A
Theological Introduction to the Old Testament
Mark W. Hamilton
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hamilton, Mark W., author.
Title: A theological introduction to the Old Testament / Mark W. Hamilton. Description: New York : Oxford University Press USA, 2018. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017032763 (print) | LCCN 2018005571 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190203139 (updf) | ISBN 9780190865160 (epub) | ISBN 9780190203115 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Old Testament—Theology. | Bible. Old Testament—Introductions.
Classification: LCC BS1192.5 (ebook) | LCC BS1192.5 .H35 2018 (print) | DDC 221.6/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032763
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Samjung, Nathan, and Hannah
Yosi son of Yoezer, the man from Saredah, says, “Let your house be an assembly point for the wise. Powder yourself with the dust of their feet and drink their words in gulps.”
(Pirqe Abot 1:4)
Contents Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
1. Introduction 1
2. The Pentateuch in Brief 11
3. “In the Beginning”: The Book of Genesis 15
4. Rescue and Renewal: The Book of Exodus 33
5. On Holiness and Life: The Book of Leviticus 54
6. In the Desert: The Book of Numbers 65
7. On Memory and Action: The Book of Deuteronomy 82
8. Israelite Historiography 97
9. A New Land and a New People: The Book of Joshua 105
10. Seeking Order Amid Chaos: The Book of Judges 117
11. The Model Convert: The Book of Ruth 132
12. God, King, and People: 1–2 Samuel 139
13. The Triumph and Tragedy of Monarchy: 1–2 Kings 157
14. Rethinking Israel’s History: 1–2 Chronicles 180
15. Ezra and Nehemiah: Finding Life After Death 193
16. The Queen of Comedies: The Book of Esther 201
17. Poetic and Wisdom Texts 207
18. God as Defendant and Plaintiff: The Book of Job 211
19. The Praises and Laments of Israel: The Book of Psalms 222
20. Proverbs: Wisdom and the Order of the World 241
21. Ecclesiastes: Doubt as an Order of Faith 253
22. Love in the Air: The Song of Songs 261
23. Introduction to the Prophetic Books 267
24. Isaiah, the Prophet of Salvation 273
25. Not Just a Weeping Prophet: Jeremiah 290
26. Mourning a Lost World: The Book of Lamentations 308
27. Ezekiel, the Prophet of the Rebuilt Temple 314
28. Keeping Faith in a Distant Land: The Book of Daniel 331
29. The Twelve Minor Prophets 342
30. The Secondary Canon 369
31. What’s It All About? 386
Index of Biblical References 389
Subject Index 415
Acknowledgments
Many minds play a role in writing a book of this sort, and many deserve thanks. First, I wish to thank the many students who have discussed the texts of the Old Testament with me over the past two decades. Their names are too numerous to list, but their faces run through my brain, and I recall them with affection and gratitude. The numerous anonymous reviewers of the book in its various stages also contributed much to its clarity and usefulness. Robert Miller and Steve Wiggins of Oxford University Press enabled the publication of this project and encouraged its completion. Josiah Peeler has read and commented on successive versions of the book, always to good effect and with cheerfulness. My children, Nathan Hamilton and Hannah Hamilton have not only suffered through their father’s obsessions with teaching old texts to young people but have also read large parts of this book with an eye toward its improvement. They have unstintingly given of their knowledge of music and science far exceeding that of their father, often with results that improve this book, and more importantly my life. Most of all, I thank my wife and partner, Dr. Samjung Kang-Hamilton, who believed in this work even through difficult patches in writing it.
