113. Von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, 177n6. The note accompanies the statement he makes in ibid., 138.

114. Cf. Seibert (Disturbing Divine Behavior, 64), who calls Delitzsch and von Harnack “two modern-day Marcionites” and Hector Avalos a “contemporary quasi-Marcionite.” In my judgment, Seibert’s own solution to difficult texts in the OT has its own Marcionite elements, as does Stark’s Human Faces of God. Once again, as per the testimonia of the current book, the OT poses a master problem for Christian theology.

115. See Bright, Authority of the Old Testament, 67, 79; Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament, 156–57.

116. Bergen, Twisted Cross, 142–71.

117. Ibid., 26, 126, 142–71.

118. See Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 106–8, on violent language death.

119. Cf. the demise of the OT in preaching, hymnody, and the RCL as detailed in chap. 2. Note also Stookey, “Marcion, Typology, and Lectionary Preaching,” which is pertinent.

120. See further Bergen, Twisted Cross; cf. also Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

121. See, e.g., Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 101: “One mutters a few sympathetic words for the forgotten and obliterated Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, also presumably part of the Lord’s original creation, who are to be pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel”; 102: “[The OT] was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals”; 107: “None of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence” (emphasis added throughout). Note Herman Rauschning’s report of a meeting in which Adolf Hitler railed against the OT, esp. the Decalogue:

“There is much more behind this,” Hitler began fanatically. . . . “We are fighting against the most ancient curse that humanity has brought upon itself. We are fighting against the perversion of our soundest instincts. Ah, the God of the deserts, that crazed, stupid, vengeful Asiatic despot with his powers to make laws! . . . That devilish ‘Thou shalt, thou shalt!’ And that stupid ‘Thou shalt not.’ It’s got to get out of our blood, that curse from Mount Sinai! That poison with which both Jews and Christians have spoiled and soiled the free, wonderful instincts of man and lowered them to the level of doglike fright.” . . . “Thou shalt not steal? Wrong!” Hitler’s voice was loud in the small room. “All life is theft.” . . . “I am the Lord thy God! Who? That Asiatic tyrant? No! The day will come when I shall hold up against these commandments the tables of a new law. And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for humanity’s liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai, from the dark stammerings of nomads who could no more trust their own sound instincts, who could understand the divine only in the form of a tyrant who orders one to do the very things one doesn’t like. This is what we are fighting against, . . . the masochistic spirit of self-torment, the curse of so-called morals, idolized to protect the weak from the strong in the face of the immortal law of battle. . . . Against the so-called ten commandments, against them we are fighting.” (Robinson, Ten Commandments, xii–xiii)

Note that both Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are of Jewish heritage.

122. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 6; cf. also 97.

Chapter 6 New Plastic Gospels: The “Happiologists”

1. See chap. 3 for the fact that there are very few expanded, long-term pidgins.

2. Bowler, Blessed, uses the terms “faith movement,” “prosperity movement,” “prosperity theology,” and “prosperity gospel” interchangeably (see 205n2), as will I.

3. As explained in chap. 1, I use “happiologists” and “happiology” to differentiate such prosperity theology and positive thinking from the authentic happiness studied in Positive Psychology. The former two are not the same as the latter, which I deem a legitimate branch of psychological study. See Peterson, Primer in Positive Psychology, 7–8; and S. Lewis, Positive Psychology at Work, 2–6. For an application of Positive Psychology to the Bible, see Strawn, Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness.

4. Osteen, Every Day a Friday, 6–7.

5. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 137–59; see also discussion and bibliography in chap. 3.

6. Ibid., 1.

7. Ibid., v–vi.

8. See Fox, Proverbs 10–31, 561; McKane, Proverbs, 459–60; Toy, Book of Proverbs, 261–62. For more on how the moral self is shaped in Proverbs, and in complicated, poetic ways, see Stewart, Poetic Ethics in Proverbs.

9. For the importance of both halves of the line in making a single poetic predication, see the classic study by Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry.

10. Osteen, I Declare, viii.

11. Note how, in Scripture, it is God’s words that have creative, generative power whereas Osteen attributes all of that to human speech. Every instance in the OT of the Hebrew Qal verb ברא/bārāʾ, “to create,” has God alone as the subject.

12. Osteen, I Declare, viii.

13. Ibid., viii–ix.

14. Ibid., ix.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., x.

17. Ibid., x–xi.

18. Ibid., xi.

19. Ibid., xii.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., xii–xiii.

22. For the “unusual” and “distinctive” language that is found in the prosperity gospel, see Bowler, Blessed, 251–54, esp. 253.

23. Osteen, Your Best Life Now, passim, but esp. x, 11, 41. For further critical remarks, see Strawn, “Triumph of Life,” esp. 296–98.

24. For the importance of the lament psalms in the Psalter, see, inter alia, Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms.

25. See, e.g., Osteen, Your Best Life Now, passim, but esp. 113–20, 144–45.

26. Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, 267. See further Brueggemann, “Costly Loss of Lament.”

27. Osteen, Every Day a Friday, 9.

28. See W. P. Brown, “Happiness and Its Discontents in the Psalms,” esp. 96–97.

29. Ben-Shahar, Being Happy, 15.

30. The work of James W. Pennebaker is of paramount importance here. See his Opening Up; Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences”; Pennebaker, “Effects of Traumatic Disclosure”; Pennebaker, “Telling Stories”; Pennebaker, “Social, Linguistic, and Health Consequences.” See also the following multiauthor works: Pennebaker and O’Heeron, “Confiding in Others”; Pennebaker, Hughes, and O’Heeron, “Psychophysiology of Confession”; Pennebaker and Susman, “Disclosure of Traumas and Psychosomatic Processes”; VandeCreek, Janus, Pennebaker, and Binau, “Praying about Difficult Experiences”; Gortner, Rude, and Pennebaker, “Benefits of Expressive Writing”; Pennebaker and Chung, “Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health.” For a brief application of Pennebaker to the Psalms, see Strawn, “The Psalms and the Practice of Disclosure.” See also Strawn, “Poetic Attachment”; and Strawn, “Trauma.”

31. Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, 263.

32. Bowler, Blessed, 11.

33. Ibid., 11, emphasis original.

34. See chap. 3; also McWhorter, Power of Babel, 135: “In most pidgins, the bulk of the vocabulary is drawn from the dominant group’s language.”

35. For a discussion of “mind-power,” see Bowler, Blessed, 12–15.

36. Ibid., 14.

37. Ibid., 15; for more on Kenyon, see ibid., 15–20.

38. Ibid., 15.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 17.

41. Ibid., 18, cf. also 25.

42. Ibid., 19, emphasis added; citing Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, 150; and Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith, 20. On other spiritual “laws” and Kenyon’s influence on pentecostalism, see Bowler, Blessed, 20–22.

43. Bowler, Blessed, 20.

44. Cf. ibid., 23, on the pentecostal preacher Fred F. Bosworth, who borrowed from Kenyon: “Though he would have despised the association, his own methods ‘sanctified’ aspects of New Thought mind-power for pentecostal audiences.” Also ibid., 24, on John G. Lake, another pentecostal, who preached “suprahuman abilities”: “Lake’s . . . stronger claims to spiritual power suggest that New Thought lit the fuse of pentecostalism’s psychological dynamite.”

45. Ibid., 96.

46. Peale, Power of Positive Thinking, still in print (e.g., New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2015). For more on Peale, see Bowler, Blessed, 55–60.

47. Bowler, Blessed, 57.

48. Note that Bowler’s conclusion in Blessed is titled “An American Blessing” (ibid., 226–37). For more on the topic, see Laderman, American Civil Religion.

49. Bowler, Blessed, 226; cf. 7: “Countless listeners reimagined their ability as good Christians—and good Americans—to leapfrog over any obstacles” (emphasis added).

