How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human(s) Hand
Three Scholars Face Truth Of Biblical History
Wikimedia Commons
Writing The Bible: The Torah is actually a redaction of texts, threaded together from different traditions.
By Jay Michaelson
Published June 22, 2014, issue of June 27, 2014.
● How the Bible Became Holy
By Michael Satlow
Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35
● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis
By Joel Baden
Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65
● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon
By Timothy Lim
Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45
By Michael Satlow
Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35
● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis
By Joel Baden
Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65
● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon
By Timothy Lim
Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45
According
to a Gallup poll taken last month, 40% of Americans believe that the
Bible is the literal record of words spoken by God. A new crop of books
from Yale University Press shows why this belief is illogical and
incoherent.
All
three cover ground that is largely familiar to scholars of religion,
but still has the capacity to shock traditionalists. Far from being a
unified set of texts, the Bible is the product of multiple hands,
contradictory agendas, and a gradual process of codification that
proceeded according to the prevailing political agendas of the times.
Indeed, the boundaries of biblical literature were themselves contested
over an extended period of time, settling only in the first centuries of
the common era.
This
is true even of the Torah itself, which scholars have long understood
to be a redaction of multiple texts, threaded together from different
traditions. This view, known as the “documentary hypothesis,” has been
remarkably successful over its 150-year lifespan. Joel Baden’s 2012
volume, “The Composition of the Pentateuch,”
surveys the history of the documentary hypothesis, observing that
subsequent scholarship has provided better evidence for the hypothesis
than did the original theorists.
Baden
emphasizes that this hypothesis is, first and foremost, a literary
solution to a literary problem. Traditionalists sometimes treat it as a
religious point of view — a matter of opinion, much like some
fundamentalists regard the theory of evolution. But neither evolution
nor the documentary hypothesis is a “point of view.” They both try to
explain otherwise perplexing evidence.
In
the case of the Pentateuch, Baden thoroughly summarizes the “problem”:
The text as we have it is rife with factual and doctrinal
contradictions, repetitions, omissions and errors. Some are well known,
such as the two versions of the Ten Commandments, and the
stitched-together narrative of Joseph being sold into slavery, which
makes no sense as a single narrative. Others only reveal themselves upon
close inspection.
Traditional
commentators were familiar with most (though not all) of these issues.
But they worked from a premise that dictated their conclusions: The
Bible was a work of divine authorship, and therefore it must somehow
make sense. No interpretation was too contorted: God speaking the words
“remember” and “preserve” at the same instant, Joseph being sold into
slavery twice, whatever. If the axiom is that the text absolutely must
make sense as the product of a single author, anything goes.
Yet
that axiom is only a premise, not a conclusion. Viewing the text
objectively, without taking the divinity of its author as a given, it
becomes clear that the Torah contains multiple traditions that were
later edited together. Most of “The Composition of the Pentateuch”
proceeds along this path. Helpfully, Baden has organized the book
thematically, according to different types of textual issues, and
provided case studies for each and careful reconstructions of the
textual strands in question.
The
results can be amazing. Reading Baden’s sifted and reconstituted
biblical passages is like a breath of fresh air. Suddenly, the stories
make sense, the narrative proceeds without perplexing insertions and
repetitions, and the distinct theological agendas of the different texts
emerge. It’s often an astonishing journey, and in refreshing the
documentary hypothesis, Baden has written an excellent introduction to
it, suitable for students but accessible to laypeople.
Michael Satlow’s “How the Bible Became Holy”
begins where Baden leaves off. Satlow notes that the documentary
hypothesis is now basically a matter of consensus among experts who read
biblical literature closely and without theological bias. As the title
implies, his question is different. How did these texts, and not others,
come to be regarded as sacred? Were they uniformly accepted? And when?
Satlow
immediately rejects the traditional explanation that the masses of
Israel readily accepted these texts as sacred. What he proposes instead
is surprising. Biblical texts, Satlow says, were initially the property
of a tiny subclass of elite scribes. They had very little authority, and
may even have originated as exercises in transcription. Only much
later, as late as the rabbinic period, was the written word given such
priority. The “people of the book” was a late invention.
“How
the Bible Became Holy” is more audacious than “The Composition of the
Pentateuch.” Baden stays with literary texts, using extratextual
evidence to support but not greatly advance his readings. Satlow,
however, employs archeological evidence, non-biblical texts, and,
occasionally, speculation.
Some
of Satlow’s evidence is revelatory: He makes a convincing case that the
scribal class only came to Jerusalem after the destruction of the
Northern Kingdom. Judea was a backwater, but when the
Assyrian-influenced Israelite scribes arrived, they brought
sophisticated traditions that transformed Judean religion. Other
evidence is less persuasive, like Satlow’s repeated suggestions that
these texts were mere scribal exercises, one step above penmanship
practice.
What
emerges is a fascinating inversion of the Bible’s picture of reality.
If you were an average Jew in ancient Israel, you gave authority to
family traditions first and foremost. These probably included the
worship of multiple gods, from El and Baal to familial “household gods”
who protected house and hearth. Priestly elites competed for authority,
with the Jerusalem cult only one of many such institutions. Some kings
were pluralistic; others favored one cult over another.
It
was in part an accident that the Jerusalem group’s traditions — which,
of course, privileged their god, YHVH, and their sacrificial cult — took
primacy. Those imported-from-Israel scribes had a lot to do with it.
Eventually, when the exiled Judeans returned from Babylonia in 539
B.C.E., it was the YHVH-centric traditions that were consulted for
authenticity — and the texts’ authority became central.
In
a way, this makes sense. After the Babylonian conquest (and Persian
conquest of Babylonia), there were no direct family traditions anymore;
everything had been uprooted. These old scraps of texts suddenly became
the repository of ancient wisdom.
Satlow’s
story continues on through Ezra and Nehemiah, the Sadducees, the Dead
Sea Scrolls, and onward through the early Christians and talmudic
rabbis. This part of the story also appears in Timothy Lim’s scholarly “The Formation of the Hebrew Canon,”
which focuses on the canonical debates that occupied Jewish and
Christian communities, and which makes a valuable contribution to
biblical scholarship, albeit one of less interest to non-specialists.
But
by now the contours are clear — far from being a straightforward
adoption of texts universally acclaimed to be holy, the composition of
the Bible proceeded in fits and starts, with multiple competing agendas.
For
the contemporary Jewish practitioner, perhaps the central question is
what all this means theologically. I resisted the documentary hypothesis
when I learned about it in college. Gradually, I settled on a
compatibilist position: Yes, these texts where written by humans, but
were “divinely inspired” and could be said to be written by God as well.
Eventually, I set this, too, aside, making peace with the textual,
historical and archeological evidence that these scholars have
adumbrated here.
At
what cost? I won’t dissemble: Losing my faith in Torah mi’Sinai — the
traditional belief that God spoke the entire Torah to Moses on Mount
Sinai—did, indeed, change how I regarded Jewish text and tradition. Some
specialness has been lost, along with traditional understandings of
authority. The yoke of Halacha (Jewish law) is one voluntarily assumed,
not compelled by some unbroken chain of tradition.
But
the point is that there isn’t really a choice between the
traditionalist view and the historical/scholarly ones. The
traditionalist view is false. So the real choice is between different
ways of being religious: one that admits the truth, and another that
denies it in the face of all available evidence.
And
in this regard, my choice of the former has led to an important
loosening of doctrinal bonds. I have come to believe that the value of
Jewish religious practice exists independent of its foundation myths. If
there is merit to the wisdom of the Torah, it exists on its own, not
because God spoke it on the mountain. If there is value to the practices
of Judaism, it exists regardless of its invention by priests in the
sixth century B.C.E..
Traditionalists
can act as if everything is at stake in these factual debates. If the
world is five billion years old, the church service is meaningless. If
the Torah was written by four sets of authors, the beauty of Shabbat
disappears. None of this need be the case. Satlow, Baden, Lim, and
hundreds of scholars like them are, in the end, only pursuing the truth.
And however one elaborates the meaning of God or religion, surely they
must have something to do with truth. This, in itself, is a religious
value, since whatever God or religion can be said to be, surely they
must have something to do with truth. If that cardinal principle is to
be maintained, the insights of these textual experts must be welcomed,
even if they shake the foundations of religious dogma. To the extent
they are correct, they are further iterations of the truth. And the
pursuit of that truth, not self-deception or willful ignorance, is the
task of religious adulthood.
Jay Michaelson is a contributing editor of the Forward. He was the 2014 winner of the Deadline Club Award for opinion writing.
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/
No comments:
Post a Comment