Our Bible was forged from a crisis of faith. Though many of its stories, proverbs, and poems were undoubtedly passed down through oral tradition, scholars believe the writing and compilation of most of Hebrew Scripture, also known as the Old Testament, began during the reign of King David and gained momentum during the Babylonian invasion of Judah and in the wake of the Babylonian exile, when Israel was occupied by that mighty pagan empire.
One cannot overstate the trauma of this exile. The people of Israel had once boasted a king, a temple, and a great expanse of land—all of which they believed had been given to them by God and ensured to them forever. But in the sixth century BC, King Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying both the city and its temple. Many of the Jews who lived there were taken captive and forced into the empire’s service. Others remained, but without a king, without a place of worship, without a national identity. This catastrophic event threw everything the people of Israel believed about themselves and about their God into question. Many assumed their collective sins were to blame and that with repentance their honor might be restored. Others feared God had abandoned them completely. Priests wondered how to conduct rituals and sacrifices without a temple or an altar, and parents worried their children would grow enamored by the wealth and power of Babylon and forget their own people’s most cherished values.
The words of Psalm 137:1–6 capture the agony:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
It should come as no surprise to any writer that all this emotional suffering produced some quality literature. Jewish scribes got to work, pulling together centuries of oral and written material and adding reflections of their own as they wrestled through this national crisis of faith. If the people of Israel no longer had their own land, their own king, or their own temple, what did they have?
They had their stories. They had their songs. They had their traditions and laws. They had the promise that the God who set all of creation in order, who told Abraham his descendants would outnumber the stars, who rescued the Hebrews from slavery, who spoke to them from Mount Sinai, and who turned a shepherd boy into a king, would remain present with them no matter what. This God would be faithful.
Today we still return to our roots in times of crisis; we look to the stories of our origins to make sense of things, to remember who we are. The role of origin stories, both in the ancient Near Eastern culture from which the Old Testament emerged and at that familiar kitchen table where you first learned the story of how your grandparents met, is to enlighten the present by recalling the past. Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale, the shades of their significance brought out by the particular light of a particular moment.
Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation. Even the story of Adam and Eve, found in Genesis 2 and 3, is thought by many scholars to be less a story about human origins and more a story about Israel’s origins, a symbolic representation of Israel’s pattern of habitation, disobedience, and exile, set in primeval time.1
My friend Kerlin, an Episcopal priest with blue hair, once said the thing she loves most about the Bible is that it sweeps her into an epic story in which she is not the central character. As much as we may wish them to be, our present squabbles over science, politics, and public school textbooks were not on the minds of those Jewish scribes seeking to assure an oppressed and scattered people they were still beloved by God. To demand that the Bible meet our demands is to put ourselves and our own interests at the center of the story, which is one of the first traps we must learn to avoid if we are to engage the Bible with integrity or care.
Indeed, one cannot seriously engage the origin stories of the Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—without encountering ancient and foreign assumptions about the nature of reality. The first creation account of Genesis 1, for example, presumes the existence of a firmament, a vast dome into which the stars and moon were affixed, believed by the Hebrews and their ancient neighbors to keep great cascades of water above the earth from crashing into the land below. An entire day is devoted to the creation of this “vault between the waters” (Genesis 1:6), with no mention of the fact that modern science proves no such atmospheric contraption exists.
In addition to sharing a cosmological worldview with their neighbors, the Jewish scribes who compiled the Hebrew Scripture shared literary sensibilities with them. If, like me, you read the Epic of Gilgamesh in college, you already know there are striking similarities between that Akkadian poem, which likely predates Genesis, and the story of Noah. Both involve a worldwide flood and a noble character who builds a boat, rescues the earth’s animals, releases birds to see if the waters have subsided, and eventually survives when the boat comes to rest on a mountain. Questions regarding which community borrowed from which are less important than simply acknowledging the fact that Israel shared a conceptual world with its neighbors and used similar literary genres and stories to address issues of identity and purpose.