50. Ibid., 229; see further 229–32.

51. Ibid., 262.

52. Ibid., 200.

53. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 271; cf. also McCrum, Globish.

54. Made by Endless Games.

55. Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer (1979), Morning Prayer II, p. 99.

56. Such moods are also among the more complex and tricky parts of a grammar. See, inter alia, Palmer, Mood and Modality. For the automaticity of prosperity speech, which is deemed to “force” God to “move accordingly,” functioning “not as requests but as contracts, guaranteeing miraculous results,” see Bowler, Blessed, 22–23.

57. According to Bowler, only one prosperity church in Houston held a Good Friday service; the other churches avoided gloomy occasions. That one church was Osteen’s Lakewood Church. Bowler recounts that she was greeted no less than six times with a chipper “HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY!” on her way in (Blessed, 193, emphasis original). She describes how Jesus was resurrected by the second song of the service and that Osteen’s wife, Victoria, took the stage pumping her fist and shouting “Isn’t it great we serve a Risen Lord?” effectively “preempting Easter by two days” (194). For more on a thick definition of happiness in biblical perspective, see the essays in Strawn, Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness; esp. Strawn, “Introduction: The Bible and . . . Happiness?”; and Strawn, “Triumph of Life.”

58. E. Wilson, Against Happiness, 20. In my judgment, Wilson errs too far in the opposite direction. In his next book, Mercy of Eternity, Wilson is candid about his own struggle with bipolar depression.

59. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 47–108.

60. Bowler, Blessed, 232.

61. Ibid., 176.

62. McConnell, Different Gospel, 166. By way of contrast, note the data on what constitutes a good attachment between a parent and a child: children in distress vocalize it to their parents. Poor attachment is marked by silent suffering. See Strawn (“Poetic Attachment,” 408–9) with reference to the Psalms. On the parent-child metaphor in Scripture, see further Strawn, “‘Israel, My Child.’” Cf. chap. 2 and W. Sibley Towner’s remark there on the dearth of lament in contemporary worship: “We prefer to sin and repent, lament and die in silent privacy” (“‘Without Our Aid,’” 33).

63. Bowler, Blessed, 176.

64. See ibid., 5, 239; cf. 6 and 9.

65. Ibid., 183, fig. 5.3.

66. See CEL 338, 424.

67. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 145–46.

68. Ibid., 146–47; see further 149–50; McWhorter, Missing Spanish Creoles; McWhorter, Language Interrupted, 252; Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, 6, 68–71.

69. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 150n5.

70. Ibid., 134–35: “Usually . . . sociohistorical realities are such that one group has its foot on the other’s neck, and the subordinate group is compelled to make do as best it can with the dominant group’s language, rather than the two groups mutually accommodating to each other’s.”

71. See further Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior.

72. B. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez: Devotional; B. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez: Bible Study; B. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez for Teens; B. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez Journal; B. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez for Kids; D. Wilkinson, Prayer of Jabez for Women; Carlson and Natchev, Prayer of Jabez for Little Ones, a baby board book. How infants “enlarge their borders” is unclear: perhaps more diapers or pacifiers?

73. Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible.

74. Ibid., 68–69.

75. See ibid., 49, 80–83. Beal cites research indicating that “the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year” (ibid., 36). For a sampling of odd Bible publications, see ibid., 133–36. See also essays by Metzger, “Curious Bibles,” 143–44; Marini, “Family Bible,” 224–25; and Bentley, “Illustrated Bibles,” 298–300—all in Metzger and Coogan, Oxford Companion to the Bible.

76. See Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 53) on how communication impossibility is a sign of language death or a new language, esp. his chaps. 1 and 3 on dialectology and speciation.

Chapter 7 Recommended Treatment

1. The terms dialect and language should be carefully distinguished. Diglossia is often discussed in terms of high (H) and low (L) dialects of a language or language group (e.g., Standard German and Swiss German), which are sometimes correlated with written and oral forms. Bi-/multilingualism designates the ability to operate in more than one fully distinct language—say, Italian and Arabic, or English and Spanish. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 87–92. For diglossia in ancient Israel, see Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew; Young, Rezetko, and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts; and further bibliography in chap. 1. In actual practice, it is not always easy to determine where one dialect leaves off and a new language begins. In what follows I focus primarily on bi-/multilingualism. For more on dialects, see also chaps. 8–9.

2. On language death and various attempts to stop it, see, inter alia, Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, esp. 169–238, 328–33; Dorian, Investigating Obsolescence; Crystal, Language Death, esp. 11–26; Aitchison, Language Change, 235–48; Harrison, Last Speakers; Harrison, When Languages Die; Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices; Grenoble and Whaley, Saving Languages; Kroskrity, Telling Stories in the Face of Danger; and Abley, Spoken Here.

3. McWhorter, Power of Babel, 200, cf. 205.

4. As noted in chap. 3, 96 percent of the world’s population speaks one or more of the top twenty most-spoken languages. See McWhorter, Power of Babel, 257; cf. CEL 288–89.

5. McWhorter, Story of Human Language, 3:37.

6. McWhorter, What Language Is, 65.

7. Hale et al., “Endangered Languages,” 8.

8. Crystal, “Death of Language,” 58.

9. See D. Wheeler, “Death of Languages,” 4. He notes that indigenous speakers sometimes feel shame about their native languages. This feeling can be exacerbated (for immigrants) by governmental policies concerning language use since nationalistic fervor is often couched in linguistic terms. In the United States, for instance, there are occasional attempts to somehow legislate the use of English and no other language. Obviously the reasons for language death are many and varied, and I focus on only certain aspects of the phenomenon. See further and more extensively Crystal, Language Death; and Hagège, Death and Life of Languages.

10. Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew, 92–93: “Exile and polyglotism are synonymous.”

11. On the problem of underuse in language, including language death, see McWhorter, Language Interrupted; also Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 80–81; Dorian, “Problem of the Semi-Speaker”; and Aitchison, Language Change, 243.

12. Ubuh (or Ubykh) was a West Caucasian language that died with its last speaker, Tevfik Esenç, on October 8, 1992 (see Crystal, Language Death, 1–2). There are several published analyses of Ubuh.

13. Recall the point made in chap. 3, that language is more a spoken phenomenon than a written one. Only about 200 of the world’s 6,000 languages are written; if plotted on a 24-hour clock, written language would fall after 23:07 (or 11:07 p.m.) on the “day” of human language. See, e.g., McWhorter, What Language Is, 145–50.

14. For Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, such languages are not completely dead and so have at least a theoretical chance of coming back to life. See further below.

15. See ibid., 52–57, deeming Latin one of the languages “not alive nor completely dead” (57).

16. For definitions of what constitutes a dead language, see Crystal, Language Death, 1–26; and Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, esp. 51–74.

17. For levels of danger, from safe through endangered to extinct (often with further subclassification, e.g., potentially endangered, endangered, seriously endangered, moribund, extinct), see Crystal, Language Death, 19–23. Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 29–30) distinguishes between “living” languages and “existing” ones.

18. Syriac, e.g., and ancient Aramaic (more closely); or Modern English and Old English (more distantly). See Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 296.

19. See, e.g., W. Chomsky, Hebrew, 206–27. For Hagège, Hebrew is one of the languages that died in terms of losing native speakers but that continued to survive: no longer living but not quite dead (Death and Life of Languages, 268–69).

20. Glinert, Grammar of Modern Hebrew, 2.

21. Cf. ibid., xxv: Hebrew is “the only known case of a mother tongue reborn”; and the judgment of Chaim Rabin: “Hebrew is the only case of a language which had completely ceased to be spoken and had no administrative status, and yet was successfully revived” (cited in Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 294; cf. further 296).