Abbreviations Biblical Books
Genesis Gen
Exodus Exod
Leviticus Lev
Numbers Num
Deuteronomy Deut
Joshua Josh
Judges Judg
Ruth Ruth
1–2 Samuel 1–2 Sam
1–2 Kings 1–2 Kgs
1–2 Chronicles 1–2 Chron
Ezra Ezra
Nehemiah Neh
Esther Esth Job Job
Psalms Ps
Proverbs Prov
Ecclesiastes Eccl
Song of Songs Song
Isaiah Isa
Jeremiah Jer Lamentations Lam
Ezekiel Ezek
Daniel Dan Hosea Hos
Joel Joel Amos Amos
Obadiah Obad
Jonah Jon
Micah Mic
Nahum Nah Habakkuk Hab Zephaniah Zeph
Haggai Hag
Zechariah Zech
Malachi Mal
1–2 Esdras 1–2 Esdr
Tobit
Tob
Judith Jdt
Baruch Bar
Epistle of Jeremiah EpJer
1–2 Maccabees 1–2 Macc
Sirach Sir
Wisdom of Solomon Wisd
Prayer of Manasseh PrMan
Matthew Matt
Mark
Mark
Luke Luke
John John Acts of the Apostles Acts
xii List of Abbreviations
Romans Rom
1–2 Corinthians 1–2 Cor
Galatians Gal
Ephesians Eph
Philippians Phil
Colossians Col
1–2 Thessalonians 1–2 Thess
1–2 Timothy 1–2 Tim
Titus Tit
Philemon Phlm
Hebrews Heb
James Jas
1–2 Peter 1–2 Pet
1–3 John 1–3 John
Jude Jude Revelation Rev
General Abbreviations
BCE Before the Common Era
CE Common Era
CH Chronistic History
DH Deuteronomistic History
ET English Translation
LXX The Septuagint or ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible
MT Masoretic Text, the standard text of the Hebrew Bible
1 Introduction
While most people skip over the introductions to books, you have chosen to be better than your peers and read the beginning. Congratulations on your intelligent decision! There is an old Israelite aphorism that appears in the book of Ecclesiastes (also known as Qoheleth), “Of making many books, there is no end. And much study wearies the flesh” (Eccl 12:12). The author (or editor) of the ancient book makes an ironic comment on the work as a whole, as if to say “there are too many books in the world, and here’s another one.” Not that there is anything wrong with either wearying the flesh in a good cause or publishing another book, as long as it helps the reader in some way. How should this book help you while not wearing you out?
Why So Many Bible Translations? And How to Choose One
All or part of the Bible has been translated into almost three thousand languages, far more than any other book. Christians began translating it into English beginning in the ninth century or even earlier, and that work has only grown over time, so that English versions are more numerous than in any other language. For several centuries, the dominant translation was the King James Version (published 1611), which has had an enormous influence on American and Commonwealth culture. If you’ve ever been saved by the “skin of your teeth” or seen the “handwriting on the wall,” you can thank the wordsmiths who made that great translation four hundred years ago. Today’s readers of English have many options, from easy-to-read versions to
A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament
the midlevel literacy versions like the New International Version or English Revised Version to more complex renderings such as the New Revised Standard Version. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and several different theories of translation inform them, but each strives to render the biblical text as faithfully as possible.
To begin, consider what this book is not. It is not a substitute for the Bible itself. Nothing can equal the experience of sustained, careful, reasoned, and thoughtful study of the sacred book shared by Jews and Christians (and honored by Muslims, but that’s another story). Rather, this work invites the reader to examine the biblical text itself. Consider this a sort of guidebook. No guidebook can be a substitute for seeing the Grand Canyon or the Aurora Borealis, but learning a little geology or astronomy can enhance the experience. No textbook can substitute for the original biblical text, with its gorgeous poetry, gripping prophetic critique, and thrilling or bewildering stories.
To continue, then, what is this book? It is a handbook on the literary, historical, and especially theological dimensions of the biblical text. It is designed to provoke conversation, perhaps even dissent or dismay, and thereby make us better readers and, one hopes, better persons. And because the Bible is most of all a collection of texts about the deepest concerns humans have—who is God? Who are we? How do we relate, if we can? How should we live?—reading it presents a demand upon the reader not easily reduced to mere understanding of ancient data. All literature, properly approached, makes demands on the reader. The Bible does so most of all.
Read this book, then, with your Bible open. Choose a good translation (or more than one). All the translations in this book are the author’s own, so yours may differ from it in various ways.