“It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis,” wrote Peter Enns, “to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.”2
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to recognize these genre categories for what they are. In the same way we automatically adjust our expectations when a story begins with “Once upon a time” versus “The Associated Press is reporting . . . ,” we instinctively sense upon reading the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark that these tales of origin aren’t meant to be straightforward recitations of historical fact. The problem isn’t that liberal scholars are imposing novel interpretations on our sacred texts; the problem is that over time we’ve been conditioned to deny our instincts about what kinds of stories we’re reading when those stories are found in the Bible. We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way.
In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.
While the circumstances of the exiled Israelites may seem far removed from us today, the questions raised by that national crisis of faith remain as pressing as ever: Why do bad things happen to good people? Will evil and death continue to prevail? What does it mean to be chosen by God? Is God faithful? Is God present? Is God good?
Rather than answering these questions in propositions, the Spirit spoke the language of stories, quickening the memories of prophets and the pens of scribes to call a lost and searching people to gather together and remember:
Remember how in the beginning, God put everything in order and made the whole cosmos a temple? Remember how we are created in God’s image, as stewards, not slaves? Remember how Adam and Eve disobeyed, how Cain and Abel fought, how all the people of the earth grew so rebellious and cruel that God regretted creating the world in the first place? Remember how one family’s faithfulness was enough to save them from the Great Flood?
Remember how God promised an elderly Abraham his descendants would outnumber the stars? Remember how Sarah laughed? Remember how God chose a peopleless nomad, a second-born son, a stuttering runaway, and a little shepherd boy to create, liberate, and rule a nation? Remember how that nation is named for a man who limped from wrestling with God?
Remember how God saw the suffering of the banished Hagar, the unloved Leah, and the oppressed Hebrew slaves? Remember how Pharaoh’s mighty army drowned in the sea?
Remember the desert? Remember the manna? Remember the water from rock?
Remember how it is our God who said, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1 NRSV)?
Remember how this God has been faithful?
This collective remembering produced the Bible as we know it and explains why it looks the way it does—foreign yet familiar, sacred yet indelibly smudged with human fingerprints. The Bible’s original readers may not share our culture, but they share our humanity, and the God they worshipped invited them to bring that humanity to their theology, prayers, songs, and stories.
And so we have on our hands a Bible that includes psalms of praise but also psalms of complaint and anger, a Bible that poses big questions about the nature of evil and the cause of suffering without always answering them. We have a Bible that says in one place that “with much wisdom comes much sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) and in another “wisdom is supreme—so get wisdom” (Proverbs 4:7 HCSB). We have a Bible concerned with what to do when your neighbor’s donkey falls into a pit and exactly how much cinnamon to add to anointing oil. We have a Bible that depicts God as aloof and in control in one moment, and vulnerable and humanlike in the next, a Bible that has frustrated even the best systematic theologians for centuries because it’s a Bible that so rarely behaves.
In short, we have on our hands a Bible as complicated and dynamic as our relationship with God, one that reads less like divine monologue and more like an intimate conversation. Our most sacred stories emerged from a rift in that relationship, an intense crisis of faith. Those of us who spend as much time doubting as we do believing can take enormous comfort in that.
The Bible is for us too.
I come from mountain people. In the shadow of Grandfather Mountain, forty winding miles from the closest city and ensconced in a cold Appalachian holler, lies a graveyard where most of my extended family is buried. The dates on the tombstones stretch back to before the Civil War, and the inscriptions conjure memories of Christmases at my great-grandmother’s farmhouse when a baffling mix of aunts and uncles, cousins, and neighbors told stories about my ancestors—Dewy, Buck, Wick, Ethel, Tarp, Cordi, Freddie, and Toots—whose legends were as strange as their names.
Take Uncle Wick and Aunt Ethel, for example. As the story goes, one hot July morning, Uncle Wick and a gaggle of local boys got themselves some discount fireworks from an out-of-towner’s tent in Bakersville. Aunt Ethel did not approve. The daughter of a coal miner, she respected explosives too much to abide anyone horsing around with them, so she told Uncle Wick he’d have to toss all those Roman candles and bottle rockets in the creek if he expected to get any supper that night. But Uncle Wick, being stubborn, and probably a little sexist, waved her off and went about his scheming. That evening, as the moon rose and the drinks flowed, he filled the front lawn with friends and family and put on a fireworks show worthy of the National Mall.
