How to Read the Bible

After Such Knowledge . . .

Viewed in its broad perspective, the modern study of the Bible must rightly appear to be an extraordinary intellectual achievement. Working at first with nothing but the biblical text itself, scholars were able to discover, through the most painstaking analysis, little clues that ultimately changed their whole conception of Scripture and how it had come to be. Thus, by studying the varying use of divine names in different parts of the Pentateuch, researchers gradually developed a theory of its composite authorship and the stages of its composition. Wellhausen’s version of the Documentary Hypothesis and his analysis of its implications for the history of Israel’s religion, while certainly not the last word, was nonetheless a model of analytical and synthetic creativity. His younger contemporary Hermann Gunkel was a scholar of no less impressive powers: in particular, Gunkel’s whole approach to breaking down biblical texts into their smallest component parts and then exploring their common literary genres and their role in daily life led the way to an utterly new understanding of where the stories of Genesis came from and how the prayers and hymns of the book of Psalms came into existence.

Historians of the ancient Near East, using recently deciphered texts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere—texts whose decipherment was itself a most impressive accomplishment, the product of international teamwork carried out over several generations—were able to illuminate hundreds of previously misunderstood biblical words and phrases, as well as numerous elements in the Bible’s narratives and prophecies and laws. Just as strikingly, they demonstrated that quite a few parts of the Bible, from the flood story to the laws of Exodus, the wise sayings of Proverbs, the Psalter’s songs of praise, and the dirges of Lamentations, had striking parallels in the compositions of ancient Israel’s neighbors. Indeed, some of the most basic elements of Israel’s religion—its ways of conceiving of and describing God, as well as the sacrifices through which He was worshiped, the very construction of His temples, and the cycle of His holy days—were connected with institutions that existed earlier in Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and other ancient Near Eastern sites.

Every book of the Bible was put under the microscope, and here too, modern scholars’ analytical skills proved little short of dazzling. The great history stretching from the death of Moses to the Babylonian exile (covering the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) was, they argued, assembled by a group of historians late in pre-exilic times; these writers had gathered disparate legends, royal archives, and other material to compose a highly theological and idealistic retelling of Israel’s past. Prophetic books were similarly scrutinized, as were the Psalms, Proverbs, and other works; in each case, painstaking attention to detail yielded insights that could hardly have been anticipated. The institutions of Israel’s daily life, as well as of its religion, were also studied. Prophecy was examined phenomenologically and in a comparative perspective; still more recently, an examination of the priesthood and the priestly worldview have thrown new light on an altogether unique theology that existed in biblical times.

All these, and much more, are the accomplishments of modern biblical scholars. Their work has not been accorded the wide acclaim given to scholars in other fields, but this is hardly surprising. For one thing, biblical research has been of interest to only a relatively small circle of researchers, clergymen, and a few laymen, and while its conclusions have had far-reaching results, the study of the Bible’s origins could never be as consequential as the drive to understand the secrets of the physical universe, or the development of life on earth, or the inner workings of the human mind. Still, if most people today know the names of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, while they have never heard of Julius Wellhausen or Hermann Gunkel or W. F. Albright, I do not believe that, in terms of intellectual achievement and intellectual courage, especially in their willingness to challenge long-held beliefs and to try to rethink problems from the beginning, it would be entirely wrong to compare this group of scholars with that one. Over the course of little more than a hundred years, they succeeded in utterly transforming what had always been the central text of Western civilization, so that—at least to those familiar with their work—scarcely a sentence of the Hebrew Bible continues to mean what it meant before they came along.

A Misunderstanding

From the start, however, many of the greatest modern scholars suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding of what their discipline was about and where it would eventually lead. That misunderstanding was highlighted in a passage cited earlier from the writings of Charles Augustus Briggs at the start of the twentieth century:

Holy Scripture, as given by divine inspiration to holy prophets, lies buried beneath the rubbish of centuries. It is covered over with the débris of the traditional interpretations of the multitudinous schools and sects . . . Historical criticism is digging through this mass of rubbish. Historical criticism is searching for the rock-bed of the Divine word, in order to recover the real Bible.121

For Briggs and many others, the whole point of modern scholarship was to sweep aside everything people had always thought about the Bible—“the débris of the traditional interpretations of the multitudinous schools and sects”—in order to discover pure, unadulterated Scripture, the “real Bible.”1

That is not how things have turned out. For the most part, modern scholarship has served only to undermine the very notion of a “Holy Scripture as given by divine inspiration to holy prophets.” To begin with, the books attributed by Scripture to Moses or Isaiah or Jeremiah are largely not, in the current consensus, the words of those prophets, but the writings of anonymous figures, some of whom may have been prophets but others of whom seem more likely to have been editors or scribes. They inserted large chunks of their own or other people’s thoughts into the text. To be sure, divine inspiration may guide the work of a scribe or interpolator as closely as it does that of a prophet—but the great mass of specific instances investigated by modern scholars has certainly seemed to point in quite the opposite direction. Why, one might rightly ask, would the same God have inspired the various authors of the text groups J, E, P, H, and D to set forth such different conceptions of proper and improper conduct, indeed, to take contrasting positions on the most basic theological issues, including the nature of God Himself? And why would the divine voice have inspired these authors to compose different accounts of the same event or contradictory versions of the same law? Time and again, scholarship has highlighted precisely the absence of agreement between one part of the Bible and another, and this in turn has necessarily undermined the notion of the common, divine origin of the whole.

Along with this, the resemblances between specific laws or proverbs or stories found in the Bible and similar ones discovered in Egypt or Mesopotamia have also worked against the idea of Scripture’s divine origins: Did God also inspire Hammurabi and Amenemope and the authors of Gilgamesh and the Sargon legend—and if He didn’t, why did He cause biblical prophets to copy the words of these human authors instead of giving them His own original laws and sayings and stories? What is more, the striking resemblances between various institutions described in the Bible and those discovered to have existed in ancient Babylon or Ugarit likewise have had a negative effect on the traditional understanding of divine inspiration. Why should the layout of the temple that God commanded Solomon to build have been so much like that of the pagan temple unearthed in Syria at ‘Ein Dara‘ (whose construction God presumably did not supervise)? Why should the sacrifices He commanded Israel to offer bear the same names and the same basic form as those of ancient Canaanite religion—a religion the Israelites were told to uproot utterly from their midst? Examples could be multiplied.

Beyond such specifics, moreover, was the whole approach to reading biblical texts adopted from the start by the modern scholarly movement. Divine inspiration notwithstanding, scholars asserted, the Bible is a collection of texts that were transmitted by human beings who lived in a certain time and a certain place. In seeking out its meaning, therefore, interpreters believed that they ought first to try to read it as if it were no different from any other human text. This postulate was inherent in Spinoza’s program,2 and it was accepted, with vague apologies, by Robert Lowth.3 A few decades later it was stated in the plainest terms by J. G. Herder:

One must read the Bible in human terms [menschlich], since it is a book written by humans and for humans. Human is the language, human the [physical] means by which it was written down and preserved; human finally is the sense in which it is to be understood, [indeed, human also must be] every aid that illuminates it, as well as the purpose and use to which it is to be applied.4

The Bible was to be read as any other human creation. So it was no accident that scholars began for the first time to highlight as such what they saw as the Bible’s flaws—apparent contradictions and inconsistencies and duplications in the putative sources of the Pentateuch and the like. It is not that interpreters in an earlier day had been unaware of contradictions or illogical statements in the Bible, but (because of Assumption 3) they had reacted to them differently. These were, Augustine and others maintained, deliberate hints that some “mystery,” a hidden teaching of some kind, was being imparted.5 Now, on the contrary, they were just errors in the text. The implications of this stance for the Bible’s divine origin are not particularly obscure. To err, after all, is human; error is not generally held to be characteristic of the divine. So what are all these inconsistencies, repetitions, and outright mistakes doing in a book attributed to God’s authorship?