Things to Watch For
Now for a little housekeeping. Each chapter of this book tries to situate a particular biblical book in its historical setting or settings, to consider how it works as literature, and what it says about key theological commitments of ancient Israel and modern Christian (and to some extent, Jewish) readers. The book is intended to have an ecumenical flavor: it considers the text from several angles, both drawing on the long history of interpretation of the Old Testament in the church and synagogue, and trying to address the most crucial questions that the text raises about the nature of God, humankind, religion, creation, politics, and, in short, the things contemporary readers most care about. The key is not to silence the voice of the biblical text but to interrogate it in the deepest possible ways.
Along with these large-scale features, a few terms deserve to be named at this point
• The Old Testament calls God by a range of names, in part because the Bible merges different ancient traditions with varying understandings of God, and
in part because the creators of the Bible wished to emphasize the ultimate inability of human beings to define God straightforwardly in terms of one name or attribute or another. The proper name is Yhwh, represented in ancient Hebrew manuscripts by the four letters yodh-he-vav-he ( הוהי), also called the Tetragrammaton, and probably originally pronounced “yahveh.” English translations often render this name as “the L ord,” following a very ancient practice (at least as early as the third century bce) that sought to prevent blasphemy by avoiding the divine name. This textbook tries to honor both the Hebrew original and the long-standing practice of reading a substitute for it by printing the divine name as Yhwh. The Hebrew Bible also uses the name Elohim about 2,600 times, El about 237 times, and various other names occasionally. This textbook prints Yhwh for the Tetragrammaton and the traditional English word “God” elsewhere except when making a special point, in which case the original Hebrew name appears.
• Hebrew words appear occasionally in the text when their appearance helps give a flavor of the biblical text. The system of transliteration works this way:
aleph ᵓ bet b gimel g he h vav w zayin z khet ḥ dalet d yodh y kaph k lamed l mem m tet ṭ samek s ayin
pe p tsade ṣ nun n resh r sin ś
shin š tav t qoph q
Long vowels are marked with a macron, so ā, ē, ī, and ō represent the vowels in “father,” “they,” “machine,” and “though.” (Think about how vowels work in French or Spanish, and you’ll be close!). The Hebrew letter khet (ḥ) is hard, as in the “ch” “chorus,” and shin (š) represents the “sh” sound, while tsade (ṣ) has the ts sound (as in “cats”).
• bce and ce dates in this book follow the most current scholarly convention “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era.” Note that the years themselves are the same in the older system bc and ad (“Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” or “In the year of the Lord”).
• Pullout boxes appear throughout the text to pursue topics of historical or literary interest.
• Footnotes are kept to a minimum, but suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter should benefit students who are writing papers or who simply want to learn more. They may also help professors at times.
• Each chapter includes a few sources for further reading. Some will be more technical than others.
A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament
Some Key Terms and Ideas
Before tracing the Bible’s story and considering the arguments it makes, one must first clarify some of the key concepts about it. What is the Bible, first of all? Answering that deceptively simple question depends on other considerations, and in part, the clarification of other terms, such as canon and Scripture, which are not identical but still overlapping.
Canon
The first term, canon, is perhaps the most complex, because any discussion of it must consider texts as both “an authoritative voice in written or oral form that was read and received as having the authority of God in it” and “a perpetual fixation or standardization, namely, when the books of the Bible were fixed or stabilized.”1 The collection of sacred texts has authority—it shapes behavior of individuals and groups—in the religious communities using it, whether Jewish or Christian (or Muslim, for the Qur’an). Even this last formulation is ambiguous, because it could refer to the stabilization of a single book or to the fixing of a collection with clear boundaries. For our purposes, the term canon denotes the collection itself, not the exact form of a given text within it, since manuscripts copied by hand inevitably contain slight (or sometimes not so slight) variations from one another. To recognize the Bible as a canon is to acknowledge that the various parts of it interact with each other and color how readers interpret each part.