22. See Glinert, Grammar of Modern Hebrew, 2; more extensively, Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew.

23. See Lust, Child Language, 101; CEL 230.

24. See, among others, Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 193. Glinert (Grammar of Modern Hebrew, 2) notes that, even before 1948, the Balfour Declaration (1917) and Great Britain’s recognition of the official status of Hebrew “secured its place as a spoken vernacular and as an all-purpose written medium.”

25. See Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew, 42–45; Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 287–89; cf. Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 185, for earlier attempts to restrict or eliminate Hebrew.

26. This phrase marks an extensive section in a chapter on Hebrew by Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 241–310, esp. 269–308), which in turn belongs to the third part of that book, titled “Languages and Resurrection.” Note also the title of Stavans’s book, Resurrecting Hebrew. Others (e.g., Glinert, Grammar of Modern Hebrew, xxv) prefer the language of rebirth. See also note 30 below.

27. But see the reflections of Brueggemann, Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge.

28. Of course this community already has a lingua franca; it just tends not to be Scripture. See further chaps. 1–2, 4–6, and 8–9.

29. See Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 3), who thinks languages are only truly dead if they have no speakers and “beyond that, if they have left no living traces in the cultures of the descendants of those who died speaking them.” Call it the second (linguistic) death.

30. For resurrection in theological perspective, see Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God; Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel. A primary point of these works is that resurrection is a new and unexpected thing—the raw transformative power of God. For the position that resurrection is more pronounced and earlier in the OT and ancient Israel than frequently thought, see esp. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel; and C. Hays, Death in the Iron Age II and in First Isaiah.

31. Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 298–99.

32. See also Jenson, Canon and Creed, 19–26; also chap. 5.

33. There were, of course, additional factors, but elementary education was a principal one. See Hagège, Death and Life of Languages, 279–80, 285; Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew, esp. 41–45; W. Chomsky, Hebrew, 231–44; Waldman, Recent Study of Hebrew, 221–22; Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 193; Sáenz-Badillos, History of the Hebrew Language, 269–72.

34. Noam Chomsky’s works are legion, but the classic is N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. For more on Chomsky, see, inter alia, Aitchison, Linguistics, 30–32, 191–229. Important works include Garman, Psycholinguistics; and Pinker, Language Instinct. For Chomsky and language acquisition, see L. White, Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition; L. White, Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar.

35. For child language acquisition, see Lust, Child Language, esp. 101–241; Elliot, Child Language; Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned; and Meisel, First and Second Language Acquisition.

36. Note the importance of the social unit for education more generally in Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.

37. See CEL 233; expansions tended to increase when observers were present, however, suggesting that glossing may be meant for the observers more than (instead of) the children. See Elliot (Child Language, 90–93) on holophrases, where children say one word and the adult is able to interpret accurately the force of the utterance.

38. See CEL 237; Elliot, Child Language, 149–63; and Lust, Child Language, 110–22, though the latter challenges its use in language teaching per se.

39. See Klein, Second Language Acquisition, 30–32.

40. See McWhorter, “Linguistics from the Left,” 185; CEL 210–13.

41. See above for problems with underuse. In the case of creoles like that of happiology, the language that is the OT is not just forgotten; it is mis-remembered if not dis-membered. As in the case with so many pidginized forms, many speakers don’t even know they are speaking a creole.

42. Incomplete language acquisition can cause problems and/or lead to major differences in later stages of a language—just as pidginization and creolization. See McWhorter, Language Interrupted. Even closer to the point, see Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 328: “If you have to hoodwink—or blindfold—your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.”

43. Cf. Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible, 27; also C. Smith, Bible Made Impossible. Note also, more generally, Dean, Almost Christian; Bergler, Juvenilization of American Christianity; Bergler, From Here to Maturity. To return to one of the figures from chap. 5, it is chilling to note that Marcion apparently came before the elders in Rome with questions regarding important Gospel texts like Luke 6:43 but received no satisfying answers. See Lebreton and Zeiller, History of the Primitive Church, 524, 526.

44. Sharp, Old Testament Prophets for Today, 20. Note also the thoughtful remarks of Moberly on Job and how its “axiom” that “piety is wisdom,” which sounds “unsuited to ‘real life’ beyond the nursery or Sunday school,” is significantly thickened up by Job’s “displaying and maintaining fear of God and departing from evil amid utter dereliction” (Old Testament Theology, 271, cf. 277).

45. Once again, cf. Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible; C. Smith, Bible Made Impossible.

46. On the linguistic side of the analogy, see McWhorter, Language Interrupted.

47. Hauerwas, Working with Words, 87, emphasis original.

48. In what follows, I focus on adult SLA, though children, too, can and do acquire L2s. For SLA more generally, see Klein, Second Language Acquisition; Meisel, First and Second Language Acquisition, esp. 191–99; Matras, Language Contact, 68–86.

49. For both similarities and differences, see Meisel, First and Second Language Acquisition, passim, esp. 240–46.

50. CEL 377. For more on language teaching, see Richards and Rodgers, Approaches and Methods; Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned.

51. Note also the idea of a critical period that is ideal in human development for language learning (generally speaking, before puberty). On this matter and brain plasticity, see Lust, Child Language, 92–96. For the critical window, see also Klein, Second Language Acquisition, 8–10; Meisel, First and Second Language Acquisition, 202–39.

52. CEL 377.

53. Ibid., 375; further, Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned, 76; Matras, Language Contact, 69–72.

54. CEL 375.

55. Ibid.

56. See chap. 2 for the correlation between regular religious practice and higher scores on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.

57. See above on the difference between diglossia and bilingualism. Again, the precise delineation between two dialects of the same language and two entirely different languages is not always clear and sometimes somewhat arbitrary, both linguistically and sociopolitically. See, e.g., CEL 362–65. For more on diglossia, see further below and chap. 9.

58. CEL 364; similarly, Klein, Second Language Acquisition, 13.

59. CEL 376.

60. See chaps. 3 and 6 on creolization and decreolization, and further, Holm, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles.

61. See, among others, Bullock and Toribio, Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, esp. Gardner-Chloros’s essay, “Sociolinguistic Factors in Code-Switching”; Gardner-Chloros, Code-Switching; Kellman, Switching Languages; and Matras, Language Contact, 101–45.

62. Hauerwas, Working with Words, 87.

63. See, e.g., Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned, 93–96; Matras, Language Contact, 72–74, 91–99.

64. For several examples, see chap. 6, but note esp. the following two that are cited there: (1) the preacher who identified the laws of God and the laws of business as “one and the same” (Bowler, Blessed, 200); and (2) Osteen’s curious metaphor of “explosion” or “explosive” to describe God’s goodness and blessing (I Declare, 1).

65. Not unrelated, perhaps, is the need to differentiate a low dialect (L) that is somehow more pervasive, say, at the spoken level, from a high dialect (H) that is somehow more official. Just as L1 ≠ L2, so also H ≠ L. See further below on the additional distinction between canon 1 and canon 2. Note also Dean, Almost Christian, 112–15.

66. Steiner, After Babel, 228, emphasis original.

67. Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 3, emphasis original. See further Strawn, “On Walter Brueggemann.”

68. For outside Israel, see esp. Gen. 1–11; Isa. 2:1–4; 19:23–25; Amos 9:7; Ps. 87; and more generally Moberly, Old Testament of the Old Testament. For outside the church, see, e.g., Acts 10. For the language of Christ being “on the loose,” see Juel, “Disquieting Silence.”

69. See Brueggemann, “That the World May Be Redescribed”; also, more generally, Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor; Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking.