Along with its focus on the Bible’s frailties, modern scholarship generally insisted that, wherever possible, the Bible’s words were to be understood within their own historical context. Thus, when Isaiah spoke of a future ideal king, one ought first to try to understand his words as referring to someone born (or about to be born) in his own day, and not to someone whose birth was centuries away. Likewise, Psalm 137 probably ought not to be attributed to David’s authorship, since it refers to the Babylonian exile, which occurred four hundred years after his time. Such an approach certainly had much to recommend it—for one thing, it corresponded to the way in which the world as we know it works. But to read in this manner was also to assert sub rosa that prophetic knowledge of future events, if not quite impossible, ought in any case to be the biblical interpreter’s last resort in seeking to understand the meaning of a biblical passage. By the same token, the addressees of biblical prophets were assumed to be listeners or readers of the prophets in their own day. Thus, Deutero-Isaiah must certainly have been speaking to his own contemporaries about the return to Zion and not (as Jews and Christians had long assumed) about events in a much later day. The same has come to be accepted, reluctantly, about this prophet’s “suffering servant.”6 Jeremiah’s “evil from the north” referred to an immediate threat from biblical Babylon, not a distant one in the end of days. As for the many mysterious foreshadowings and cryptic references found by earlier readers of the Bible, modern scholars were agreed that these were largely illusory. The binding of Isaac was not a typological prefiguring of the crucifixion, but an etiological tale about human sacrifice; a law prohibiting Molech worship was not a cryptic reference to intermarriage, but a straightforward interdiction of a form of worship that existed early within the biblical period.

With the emphasis on reading the Bible in human terms and in its historical context also came a subtle shift in tone. As modern biblical scholarship gained momentum, studying the Bible itself was joined with, and eventually overshadowed by, studying the historical reality behind the text (including how the text itself came to be). In the process, learning from the Bible gradually turned to learning about it. Such a shift might seem slight at first, but ultimately it changed a great deal. The person who seeks to learn from the Bible is smaller than the text; he crouches at its feet, waiting for its instructions or insights. Learning about the text generates the opposite posture. The text moves from subject to object; it no longer speaks but is spoken about, analyzed, and acted upon. The insights are now all the reader’s, not the text’s, and anyone can see the results. This difference in tone, as much as any specific insight or theory, is what has created the great gap between the Bible of ancient interpreters and that of modern scholars.

As modern scholars learned more and more about biblical texts, what they often saw was the human side of the text at its worst. If they were right about the etiological purpose of ancient narratives, whereby eponymous ancestors (Cain, for example) were invented by a narrator in order to explain later reality (the cruelty of Cain’s putative descendants, the Kenites), then the very existence and preservation of such tales seemed to bespeak an almost childlike simplemindedness. What did it say of ancient Israelites—readers and writers both—if they really believed that the in utero rivalry of two brothers, Jacob and Esau, could explain the later rivalry of two nations, Israel and Edom? Frequently, moreover, the Bible was found to distort the truth or lie outright. Thus, scholars concluded, there really could have been no massive exodus from Egypt or any sweeping conquest of Canaan. The desert tabernacle was the later invention of a priestly writer. Royal propagandists disguised David’s violent putsch (and perhaps his participation in Saul’s murder) as his magnanimous accession to the northerners’ desire to have him replace Saul on the throne. The canonical prophets did not really write much of the material the Bible attributed to them, nor did David or Solomon; but someone was responsible for these attributions, and that someone could not have been a very honest fellow.

Modern scholars’ explanations have proven very persuasive—and that is just the problem, since, in approaching the text in the way they have, they seemed to have stripped the Bible of much of its special status. How is the Hebrew Bible any different now from the altogether human creations of ancient Near Eastern literature? Far from uncovering “Holy Scripture, as given by divine inspiration to holy prophets,” as Briggs had thought, modern scholarship has actually accomplished exactly the opposite, reducing Scripture to the level of any ordinary, human composition—in fact, arguing that it was in some cases even worse: sloppy, inconsistent, sometimes cynical, and more than occasionally deceitful.

Ancient Interpreters

The next question ought logically to be: why did anyone ever think otherwise? What on earth could have ever made people suppose the story of Isaac was actually a foreshadowing of the crucifixion? Why should anyone have ever believed that Psalm 137 (a psalm that certainly does not present itself as a prophecy, but rather seems to have been written by someone looking back on the Babylonian exile after it was over) could possibly have been written by David, who therefore must have foreseen events that would not occur until four hundred years after his death? How did the worship of a god named Molech ever come to be understood as a reference to intermarriage? More generally, what could have led readers to suppose that, in an anthology of individual texts that were written over the course of more than a thousand years, the texts themselves would not disagree with one another on the most fundamental matters? And why should anyone have ever thought such a large and diverse collection of texts would not contain a single inconsistency, a factual error or scribal mistake, or the like? Even more strikingly, how did anyone ever arrive at the conclusion that texts composed hundreds and hundreds of years earlier were addressed to readers today?

The answer is that this whole way of approaching the Bible is the product of its ancient interpreters. There is little in the biblical texts themselves to suggest that they were intended to be read in this fashion. Nevertheless, that is how they came to be read, and it was this way of reading that made the Bible what it was for so many centuries, a divine guidebook full of instruction and wisdom, yea, the word of God—or, to cite again the words of the Geneva Bible,

the light to our paths, the keye to the kingdome of heaven, our comfort in affliction, our shielde and sworde against Satan, the school of all wisdome, the glasse [mirror] wherein we behold God’s face, the testimonie of his favour, and the only foode and nourishment of our soules.7

Disquieting as it may be, one is left with the conclusion that most of what makes the Bible biblical is not inherent in its texts, but emerges only when one reads them in a certain way, a way that came into full flower in the closing centuries BCE.

By all accounts this way of reading started slowly and only gradually gained momentum.8 Its first stages are attested within the Bible itself—in the psalm headings that seek to connect individual psalms with events in David’s life;9 in the book of Chronicles and its recasting of the history related in the books of Samuel and Kings;10 in the editorial rearranging and supplementation of prophetic collections; in the revision of earlier laws to harmonize conflicts or to accommodate them to changed circumstances or later practices. But it is really in the closing centuries BCE and the first century CE that Israel’s sacred library underwent its most dramatic change. This is the period in which, in the interpretations found in the biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, biblical texts are for the first time explicitly held to be replete with hidden meanings and subtle hints, so that when the Bible says X it often really means Y.11 This is likewise the time when (as the Dead Sea Scrolls attest), prophecies from five or six centuries earlier are openly asserted to refer to events of Seleucid Syria or the Roman occupation of Palestine.12 It is also the time when Ben Sira and 1 Baruch proclaim that the Torah is no other than the world’s great book of divine wisdom, nay, personified divine Wisdom on earth,13 and when, in Jubilees and other ancient texts, the entire text of the Pentateuch is attributed to the authorship of God.14 What happened in these few centuries was nothing less than a radical refashioning of Israel’s ancient library. The texts themselves were not changed, or at least not much. What changed—at first ever so slightly, but then more and more dramatically—was the set of assumptions that interpreters brought to the task of reading. Soon enough, those assumptions were generating a large body of actual interpretations, and each new interpretation only reinforced the overall approach that interpreters were taking.15

How It Happened

A number of specific instances mentioned in the preceding chapters offer a series of snapshots of how ancient interpreters came to change the whole character of Israel’s ancient library of texts. It did not happen all at once.

In the area of biblical law, for example, apparent contradictions or conflicts between laws must have demanded the attention of interpreters from an early period. So, for example, Exod. 12:8 said that the Passover sacrifice had to be “roasted,” but Deut. 16:7 said “boiled.” What was a person supposed to do? We know that this contradiction must have bothered people from very early times, since a solution (of sorts) appears even within the Bible itself, in one of its later books. “They boiled the Passover lamb in fire,” reports 2 Chron. 35:13, thereby implying that “boil” in Deuteronomy really meant “roast” (= boiling in fire) as stated in Exodus.