What does one call this collection of sacred texts, then? The answer to that depends on who is doing the calling. Jews often speak of the Miqra (“what is called out or spoken”) or Tanak. Most Christians speak of the Old and New Testaments, the former being the collection they share with Judaism. Modern scholars speak of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles or the First and Second Testaments or the Former or Latter Testaments in order to acknowledge that the various collections in play overlap and also that each group using them deserves respect. This volume uses these terms more or less interchangeably and without prejudice.
Yet there is a conceptual problem here because different groups that use these collections include different texts within it. Not only do Jews and Christians differ about what goes into the collection, but Samaritans, for example, venerate only the first five books (the Pentateuch), while Christians disagree among themselves as to whether the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books belong in or out. The Ethiopian Church, uniquely, uses the ancient work 1 Enoch (written in several stages from 200 bce to 200 ce or even later) and other ancient texts. So canon cannot be a straightforward concept. Moreover, the variation in content leads to some variation in belief and practice. For example, whether a person believes in purgatory or not depends in part on which texts he or she thinks have canonical status.
At the same time, however, the existence of variety should not obscure an important level of agreement. Both Jews and Christians have regarded the vast majority of other books as noncanonical, not necessarily bad but definitely less important. And they have
agreed on the basic ideas that fit within the canon (the unity and oneness of God, the election of Israel, the emphasis on justice as the root of piety, and so on). The surface pluralism underscores a deeper unity. And so one must take account of both factors— diversity and unity—without overemphasizing one or the other. To overemphasize diversity can cause one to lose a sense of the crucial ideas of the Bible and their development. To overemphasize unity can lead to fanatical support of positions that, again, lose perspective.
Moreover, in addition to the theological issues surrounding the idea of canon, historical issues must be considered. While many details of the development of the biblical canon remain obscure, a few things are clear enough. Until the second or third century ce, when Christians and others began using a newfangled invention called a codex (a book bound as ours are today), a “bible,” then, was simply a cabinet full of scrolls that a worshiping community, a synagogue or, later, a church, used in worship, meditated upon, and wrote commentaries, sermons, and prayers about. Different cabinets held different books (Table 1.1).
Some Jewish communities also included additional works in their cabinet of scrolls, such later works as 1–4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, and Tobit. These documents, discussed more fully in Chapter 30, became part of most Christian collections of sacred texts as well. Because many (most?) early Christians after the first century ce were Greekspeaking gentiles, they used the ancient Jewish texts that had been translated into Greek, including this larger collection. Thus the earliest Christian lists of sacred books that have survived—from Origen in the early third century ce and Eusebius about a century later—include the books that modern Western Christians usually speak of as the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books.
Amid all this complexity, we should recall an important fact. Finding the limits of the canon has historically been less important than ensuring healthy teaching in the church’s or synagogue’s life. The primary theological and moral concerns of these communities did not revolve around determining precisely which books came in and which stayed out, but around the overall theological picture or what Christians often call a “rule of faith”: a basic pattern of belief and practice rooted in the Bible but not dependent on a literal, restrictive reading of it.
The need for precision became most acute during times of crisis. For Jews, it meant rejecting the Old Greek translation (the Septuagint or LXX) for the synagogue and a growing emphasis on the Masoretic Text (MT), the Hebrew text standardized in the first century ce and preserved to the present, as well as translations derived from it. For Christians, defining the boundaries of the Old Testament, or rather defending its importance to their faith, took on urgency in the second century ce because of internal disputes surrounding an eccentric Roman church theologian, Marcion of Sinope. A convert to Christianity, Marcion apparently sought to free his new faith from its Jewish past by accepting the widespread gentile critique of the Old Testament’s portrayal of God as a morally defective, ignorant being who could not be the good creator of the universe worshiped by Jesus Christ. Law and grace, he believed, could not coexist. At least
Table 1.1
Old Testament Canonical Lists
Masoretic Text
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
1–2 Samuel
1–2 Kings
Isaiah
Septuagint
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1–4 Kingdoms
1–2 Chronicles
Jeremiah 1–2 Esdras1
Ezekiel Esther 12 Minor Prophets
Judith Tobit
1–4 Maccabees
Psalms Psalms
Job Odes
Proverbs
Proverbs
Ruth Ecclesiastes
Song of Songs
Song of Songs Ecclesiastes
Job Lamentations
Wisdom of Solomon
Esther
Ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus)
Daniel Psalms of Solomon
Ezra-Nehemiah 12 Minor Prophets
1–2 Chronicles
Isaiah
Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations
Epistle of Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Daniel Susanna
Bel and the Dragon
1 2 Esdras = a revision Ezra and Nehemiah.