70. See Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew, 72, 93; cf. Jubilees 12.25–27 but contrast b. Sanh. 37b.

71. Though of course Jews could (and did!) draw on the Hebrew Bible, analogically understood, in all these ways, exactly as I am arguing via the linguistic analogy (see Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 183–96). Thus I am not arguing that people be fluent in the biblical languages per se (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and so forth) but in biblical language (singular). See further chaps. 1 and 8–9. There can be no doubt, regardless, that the continued existence of Hebrew in written form played a crucial role in its revival—a situation that the OT shares and that could be drawn on for its successful “resurrection” (see above).

72. Sheppard, “Canon,” esp. 64–67. See also McDonald, Biblical Canon, 55–58. Note also J. Sanders (“Canon: Hebrew Bible,” 847) on the difference between norma normans (functionally authoritative texts) and norma normata (sacred texts with unchangeable shapes); and the brief discussion in Strawn, “Authority: Textual, Traditional, or Functional?” Barr (Holy Scripture, 75–79) speaks of three canons, but in a very different sense (see McDonald, Biblical Canon, 55n40).

73. For these and other books, see OTP, NTA, and the Apostolic Fathers. For the OT Apocrypha, which is sacred in Catholic and Orthodox circles but not in Protestantism, see below. Note that 1 Enoch is actually deemed canonical in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (cf. Jude 14–15, which cites it). For the larger issues of canonization, see McDonald, Biblical Canon; Sundberg, Old Testament of the Early Church; Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible.

74. The death of canon 2 also means the loss of a way to evaluate (resist, recognize, redescribe) canon 1.

75. For useful overviews, see “Apocrypha, the,” in ODCC, esp. 84; Metzger, Introduction to the Apocrypha, esp. 175–204; briefly, Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible, 128.

76. According to Greenslade, “The first edition of an English Bible deliberately issued without them was probably the Geneva Bible of A. Hard, Edinburgh, 1640, which retains the Prayer of Manasses only and gives reasons for omitting the rest” (“English Versions of the Bible,” esp. 169), though still earlier editions omit the OTA (see already certain primitive manuscripts of the Syriac Peshitta: de Hamel, Book, 307). The Westminster Confession of 1648 explicitly stated that these books were “of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings” (Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible,” 169). Luther did include the Apocrypha as an appendix in his 1534 translation, stating in his preface that they are “useful and good to be read.” Even so, Luther also indicated that these books are “not to be esteemed as part of the Holy Scriptures.” See Volz, “Continental Versions to c. 1600: German,” esp. 100.

77. See Metzger, Introduction to the Apocrypha, 239–47.

78. Contrast, e.g., a Catholic translation like the NAB. The principal Greek witnesses do incorporate the apocryphal books throughout the OT canon—e.g., Wisdom and Sirach with Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes; Tobit, Judith, and so forth with 1 Chronicles–Esther; and so on.

79. Cf. chap. 2 for the fact that sermons on texts from the Apocrypha in the Best Sermons series were only from Catholic priests.

80. But see the helpful collection of essays in Meurer, Apocrypha in Ecumenical Perspective.

81. Note, however, that Sirach, Tobit, Psalm 151, and the Letter of Jeremiah are now attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls, demonstrating that Hebrew versions of these books once existed. See Collins, “Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.” The Greek versus Hebrew criterion is, therefore, not definitive.

82. The BCP draws extensively and organically from the apocryphal books, not only in the lectionary, which includes readings from Ecclesiasticus/Sirach (2:[1–7,] 7–11; 10:[7–11,] 12–18; 15:11–20 [2×]; 27:30–28:7; 38:1–4, 6–10, 12–14; 38:27–32 [2×]; 44:1–10, 13–14), Wisdom (1:16–2:1; 2:[6–11,] 12–22; 2:1, 12–24 [2×]; 3:1–9 [2×]; 7:7–14; 12:13, 16–19), Judith (9:1, 11–14), Baruch (5:1–9), 2 Esdras (2:42–48), Song of the Three Young Men (29–34, 35–65), and the Prayer of Manasseh (1–2, 4, 6–7, 11–15), but also in the daily office, which includes readings from Baruch (3:24–37; 4:21–29; 4:36–5:9), Ecclesiasticus (1:1–10, 18–27; 2:1–11; 2:7–18; 3:3–9, 14–17; 3:17–31; 4:1–10; 4:20–5:7; 6:5–17; 7:4–14; 10:1–8, 12–18; 11:2–20; 15:9–20; 18:19–33; 19:4–17; 24:1–12; 28:14–26; 31:3–11; 31:12–18; 31:25–32:2; 34:1–8, 18–22; 35:1–17; 36:1–17; 38:24–34; 39:1–10; 42:15–25 [2×]; 43:1–2, 27–32; 43:1–12, [27–33]; 43:1–22; 43:23–33; 44:1–15; 44:19–45:5; 45:6–16; 46:1–10; 46:11–20; 48:1–11 [2×]; 50:1, 11–24; 51:1–12; 51:6b–12; 51:13–22), 1 Maccabees (1:1–28; 1:42–63; 2:1–28, 2:29–43, 49–50; 3:1–24; 3:25–41; 3:42–60; 4:1–25, 4:36–59), Wisdom (1:1–15; 1:16–2:1, 12–22; 1:16–2:11; 2:21–24; 3:1–9 [2×]; 4:7–15; 4:16–5:8; 5:1–5, 14–16; 5:9–23; 6:12–23; 7:1–14; 7:3–14; 7:22–8:1; 9:1, 7–18; 9:1–12; 10:1–5, [5–12,] 13–21; 13:1–9; 14:27–15:3; 16:15–17:1; 19:1–8, 18–22), 2 Esdras (2:42–47), and Judith (4:1–15; 5:1–21; 5:22–6:4; 6:10–21; 7:1–7, 19–32; 8:9–17; 9:1, 7–10; 10:1–23; 12:1–20; 13:1–20). Several of the lectionary readings are optional, however. One should note the heavy emphasis on the wisdom genre in the lections used (esp. from Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom of Solomon); other genres and the majority of the books in the OTA are underrepresented. Only a few books enjoy full, continua-style reading—Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom primarily but also, to a lesser degree, 1 Maccabees, Baruch, and Judith (though in the latter case, the reading is optional for Esther in proper 20). The Song of the Three Young Men (vv. 29–34, 35–65) and the Prayer of Manasseh (vv. 1–2, 4, 6–7, 11–15) are used as canticles in response to the other scriptural readings in the two rites for morning prayer.

83. For brief summaries of the importance of the Apocrypha, including the theology contained therein, see “Apocrypha, the,” in ODCC 84–85; Metzger, Introduction to the Apocrypha, 205–38.

84. See, “Erasmus, Desiderius,” in ODCC 556–57. I thank Tim Beal for discussions on NT-only Bibles. See his Rise and Fall of the Bible for discussion of some editions thereof. Note also that the Bogomils, adherents of a medieval heresy, accepted only the NT and the Psalms. See “Bogomils,” in ODCC 219–20.

85. Compilers of these NT-only Bibles often feel compelled to include the Psalms. Thus the Psalms may yet retain some staying power, liveliness, or authority that other parts of the OT have lost. See further chap. 9, but note the problems besetting the Psalms in hymnody and lectionary as delineated in chap. 2.

86. To be clear, in my opinion the history of Christian doctrine and its use of the OT is, on its own, insufficient to prevent the OT’s demise. On the one hand, that rich history demonstrates the existence of competent speakers, but on the other hand, that history and use—if left simply back then and back there—will not necessarily or automatically produce new speakers. Christianity in Germany, too, depended on and had access to the history of Christian doctrine (esp. Protestantism!) but nevertheless witnessed the near-death of the OT in the twentieth century (see chap. 5). One could easily say that it was only competent speakers, esp. among the Confessing Church, who prevented that death.

Chapter 8 Saving the Old Testament

1. Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons, 70.