Sure enough, not ten minutes into the revelry, Uncle Wick came charging into the kitchen, a bloody handkerchief pressed to his hand, screaming, “Ethel! Ethel! I done blowed my finger off!”
Without even looking up from her sink of dishes, Aunt Ethel replied, “Well goody, goody.”
That response became so enshrined in our family parlance, I heard it every time I fought my mother on wearing a jacket to school only to come home complaining about the cold bus, or looked for sympathy after flunking a test for which I refused to study, or spent a weekend nursing a sunburn, having lied about wearing sunblock. Mom would give me a wry smile and say, “Well goody, goody,” just like her mother and her mother’s mother before that. I rolled my eyes, but the joke reminded me I belong to a long line of unflappable southern women.
Even my middle name, Grace, harks back to my great-grandmother, a woman whose dry wit charmed all but the crustiest farmhands, and whose picture in the family photo album shows her frowning in front of the smokehouse, holding a hog’s head by the ears. Grace was the first woman in Mitchell County to drive a car, and her daughter, my grandmother, was one of the first to go to college. I once scaled a small boulder to get a picture of a dewy leaf for Instagram, so clearly the legacy of valor continues.
Origin stories take all sorts of forms, from the story of why the women of my family say “goody, goody,” to the explanation for why there’s a rusty toilet seat hanging from your grandfather’s barn door, to the legends that urge us to idealize our nation’s founders, to the reason your Jewish neighbors dip celery in salt water at their Passover meal each year. So ubiquitous they can blend into the scenery, origin stories permeate our language, our assumptions, our routines.
An eighteenth-century English naval officer once raised a telescope to his blind eye to ensure he’d miss the signal from his superior ordering him to withdraw from battle, and two hundred years later, we still talk about politicians “turning a blind eye” to corruption. My friends and I drink at a place called Monkey Town Brewery because eighty years ago our town prosecuted a substitute teacher for presenting the theory of evolution to a biology class, bringing the “Trial of the Century” to Dayton, Tennessee. The ghosts of old gods haunt our calendars—Thursday marking “Thor’s Day”—and the heroes of centuries past still hunt and battle and dance across our night sky. Cultures worldwide treasure their creation myths, those passed-down tales that orient a people in the universe and explain how it all began, whether it was from a lotus risen from the navel of Vishnu (Hindu), or out of the belly of the Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal), or from the Spider Woman guiding the lost to a new world (Hopi). Americans love stories about billion-dollar companies that started in garages and superheroes bitten by radioactive insects.
Origin stories sometimes serve to protect us from uncomfortable truths, like the way nostalgia for the first Thanksgiving tends to charm white folks out of confronting our ancestors’ mistreatment of indigenous people. Or they can offer dignity and hope to the suffering the way recounting Israel’s deliverance from Egypt has comforted the Jews through exiles and diasporas and African Americans through slavery and the civil rights movement. Good therapists encourage clients to engage their “storied selves,” as research shows people who can construct the events of their lives into redemptive narratives have healthier outcomes. You can pay a consultant several thousand dollars to help your organization determine its “guiding story.”
“Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience,” wrote Daniel Taylor in his book Tell Me a Story, “they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere—from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don’t recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.”3
“Every people has a story to tell,” wrote theologian James Cone in God of the Oppressed, “something to say to themselves, their children, and to the world about how they think and live, as they determine and affirm their reason for being. The story both expresses and participates in the miracle of moving from nothing to something, from nonbeing to being.”4
Origin stories tell us who we are, where we come from, and what the world is like. They dictate the things we believe, the brands we buy, the holidays we celebrate, and the people we revere or despise. Sometimes we construct our present realities around our stories of origin; other times we construct our stories of origin around our present realities; most of the time it’s a little of both. How I understand myself as an American, a Christian, a woman, a mother, a daughter, an introvert, a southerner, a Held, an Evans, and an Alabama Crimson Tide football fan depends largely on the stories I’ve heard and inherited, and the stories I’ve told myself. Spiritual maturation requires untangling these stories, sorting fact from fiction (or, more precisely, truth from untruth), and embracing those stories that move us toward wholeness while rejecting or reinterpreting those that do harm.