CAPTION: Greek and Hebrew biblical manuscripts before the Middle Ages arrange the books in different ways except in the Pentateuch, which always takes the same order.
according to his opponents, Marcion rejected not only the Hebrew scriptures that other Christians venerated but also most of what became the New Testament as well (since the latter quotes the former on virtually every page), leading him to honor Paul as the only true apostle and an expurgated version of Luke as the only true gospel. Nor was his work the last time that some Christians sought to dissociate themselves from Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: the German Christian movement of Nazi Germany is the most notorious and extreme example of an unfortunate trend on the margins of Christianity. Even today, many people wrongly believe that the God of the Old Testament differs radically from the God of the New.
The Christian Church in general has gone another direction, agreeing with the earliest followers of Jesus—all Jewish adherents of a Jewish messiah, after all—that the earlier texts of Israel belonged in the church and, indeed, were indispensable to its spiritual health. The early Christians’ retention of a connection to Israel has shaped both faiths to this day. Even if the boundaries of the Jewish and Christian canons differ, both collections function as scripture (sometimes “Scripture,”) that is, as written texts performed orally and studied (in many media) in religious settings in ways that shape communities and their beliefs and practices.
Scripture
Now to a second term: scripture. From the Latin verb scribere (“to write”—hence the English words “scribble,” “script,” and “scribe”), the term simply denotes something written, especially a sacred text. In the great monotheistic religions that derive ultimately Israel—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i—key sacred texts have a unique authority in their parts and as collections. True, the understandings of the origins and content of these texts vary considerably, but the notion that the followers of these faiths are Peoples of the Book (to use the Muslim expression) is an important insight into their workings. Attention to the Qur’an (for Islam) or the Kitab-i-Iqan (for Baha’i) lies well beyond the scope of this book, but suffice it to say that the phenomenon of a book religion, a religion for which a single text carries unparalleled authority in faith and morals, is not unique to Christianity or Judaism. The idea that the one God would communicate fairly clearly with human beings through the medium of prophets, whose words could be preserved in writing, is a corollary of a belief that God has a profound interest in the wellbeing of human beings in every aspect of their lives. Thus the sacred texts do not function primarily as talismans that work on the divine realm, but as documents that human beings must understand and somehow implement. The question is, how?
The Bible as an Interpreted Document
How does one understand a text? It depends on both the text and the reader. Consider an elementary example from contemporary life:
8
A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament
“Mark struck out at home”
Assuming I know English (and recognize that the text is in English), I quickly realize that it has a subject (“Mark”) and a verb (“struck out”), as well as a reference to a location (“at home”). But what does the text mean? Since it seems fragmentary, I want to know about the larger conversation of which it is a part. Does the sentence come from a report of a baseball game (Mark, a batter, missed contacting the ball safely three times in a row and thus was put out)? A romance novel (Mark, a frustrated lover, failed to impress his wife sufficiently to receive an amorous response)? A crime report (Mark, a deranged person, beat on his house with a crowbar)? Is Mark a person in history, a fictional character, an ancient deity? No text exists by itself but only in association with other moments of communication, thickly layered in an interpreter’s experiences.
Interpretation becomes more complex when the text we are encountering comes to us only in written form, and in a dead language to boot. Customs, beliefs, and practices that the text assumes without much explanation have grown obscure. Even the act of translating the text from, in our example, Hebrew or Aramaic to English or another modern tongue, requires a great deal of knowledge, not just of grammar and vocabulary but of literary forms and techniques. When the text is an extremely complex one, such as the Bible, the work becomes all the more difficult, as well as all the more rewarding.