2. Recall too the phenomenon of “New Testament Churches,” mentioned in chap. 1.

3. C. S. Lewis, Great Divorce, 36.

4. Ibid., 43–44.

5. See the otherwise flawed and misguided critique of biblical studies in Avalos, End of Biblical Studies, though there is a note of truth in what he says on this particular point. More useful accounts, intended ultimately to help biblical and theological studies and not hurt them (as per Avalos), may be found in Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible; and Legaspi, Death of Scripture. Note also Moore and Sherwood, Invention of the Biblical Scholar; and the not entirely unrelated studies by Clines, “From Salamanca to Cracow” and “From Copenhagen to Oslo.”

6. See esp. Charry, “Academic Theology”; Charry, Renewing of Your Minds; Charry, God and the Art of Happiness. Further, see Legaspi, Death of Scripture.

7. See note 5 above.

8. Wiesel, Trial of God, 46.

9. Again, see Charry, “Academic Theology,” 90–104; Charry, Renewing of Your Minds; cf. also Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 47–108.

10. See chap. 6. For American civil religion, see Laderman, American Civil Religion; cf. the plethora of recent publications, such as Lee, American Patriot’s Bible, KJV; Lee, Young American Patriot’s Bible; D. Barton, Founders Bible (NASB); Foster and Lillback, 1599 Geneva Bible: Patriot’s Edition. See Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible, passim, for the problems that pertain to boutique Bible production and for the market-driven nature of Bible publishing. As he explains: “Rupert Murdoch didn’t acquire Zondervan because he wanted to spread the Word any more than he acquired My-Space because he wanted to expand his friends list. As owner of HarperCollins, he also publishes occult classics like The Satanic Bible and The Necronomicon. Getting into Bible publishing is simply good business” (34–35). Cf. J. Smith, “Scriptures and Histories,” 33, on “commercial Bible printers seeking a comparative advantage for their product which was, after all, identical to that of their competitors. The solution, as with soap powder, was found in varying the packaging and in the diversity of extra-biblical materials each edition included.”

11. See McWhorter, Language Interrupted, for the fact that incomplete language acquisition can cause as many problems in language use and/or lead to as many differences in later stages of a language (vis-à-vis its original) as do pidginization and creolization.

12. Buechner, Magnificent Defeat, 110.

13. See, e.g., Legaspi, Death of Scripture; Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible. It is fascinating to observe that Adolf von Harnack painted Marcion as the first historical critic (History of Dogma, 1:277–78).

14. See the incisive remarks of Levenson, “Eighth Principle of Judaism and the Literary Simultaneity of Scripture,” in Levenson, Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism, 62–81. Cf. Childs, Isaiah, xii:

After having recently completed a lengthy project on biblical theology, . . . I am fully cognizant that its effect has been minimal on the field of biblical exegesis. Usually books on biblical theology have been relegated to a special subdiscipline, and thought to relate only to larger hermeneutical and theological concerns without any close relation to exegesis. Those engaged in biblical theology are often dismissed as “theologians,” and not biblical interpreters. For my part, I have always considered biblical theology to be only an ancillary discipline that better serves in equipping the exegete for the real task of interpreting the biblical text itself.

15. For the crucial feedback loop of catechesis-and/with-criticism (and vice versa), see Strawn, “Teaching in a New Key.”

16. On jargons, see Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 456–62, 522–23.

17. The image is Beal’s, in Rise and Fall of the Bible, 80–83.

18. Perhaps not completely; it could continue to survive as a technical jargon (see note 16 above and further below). Even so, see chap. 7 on dead vs. existing languages and the (non)possibilities of language revival.

19. See, inter alia, Harrison, Last Speakers.

20. See, e.g., Strawn, “Comparative Approaches”; Strawn, “History of Israelite Religion.”

21. Here I part company with, e.g., Legaspi, Death of Scripture, who overstates, I think, the malfeasance of certain branches of biblical study.

22. Linguistically speaking, jargons are not uncommon phenomena, and there is nothing wrong or bad about them. They are quite effective insider speech. In my linguistic analogy, a jargon is a problem only when it becomes incomprehensible to any and all others, including those who presumably would like to speak it generally or who think they already do. “Mechanic-ese,” highly technical jargon about car repair, is perfectly well and good and highly effective among those fluent in the jargon, but it is problematic for those who don’t speak the jargon and want to learn how to fix their own car.

23. Cf. chap. 1 on how and not just if the OT is present. See further chap. 9 below and also Strawn, “Teaching in a New Key.” For a helpful example of how the entirety of the OT might be taught and be useful in instruction, see Brueggemann, Creative Word.

24. I have not mentioned, e.g., serious attempts to expose people to wide swaths of Scripture, which are certainly analogous to language immersion programs. The Disciple Bible Study or Covenant Bible Study programs come immediately to mind. What one often finds in the execution of these studies, however, is how hard it is for laypeople to recognize this material—esp. the OT—as their own, and as their own language. That is because it isn’t their own language—not yet, at any rate—though the programs are designed to help remedy that situation.

25. McConville, Deuteronomy, 10.

26. See, e.g., Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy.

27. For more on “Torah” in Deuteronomy, see Olson, Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses; and Vogt, Deuteronomic Theology and the Significance of Torah.

28. See, e.g., Seow, “Torah.” As pointed out by Kaminsky and Lohr (Torah: A Beginner’s Guide), in later periods and in its most expansive meaning, Torah “can refer to any part, or all, of the vast trove of Jewish law and lore from antiquity to today” (17, similarly 3).

29. See Olson, Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses; also Miller, “That the Children May Know”; and Firth, “Passing on the Faith in Deuteronomy.”

30. One of these strategies is inscribing the audience into the earlier story. Note, e.g., the repetition of “we” language in the parent’s response to the child’s question about “you” in Deut. 6:20–25. This same sort of inscription happens throughout Deuteronomy in Moses’s own discourse insofar as the new, second generation is consistently addressed as if it were the first one out of Egypt and present at Sinai (see, e.g., 1:6, 32; 4:15; 9:7; and passim). See further Strawn, “Slaves and Rebels.”

31. See Miller, “That the Children May Know.”

32. See Lundbom, Deuteronomy, 9–10; and the famous essay by Tillesse, “Sections ‘tu’ et sections ‘vous’ dans le Deutéronome.”

33. For what follows, see Strawn, “Keep/Observe/Do!” For more on Deuteronomy’s rhetoric, see Lenchak, “Choose Life!,” 63–66; and Hur, “Rhetoric of the Deuteronomic Code.” See also Lundbom, Deuteronomy; Lundbom, Jeremiah, esp. xix–xliii; Lundbom’s collected essays, Biblical Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, esp. chaps. 1, 11–13.

34. For repetition in SLA, see Tomlin, “Repetition in Second Language Acquisition.”

35. Muilenburg, “Study in Hebrew Rhetoric,” esp. 100. For more on repetition and language acquisition, including with children, see Johnstone, “Introduction”; Tomlin, “Repetition in Second Language Acquisition”; and Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned, 10–15, 127, 138–39, 183–84.

36. The Hebrew name of Deuteronomy is, in fact, dəbārîm, “words” (see 1:1), which nicely summarizes the book on several levels. See Miller, Deuteronomy, 1–2.

37. See chap. 7 and note the problematic results of inadequate language practice detailed in chap. 2, esp. as captured in the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.

38. For more on this point and for what follows, see Strawn, “Designated Readers.”

39. Brueggemann, “Preacher as Scribe,” 13, emphasis original.

40. Ibid., emphasis original. This is the first of two important re-texting tasks according to him; the second is to listen to the congregation, which is often textless—or, in the linguistic analogy—ignorant of the language.

41. Joshua 1:8 is the center of a chiasm with a verse on each side (vv. 7 and 9) enjoining Joshua to be strong and courageous. This envelope structure serves to highlight v. 8 and its injunctions to attend to “this book of Torah” (sēper ha-tôrâ ha-zeh), which is, again, Deuteronomy (see above and Josh. 1:7: “the law that Moses commanded you” CEB).

42. Note the nineteenth-century portraits of the family gathering around Scripture discussed in Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible, 139–40. For the importance of parents in the religiosity of contemporary Christian teenagers, see Dean, Almost Christian, 109–30 (chap. 6, “Parents Matter Most: The Art of Translation”); and Smith with Denton, Soul Searching, 56–57.

43. See, e.g., Strawn, “Commentary on Joshua 24:1–15.”

44. See the classic study by Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, esp. 320–65.

45. See above on the phraseology. Lundbom (“Lawbook of the Josianic Reform”; repr. in Lundbom, Biblical Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, 121–30; see also Lundbom, Deuteronomy, 13–18) argues that the book found in Josiah’s time is actually the Song of Moses in Deut. 32. See further below and Strawn, “Reading Josiah Reading Deuteronomy.”

46. Again, see Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School.

47. See the discussion of language and identity in chap. 7, which interacts with an important passage from Kutscher, History of the Hebrew Language, 298–99. Note also, and more recently, Schniedewind, Social History of Hebrew.

48. See Aitchison, Language Change, 1–7.

49. See Strawn, “Deuteronomy”; and more extensively Levinson, Deuteronomy. Cf. also Stackert, Rewriting the Torah.

50. For the latter, see, e.g., McWhorter, Language Interrupted.

51. See Strawn, “Keep/Observe/Do”; for a worked example on sameness/difference, see also Strawn, “X-Factor: Revisioning Biblical Holiness.”

52. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again.

53. What follows is indebted to Strawn, “Deuteronomy,” 74–75; see also Strawn, “Slaves and Rebels.”

54. Neruda, “Love,” in Neruda, Poetry of Pablo Neruda, 5.

55. I cannot resist one aside about Torah/law at this point because Deut. 32, the song and climax of Torah, shows how so much Christian antinomianism is so thoroughly pidginized. Far better is Calvin, who wrote, “Whoever wants to do away with the law entirely for the faithful, understands it falsely” (Institutes 2.7.13); and the catechism of the BCP, 848: “Q. Since we do not fully obey them [the Ten Commandments], are they useful at all? A. Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need of redemption.” See Miller, Way of the Lord, 265n47, for the notion that the ancient Greek laws were sung to the accompaniment of the kithara (lyre, harp; cf. Plato, Laws 4.722).

56. Given what is said in Deut. 31:16 concerning Israel’s inevitable apostasy and in vv. 19, 21 about the function of the Torah-song after such apostasy, it may not be going too far to say that Deuteronomy’s efficacy (see above) is a function of the Torah-song primarily if not preeminently. Note again Lundbom’s opinion that the lawbook of Josiah’s time was Deut. 32 (“Lawbook of the Josianic Reform”; and Lundbom, Deuteronomy, 13–18). Beyond the texts that are cited below from 2 Macc. 7, 4 Macc. 18, and Rev. 15, note also the Deuteronomic themes in Dan. 9 and the explicit mention of “the Law of Moses, the servant of God” and the curses and judgments written therein in Dan. 9:11 (also v. 13). The intercessory and rhetorical turns Daniel makes in his prayer (9:15–19) are not unlike Moses’s own in Deuteronomy (e.g., Deut. 9:18–29) and in the turn from judgment to mercy in Deut. 32. Other pertinent texts that may also demonstrate the efficacy of Deuteronomy in later contexts and generations include Ezra 3:2; 6:18; Neh 1:7–9; 8:1, 14; 9:14; 10:29; and Mal. 4:4.

57. Cf. the criticisms of Lindbeck, some more effective than others, mentioned in chap. 1.

58. Note the importance of Scripture in, e.g., Erasmus’s “Preparing for Death.”

59. See the following works that stress intertextual fields of allusion and citation in the ways the NT draws on the OT: R. Hays, Echoes of Scripture; R. Hays, Conversion of the Imagination; R. Hays, Reading Backwards; and J. Wagner, Heralds of the Good News.

60. See Charles (Revelation, 2:27) for the opinion that these saints are deceased martyrs. If so, they are still speaking the language, even beyond death.

61. Mounce, Revelation, 287: “Practically every phrase of the hymn comes from the rich vocabulary of the OT.” Charles, Revelation, 2:36: “The Martyrs’ Song is formed almost wholly of O.T. expressions.” See also Beasley-Murray, Revelation, 235–36; and Beale, Revelation, 793–99.

62. Many scholars favor Exod. 15 over Deut. 32 as the primary referent for “the song of Moses” in Rev. 15 (e.g., Mounce, Revelation, 286–87; Charles, Revelation, 2:34–36), but even these must admit to allusions to Deut. 32; cf. Witherington, Revelation, 206: “The song is a patchwork quilt of OT phrases, and its content owes more to Deuteronomy 32 than to Exodus 15.”

Chapter 9 Ways Forward and Not

1. Towne, “‘Obituary’ for God.”

2. See Davis, Wondrous Depth, xiv: The OT is “an urgent and speaking presence”; 2: the OT is “an immediate presence that exercises shaping force in Christian lives—indeed that serves as a source of salutary pressure on our lives.” Note also Strawn, “Four Thoughts on Preaching and Teaching the Bible.”

3. See chap. 5 for censorship of OT hymnody in Nazi Germany; and chap. 2 for Christian songs that do not capture the full witness of the Psalms and their covenantal dynamic. See further below for a contemporary Christian song that nicely models the largeness of God in a nonreductionist way.

4. Yet reading by itself will not be enough: “It shows no respect for the Old Testament passage when it is left unexpounded” (Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 12).

5. But note the continued debate on the status of the OT in recent German discussion, esp. the controversial support of von Harnack by Slenczka (e.g., “Texte zum Alten Testament”). See the reply by Hartenstein, “Zur Bedeutung des Alten Testaments.” I thank Klaus Peter-Adam for bringing these items to my attention.

6. Once again, I employ scare quotes here because what I say is applicable beyond pastors, whether formally ordained or not. It can apply just as well to any tasked with the teaching of others, whatever their age.

7. See Webster, Holy Scripture, esp. 107–35; and Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible.

8. Some Algonquian languages are so difficult that even children raised from birth in the language are not considered competent until well into puberty. Such a situation concerns basic language competency, not yet the language mastery necessary for the highest of language arts (e.g., poetry). See further below.

9. Apprenticeship and experience are other terms to describe the issue at hand. See Dewey, Experience and Education; Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning; Gee, Situated Language and Learning; Gee, Social Mind. I thank Christy Lang Hearlson for discussions on this point and for directing me to this literature. See also Charry, God and the Art of Happiness, 252.

10. See, inter alia, E. Anderson, Worship and Christian Identity.

11. See chap. 7 and the literature cited there, esp. Lightbown and Spada, How Languages Are Learned; and Klein, Second Language Acquisition.

12. For what follows I am indebted to Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, 39–40; and his comments in “Preaching Moment 022.” Long takes inspiration from Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate.

13. Long points out that this practice of “filleted address” (my phrasing) not only recognizes the complex plurality of the congregation, but also rhetorically disarms people from saying, “I didn’t get anything out of that; it wasn’t addressed to me.”

14. Note, e.g., that the collocation “orphans and widows” appears together only here in the NT, but it is commonly found in the OT. See, e.g., Exod. 22:22; Deut. 10:18; 14:29; 16:11, 14; 24:19–21; 26:12–13; 27:19; Ps. 68:5; Isa. 1:17. For more on James and the OT, see, among others, Carson, “James.”

15. Steiner, After Babel, 228, emphasis original; cf. chap. 7 above.

16. The reference is to Barth, “Strange New World within the Bible.” Cf. Rutledge, foreword to Stewards of the Mysteries of God, xi: “Without total and continual immersion in ‘the strange new world of the Bible,’ the preacher will only be able to tell stories from his or her personal human perspective, relating them almost incidentally to the readings for the day—thereby failing to transmit the world-overturning, kosmos-re-creating nature of the Voice of God.”

17. See, e.g., Brueggemann, “That the World May Be Redescribed”; further Brueggemann, Pathway of Interpretation.

18. Cf. LaSor, Hubbard, and Bush, Old Testament Survey, 585–90. More recently, see Beale’s tellingly titled New Testament Biblical Theology; and Brueggemann, “Review.” See also Beale, New Testament Use of the Old Testament; Beale and Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament.

19. See Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 2: the OT is “the operating system for the New Testament. . . . The Second Testament simply will not work without its engine; it is ‘powered on’ by it.” Also cf. Johnson, Writings of the New Testament, 2; and Seitz (Word without End, 69n17), who, speaking of the NT writers, wonders, “Is there a Gentile among them?”

20. One of the great biblical theologians of the recent past, Childs, recognized this point in the transition from his early work—Biblical Theology in Crisis, esp. 114–15, which posited an approach to doing biblical theology that focused on the use of the OT in the NT—to his later work, which proceeds quite differently, including extensive attention to what he called the “discrete” witnesses of the OT and the NT, esp. in his Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. I thank Stephen B. Chapman for discussions on this matter. See also, and more briefly, Childs, “Nature of the Christian Bible.” Despite this point, I believe Childs himself (or at least his followers) is sometimes guilty of favoring overmuch a kind of NT-centrism. See Strawn, “And These Three Are One.”

21. Cf. the testimonia to the present book, esp. that of Vischer: “Tell me what you would strike from the Old Testament and I’ll tell you what defect there is in your Christian knowledge.”

22. For discussion of the “two-Testamented” nature of Christian Scripture, see Childs, “Nature of the Christian Bible”; and esp. Seitz, Character of Christian Scripture.

23. In addition to the items already cited, see Jenson, Canon and Creed, esp. 19–26.

24. See, e.g., Achtemeier, Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel; Achtemeier, Preaching from the Old Testament; McCurley, Proclaiming the Promise; Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament; Greidanus, Preaching Christ from Genesis; Greidanus, Preaching Christ from Ecclesiastes; Greidanus, Preaching Christ from Daniel; and the discussion of Eric Seibert’s work in chap. 5. Contrast Strawn, “And These Three Are One”; more extensively, Goldingay, Do We Need the New Testament?

25. See C. Campbell’s foreword to Threat of Life, ix.

26. See also West, Scripture and Memory; and O. Allen, Preaching and Reading the Lectionary.

27. Appendix 6 demonstrates this dexterity insofar as Brueggemann’s corpus, which is significantly smaller than the Best Sermons series (134 sermons vs. 879 sermons, respectively, or 6.5 times smaller; see tables 3–4 in chap. 2 and apps. 1–3), outperforms those three series combined in every biblical book he preaches from.

28. An amazing repository of such linkage may be found in the margins and app. 3 of Aland et al., Novum Testamentum Graece.

29. See the previous note and the works cited in note 59 in chap. 8 above.

30. See Miles, “Proclaiming the Gospel of God,” esp. chap. 3; and Davis, Wondrous Depths.

31. In point of fact, there is no one such “way,” but numerous ways—as many ways as two lines of poetry relate to each other in Hebrew parallelism. For this evocative analogue for relating the Testaments, see Miles, “Proclaiming the Gospel of God”; and more briefly, LeMon and Strawn, “Parallelism,” esp. 513–14.

32. See, briefly, Strawn, “Teaching the Old Testament”; more extensively, de Villiers and van Henden, Coping with Violence in the New Testament; and (despite the title) H. Thomas, J. Evans, and Copan, Holy War in the Bible. Similarly, Rutledge (And God Spoke to Abraham, 5n7), noting the contrast between the wrath of God in the OT and the love of God in the NT, rightly observes: “This contrast, all too frequently drawn, requires not only the ignoring of large parts of the Old Testament but also a willful disregard of the many passages of judgment in the words of Jesus.” The reverse problem, that the “good stuff” comes only from the NT, is similarly ignorant or illiterate. On its own, Isa. 54:9–10 suffices as definitive proof to the contrary.

33. See chap. 5 above for Marcion and chap. 4 for Hitchens. The specific chapter in Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 109–22, is titled “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.”

34. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 4.

35. On the latter, see Newsom with Breed, Daniel; and Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire.

36. The relationship of the Testaments is a massive topic. For a beginning, see Barr, Old and New in Interpretation; Hasel, Old Testament Theology, 172–93; Reventlow, Problems of Biblical Theology, 10–144; Seitz, Character of Christian Scripture.

37. From Donne’s sermon “The Fear of the Lord,” cited by Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 10. The sermon itself is in Davis, Imagination Shaped, 96–113, here citing 113.

38. For this point, see (from the perspective of the lectionary) Ramshaw, “First Testament in Christian Lectionaries”; and Stookey, “Marcion, Typology, and Lectionary Preaching”; as well as (from the perspective of systematic theology) Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation?

39. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 2. See also the insightful remarks of Smend, “Unconquered Land,” 259.

40. See, e.g., N. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, 42–45. Note that Blackman found Marcion guilty of “committing the error of trying to possess the climax without the antecedents, which alone gave it a setting and made it intelligible” (Marcion and His Influence, 120).

41. As Rutledge declares, the “widespread misunderstanding” of the relationship of the Testaments, which so easily becomes incipiently anti-Judaic, “is so deeply lodged in the minds of many church members that only a very concerned, intentional remedial program . . . extending over a period of years can displace it. The primary way to do this is to preach the gospel from the Old Testament in an ongoing, comprehensive fashion” (foreword to Miller, Stewards of the Mysteries of God, esp. xii–xiii).

42. See further Strawn, “And These Three Are One.”

43. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 157. Cf. further Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation?

44. I am not unaware of texts like 1 John 1:5. My point is that 1 John 1:5 must be set in conversation with other texts, such as Isa. 45:7.

45. Cf. Beal’s evocative description of the Bible as a “library of questions” (Rise and Fall of the Bible, 146–79). An interesting case study in reading the whole Bible, which he calls “messier” and “infinitely more complex” than what people often think about it—and the benefits of doing so—may be found in Plotz, Good Book, though even attempts to reckon with the whole aren’t foolproof, which is also on display in Plotz’s work (see further below).

46. See Beal (Rise and Fall of the Bible, 148–49) on “impoverishment by univocality” (a phrase from Derrida). One might contrast the multilevel approach that marked early Jewish and Christian exegesis. See, e.g., Gunneweg, Understanding the Old Testament, 7; Dawson, Christian Figural Reading. For “bothness” in action, see, e.g., Heschel, Prophets, 358–92, on God’s wrath; cf. the discussion in Strawn and Strawn, “Prophecy and Psychology,” esp. 619–21. For additional examples of attempts (and metaphors) to hold the entirety of the OT together, see Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament; and Knohl, Divine Symphony. Once again contrast Marcion, who, when faced with the “unmanageable abundance” and diversity of the revealed material in the OT, was stupefied by this abundance and “especially the complexion oppositorum [combination of opposites]” (von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel, 6).

47. Helm, Big Picture Story Bible. See Strawn, “Triumph of Life,” esp. 315–20.

48. Andrew Thomas (featuring Kawan Moore), “You Are” (2011). Thanks to Andrew Thomas for his permission to cite this song; this part of the lyric is rapped by Kawan Moore.

49. See, inter alia, McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue; and Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

50. Beal, Rise and Fall of the Bible, 145: “The only constant in the history of the Bible is change. The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition, . . . less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream”—or, as the linguistic analogy would have it, as a language being constantly practiced and changing in the process.