Activist and theologian Monica Coleman engaged in this untangling in her stunning memoir, Bipolar Faith. The memoir begins by locating Coleman’s own story of trauma and depression within the context of her family’s story, particularly the story of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper from South Carolina who, after the death of his wife, hanged himself in a shed. No one from the family ever took down the noose, so it remained swinging from the rafters for thirty years.
“When I think of growing up in that setting,” Coleman wrote of her orphaned grandmother, great-aunts, and great-uncles, “I begin to understand. Every time they played in the shed, they saw the rope. Ten times a day. At least once a week. They got used to it; it became normal—part of their days. And a heaviness hung over each life, and the sadness remained. Like a heavy fog.”5
No one diagnosed Coleman’s great-grandfather with depression—“Who can stop to think of a clinical illness when the children need to be fed?”—but to come to terms with her same diagnosis, Coleman had to reckon with the shadow of that noose and how it taught her early on that “sadness can own you. You can die of grief.”6
For Coleman, liberation is a tenuous dance, aided by faith, medication, therapy, and supportive relationships. “Now I dance for my own ancestors,” she wrote. “I dance for Grandma and Great-Grandaddy. I dance for my great-aunts and great-uncles who lived with the noose. . . . I will dance their tears and their ability to live through them. . . . I will dance the legacy they left me, and the freedom I can eke out.”7
Coleman’s story reminds us there are demons in our stories that can only be cast out when we call them by name.
Indeed, my own Appalachian heritage isn’t all folksy bluegrass ballads accompanied by clawhammer banjos. That cold mountain creek crawled through plenty of mobile home parks strewn with broken toys and beer cans, and the blight of alcoholism felled some of my dearest cousins. It was in this community of aunts, uncles, cousins, and great-grandparents that I first heard the N-word muttered with disdain. It’s important to identify and unpack these stories—the good and the bad, the true and the half-true—for they explain so much of what we believe and how we behave.
When faced with the decision to hold on to that empty coffee canister or toss it out, my husband, Dan, can recall with gusto a litany of tales from relatives who survived the Great Depression and war rationing to give every item they owned a second or third life. Just yesterday, while lamenting a friendship that had fallen by the wayside, I told myself a story about how I “chose a career over having friends.” What an elaborate little tale I’d spun to explain a forgotten birthday! We’re all creative writers, you see, dabbling with a bit of fiction here and a bit of nonfiction there to try and make some sense of our lives.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”8
When we understand the function of origin stories, both in our culture and in our lives, we can make better sense of those found in Scripture. The creation account of Genesis 1, in which God brings order to the cosmos and makes it a temple, is meant to remind the people of Israel, and by extension, us, that God needs no building of stone from which to reign, but dwells in every landscape and in the presence of the humble will make a home. Should all other identities or securities be thrown into tumult, should nations be fractured and temples torn down, this truth remains—God is with us and God is for us. It’s a story as true now as it was then.
Of course, we miss all this when we insist the Bible’s origin stories are simply straightforward recitations of historical fact, one scientific discovery or archaeological dig away from ruin. What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue. But this represents a massive misunderstanding of the genre itself.
It’s a bit like this: Imagine if, for your birthday, your entire family gathered—parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends—and in celebration of the anniversary of your birth, presented you with a formal reading of your birth certificate.
May 1, 1984. 10:05 a.m. 6 lbs, 14 ounces. Tupelo, Mississippi.
That’s it. No dinner. No homemade cards. No cake and ice cream. No long, candle-lit evening retelling those familiar, exaggerated stories about how your dad nearly wrecked the car on the way to the hospital, or how you pooped all over that fancy take-home dress your grandmother made, or how your uncle kept flirting with the nursing staff. No laughter-filled debates over which you said first, “Mama” or “Dada.” No internet searches for where the Olympics were held that year and who ran for president. No reminders that you were named after a beautiful shepherdess from the Bible and a stubborn schoolteacher from Appalachia.
Just the facts.
That would be weird, right?