A somewhat more complicated instance was the biblical law of guardians (Exod. 22:6–14). This law seemed to contradict itself in the most flagrant manner, saying in one paragraph that a guardian who had been robbed could get off with a solemn oath, while in the very next paragraph asserting that a robbed guardian had to repay the value of the stolen goods. To ancient interpreters, it was simply axiomatic that the Bible couldn’t contradict itself. The contradiction disappeared as soon as someone hit upon the solution that paragraph 1 was referring to an unpaid guardian, while paragraph 2 referred to a paid one. Once accepted, this interpretation surely became a prime example of the fact that the Bible does not contradict itself, even when at first it might seem to. Moreover, this interpretation proved that the Bible often does not say openly what it means but must be examined for any hidden implications—since, in this instance, the text had nowhere said that it was dealing with two different kinds of guardians.

Most scholars agree that at least some of Israel’s ancient texts had been preserved in writing as early as the eighth, ninth, or even tenth centuries BCE. If so, this would indicate that way back then, these writings must have had some role in people’s lives, some ongoing function. (Otherwise, why write them down and keep copying them, century after century?) This proposition seems most interesting in the case of prophetic texts. After all, there were good reasons for preserving other sorts of texts in precise, written form. One needed to know the exact language of laws; likewise, detailed records of events were certainly necessary for kings to preserve, for reasons of state; priests probably kept in writing the procedures of their profession in order to insure that they would be followed unchangingly from generation to generation. But why should the exact words of Isaiah or Amos have been written down and saved from the eighth century on? The most plausible explanation seems to be that, at a relatively early stage, the words of these prophets were considered precious and worthy of preservation.

Yet these prophetic texts also seem rather quickly to have changed their significance. They were apparently rearranged and supplemented by editors, and this has suggested to scholars that, once the immediate occasion of their being uttered faded into the past, prophetic sayings began to be reinterpreted. Eventually they came to be perceived as bits of timeless ethical instruction, or evidence of the divine plan for history or of the prophet’s own foreknowledge of much later times.16 The rise of apocalyptic writings toward the end of the biblical period probably also left its stamp on the prophetic utterances of an earlier age: a reference no longer understood (such as Ezekiel’s Gog and Magog) or some ominous prediction (“I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth at daylight,” Amos 8:9) could surely have served the purposes of religious figures in a later age eager for the end-time: “What Amos predicted is about to happen now!”17

Other ways in which ancient texts changed their meanings have already been discussed. In the Psalter is evidence of the emergence of a new kind of psalm that had no connection with the original psalms’ use in temple worship. The new psalms speak of praising God “in my house” or “continually,” or, like Psalm 119, seem like an unending litany to be read through in private, ritual recitation. This shift must, in turn, have brought about the reinterpretation—and probably reappropriation—of the old cultic psalms. They too could be put to noncultic use, so long as “I come before You” was understood to refer to the now omnipresent deity, and the “offerings” proffered were offerings of the lips and of the heart. This might seem like a small change, but its reverberations were enormous: properly interpreted, the reading and studying of any part of Scripture could become a kind of offering. It is thus hardly surprising that a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls prescribes that “anywhere where there are ten people, let there not be lacking a man expounding the Torah day and night, continuously, concerning the right conduct of a man with his fellow. And let the [Assembly of the] Many see to it that in the community a third of every night of the year [is spent] in reading the Book and expounding the law and offering blessings together” (Community Rule 6:6–8).

The Song of Songs is another striking instance because its very inclusion in the biblical canon presumes that its words had, at some earlier point, undergone a radical reinterpretation. Someone must have said: “This song isn’t really about love between a man and woman; it’s about God and Israel.” The fact that it is in the Bible may attest to the persuasive powers of this particular individual, but it seems as well to argue that, by that stage in the emergence of the biblical canon, all sorts of texts were being interpreted in a way quite out of keeping with their apparent meaning. It is not difficult to imagine that by then the stories of Genesis had acquired the character of moral instruction (indeed, they explicitly had done so by around 180 BCE, in the writings of Ben Sira, as well as in somewhat later compositions such as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), while the exodus narrative and subsequent wilderness wanderings had become, in some quarters, metaphors or timeless examples of the ways of God and men (in the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo’s writings, in the first centuries BCE and CE). It was in these crucial centuries that the great literary heritage of the past was truly becoming Scripture.

The special role of wisdom writings and the wisdom mentality—in its ascendancy after the return from the Babylonian exile—deserves to be singled out. It is really the wisdom mind-set that made so many ancient texts into Scripture. Like wisdom writings, all of Israel’s ancient library now became a series of eternally valid lessons, the wisdom of the ages. History, for example, was not history but instruction, and the people whose lives it charted thereby acquired a representative character: they all became the “righteous man” and the “wicked man” of the book of Proverbs, their lives exemplars of either all good or all bad. (This is how Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and dozens of others were changed by ancient interpreters.) Along with this was the presumption that, no less than the gnomic proverbs of wisdom literature, the Bible’s stories, prophecies, psalms, and songs were likely as well to have a concealed message: wisdom’s full meaning was never immediately apparent. And just as even the most obvious contradiction in wisdom writings was axiomatically true and no contradiction at all (“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes,” Prov. 26:4–5),18 so an apparent inconsistency or contradiction anywhere in Scripture must likewise simply be illusory. Finally, wisdom itself had no real author, so neither did Scripture: whoever its particular tradent might have been, Moses or Solomon or Isaiah, he was no more the real author than was the ancient Egyptian who wrote down the eternal wisdom contained in the Instructions of Ptah-hotep. Wisdom’s true source was God. Not to put too fine a point on it, each of the wisdom traits just listed corresponds to one of the Four Assumptions.

In short, the wisdom mentality seems to have exercised a profound influence on how the Bible was perceived in late biblical times. Examined through the lens of wisdom writings, the original meaning and even the original genres of Israel’s ancient texts were subtly modified, reconfigured by a whole new way of reading.19 It was this way of reading, as much as the texts themselves, that Jews and Christians canonized as their Bible. Along with it came the great flood of interpretive motifs created by the ancient interpreters; in ten thousand particulars, these individual motifs changed the whole character of Israel’s sacred library. It is this book of changed meanings that was the original Bible.

A Massive Rewriting

One would not be wrong to think of this transformation as, in effect, a kind of massive act of rewriting. The raw material that made up the Bible was written anew not by changing its words but by changing the way in which those words were approached and understood. This sounds like an exaggeration when stated so baldly, but I hope the previous chapters have offered proof that it is not. What we have observed all along are two very different sets of documents, the biblical texts in their original settings and meanings and what those texts were later made out to mean by Jewish and Christian authorities. The words of the two sets of documents are basically the same, but they nonetheless make up, side by side, two completely different books.20

Modern biblical scholarship began in the belief that the Bible’s meaning was simply inherent in its words, indeed, that by throwing away the Four Assumptions of ancient readers and all the interpretations they had generated, the “real Bible” would emerge. This, as we have seen, did not happen. But now that the genie is out of the bottle and modern scholarship has discovered everything it has discovered about the text’s original meaning, what is to become of the Bible?

The first step in formulating an answer to that question, it seems to me, is to understand that the answer must depend very much on who is doing the asking. I do not think it can ever be the same for both Christians and Jews, or for Catholics and Protestants, or even for Episcopalians and Southern Baptists. The historical reasons for these differences need not be treated here, but one or two observations about how some of these groups differ in their approach to the Bible may make things clearer.

Fundamentalism

The first observation concerns the whole phenomenon of Protestant fundamentalism.21 Modern biblical scholarship started out as a largely Protestant movement; it did not, however, advance unopposed. Indeed, it has played a major role in dividing the Protestant world into its liberal and conservative camps, the latter including various groups usually described as fundamentalist or evangelical. This split is older than the twentieth century: we briefly glimpsed the opposing forces in the heresy trial of Charles Augustus Briggs at the end of the nineteenth century, and the tensions and controversies created by modern scholarship go back further than that. Nor would it be fair to pin everything on research into the Bible: the rise of science and rational thought had raised troubling questions about the Bible’s veracity still earlier, and the weight to be given to arguments from reason as opposed to divine revelation is a debate that has been conducted from medieval times on.

