A pastor from a Christian discussion I attended last December told us of a prominent sociology professor and journalist who read the bible but couldn't understand it so he set it aside.
I used to have my own set of objections to the bible. But then I realized how unjustified I was for holding those opinions because I don't really know anything about it-- I haven't even read it then. So I started reading it. I haven't finished it yet and there are a lot of things I still don't understand, but I found it a pretty addictive read when I realized what it really is about.
Interestingly, I learned from a lecture that the bible was possibly the first codex. A codex, if you didn't know ( I didn't), is a collection of sheets of paper, stack and bound together on one side... and this we now call a book. Before the codex, ancient people used scrolls and the term "book" meant something different. Perhaps kind of like in the sense of "the books of the bible," "the book of Genesis," etc.
The bible is not just something you read and then understand immediately. You have to study it. Christine Hayes, a Yale faculty of religious studies, has a very interesting lecture on other common myths about the bible. It can be watched here or read below. The text below is just a portion of the video.
Chapter 2. Common Myths about the Bible [00:16:10]
So before we proceed, I need to ask you to set aside for the purposes of this course, some of the more common myths about the Bible. I have a little list here for you. The first is the idea that the Bible's a book. It's not a book. We'll get rid of that one. The Bible is not a book with all that that implies, that it has a uniform style and a message and a single author, the sorts of things we think of when we think in a conventional sense of the word "book." It's a library. It's an anthology of writings or books written and edited over an extensive period of time by people in very different situations responding to very different issues and stimuli, some political, some historical, some philosophical, some religious, some moral. There are many types or genres of material in the Bible. There's narrative, wonderful narrative stories. There's all kinds of law. There are cultic and ritual texts that prescribe how some ceremony is supposed to be performed. There are records of the messages of prophets. There's lyric poetry, there's love poetry, there are proverbs, there are psalms of thanksgiving and lament. So, there's a tremendous variety of material in this library, and it follows from the fact that it's not a book but an anthology of diverse works, that it's not an ideological monolith. And this is something a lot of students struggle with. Each book, or strand of tradition within a book, within the biblical collection sounds its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that is the Bible. Genesis is concerned to account for the origin of things and wrestles with the existence of evil, the existence of idolatry and suffering in a world that's created by a good god. The priestly texts in Leviticus and Numbers emphasize the sanctity of all life and the ideal of holiness and ethical and ritual purity. There are odes to human reason and learning and endeavor in the wisdom book of Proverbs. Ecclesiastes reads like an existentialist writing from the twentieth century. It scoffs at the vanity of all things, including wisdom, and espouses a kind of positive existentialism. The Psalms are very individual writings that focus on individual piety and love and worship of God. Job, possibly the greatest book of the Bible, I won't give away my preferences there, challenges conventional religious piety and arrives at the bittersweet conclusion that there is no justice in this world or any other, but that nonetheless we're not excused from the thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task of righteous living. One of the most wonderful and fortuitous facts of history is that later Jewish communities chose to put all this stuff in this collection we call the Bible. They chose to include all of these dissonant voices together. They didn't strive to reconcile the conflicts, nor should we. They didn't, we shouldn't. Each book, each writer, each voice reflects another thread in the rich tapestry of human experience, human response to life and its puzzles, human reflection on the sublime and the depraved.
And that leads me to my second point, which is that biblical narratives are not pious parables about saints. Okay? Not pious tales. They're psychologically real literature about very real or realistic people and life situations. They're not stories about pious people whose actions are always exemplary and whose lives should be models for our own, despite what Sunday School curricula will often turn them into. And despite what they would have us believe. There is a genre of literature that details the lives of saints, Hagiography, but that came later and is largely something we find in the Christian era. It's not found in the Bible. The Bible abounds with human not superhuman beings, and their behavior can be scandalous. It can be violent, it can be rebellious, outrageous, lewd, vicious. But at the same time like real people, they can turn around and act in a way that is loyal and true above and beyond the call of duty. They can change, they can grow. But it's interesting to me that there are many people who, when they open the Bible for the first time, they close it in shock and disgust. Jacob is a deceiver; Joseph is an arrogant, spoiled brat; Judah reneges on his obligations to his daughter-in-law and goes off and sleeps with a prostitute. Who are these people? Why are they in the Bible? And the shock comes from the expectation that the heroes of the Bible are somehow being held up as perfect people. That's just not a claim that's made by the Bible itself. So biblical characters are real people with real, compelling moral conflicts and ambitions and desires, and they can act shortsightedly and selfishly. But they can also, like real people, learn and grow and change; and if we work too hard and too quickly to vindicate biblical characters just because they're in the Bible, then we miss all the good stuff. We miss all of the moral sophistication, the deep psychological insights that have made these stories of such timeless interest. So read it like you would read any good book with a really good author who knows how to make some really interesting characters.
Thirdly, the Bible's not for children. I have a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old. I won't let them read it. I won't let them read it. Those "Bible Stories for Children" books, they scare me. They really scare me. It's not suitable for children. The subject matter in the Bible is very adult, particularly in the narrative texts. There are episodes of treachery and incest and murder and rape. And the Bible is not for naïve optimists. It's hard-hitting stuff. And it speaks to those who are courageous enough to acknowledge that life is rife with pain and conflict, just as it's filled with compassion and joy. It's not for children in another sense. Like any literary masterpiece, the Bible is characterized by a sophistication of structure and style and an artistry of theme and metaphor, and believe me, that's lost on adult readers quite often. It makes its readers work. The Bible doesn't moralize, or rarely, rarely moralizes. It explores moral issues and situations, puts people in moral issues and situations. The conclusions have to be drawn by the reader. There are also all kinds of paradoxes and subtle puns and ironies, and in section where you'll be doing a lot of your close reading work, those are some of the things that will be drawn to your attention. You'll really begin to appreciate them in time.
The fourth myth we want to get rid of: the Bible is not a book of theology, it's not a catechism or a book of systematic theology. It's not a manual of religion, despite the fact that at a much later time, very complex systems of theology are going to be spun from particular interpretations of biblical passages. You know, there's nothing in the Bible that really corresponds to prevailing modern western notions of religion, what we call religion, and indeed there's no word for religion in the language of biblical Hebrew. There just isn't a word "religion." With the rise of Christianity, western religion came to be defined to a large degree by the confession of, or the intellectual assent to, certain doctrinal points of belief. Religion became defined primarily as a set of beliefs, a catechism of beliefs or truths that required your assent, what I think of as the catechism kind of notion of religion. That's entirely alien to the world of the Bible. It's clear that in biblical times and in the Ancient Near East generally, religion wasn't a set of doctrines that you ascribed to. To become an Israelite, later on a Jew — the word "Jew" isn't something we can really historically use until about this time [ca. 500 BCE], so most of our period we're going to be talking about the ancient Israelites — to become an Israelite, you simply joined the Israelite community, you lived an Israelite life, you died an Israelite death. You obeyed Israelite law and custom, you revered Israelite lore, you entered into the historical community of Israel by accepting that their fate and yours should be the same. It was sort of a process of naturalization, what we think of today as naturalization. So the Hebrew Bible just isn't a theological textbook. It contains a lot of narratives and its narrative materials are an account of the odyssey of a people, the nation of Israel. They're not an account of the divine, which is what theology means, an account of the divine. However, having said this, I should add that although the Bible doesn't contain formal statements of religious belief or systematic theology, it treats issues, many moral issues and some existential issues that are central to the later discipline of theology, but it treats them very differently. Its treatment of these issues is indirect, it's implicit. It uses the language of story and song and poetry and paradox and metaphor. It uses a language and a style that's very far from the language and style of later philosophy and abstract theology.
Finally, on our myth count, I would point out — well I don't really need to cross this out, this is something to discuss — I would point out that the Bible was formulated and assembled and edited and modified and censored and transmitted first orally and then in writing by human beings. The Bible itself doesn't claim to have been written by God. That belief is a religious doctrine of a much later age. And even then one wonders how literally it was meant — it's interesting to go back and look at some of the earliest claims about the origin of the biblical text. Similarly, the so-called five books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the first five books we call the Pentateuch of Moses — nowhere claim to have been written in their entirety by Moses. That's not something they say themselves. Some laws in Exodus, you know, the Book of the Covenant, a few things — yes, it says Moses wrote those down, but not the whole five books that tradition later will ascribe to him. The Bible clearly had many contributors over many centuries, and the individual styles and concerns of those writers, their political and religious motivations, betray themselves frequently.
I leave aside here the question of divine inspiration, which is an article of faith in many biblical religions. It's no doubt an article of faith for people in this very room. But there is no basic incompatibility between believing on faith in the divine inspiration of the Bible and acknowledging the role that human beings have played in the actual formulation and editing and transmission and preservation of that same Bible. And since this is a university course and not perhaps a theological course or within a theological setting, it's really only the latter, the demonstrably human component, that will concern us.
It's very easy for me to assert that our interest in the Hebrew Bible will be centered on the culture and the history and the literature and the religious thought of ancient Israel in all of its diversity rather than questions of faith and theology. But the fact remains that the document is the basis for the religious faith of many millions of people, and some of them are here now. It is inevitable that you will bring what you learn in this course into dialogue with your own personal religious beliefs, and for some of you, I hope all of you, that will be enriching and exciting. For some of you it may be difficult. I know that, and I want you to rest assured that no one in this course wishes to undermine or malign religious faith any more than they wish to promote or proselytize for religious faith. Religious faith simply isn't the topic of this course. The rich history and literature and religious thought of ancient Israel as preserved for us over millennia in the pages of this remarkable volume, that is our topic, and so our approach is going to be necessarily academic; and especially given the diversity of people in this room, that's really all that it can be, so that we have a common ground and common goals for our discussions. But it has been my experience that from time to time students will raise a question or ask a question that is prompted by a commitment, a prior commitment to an article of faith. Sometimes they're not even aware that that's what they're doing, and I want you to understand that on those occasions I'll most likely respond by inviting you to consider the article of faith that lies behind that question and is creating that particular problem for you. I'm not going to be drawn into a philosophical or theological debate over the merits of that belief, but I'll simply point out how or why that belief might be making it difficult for you to read or accept what the text is actually and not ideally saying, and leave you to think about that. And I see those as wonderful learning opportunities for the class. Those are in no way a problem for me.
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