51. See Jenson, Canon and Creed, and note the musical and dramatic analogues of old and new found in McClure, Mashup Religion; and Martoia, Bible as Improv, respectively. See also Brueggemann, Creative Word.

52. See Aitchison, Language Change.

53. Note Hagège (Death and Life of Languages, 319), who argues that even creolization is a response to—specifically a struggle against—language death.

54. See their website at http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/English/Pages/Home.aspx.

55. Note the axiom of St. Stephen I: nihil novandum, nisi quod traditium est, “no innovation, except from tradition” (cited in Grant and Tracy, Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 82). Once again, with reference to the OT and this issue, see Brueggemann, Creative Word, and the literature cited there, esp. J. Sanders, Torah and Canon.

56. See Jenson (Canon and Creed, esp. 3–5, 33, 40–41) on the problem of the “telephone game,” in which transmission over time often results in a disintegration of the original message. Jenson argues that canon, creed, and episcopacy (church governance) are ways the more deleterious aspects of diachronic change are resisted. Indeed, he evocatively suggests that “perhaps in his youth Marcion had been impressed by an abrupt round of the telephone game,” though he apparently lacked the prophylactics offered by canon, creed, and episcopacy. Cf. Grant and Tracy, Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 82: “The possibility of fresh and creative insights remains open. Unless, however, the continuity is maintained it is difficult to understand how the word ‘Christian’ can be employed in describing the insights.”

57. On the passage, see Green, Gospel of Luke, 249–50. It is telling that Marcion excised v. 39 from his version of this pericope in Luke (see ibid., 250).

58. This is clearly quite different from “rebranding” or “remarketing” the Bible. As Beal (Rise and Fall of the Bible) reminds us, consumerism of Scripture is not the same as (and far from) literacy.

59. See chap. 2 and, e.g., Boyd, Why Lyrics Last; and Sacks, Musicophilia, esp. 32–53 (on “brainworms”). Boyd states that narrative is “the default task orientation of the human mind” but that “all kinds of pattern appeal to our appetite for ordered information” (3, emphasis original). Lyrics that are lasting “blend the appeal of pattern with other strategies for attention” (5). In this way, lasting lyrics (even the very same lyric) are able to call us “again and again to discover new patterns and new pleasures from endless new perspectives” (6).

60. Magrassi, Praying the Bible, 112.

61. Cf. Strawn, “Sanctified and Commercially Successful Curses”; and again, the distinction between canon 1 and canon 2 made in chap. 7 above. According to Blackman (Marcion and His Influence, 64–65), Marcion may have made up psalms of his own to support his theology.

62. Cf. Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham, 11: “In the mainline church environment of today, it is much easier to find information about Celtic spirituality, labyrinth-walking, Jungian dream interpretation, the latest findings of the Jesus seminar, and other such eclectic topics than it is to find in-depth teaching about the Old Testament.”

63. See the intriguing essay by Sauter (“Jonah 2: A Prayer out of the Deep”) in which he posits that Jonah’s otherwise ill-timed and mismatched psalm from the belly of the fish may be a piece of memorized liturgy: it is all Jonah can remember to pray in his moment of distress. The irony is that even this ill-timed prayer is effective! Bergen (Twisted Cross, 143) reports that the only area where the German Christian “assault on Jewish influence” made “less significant inroads” was in the area of church music.

64. In addition to the literature cited in chap. 7 on language learning and children, one might take as an instructive anecdote how many of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible (1611) were what might be called “child prodigies,” introduced to the biblical languages at very young ages. See G. Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611–2011, 276–301. For a delightful example of the power of religious lyric for children, see Stephen Dunn’s poem “At the Smithville Methodist Church.”

65. See above, also chaps. 3 and 7 and these additional biblical texts: Josh. 8:30–35; Neh. 13:24; and Matt. 21:15–16 (quoting Ps. 8:1–2).

66. See Dean, Almost Christian; Kinnaman with Hawkins, You Lost Me; and C. Smith with Denton, Soul Searching, 268: “A major challenge for religious educators of youth, therefore, seems to us to be fostering articulation, helping teens to practice talking about their faith, providing practice at using vocabularies, grammars, stories, and key messages of faith. Especially to the extent that the language of faith in American culture is becoming a foreign language, educators, like real foreign-language teachers, have that much more to work at helping their students learn to practice speaking that other language of faith. Our observation is that religious education in the United States is currently failing with youth when it comes to the articulation of faith” (emphasis original).

67. In addition to the literature cited in the previous note, one might note how various children’s Bibles often paraphrase, rewrite, and/or sanitize the Bible in various ways, for various reasons, and with varying effects. See Frerichs, “Children’s Bibles,” 108–9; and further, Bottigheimer, Bible for Children. As a poor example of how a children’s Bible handles the relationship of the Testaments, see Milton, Family Story Bible, which divides its table of contents of paraphrased Bible stories between the “Hebrew Scriptures” and the “Christian Scriptures.”

68. Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance,” 482, emphasis added.

69. But see Magrassi (Praying the Bible, 50) on the clarity of the abbreviated divine word, which in his case concerns the christological reading of Scripture. Despite this clarity, it is important that Magrassi recognizes that even “Jesus” is an abbreviation, not coterminous with the full extent of the whole of Scripture. One might contrast the work of Seibert (Disturbing Divine Behavior), which, in its privileging of the “actual God” revealed by Jesus rather than the “textual God” (169–81), cannot avoid “rejecting major sections of the Old Testament, a bit like Marcion,” according to Lamb (God Behaving Badly, 102), and maybe more than a bit. A further problem: Seibert’s “actual God” is the “textual God,” but just part of that God—the part Seibert most likes. The issue is made still clearer once Seibert admits to struggling with the problem of inconsistency in the Bible’s presentation of God’s character (Disturbing Divine Behavior, 173). But, once again, bothness is required to achieve the full picture.

70. See Strawn, “Lyric Poetry”; Dobbs-Allsopp, On Biblical Poetry; and Brueggemann, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid.

71. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, chap. 2.

72. The reference is to Plotz, whose Good Book began as “Blogging the Bible” for Slate.com. The above judgment holds equally true for John Hartung’s work discussed in chap. 4 (“Love Thy Neighbor”), despite his claim to have read the Bible for years and his disavowal of needing any instruction (!) in reading.

73. The translations of ʾAbot are from Neusner, Mishnah, 678 and 676, respectively.

74. Morgan with Barton, Biblical Interpretation, 3: “Language is the necessary vehicle here, but the heart of the problem lies in understanding the subject-matter being discussed. In biblical interpretation also, learning the languages is a first step, but the major difficulties arise over the subject-matter.”

75. Even modern and more familiar languages have more than their fair share of complexities like mood and modality. See, e.g., Palmer, Mood and Modality. It is again telling that so much common reflection on the Bible is not marked by such nuance.

76. This is not entirely unrelated to the issue of “picking and choosing” discussed in chap. 4, which was the bane of the New Atheists (though they proved to be subject to their own critique!). The difference here is that the poet’s selection is intentional and predicated on linguistic dexterity and skill, as well as knowledge of the whole, not the result of ignorance or arbitrariness. It is a matter of linguistic phronēsis, poetic practical wisdom.

77. See Brueggemann with Sharp, Living Countertestimony, 115: “Kingdom scribes, scholars who serve the secret of God, work at the artistic pivot point of old and new, of tradition and interpretation, of crucifixion and resurrection. At their best, scribes preclude the dumbing down to which the Church is deeply tempted in its effort to domesticate. They insist that what is familiar and comfortable must be recognized as strange. He [Jesus] left them with the parables; and he left them with the heavy lifting to do.” See also Brueggemann, “Preacher as Scribe.”