Still, most studies of Christian fundamentalism point to the late nineteenth century as its time of origin, and the rise of modern biblical scholarship as the most important of its proximate causes. The term “fundamentalism” itself derives from a series of volumes called The Fundamentals, published between the years 1910 and 1915 and ultimately distributed in more than 3 million copies. The authors of the various essays in these books were, in large measure, scholars and ministers disturbed by German “higher criticism,” which highlighted the human authorship (and human fallibility) of Scripture, as well as by scholarly inquiries into the “historical Jesus” that emphasized his humanity at the expense of his divinity. Something had to be done, the authors felt, to defend Holy Writ and the doctrine of divine inspiration.22 Many liberal Protestants found this approach muddled and anti-intellectual; in fact, the word “fundamentalist” was originally a liberal’s jibe aimed at anyone who subscribed to the basic approach advocated in The Fundamentals. But conservatives were heartened by these books and the approach they advocated, and their basic stance has not changed significantly since then.

It is, I think, simply in the nature of things that this state of affairs will continue; evangelical Christians and others of a conservative bent will continue to be wary of modern scholarship (although some thoughtful conservatives have, in different ways, sought to explore the extent to which such scholarship can coexist with their faith).23 Beyond this obvious point, however, one might ask whether the preceding chapters can shed any light on the nature of this conservative stance. Fundamentalists/evangelicals would scarcely appreciate being told that they have inherited anything from the Bible’s ancient interpreters. Their whole position is, on the contrary, that Scripture speaks directly and literally to us today, without any need for traditional interpretations or ideologically motivated expositors dragging the text hither and yon. But to someone looking from afar, it should be clear that the fundamentalist stance is in fact predicated on at least three of the Four Assumptions of ancient interpreters. Fundamentalists certainly hold that the Bible is perfectly consistent and free of error; that it is addressed to human beings today, speaking about our present and immediate future as well as teaching lessons necessary to salvation; and that it is, in the strictest terms, the word of God. In these respects, indeed, in their whole way of reading Scripture, fundamentalists have much more in common with those ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters than many would likely suspect.

In place of the fourth assumption, however—that the Bible speaks cryptically—fundamentalism asserts that almost everything Scripture says is literally true. It is this proposition that has created the greatest difficulties for fundamentalist hermeneutics—and, interestingly enough, it is one that would certainly have puzzled the ancient interpreters. On the one hand, they would have readily agreed that what the Bible reports did indeed happen—there were indeed real people named Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel and Rebekah; the Israelites did indeed cross the Red Sea on dry land, and so forth. On the other hand, they would have also dismissed such statements as obvious; Scripture’s important message, they would say, is often hidden, so that only by going beyond the obvious can one arrive at its true meaning. It is precisely that message, they would tell fundamentalists, that you are missing.

It is certainly not my purpose here to take sides in Protestantism’s liberal/conservative debate, but one basic irony underlying the above observations deserves to be spelled out. To liberals, fundamentalists and evangelicals often seem like naïve Bible thumpers. Haven’t they heard about modern science or biblical scholarship? Don’t they care about the truth? Yet, in the broad perspective, the fundamentalist stance—occasional anti-intellectualism and all—has succeeded in preserving much of what is most basic about the Bible, the ancient approach to reading it. By contrast, what now seems naïve is precisely the liberal faith that, despite their abandonment of a good bit of that approach, the Bible can somehow still go on being the Bible.

A Liberal Approach to Scripture

The most sustained reckoning with the conclusions of modern scholarship has been in the “liberal” camp or, rather, camps (that is, not only liberal Protestants, but many liberal-minded Catholics and Jews as well). It would be quite impossible to survey here the many different ways in which nineteenth-and twentieth-century theologians have sought to deal with scholarship’s sometimes disturbing conclusions, but certainly one overall trend has been to retreat from the idea of the Hebrew Bible as a factual recitation of past events 25 and to see it as something else: a proclamation of faith, a history with a theological message,26 a text with a “fuller meaning” or “more than literal” sense,27 and much more. In the process, theologians have frequently sought to distance themselves from the actual details of the text (many of which seem inappropriate to modern thinking) in order to focus on its “main ideas” or theological “center” or overall theme.28 Anything unrelated to these, including bloodthirsty oracles against neighboring peoples or divine calls for vengeance or the utter destruction of Israel’s enemies, as well as accounts of miracles and other items that challenge modern science or common sense or our modern knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history and civilization, could be “demythologized” or simply ignored.29

This overall change in focus has been joined with the broader philosophical and literary-critical debate about hermeneutics, that is, the nature of a text’s signification and meaning.30 In particular, the role of the reader and readerly assumptions in establishing meaning has been highlighted—not (as this subject has been evoked in the present study) as a way of understanding ancient biblical interpreters, but as a justification for reading the Bible today in ways that are at odds with the assumptions of modern scholars. Some theologians have thus highlighted the role of the “community of believers”—either today’s church members or the original community of Christianity’s founders—in establishing the norms by which Scripture is to be read. For others, a purely literary approach to the Bible has seemed to offer a way out of the straitjacket of original meaning. Just as readers of a novel do not need to concern themselves with the stages by which it was created or whether the events described really happened, so too with the Bible; and if the modern, literature-minded reader’s approach is not freighted with the same assumptions and knowledge of a hardnosed biblical scholar, so what? “Postmodernism” has served as a rallying cry for a great many of these different approaches.31

Along with this has been a gradual shift in the idea of Scripture’s divine inspiration. For centuries people were content to believe that God had simply whispered His words into the prophet’s ear or otherwise inspired him in the most concrete manner: the prophet was, in one well-worn image, the pipe through which God’s breath blew to make Scripture’s wondrous music. More recently, however, various theologians have come up with a range of different understandings of inspiration, so that nowadays a person can choose “limited verbal inspiration” instead of “strict verbal inspiration” or else opt for “nontextual inspiration” or “content inspiration,” all of which are yet different from “inspired experiences” or “social inspiration.”32 By the same token, Scriptural “infallibility” is distinguished from Scriptural “inerrancy,” and both of these have been found to be different from the “essential truth” of Scripture, which emerges despite its human authors and their many errors.

It would be misleading, however, to characterize this liberal stance as fundamentally defensive—certainly that is not how its proponents would describe it. On the contrary, most would express relief at being rid of an earlier approach to the Bible that they feel to have been untrue—and untruthful. If it is possible to hold on to the general idea of divine inspiration without requiring people to believe in all sorts of unlikely attributions and improbable scenarios, then most would say: thank goodness! And such a stance will go far toward resolving honestly the theological problems of Scripture’s many contradictions (with itself, with modern science, and with everything historians have discovered about the ancient Near East) and will likewise free the modern reader from having to give equal weight to everything found in the Old Testament—treating its teachings about erem and homosexuality, for example, with the same seriousness as its lessons about love of God and love of one’s neighbor. Moreover, while few liberals even bother to contemplate seriously the ancient interpreters’ way of reading the Bible, those who do usually express thanks that modern scholarship has also freed them from the grip of the Four Assumptions and the great body of interpretive motifs they generated. Surely we are immeasurably better off, they say, for having jettisoned this artificial way of reading; no serious person could ever advocate its readoption.

Still, an observer perched on a distant promontory might find this assessment of things somewhat rosier than the reality it seeks to describe. Ancient interpretive methods may sometimes appear artificial, but this hardly means that abandoning them guarantees unbiased interpretation. In fact, so much of what liberal theologians and commentators have to say is typically not all that modern scholarship has brought to light, but rather represents an attempt to find a compromise between that scholarship and what the commentators themselves would still like the Bible to be. Thus liberal commentators, in the face of all they know about etiological narratives and the like, often prefer to tell their readers about other things: Abraham’s or Jacob’s supposedly righteous behavior (despite appearances!), Rahab’s proto-feminism, or the vast moral gulf separating the biblical flood narrative from its Mesopotamian counterparts. (I have, in an appendix to this volume, assembled some representative examples of this phenomenon; see “Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite” on the website www.jameskugel.com.) At times, their interpretations are scarcely less forced than those of ancient midrashists (and usually far less clever).

Looking beyond such specifics, our distant observer would no doubt also point out that the Bible of liberal theologians has changed. It simply is not what it was in the days of the Geneva Bible, or even a century or two ago: the verbum Dei, God’s great book—open it to any page and His timeless guidance will tell you, you in particular, what to believe and think and do. Without any widespread acknowledgment of the fact, the Bible seems to have dropped down a peg. Sensible and sober, still containing uplifting words here and there, it is nevertheless more of a human document than ever before, which is to say that its power to command and even instruct has been diminished. “But is this such a bad thing?” liberals might respond. “Was it better to have an entire belief system built on sand?”

Today’s liberal theologians are thus being pulled in two opposite directions. On the one hand, they want to be honest about what the Bible really says and really is—even if such honesty includes some of the painful discoveries of modern scholarship. Long live the truth! On the other hand, they are still wedded to the idea of the Bible continuing to play the role it always has played, as a divinely inspired (if only in some attenuated sense) guide and a source of still-relevant teachings—in short, the Good Book. These two aims are often at odds with one another. The attempt to reconcile them thus puts liberal scholars in the uncomfortable position of wanting to have their Bible and criticize it too.

Have their efforts at reconciliation succeeded? It seems to me that the jury is still out. Thirty or forty years ago, some of those familiar with the discoveries of recent scholarship were warning that biblical theology was “in crisis.”33 More recently, others have proclaimed the “death of Scripture”34—and it is not biblical scholars alone who are worried. When all is said and done, I think a great many ordinary people are dissatisfied with what Scripture has become. Their first question is: Is the Bible true?, and they are uncomfortable with the apologetic tone of the answers they get back, as well as with the invocation of modern hermeneutical theories about the reader’s role in creating the text. Someone who sees the Bible primarily as an account of things that actually happened usually has a hard time continuing to honor it when archaeologists and biblical scholars deny the historicity of most of its stories.

Is this likely to change? Or perhaps I should say “change back,” since, as we have seen, this was not primarily how the Bible’s first readers read the text. Indeed, for most of the Bible’s history, it was the words of Scripture and its “lessons” that were all-important; these words were the gateway to all the key teachings (and, often, hidden meanings) underneath the text. The historical reality of the events being described (what came to be called, in medieval Christianity, the text’s sensus litteralis or historicus) was altogether secondary. Thus, Philo could remark that there was indeed an actual Abraham who once walked the globe, but the significant sense of his story was a representation of the human soul in search of God—anytime, anywhere. Similarly, Paul could say that the events that occurred during the Israelites’ desert wanderings “happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). To put it differently: the events of the past are one thing, but the words of Scripture are quite another, and it is the words that count for us. In precisely this sense, another New Testament letter saw the importance of Scripture in its capacity “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).

Scripture’s Changed Meaning

In trying to coax modern readers back in this direction, some scholars have sought to build a bridge between the true, historical reality as they know it, including the original meaning of various biblical texts, and the way of reading those same texts described in the preceding paragraph, reading the Bible not as history but “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” These scholars therefore stress that the Bible itself offers ample evidence that the original meaning of this or that text was drastically altered even within the biblical period—by editors or perhaps by people who were themselves prophets, who rearranged, supplemented, interpolated, and otherwise put a very different spin on the original prophet’s words.

From the standpoint of this book’s overall concern with the role of ancient interpreters, this might seem to be a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, I think I would not be wrong to say that most liberal theologians still see the border between the biblical and the postbiblical, between the prophet and the interpreter, as absolute. Indeed, the further back one moves into biblical territory, the safer one is. How else, for example, to understand Gerhard von Rad’s insistence that one must give equal attention to “each phase” leading up to the biblical text’s final form, rather than just reading the final form itself? It was the latter, after all, that was the Bible, accepted by Christianity’s original community of believers;35 what any earlier form of the text might have been, and what it might have meant to which group, are a matter of pure speculation. But if you believe that the biblical is good and the postbiblical is at least irrelevant and perhaps corrupting, then the form of the text that sits on the border between the two cannot take precedence over earlier forms.36 That is why “each phase” leading up to the final text must be considered—to locate the beginnings of a changed way of reading safely within sola scriptura–land. One scholar has even gone so far as to claim that the final, canonized form of the text is actually to be considered inferior to those earlier forms, the precanonical editions and stages.37

As we have seen, however, it was not principally the rearranging and interpolating done by editors that turned these ancient writings into Scripture, but the whole tradition of interpretation that emerged toward the end of the biblical period. This point, it seems to me, is most important even with regard to those contemporary theologians who, at first glance, might seem to have taken a step still closer to the argument of the present study—that is, “canonical” critics who, in various shades and forms, assert the primacy of the final, canonical form of the text over its earlier stages.38 But any appearance of closeness is an illusion. Faced with the theological problems posed by modern biblical scholarship, canonical critics correctly insist that a text’s original meaning is not necessarily its only meaning, indeed, that the original constituents of the Bible necessarily took on a new meaning as soon as they began to be supplemented and edited and ultimately placed in a larger environment of texts, the biblical canon. But this apparently historical argument takes no account of what those texts actually meant at the time of their canonization. That is, canonical criticism draws the line at the canonical text. It does not seem to realize that the earliest “community of believers” canonized not only the text but their own peculiar way of reading and interpreting it. There was nothing optional about the latter: it was what the text meant. Nor is there anything obscure about what that way of reading and interpreting was: it cries out from nearly every page of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, and has been documented in dozens of modern studies. I should make it clear that I am not saying that the only legitimate way now to read the Bible is the way Paul or Jerome read it, only that the canonical critics’ appeal to the magical moment of canonization as decisive is, historically speaking, highly selective. It takes what it wants—the final, canonical shape of the text—and throws out the rest: the whole unwritten set of instructions as to how the text is to be read, along with the rich body of specific interpretations that accompanied it at that time. And it does this only the better to pursue the great Protestant enterprise of interpreting things afresh.

Moreover, from a historical standpoint, canonical criticism’s location of the great change in the Bible’s meaning within the Bible itself (in the psalm headings, for example, or the editorial shifts within prophetic books) is, as already indicated, quite misguided. These are indeed the signs of the beginnings of change, but they pale before the immense transformation introduced by interpreters in the third, second, and first centuries BCE. It was truly out of the work of these interpreters that the canonized Bible emerged, and without it, one might well doubt if the Bible ever could have come to occupy the central place that it did within Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, the very idea of the Bible—that God conceived everything within it in order to tell people what to think and do, and that, in keeping with this, its every word is significant and potentially full of hidden meaning as well as perfectly consistent with every other word—is the product of the interpretative revolution of these closing centuries BCE. If so, why should canonical critics devote so much attention to the scattered forerunners of this revolution found within the Bible itself while largely ignoring the fact that the great change came later and was the product of an anonymous group of Jewish interpreters? The answer, I have already suggested, lies in the historic Protestant allegiance to the Bible alone—sola scriptura. Nothing else can rival the Bible’s authority.

Judaism and Modern Biblical Scholarship

The situation in Judaism is quite the opposite. The founders 39 of what was to become, after the first century CE, the dominant form of Judaism (“rabbinic Judaism”) had always attributed great importance to the Torah’s traditions of interpretation. In fact—for various reasons that need not detain us here 40—those traditions were granted a special status in Judaism: they were referred to collectively as the Torah-that-was-transmitted-orally (or “Oral Torah” for short), and they were sometimes asserted to go back all the way to the time of Moses himself, who had received them at the same time that he received the written text of the Pentateuch.41 If so, according to the exponents of rabbinic Judaism, then there were really two Torahs, the written Pentateuch and the traditions of its proper interpretation and application, which had been transmitted orally along with it.42 In the terms that we have seen, this was a kind of canonization of the idea that Abraham was a monotheist who underwent ten tests; that Jacob was a learned student, while his brother Esau was a brutish lout; that the Israelites heard only the first two of the Ten Commandments directly from God; that in forbidding “work” on the sabbath, the Torah had in mind precisely thirty-nine different types of work; that the Torah’s law of guardians distinguishes between a paid and an unpaid guardian; that a water-giving rock followed the Israelites in the desert; that the Shema is to be recited every morning and evening; and so on and so forth. All such traditions were held to be of equal authority with the written text, and this idea has remained a central tenet of Judaism to this day.

The “Oral Torah,” it should be noted, consisted of more than biblical interpretation alone—it also contained rules governing a number of matters not covered in the Pentateuch (for example, prayers and blessings to be recited on various occasions; agricultural laws; some torts and other areas of civil law; matters connected with betrothal, marriage, and divorce; parts of criminal law and judicial procedure; a detailed description of temple rites, purity statutes, and so forth). It thus included a vast body of material, and even though it continued to be called the “Oral Torah,” this material was eventually committed to writing—it became the Mishnah and Tosefta and the two Talmuds and various compilations of midrash in different genres. Thus, today, Judaism has essentially two canons, the biblical one and the great corpus of writings included under the Oral Torah.

Although these two bodies of writings were, and are, said to be of equal authority, in practice, the Oral Torah always wins. The written Torah may say “an eye for an eye,” but what these words mean is what the Oral Torah says they mean, namely, monetary compensation for any such injury (b. Baba Qamma 83b–84a). The written Torah may say that Jacob went to his father “deceitfully,” but the Oral Torah explains that he really didn’t lie. And so on and so forth for every apparent problem, every inconsistency or contradiction or infelicity in the written text. The solutions produced by the Bible’s ancient interpreters simply became what the text meant. So Judaism has at its heart a great secret. It endlessly lavishes praise on the written Torah, exalting its role as a divinely given guidebook and probing lovingly the tiniest details of its wording and even spelling. Every sabbath the Torah is, quite literally, held up above the heads of worshipers in synagogue, kissed and bowed to and touched in gestures of fealty and absolute submission, some of which may, incidentally, be traced all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia.43 Yet upon inspection Judaism turns out to be quite the opposite of fundamentalism. The written text alone is not all-powerful; in fact, it rarely stands on its own. Its true significance usually lies not in the plain sense of its words but in what the Oral Torah has made of those words; this is its definitive and final interpretation.44

As a result, the whole approach of modern biblical scholarship, which is predicated on disregarding the ancient interpretive traditions of Judaism (and, for that matter, Christianity) and rejecting the four fundamental assumptions that underlie them, must inevitably come into conflict with traditional Jewish belief and practice. The modern program rules out of bounds precisely that which is, for traditional Jews, the Torah’s ultimate significance and its definitive interpretation. To insist on taking the Torah’s words at face value, without regard to what the Oral Torah says about them, is thus for a traditional Jew somewhat comparable to telling a Christian that he or she must take the laws of the Old Testament at face value, without regard for all that Paul has to say about them in the New Testament, as well as about the new covenant of Christianity that has come to take their place. I do not know any Christians who would accept such a proposition.

My own view, therefore—though others may disagree—is that modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are and must always remain completely irreconcilable. Individual Jews may, for one reason or another, seek to speculate about how different parts of the Bible came to be written or about the historical circumstances and original purposes of its various components, but none of this speculation can have any part in traditional Jewish study or worship; indeed, the whole attitude underlying such speculation is altogether alien to the spirit of Judaism and the role of Scripture within it. Nothing in the present volume is intended to suggest otherwise.

But if this is so, does Judaism have any response to all that modern biblical scholarship has discovered? This is a question with more than a century of answers to it, and one cannot rightly speak of a single answer or even a single direction.45 Still, I do not think it would be wrong to characterize at least one major voice in this polyphony as basically following part of the argument about original meaning that we have been tracing throughout. What Scripture means is not what today’s ingenious scholars can discover about its original meaning (and certainly not about the events and persons it describes), but what the ancient interpreters have always held it to mean. A more theoretical version of this answer—and more in keeping with what we have seen in the previous chapters—might go like this: The texts that make up the Bible were originally composed under whatever circumstances they were composed. What made them the Bible, however, was their definitive reinterpretation, along the lines of the Four Assumptions of the ancient interpreters—a way of reading that was established in Judaism in the form of the Oral Torah. Read the Bible in this way and you are reading it properly, that is, in keeping with the understanding of those who made and canonized the Bible. Read it any other way and you have drastically misconstrued the intentions of the Bible’s framers. You are like someone who thinks Swift’s satirical Modest Proposal was a serious program for ending the famine in Ireland—or perhaps a better example from our discussion of the Song of Songs: you are like someone who understands the words of “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” like a twelve-year-old camper. No one has ever told you about its other meaning; that is to say, no one has explained to you why the adults are singing it with religious fervor. Don’t tell me that original songwriter’s intention is everything:46 when the grown-ups sing it, every word has the messianic meaning I described. Now if it doesn’t for you (and if you’re not a twelve-year-old camper), then why are you singing it at all? Similarly with the Song of Songs and with all of Scripture: its true meaning is not the original meaning of its constituent parts, but the meaning it had for the people who first saw it as the Bible, God’s great book of instruction. If it doesn’t have that meaning for you anymore—if all it is is etiological tales and priestly polemics and political speeches—then why are you singing it?

The Very Idea of the Bible

This seems to me a plausible position in the light of all we have seen about the emergence of the Bible. And yet, for someone who takes the Bible seriously, this stance alone hardly resolves the difficulties posed by the last century or so of biblical scholarship. For such a person, hearing or reading about the Documentary Hypothesis for the first time—or any of the other basics of biblical criticism—can be devastating. Items such as the divine origin of the Torah and the role ascribed in it to Moses, as well as the historicity of the patriarchal narratives, the exodus, and the conquest of Canaan, all play a crucial role in his or her faith. Yet all of these, as we have seen, have been cast into doubt by modern scholarship. In the face of such doubts, “Sorry, that isn’t how we read the text” or even “That isn’t how the Bible was first read when it became the Bible” may not be an adequate response.

Another sort of answer, it seems to me, has been lurking in the background of this book all along. It is probably not the sort of answer that will satisfy most traditional readers of the Bible, certainly not at the first shock of discovering modern scholarship. In the long run, however, it may at least suggest a somewhat different approach to thinking about Scripture and the problems raised by modern scholarship. It all has to do with the way in which God was apprehended in ancient Israel, and more particularly, with a significant change that took place in that way of apprehension.

When God first appeared to Abraham or Jacob, He was, by the Bible’s own testimony, the God of Old: He stepped through the curtain that divides ordinary from extraordinary reality, spoke for a minute or two, and then disappeared. Such encounters are consistently represented in the Bible as frightening; the normal human reaction to His appearance was that of the Israelites at Sinai: “When the people saw, they trembled and stood at a distance” (Exod. 20:18). And yet, along with fear, there was, at least for some, the desire—or perhaps more correctly, the perceived need—to meet the deity, to somehow maintain the vital, if dangerous, connection with Him. This, after all, was the whole idea of the ancient Near Eastern temple, a safe and carefully controlled environment in which trained cultic personnel could stand up close (and not “at a distance”) in order to seek the deity’s favor.