The academic discipline of interpretation is called hermeneutics. It relates closely to the task of exegesis, which is the attempt to explain what a text said in its earliest discernible context. However, hermeneutics goes beyond that fundamental task, or as Antony Thiselton puts it,
whereas exegesis and interpretation denote the actual processes of interpreting texts, hermeneutics also includes the second-order discipline of asking critically what exactly we are doing when we read, understand, or apply texts.2
Sometimes scholars speak of the “hermeneutical circle” or “hermeneutical spiral,” which is simply the recognition that anyone reading a text brings to it his or her own presuppositions, experiences, memories, and imagination. The act of interpreting a text involves a sort of dance of the readers with the text. The dance has three dimensions, so to speak. First, the “ideal reader” of the Bible, for whom the texts were created, is not the solitary individual “objectively” reading a text. (Such a reader is imaginary anyway, an unfortunate by-product of the Enlightenment’s admirable attempts to eliminate prejudice and ignorance.) Rather, the best reader of these texts is the one who attends to them with great care, engaging them with a critical eye and also with some degree of willingness to hear what they seek to say. At one level, such a requirement would be true of the reader of any great work of literary art, yet it is doubly true of religious texts like the Bible because they insist on trying to form their readers in particular ways. Something happens to us when we read them.
Second, the most brilliant readers of the Bible through the centuries have understood it to engage the profoundest questions human beings ask, and indeed, to point to God. As the great New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) stated:
The Bible does not approach us at all like other books . . . . We come to know it through the Christian church, which put it before us with its authoritative claim. The church’s preaching, founded on the Scriptures, passes on the word of the Scriptures. It says: God speaks to you here!3
Today one might qualify Bultmann’s statement in various ways in part because the pressure on religious claims he responds to does not always rise to the level he experienced under the Nazis, the time at which he said this. Yet the basic insight that the collection we call the Bible survives because Jews and Christians read it for meaning in the lives of their communities is relevant to its interpretation. Critical scholarship can, and often does, go hand in hand with an attitude of reverence and attentive listening for the key claims of the text, not only claims about the nature of reality but claims upon the commitments of readers.
Third, contemporary readers of the Bible may operate as precritical, critical, or postcritical interpreters. Most Jews and Christians before the eighteenth century could be called precritical, not because they were not intellectually serious, for they often were, but because they did not question the basic veracity of the biblical text. Or if they did question its literal sense (a move very common among some interpreters such as the ancient Christian school of Alexandria), they did so in order to find a deeper spiritual sense. However, beginning in the sixteenth century with such thinkers as Baruch (a.k.a. Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677), scholars asked whether the historical and scientific claims that a literal reading of the Bible would stand up to careful scrutiny. A major insight of this approach has been the recognition that the Bible is, whatever else it may be, a human work making arguments and reflecting ideas that have a location in time and space. In more recent times, a postcritical reading has become possible. In such a strategy, of which there are many variations, the interpreter recognizes that the Bible has a history and that many of the historical motivations of its creators can be identified within the stream of human experience (it did not drop out of heaven). Yet she also seeks a deeper theological truth, a “nevertheless,” according to which the biblical text speaks to some deeper reality shaped by God and available to human beings through the medium of the text itself, properly read.
A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament—the very book that you are reading— attempts a postcritical approach. On the one hand, it takes seriously the findings of modern research and seeks to understand how and why the various biblical books came into being. On the other hand, it seeks to interpret those books in terms of a hermeneutics of sympathy, that is, from a point of view that wishes to understand the theological arguments that those books make on their own terms, with an eye toward the sort of readers they endeavor to create.