We know who we are, not from the birth certificates and Social Security numbers assigned to us by the government, but from the stories told and retold to us by our community. Should the time of birth on your certificate be off by a minute, or should it be lost altogether, it wouldn’t change what’s truest about you—that you matter and are loved.
Literary scholar Barbara Hardy said as long ago as 1968, “We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.”9
We meet God in narrative too.
The origin stories of Scripture remind us we belong to a very large and very old family that has been walking with God from the beginning. Even when we falter and fall, this God is in it for the long haul. We will not be abandoned.
When I was in second or third grade, the Bible college that employed my father moved locations, converting a recently vacated church building in Birmingham into a campus of offices, dorm rooms, and classrooms. In the moving process, my dad scored all kinds of secondhand finds from those old Sunday school rooms—books, art supplies, boxes of expensive wooden building blocks—treasures he brought home to two adoring little girls every afternoon after work. One day he walked through the door with one of those giant flannelgraph boards used for telling Bible stories. Mounted on a wooden easel, the flannel-covered board could be affixed with sandpaper-backed paper cutouts of biblical characters from the Old and New Testaments, characters like Noah, Abraham, Rachel, Ruth, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the colors of their robes faded from years in storage.
My little sister, Amanda, and I spent many barefoot hours in our living room with that board and those cutouts, together reenacting the tales of Abraham’s family and Jesus’ miracles, often filling in the narratives with our own imaginative stories. (I remember I created a rather dramatic and detailed backstory for the little boy whose lunch of fish and loaves Jesus turned into a meal to feed five thousand, complete with an argument with his mother that morning, an attempted runaway, and a moment of repentance and redemption as he volunteered his lunch for the sake of the gospel.) We invented conversations between Abraham and Isaac as they descended Mount Moriah. We embellished the details of Ruth’s courtship with Boaz. We imagined what happened to Zacchaeus after the “wee little man” from our Sunday school song climbed out of his sycamore to follow Jesus.
Little did we know that we were participating in a long tradition of creative engagement with the biblical text, one dating back thousands of years.
Christians can learn a lot about Scripture from the people who have had it the longest. I came to this realization a few years ago when a writing project around the women of the Bible introduced me to midrash—those imaginative explorations and expansions of Scripture that serve as the most common form of biblical interpretation in Jewish traditions. These writings, some ancient and some modern, alerted me to details in the text I’d never noticed before, and offered both playful and instructive interpretations of those details that animated the biblical characters in fresh new ways.
For example, the Bible’s reference to Leah’s “weak eyes” is explained in some midrashic traditions as a sign that Leah’s eyes were weak from weeping, for she feared she would be forced to marry the wild scoundrel Esau. The two bracelets Isaac gave to his bride-to-be, Rebekah, are imagined to represent the two tablets upon which the Ten Commandments would be chiseled, a sign of the momentous nature of this union, which would bring the people of the Torah into the world. Abraham is given a colorful backstory by the rabbis who composed midrash, including a famous tale in which, as a boy, he smashed the idols in his father’s shop, told his father the mess had been created by the idols fighting one another, and then cleverly exposed the emptiness of idolatry when his father insisted inanimate objects could not war with one another. Even the donkey that accompanied Abraham and Isaac on their fateful trip to Mount Moriah gets a detailed pedigree in one midrash, which suggests the ass descended from the donkey created on the sixth day of creation and is the same animal that spoke to the prophet Balaam, carried Moses as he descended into Egypt, and will one day be mounted by King David when he returns in triumph during the messianic age. That’s a busy donkey.
Wilda Gafney, an Episcopal priest and biblical scholar whose book Womanist Midrash offers a midrashic interpretation of biblical women rooted in the African American preaching tradition, explained, “Midrash interprets not only the text before the reader, but also the text behind and beyond the text and the text between the lines of the text. In rabbinic thinking, each letter and the spaces between the letters are available for interpretive work.”10
Midrash, which initially struck me as something of a cross between biblical commentary and fan fiction, introduced me to a whole new posture toward Scripture, a sort of delighted reverence for the text unencumbered by the expectation that it must behave itself to be true. For Jewish readers, the tensions and questions produced by Scripture aren’t obstacles to be avoided, but rather opportunities for engagement, invitations to join in the Great Conversation between God and God’s people that has been going on for centuries and to which everyone is invited.