Yet, at a certain point in this history (it is difficult to say precisely when), Israel began to conceive of a different sort of “standing up close,” and the change proved revolutionary. It had to do with serving God. The idea of human beings as the gods’ servants or slaves has an ancient pedigree in the Near East, but in Israel this commonplace came to define a relationship, first between God and specific individuals, then between Him and the whole people: “They are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. 25:42, 55). To be a servant or slave was to be in a state of humble subjection, ever eager to do the master’s bidding; but it was also conceived to be a state of closeness, even familiarity. (This English word, it might be noted, is related to the Latin familiaris, the household slave who “belonged to the family.”) To be God’s servant was to be part of His household.47

But what exactly did God want His familiar servants to do? The laws of the Decalogue, according to some scholars, may have begun as the simple code of conduct among scattered tribes, binding them to their distant Suzerain and imposing on them minimal standards of decency in dealing with one another. But the idea of divinely given laws—the whole idea of the Decalogue—was a remarkable one, and soon a broad range of other laws and statutes (civil and criminal, cultic and ethical) were promulgated in this same God’s name. This made for a unique legal system. Elsewhere, to violate the law was a crime; in Israel it was also, explicitly, a sin. By the same token, to keep the law scrupulously was not merely good citizenship; it was to do God’s bidding. So it was that, with ever greater emphasis, serving God meant not only offering sacrifices in the temple, but carrying out His many statutes. This is, among other things, the central theme of the legal core of Deuteronomy. In these laws the temple is presented as distant, a place to which pilgrims repair periodically. It is thus far from most people’s ordinary experience, whereas God’s laws are ever-present, governing a person’s everyday life and that of his neighbors and his village. Indeed, there were soon so many divine commandments it was difficult to remember them all; so, “I will put my Torah inside them, I will write it on their very hearts: I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they need to teach one another or say one to the other, ‘Be obedient to the LORD,’ for they shall all be obedient to Me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD” (Jer. 31:33–34).

True, the people of Israel were not always, and not uniformly, conceived as God’s servants in the Bible. In much of it, those servants were individuals, notably “His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7; 2 Kings 17:23; etc.). They, like the priests, were uniquely close to Him; their words expressed His judgments on Israel and on its neighbors. Yet as those words were preserved beyond their immediate time, they also changed. The divine intermediaries who uttered them and the specific situations that they addressed faded into the background. Instead, the prophets’ utterances—now timeless and without precise context—became instructions to any who cared to know God’s will and God’s ways, “O you who tremble at His word” (Isa. 66:5).

The period following the return from Babylonian exile was one of renewed dedication to God’s will. It is in this context that one should locate the seeds of the very idea of a Bible, a great, multifarious corpus of divinely given instruction. All those texts saved from the ancient past came, slowly but steadily, to be united behind a single purpose: to tell people what God wanted them to know and believe and do, to tell them how to be God’s familiar servants.48 Of course, the Pentateuch or Torah was foremost, as a glance at the great corpus of ancient interpretation will confirm (that is, the material found in the biblical apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the writings of Philo and Josephus). The first five books of the Bible were by far the most important ones to study and understand, because their laws, but also their stories, told you how to act and what to do. Indeed, the fact is that the Pentateuch as a whole came to be known as the Torah, a term that, while it might broadly be translated as “teaching,” retained some of its earlier nuance of “law” or “legal procedure.” (Hence the Greek translation of this title—in the Septuagint and Philo and the New Testament—as the nomos, the “law” or regula vitae.)

Yet here is a most interesting point: the words of that Torah were evidently not sacrosanct. On the contrary, as we have seen throughout this study, their apparent meaning was frequently modified or supplemented by ancient interpreters—sometimes expanded or limited in scope, very often concretized through specific applications or homey examples,49 sometimes (as with “an eye for an eye”) actually overthrown. An obvious question arises: if the laws and stories of the Pentateuch were deemed to come from God, how dare mere humans fiddle with them, adding to them, taking them out of context, changing their meaning, or even getting them to say the opposite of what they said?50 Did not the Torah itself quite explicitly command: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything away from it” (Deut. 4:2)?

This is, I believe, the question to ask, since the answer reveals the very idea of Scripture at its essence. The answer is that there was something considered even more important, more powerful, than the words of the text themselves. That something was precisely the “standing up close” mentioned above: the supreme mission of serving God, of being God’s familiar servants. Scripture was sacred, but more sacred still was the purpose underlying the very idea of Scripture. How else to explain that the Torah’s laws could be treated as they were, modified even within the Bible itself, and then lavishly, unashamedly expanded and reinterpreted and applied to the concrete situations of daily life by the ancient interpreters? Indeed, this same tendency has carried through clearly even into modern times.51

Viewed from this perspective, the sometimes disturbing insights of modern scholarship must necessarily take on a different aspect. In Judaism, Scripture is ultimately valued not as history, nor as theology, nor even as the great, self-sufficient corpus of divine utterances—all that God had ever wished to say to man. Judaism is not fundamentalism, nor even Protestantism. What Scripture is, and always has been, in Judaism is the beginning of a manual entitled To Serve God, a manual whose trajectory has always led from the prophet to the interpreter and from the divine to the merely human. To put the matter in, I admit, rather shocking terms: since in Judaism it is not the words of Scripture themselves that are ultimately supreme, but the service of God (the “standing up close”) that they enjoin, then to suggest that everything hangs on Scripture might well be described as a form of fetishism or idolatry, that is, a mistaking of the message for its Sender and the turning of its words into idols of wood or stone. Rabbinic Judaism’s whole attitude toward the written text is quite the opposite of such fetishism. For Judaism, the crucial element in Scripture has always been the imperative that Scripture’s very existence embodies (and the changed apprehension that underlies that imperative), the basic divine commandment reflected in Deuteronomy’s exhortation “to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut. 10:12) and similar pronouncements. To flesh out this commandment was the purpose of all of Scripture and all later interpretation. With such a purpose foremost, the Bible’s original component texts easily lent themselves to flexible reinterpretation. As a matter of fact, a fossilized, petrified meaning would, soon enough, end up betraying this purpose of Scripture by making it outmoded and obsolete.52

In saying this, I may seem to have doubled back to an earlier theme, the importance of the ancient interpretations that have accompanied Scripture on its journey. But this time, the point I am seeking to make is slightly different. The very idea of Scripture, I wish to say, was at its origin an expression of a certain way of apprehending God—not the fleeting, frightening way in which the God of Old was encountered, but the way of coming before Him in constancy as His familiar servants. Seen in the broadest perspective, this is hardly the only way that human beings have sought to apprehend God (not even within the confines of ancient Israel). But it was the way that came to increasing prominence, especially after the Babylonian exile, and it left its mark most visibly in Hebrew Scripture. Scripture was the set of written instructions God had given to His familiar servants.

This character of Scripture subsequently underwent not one but three significant revisions, first with the rise of Christianity, later with the Protestant Reformation, and finally with the full flowering of modern scholarship. Early Christianity never abandoned the basic servants-of-God posture that underlay the religion of Israel in later times, even though at the heart of Paul’s theology was the replacement of the old covenant of laws with a new one of grace. Belief and devotion are, after all, also a kind of service, even when disconnected from a specific menu of devotional acts. Thus Quid agas—“what you should do”—never ceased to be a major element in Christian teaching, and it was held to be one of the three spiritual senses of Scripture. But as a practical matter, “what you should do” was, in late antiquity and medieval times, no longer primarily located in Scripture: the laws of the Old Testament were now mediated by the New. Instead, the service of God was a matter of direct church teaching and of the creeds—some of it certainly based on Scripture, but interpreted by papal authority and hallowed tradition. As for the actual text of the Old Testament, it became, from the church’s ascendancy through the Middle Ages and beyond, significant primarily for its connection to the New Testament, often as the foreshadowing and confirmation of the New, or the promise that was fulfilled in the events of the New.53

The new Protestant denominations ushered in a further change. With no pope and no authoritative traditions of interpretation, the words of Scripture now stood alone—sola scriptura. As such, Scripture was summoned to play a role it had never played before and for which, by the nature of things, it was rather ill-suited. How indeed was one to reconcile apparent contradictions, and what was one to do with teachings that no longer corresponded to anything in current reality? The latter was an especially pressing question for the new Protestant denominations, in which the doctrine of justification by faith alone—sola fide—had only widened the gap between Torah and Gospel. The answer proposed was twofold. On the one hand, Scripture soon became the raw material for theologians to use in formulating its important message or messages; troubling elements could simply be omitted. (“Had to be omitted,” theologians now said, since if ancient Judaism’s “apprehension of God” was different from that which preceded it, Christianity’s was necessarily different from that of ancient Judaism.) On the other hand—and here we join the movement of modern biblical scholarship—it was the real events and real people about which Scripture reported that moved to the fore and began to be studied for their own sake. The imperfections of the text were simply that, imperfections; they mattered little if what counted was “what really happened” and its corollary, “what really was said.”54 C. A. Briggs and his generation had hoped that archaeology, ancient Near Eastern history, and philology would combine to restore the “real Bible.” This has not happened. And so, while the fundamentally changed apprehension of God that underlay the very idea of Scripture remains alive to some degree in all the biblical religions, its connection with Scripture is, for many readers, increasingly strained.

This, it seems to me, is the larger picture behind the story traced on these pages, and a deeper understanding of this sequence of events may help illuminate the nature of the Bible’s current difficulties. I am certainly not saying that this evolution ought now to be reversed. But it is really only through an appreciation of the original idea of Scripture, and the apprehension of God that underlies it, that those difficulties can be put in proper perspective.

By the same logic, it seems to me that the whole matter of Scripture’s inspiration can only be understood in connection with the overall change in Israel’s apprehension of God described above. Divine inspiration is not, at bottom, a matter of conferring a seal of divine approval on this or that passage of Scripture, or even on Scripture as a whole. Precisely in the light of what was just seen about the flexible way in which Scripture’s words were treated by the very people who maintained its uniformly divine character, such a conception of inspiration seems to make little sense. Rather, as some rabbinic texts themselves intimate,55 it all has to do with the great, single revelation that inaugurated (and on which was predicated) Israel’s changed apprehension of God. Scripture reflects the real moment in the history of the human apprehension of the divine that occurred back in biblical times and subsequently changed everything, first for Israel and then for much of humanity: the moment when Israel first stood before God as His familiar servants, eager to carry out His will in myriad particulars. The Bible, it seems to me, remains the most accessible avenue into the world of that change, setting out both what preceded it as well as what immediately followed, a basic program for the service of God in daily life.

Harvard Prof Says Bible Research a Mistake

I have, in some sense, been writing this last chapter for the past thirty years, and now that it is done, I still have the feeling that I have left too many things unsaid. In any case, as someone with some experience in such matters, I can readily imagine how this chapter may be misconstrued. The above is certainly an appealing headline, and I have some premonition that it will appear somewhere, the review underneath it conveniently skipping over the first thirty-five chapters of this book in order to concentrate on (and misrepresent) the thirty-sixth. In truth, however, my subject has been not the ruin of the Bible but the Bible itself—its highways and little byways, heroes, brigands, walk-ons, and also-rans, its mysteries and its ineffables, as well as its sometimes treacherous little details. Beyond all these, this book is about two extraordinary sets of interpreters, and I have made no effort to disguise my admiration for both. Their approaches, however, are quite irreconcilable—this, if some headline is required, is the one I would prefer. Happy the reader who can open the Bible today and still understand it as it was understood by those who first proclaimed it the Bible. For anyone else, I hope that this book may at least offer some help in finding an escape from the box of original meaning and, perhaps as well, some greater appreciation of the way of reading championed by the Bible’s first interpreters—those who turned the erotic Song of Songs into the allegorical one, the stories of Genesis or Judges into moral tales, and the temple-centered, cultic psalms into the timeless and placeless stirrings of every heart. No doubt, a bit of imaginative effort is demanded nowadays to enter into their frame of mind—to focus first on the text itself, on its very words, and then quite consciously to allow them to speak as best they can about God and man, heaven and earth, and how it is that these may meet. I certainly have nothing against exploring “what really happened” and how the Bible came to be written, but I would not mistake such things for what is foremost. They are rightly the province of specialists, people who (like me) got bitten by the bug. As for all I have omitted, it seems best to me simply to let this study sputter out with a few disjointed observations I have jotted down over the years.

Anyone who has studied different religions knows that the “ideas” part of them counts for relatively little. Someone rhythmically chanting “Hari Krishna” may, in some technical sense, be speaking words, but these phonemes are clearly only a kind of vehicle. So too for formulaic prayers and hymns, repeated week after week or day after day. There always has to be something to make the connection between human beings and God, and that something often consists of words (we humans are speakers and thinkers, after all)—words of prayers and, sometimes, even the words of theological doctrines and ideas. But those words are really the frail filament through which the electric current passes. Without them it would not pass at all, of course; but they are frail nonetheless. (I remember, with a smile but also some understanding, the woman who told her pastor that she “had found great support in that blessed word, Mesopotamia.”)56

Scripture is, in one sense, the opposite of prayer (words from God rather than to God), but it makes this same connection. Scripture in different religious traditions always seems to have the remarkable ability to become the locus of people’s deepest inner fumblings and mumblings: those words suddenly contain so much—their quality of Scripture gives them that right—and they fill up with all that is most important: they become the theater of the soul.

• • •

How can you distinguish the word of God from other, ordinary, human words in Scripture? I do not know of any litmus test that can be used. I suppose I have my suspicions about this verse or that one, but I really do not believe it is my business to try to second-guess the text’s divine inspiration. And so, I like to think about Scripture in the same terms I think about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. That little flat-topped, squared-off hill (a short walk from my house) was once the site of Solomon’s temple, and then, after that temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, it soon became the site of the second temple, until it too was put to the torch, this time by the Romans. It lay in ruins for several centuries, until the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, when the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque were built on it. Not immediately thereafter, but soon enough, custom and, eventually, rabbinical decree forbade pious Jews from ascending that hill and walking about, lest by accident their foot defile the place where once the Holy of Holies stood, the place of God’s presence on earth (which could be entered only once a year, and only by one man, the high priest). This prohibition is in force to this day. So every day, pious Muslims and Christian pilgrims and Japanese tourists climb up the steps and walk all around the Temple Mount, but religious Jews do not. I do not.

Now, of course, I have my own ideas about where the Holy of Holies once stood. I think there is every reason to doubt that it stood, for example, in the extreme northeastern corner of the Temple Mount—why should anyone have built the temple way over there, and in such a way that the Holy of Holies stood precariously close to the flat hill’s edge? In fact, I doubt that it was close to any of the edges of the current Temple Mount. So couldn’t I just walk very carefully around on the outer perimeter and stand there, safe in the knowledge that I am not violating the space once occupied by God’s presence? But of course I don’t.

I like to think of Scripture as a similar sort of space. I certainly could not pinpoint Scripture’s Holy of Holies, the very center from which the divine presence radiated outward. But I suppose I could try to put together my own collection of verses that might correspond to the extreme northeastern corner of the Temple Mount: could God truly have resided over here? Still, I am content to respect Scripture’s current dimensions and its integrity. Even if I could somehow distinguish divinely inspired words from ordinary human ones, such an exercise would be pointless from the Bible’s standpoint. We have seen that, since ancient times, the trajectory of being God’s servants inevitably led from words of God to merely human words, and that the latter have had a great deal to do with the essence of the Bible, turning all of it into a manual of “what to do.” So, while I could not be involved in a religion that was entirely a human artifact, it would, in theory at least, be enough for me if God said what He is reported to have said in Exodus and Deuteronomy: “Do you want to come close to Me? Then do My bidding, become My employees.” The fleshing out of that primal commandment takes place in Scripture and outside of Scripture, and it is all one sacred precinct; indeed, the divine presence suffuses every part of it.