Two basic hermeneutical lines of inquiry shape much of this textbook. The first is the relationship between tradition and imagination. The biblical texts are highly imaginative as they employ numerous literary genres and techniques, often in surprising ways. The level of artistry is ordinarily of the highest sort. At the same time, the ancient Israelite writers did not set the same premium on originality that has become indispensable since the Romantic movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, all ancient authors (Israelite or not) felt themselves answerable to a public that expected certain things. The goal was not to be novel but to be creative within the bounds of existing practices. They did not confuse the new with the good. The biblical texts thus come out of what one might call traditioned imaginations: their creators followed the rules of the time while creating great art, much as Shakespeare borrowed plot lines and structures while writing his plays, or Michelangelo sculpted within the context of Renaissance conventions while transforming them from the inside out. The interplay of tradition and imagination will appear time and again in this work.
The second hermeneutical lens can be called divine-human synchrony. The Bible says things about God and humans that reflect a coherent and accurate view of both. To be clear, one may acknowledge that various statements in the Bible about facts of human history or natural science need not be taken as fact in a strict sense, often because they were not intended to be. The real world does not have a storehouse for hail (Job 38:22), and daylight does not exist independently of the sun (Gen 1:3–5), for example. A very literal-minded reading of the Bible will thus often mistake its poetic register and seriously misunderstand it. Yet when it speaks of human sinfulness and divine love, of the relationship of covenant with its obligations and affections, among other topics, it speaks of the deepest things humans can know. At least this is the thesis that this book will test. Welcome to the conversation!
Notes
1. Lee McDonald, The Biblical Canon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 55.
2. Antony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 4.
3. Rudolf Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (New York: Living Age/Meridian, 1960), 168.
For Further Reading
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. 13 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1949–1962. Graf Reventlow, Henning. History of Biblical Interpretation. 4 vols. Translated by Leo G. Perdue and James O. Duke. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009–2010. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1989.
The Pentateuch in Brief
Imagine again the cabinet in the synagogues of the first century ce. In every Jewish and Samaritan community the core texts for worship and study were the five scrolls of Torah, usually known by their Greek name the Pentateuch (Genesis–Deuteronomy). Early interpreters of these texts attributed them to their major character Moses (often calling them the Books of Moses) even though the books themselves do not explicitly claim him as their author. (Exod 17:14 and 24:4 refer to shorter works by him.) By the first century, Jews and Christians spoke of the Pentateuch as the books of Moses or the law of Moses (see Mark 12:26; Luke 24:44) without worrying about the great prophet’s precise role in composing the books.
Early on, however, careful readers of the Pentateuch noticed certain problems with the assumption that Moses had written all of it. Thus the Babylonian Talmud, a vast collection of Jewish law and lore compiled from earlier sources in the sixth century ce, reports rabbis who wondered how Moses could have written the story of his own death in Deut 34.1 (Answer 1: he wrote it through prophecy, weeping. Answer 2: he did not write it, but rather Joshua picked up the pen where Moses had left off in Deut 33.) Several centuries later, the Spanish rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) observed anachronisms in the Pentateuch such as “The Canaanite was then in the land” (Gen 12:6) and “Og’s bed is still in Rabbath-Ammon” (Deut 3:11). However, neither he nor anyone else tried to work out the implications of such facts because their interests lay with reading the Bible for its ideas about God and human behavior.
A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament
During the early modern period careful readers concluded that the Pentateuch contains many statements that seem in tension with each other. Who created the world, for example? Is the deity’s name Yhwh or Elohim or Yhwh Elohim? Whom did Cain marry (Gen 4:17) if his family were the sum total of the human race? Did Noah bring into the ark a pair of each animal (6:19; 7:9) or seven pairs of some animals (7:2–3), and did the flood last 40 (7:4, 17), 150 (7:24), or 375 days? And why, after the Flood, did the mountains appear in the middle of the season that Israel would celebrate as the Feast of Tabernacles (Gen 8:5; see Lev 23:39–43; Num 29:12–38)? If Gen 36:31 lists Edomite kings who predated Israelite kings, does this statement imply that Israelites already had kings? And so on it goes.