I suspect I resonate with midrashic interpretation because it helps me recover some of the curiosity and wonder with which I approached the Bible as a child. It gives me permission to “play” a little with the stories. It also gives me permission to indulge my questions and confront my doubts. For example, it wasn’t until I encountered the volumes of midrash around the story of the binding of Isaac that I realized I wasn’t alone in my misgivings about that tale in which God tests Abraham by instructing him to sacrifice his only son on an altar, only to send an angel to stay his hand just before Abraham plunges the knife into his son’s chest. Readers ancient and modern have struggled with that story, positing different possibilities for why God would ask Abraham to do such a thing. Was God using Abraham to make a point against the practice of child sacrifice, common among the pagans? Or did Abraham only imagine he heard the voice of God? Was God disciplining Abraham for his treatment of Ishmael? Would Abraham himself have finally relented, before actually committing the act, and would disobedience have ultimately been the right and ethical thing for him to choose? How should parents understand the moral of this unsettling tale?
As it turns out, Jews believe these questions are up for debate, instructive not only when we arrive at an answer, but when the ensuing discussion reveals something important to us about our faith, our community, and ourselves. While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.
A Jewish friend of mine told of a dinner party in which her husband, a rabbi, invited a group of fellow rabbis, scholars, and friends over for conversation.
“We were debating application of Torah long into the night,” she told me. “Everyone brought a different point of view, no one could exactly agree, shouts of hearty agreement and fierce dissent woke the baby twice, and we nearly ran out of food.
“For a group of Jews,” she said with a laugh, “it was the perfect evening.”
Her story reveals how the biblical text comes alive in the context of community, its endless shades and contours revealed in the presence of a diversity of readers—young and old, learned and unlearned, rich and poor, historic and contemporary, living and dead. This style of engagement not only brings us closer to Scripture’s many truths, but closer to one another. The sacred text becomes a crucial point of contact, a great dining room table, erected by God and set by God’s people, where those who hunger for nourishment and companionship can gather together and be filled.
“The Bible creates community,” wrote Timothy Beal in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, “by providing space for community to happen. It offers storied worlds and theological vocabularies around which people can come together in conversation about abiding questions. It calls for creative, collaborative participation.”11
This attitude stands in stark contrast to the winner-take-all posture in many fundamentalist Christian communities, which positions the solitary reader as objective arbiter of truth, his “straightforward” reading of the text final and exclusive. The refrain goes something like, “The Bible said it; I believe it; that settles it,” which is not exactly the sort of conversation starter that brings people together.
Midrash, with its imaginative engagement of the Bible’s stories, reminds us that biblical interpretation need not be reduced to a zero-sum game, but rather inspires endless insights and challenges, the way a good story does each time it is told and retold. Our relational God has given us a relational sacred text, one that, should we surrender to it, reminds us that being people of faith isn’t as much about being right as it is about being part of a community in restored and restorative relationship with God. This is how Paul engaged Scripture, after all, and Jesus—both of whom were Jews.
The narrative tradition of Jewish interpretation is supported by the colorful cast of characters that comprises Israel’s family of origin, characters whose antics, in the words of Rabbi Visotzky, unfold in the book of Genesis like “the longest-running family soap opera in history.”12 Aunt Ethel and Uncle Wick have nothing on Father Abraham and Mother Sarah—and the children, grandchildren, in-laws, and enemies who populate some of Scripture’s most memorable scenes.
As the story goes, God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising to bless him with enough descendants to make a great nation, one whose population would grow to outnumber the stars and would bless every other nation on earth. But Abraham and his wife Sarah are childless and elderly, and rather than trusting God with their fertility, they give Abraham an Egyptian slave named Hagar to impregnate, the result of which is Ishmael, a boy who would grow to be “a wild donkey of a man” (Genesis 16:12). As tensions between Hagar and Sarah escalate, God renews his promise to Abraham to give him a son with Sarah, urging him to remain blameless and upright and to signal his commitment by circumcising his children and their descendants. Sure enough, after many years of waiting, Sarah gives birth to Isaac, who is promptly circumcised.
Sarah dies. Isaac grows up. Abraham arranges for his son to get a good wife, a woman named Rebekah. Isaac and Rebekah give birth to twins—Jacob and Esau—whose epic rivalry begins at delivery, as the younger, smooth-skinned Jacob grasps the heel of the older, hairy Esau on the way out of the birth canal. It’s a bit baffling that God would favor Jacob, a quiet and conniving mama’s boy who tricks his older brother out of his inheritance rights and deceives his aging father into compliance, but Hebrew Scripture has a soft spot for scrappy underdogs, so he grows into the unlikely hero of Israel’s origin stories.
After provoking Esau’s rage, Jacob flees to his uncle Laban’s home in Paddan Aram, where Jacob falls in love with Laban’s beautiful daughter, Rachel, who herself has a complicated relationship with her own sibling, Leah. Laban promises to give Jacob Rachel’s hand, but only after he works for his uncle, breeding and tending sheep for seven years, because apparently Jacob is something of an ancient Mesopotamian sheep-whisperer. The wedding day arrives, and of course there is much dancing and drinking and merrymaking, but when Jacob wakes up the next morning to kiss his new bride, “behold, it [is] Leah!” (Genesis 29:25 NASB). The con artist has become the mark. Laban eventually gives Jacob Rachel in exchange for seven more years of work, and predictably, an intense rivalry brews between the sisters. With the help of a couple of handmaids, they give Jacob twelve sons and a daughter. Meanwhile, Esau builds an army.
When twenty years of Laban’s hijinks become too much, Jacob decides that an angry brother with an army is better than an opportunistic father-in-law with a bunch of sheep, so he gathers his enormous family, with all their livestock and belongings, and leads them to the desert to return to Canaan.
In this wilderness, between one bad situation and another, Jacob encounters a mysterious stranger.
While camping alone on the river Jabbok, Jacob is roused by what appears to be a man—and a strong one at that—intent on a fight. The two wrestle all through the night, each one gaining the upper hand at one moment only to lose it the next. As dawn breaks and it becomes clear this stranger is no mere “man” but rather the very presence of God, Jacob musters the gall to demand a blessing from his opponent. God relents and delivers a blessing to Jacob in the form of a name change. From now on, Jacob will be known as Israel, which means “He struggles with God.” The fighting ends, but not before Jacob sustains an injury to his hip, one that leaves him walking with a limp for the rest of his life. Jacob goes on to make peace with his brother. His twelve sons become the twelve tribes of Israel, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The significance of this story of family origins to the people of Israel cannot be overstated, for it demonstrates how the dynamic, personal, back-and-forth relationship between God and God’s people is embedded in their very identity, their very name—Israel, “because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome” (Genesis 32:28).
“Israel’s self-understanding is one of being in a locked battle with God,” wrote Peter Enns and Jared Byas in Genesis for Normal People. “This is not a people who see themselves as triumphant tops on the food chain, but as a wandering, wondering people who—to use the vernacular of our day—struggle with their faith.”13
This understanding of themselves as a people who wrestle with God and emerge from that wrestling with both a limp and a blessing informs how Jews engage with Scripture, and it ought to inform how Christians engage Scripture too, for we share a common family of origin, the same spiritual DNA. The biblical scholars I love to read don’t go to the holy text looking for ammunition with which to win an argument or trite truisms with which to escape the day’s sorrows; they go looking for a blessing, a better way of engaging life and the world, and they don’t expect to escape that search unscathed.
“Perhaps we need the angel to start grappling with us,” wrote Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow, “to turn us aside from the questions which have easy answers to those which cause us to grow, no matter how painful that growth can be.”14
If I’ve learned anything from thirty-five years of doubt and belief, it’s that faith is not passive intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It’s a rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, all-night-long struggle, and sometimes you have to demand your blessing rather than wait around for it.
The same is true for Scripture. With Scripture, we’ve not been invited to an academic fraternity; we’ve been invited to a wrestling match. We’ve been invited to a dynamic, centuries-long conversation with God and God’s people that has been unfolding since creation, one story at a time. If we’re lucky, it will leave us with a limp.