At the same time, in spite of all these minor difficulties, the Pentateuch is not just a hodgepodge of stories, laws, and poems. Rather, the five books contain a clearly structured story that begins with the whole human race and zooms in on one family that soon becomes a nation. The episodes of the story fit together, not like a modern novel with prolonged explorations of the motives and values of the individual characters, but through a process often called gapping, in which each vignette offers just enough detail to help it make sense and leaves enough unexplained to make it interesting and worth reading. There is a highly cultured narrative art at work in the Pentateuch that is different from modern expectations but sophisticated on its own terms. The Pentateuch combines many sorts of genres together into an integrated whole.
Since the seventeenth century, many scholars have tried to identify both the coherence and incoherence of Genesis–Deuteronomy by referring to sources of some sort. Since ancient people had no notion of copyright or plagiarism, the ancient authors could sometimes quote those sources or allude to them or simply incorporate them en masse. And this is what modern scholars concluded had, in fact, occurred in the Pentateuch. In some ways, such a hypothesis should not be very surprising. All literary works use sources, and most authors have in their heads a great many books that they have read. That is why modern people invented the footnote as a way of honoring their sources (as well as bedeviling unsuspecting university students!). Modern scholars have typically thought of the sources of the Pentateuch in two ways.
One idea, called the Documentary Hypothesis (DH), combines at least two, and more likely three or four, fully worked out documents recounting Israel’s earliest history. The sources were usually identified as J for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German), E for the Elohist, D for the Deuteronomist, and P for the Priestly Source. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Pentateuch’s duplicate stories, different viewpoints, and changes in literary style derived from the disparate origins of different sections of the book.
Other scholars, meanwhile, have argued for something more like a Fragmentary Hypothesis, according to which different texts come from many locations and coalesce only late in the evolution of the book. In this view, there are still two major layers of the Pentateuch, a Priestly layer (P) and a nonpriestly layer (non-P, or everything else). These
Pentateuch
two layers interacted with each other until they were combined into one grand work sometime during the fifth or fourth century bce.
It would be hard to know how many contemporary scholars hold each view, and in some ways the dispute always involves assumptions that are hard to test. Remember the old optical illusions from introductory psychology classes? Is the object a duck or a rabbit? A vase or two people facing each other? These hypotheses are a bit like that.
What we know for sure is that much of the Pentateuch has a strong interest in the sacrificial worship in sanctuaries (so it’s priestly), and much does not (so it’s probably not priestly). Yet the stories in Genesis–Deuteronomy, not to mention the laws, come from different times and places, and thus reflect different viewpoints on a range of issues.
At the same time, the creator(s) of the first five books of the Bible worked to place these materials together in a coherent whole that made sense. The process of composition was conservative in that it allowed the tensions between various texts to survive rather than smoothing things out. (Hence all the minor problems pointed out earlier.) Yet it was also highly creative, because it fashioned a theological world out of all the disparate raw material with which it worked. The Pentateuch is an authorizing story, a text that both explains how Israel came to be and argues for a way of life that it should adopt, preserve, and celebrate.
The Pentateuch works by juxtaposing stories and laws, so that the thoughtful reader could use each to interpret the other. Consider first the stories: biblical narrative, in the Pentateuch and elsewhere, consists primarily of short vignettes woven together to form a comprehensive story. Unlike other literatures, Israel’s does not emphasize the interior state of the character, but rather reveals the character through action and brief speech, usually with just enough conversation happening to reveal the characters’ inner world. How does one read such stories, then?
J.P. Fokkelman suggests ten productive questions to ask of any narrative texts:
1. Who is the hero?
2. What is the quest in which the hero engages?
3. Who are the helpers and opponents?
4. Where does the narrator intrude in the text?
5. Does the narrator keep to the chronology of events or alter it in some way?
6. Where is time skipped?
7. Is there a plot?
8. Where are the speeches, and what do they say?
9. What surprising choice of words appear in the text?
10. Where does the unit start and stop, and how are the divisions indicated?
This list opens up an understanding of the Bible as a literary creation, and will be useful to us throughout this book. But we should also add some deeper questions that illuminate the Bible as a theological work:
