The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis

Joel S. Baden

I have talked before about source criticism of the Torah/Pentateuch, usually whenever the Kuzari Principle comes up. My 2011-12 series on biblical scholar James Kugel's How to Read the Bible dealt by necessity with source criticism, that is, with the Documentary Hypothesis (DH).

I once summarized the DH this way:

The modern form of [the DH] emerges from seven types of evidence: (1) the Hebrew language of different periods in the Torah, (2) the use and quantity of terms in the different sources, (3) consistent content (such as the revelation of God's name, (4) the narrative flow of each source, (5) the connection between parts of the Torah and other parts of the Bible, (6) the relationships of the sources to each other and to history, and (7) the convergence of the different lines of evidence. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Torah as we have it today develops from early oral and written sources that coagulated into four main sources--J, E, P, and D. Between 922 BCE and 400 BCE, the four sources were compiled and woven together to produce the Torah.

This summary, taken from Richard Elliott Friedman, does not discuss the divide between documentary and non-documentary pentateuchal scholars. Indeed, the summary doesn't indicate how much of the DH had been discarded because of the approach's methodological problems.

Joel Baden, an Assistant Professor at Yale Divinity School, writes about the transformation of the DH in the last four decades. This transformed DH is sufficiently new; he calls it a Neo-Documentary Hypothesis (NDH) and asserts that through it, revitalized source criticism "is regaining its place as a viable, productive, and current approach to the Pentateuch."

Baden's NDH is a narrative-based approach to the Pentateuch, interested in assessing literary phenomena against the source-critical position that the text was formed from the combination of previously independent documents, that is, essentially complete and self-contained sources.

I like Baden's framing of the DH/NDH:

The Documentary Hypothesis, it must always be remembered, is precisely that: a hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the literary phenomena of the Pentateuch: clear narrative contradiction, repetition, and discontinuity. It posits that the best explanation for these features is the existence of four independent documents that were combined into a single text, basically the canonical Pentateuch as we now have it. It is the literary solution to a literary problem, no more and no less. Scholarly claims regarding stylistic criteria or similarity of narratives are not inherent parts of the theory; they are aspects of the methods used to argue for the theory. If they do not succeed, the theory does not of necessity fail; the methods do. The theory may simply need to be argued on different grounds. Thus the very correct criticisms of anti-documentary scholars from the earliest days of the theory until our own time are not necessarily grounds for dismissing the whole hypothesis; they are, rather, a call to refine and revise the methods employed by scholars when describing and applying the hypothesis. When such refinements and revisions are undertaken, as they have been recently, the Documentary Hypothesis regains its place as the most economical, comprehensive explanation for the literary phenomena of the canonical Pentateuch.

The last bit above boldly asserts the preeminence of the DH via the NDH. Below, Baden explains the literary focus of the NDH:

We place at the forefront of the analysis plot and narrative continuity—the events that occur, the sequence in which they occur, cause, and effect. The mark of an author is his creation of and adherence to a distinctive and definable set of narrative claims: who did what, when, where, and how. Where these claims are contradictory, we must consider that a different author is at work; where they are the same, there is no need to pursue any source division.

One key issue for the DH/NDH is separating it from at least some of the work of Julius Wellhausen (and followers):

For generations now, the Documentary Hypothesis has been considered synonymous with Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the evolutionary growth of ancient Israelite religion. The source division and the placement of the sources in a straight line of development from earliest to latest, from naturalistic to legalistic, has been taken as the fundamental claim of the hypothesis. This is demonstrated by the attempts in scholarship to debunk the Documentary Hypothesis by arguing against Wellhausen’s view of Israelite religion, as if the former is dependent on the latter. On the contrary, however, it was Wellhausen’s source division in his Composition that allowed for his historical reconstruction in the Prolegomena. In the first book, he addressed only the literary evidence; in the second, he addressed only the historical questions. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis returns to the first stage, and leaves the second unconsidered. The literary question is primary, and is in fact the only question that can be answered by the documentary theory. Even if one disagrees with or disproves the arguments of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, the literary analysis of the Pentateuch stands on its own merits.

Separation and restriction are recurring themes in Baden's explanation of the NDH. Below, he discusses how the NDH becomes a better scholarly approach by being properly restricted in scope:

The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is concerned only with the penultimate form of the text: what the compiler had at hand when he put the four documents together. This approach allows for far greater clarity in addressing the question of how the Pentateuch came to be this way, for it goes back only a single step. It is crucial to note, however, that the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny the internal growth of the sources; it is simply unconcerned with them. Like so much else, how each source came to look as it does is a secondary question. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny that each source has a history; nor does it deny that the Pentateuch itself has a history after the compilation of the documents. It is a restricted answer to a restricted question.

The next bit, below, presents the NDH as a kind of return or re-start of the DH model:

The classical theory began as a fairly simple proposition: four independent documents, combined into a single Pentateuch. Over time, however, it expanded dramatically, so that even within a generation or two of Wellhausen the analysis of the Pentateuch required innumerable sigla, regular divisions of the text into half-verses and even single words, and highly complex theories about redaction. The unwieldiness of this theory inevitably led in part to opposition, as it could no longer be said that the Documentary Hypothesis was a particularly simple or elegant solution to the problems of the pentateuchal text. Ironically, of course, the newer analyses coming out of Europe are, if anything, even more complex than the most tortuous classical source-critical work. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis restores the simplicity of the earlier scholarship. It requires precisely four sources and one compiler.

This is a tremendously interesting essay, and comments/objections from readers appearing below the article are also enlightening. I would be very interested to understand non-documentary hypotheses better.

Everything Rests on Sinai: Final Thoughts on Kugel's How to Read the Bible

If you are a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim--or a theist in the Abrahamic vein--your foundational belief is the revelation at Sinai. This claim may surprise you, but bear with me for a moment.

Maybe you don't believe that 600,000 or 3,000,000 (depending on who you ask) Jews gathered at the base of a mountain. Maybe you don't believe the event took place at a mountain. Maybe you are not sure when it happened. But you believe something miraculous happened in the desert. You believe that divine and human communed there. What's more, you believe this event inaugurated the force behind the Torah, Israel, the First and Second Temples, Jesus, Paul, Peter, the New Testament, the Church, Mohammed, and the Qu'ran.

Sinai is unique in the Bible: it's the one thing that must have some kernal of real, historical truth.You don't need Adam and Eve to be a believer. You don't require Babel, or the deluge, or even Abraham's binding of Isaac. The Exodus is almost indispensable. Belief can survive without these. All these stories can be fictional or metaphorical, even wholly so.

The Sinai revelation is different. There is a limit on how metaphorical, poetic, or embellished this story can be. If it is total fiction, then all Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are fictions too. Jesus cannot be God-incarnate if God never gave Israel the two Torahs. Jesus cannot have died for anyone's sins, even his own, without the precedent of God's holy instruction to humanity. Mohammed cannot be a prophet if there was no prophet at Sinai. If nothing truly miraculous happened in the desert, then nothing miraculous happens in minyan, in church or mosque, and in history. The end of days will surely happen, but it too won't be miraculous.

Absolutely everything about Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious belief comes down to Sinai.

This is the lesson taught me by the series on Chapter 36 of James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. It was not Kugel's lesson, as he did not dwell too much on being a believer except for that final section of the chapter. Nevertheless, as we leave Kugel's book and look at the world, the question that people have to answer and deal with is "What is it you think happened out there in the desert?"

I've given my answer. I don't know Kugel's, unless I have skipped over it. I imagine he thinks that something divine happened out there.

The more important question--that is, the one that has real consequences in the world--is why one would think something happened (or didn't) in that wilderness. The why is the more telling, for what happened merely separates us while why do you think that determines whether we are friends or enemies.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 12]: Only One Bible

We continue to read Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. This twelfth installment covers the last section. 

In this final section, Kugel cautions against misrepresenting Chapter 36 or giving it greater importance than all of How to Read the Bible before it:

My subject has been not the ruin of the Bible but the Bible itself--its highways and byways, heroes, brigands, walk-ons, and also-rans, its mysteries and its ineffables, as well as its sometimes treacherous little details. Beyond 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.

Reminding us of his main subject and aims, Kugel also describes a particular use for the book: "I hope that this book may at least offer some help in finding an escape from the box of original meaning." This specific help is very important; it's the key to everything Kugel has done:

• Defined two different sets of biblical interpreters: the first interpreters (ancient period) and modern interpreters (post-DH scholars).
• Showed that the approaches of the two sets are irreconcilable. One cannot read the bible as one set and accept the interpretations of the other set at all.
• Argued, moreover, that modern biblical criticism is not criticism of the (real) Bible.

The third bullet point requires explanation. To do this, let me first refer back to the previous installment of our series, where I quoted Kugel on reading the Bible properly.

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.

My earlier analysis did not appreciate that Kugel’s point was eminently bold. In the quote, Kugel says that the Bible is only the Bible when approached as it was by the ancient interpreters. Implicitly, therefore, the approach of modern scholars makes the Bible not the Bible but rather a set of texts with disparate “original meanings.” These meanings thus have nothing to do with the Bible as Bible!

To illustrate further, you can read modern biblical scholarship. You can follow its arguments and even come to agree with its conclusions. The point is that these conclusions don’t affect you when you read the Bible properly. Reading properly takes you beyond the conclusions, and this is how you “escape the box of original meaning.”

With some personal pride, I say that this approach--separating the belief-based context from the historical--was one that I myself adopted when tried to retain a semblance of Jewishness. In those days, I reasoned that when I prayed at shul, it was as if Judaism was true. Judaism didn’t need to be true outside or in reality, but it could be and would be when I was playing the part of observant Jew. Shul was a theater and I a player.

In those days, I would have happily agreed with Kugel’s description:

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.

Similarly, I have argued that the Hebrew Scriptures are a different Bible to a Jew and a Christian:

The Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures are different texts because the Old Testament is already rendered throughout as a translation that prefigures Jesus. People don't simply open the Old Testament and on their own start seeing Jesus parallels. Rather, the Old Testament has been translated with Christology in mind and the resulting text is available expressly to support Christian theological interpretations.

Read the Hebrew Scriptures as pre-figuring Jesus and you are not reading them as a Jew. For Kugel, the Bible really is the Hebrew Bible; there really is no other Bible. Neither the box of original meaning nor the box of Christian meaning ultimately affects the Bible, for the Bible only happens through a single set of approaches now associated with rabbinic Judaism.

I see wisdom in most everything Kugel says, and although I rarely disagree with him, I depart from him significantly. I depart when he contains the Bible to the approach of its first interpreters. I depart again when he connects belief and behavior, as when he discusses what it means to be an observant person. Kugel means religiously observant, Jewish particularly, but I don’t. He describes the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Jewish religious prohibition against approaching the area, "lest by accident [pious Jews'] 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)." Kugel believes the Holy of Holies sat in an entirely different place from the current Temple Mount. Nevertheless, he follows other observant Jews and does not approach the Temple Mount.

Were the opportunity ever to come for me to ascend the Temple Mount, I probably would. How could I not? This, then, is where I depart from Kugel again.The tenets of my observance would encourage me to ascend, to see, to learn, to consider.

The departure continues. Kugel suggests that even if the rabbis are sometimes wrong, what matters is their project to record and represent God’s intent for His people. Their project to help His people live out God’s will. For Kugel, though, there is such a thing as God’s intent. There is a Holy of Holies somewhere in the textual archaeology of the Bible. There is a continuity between God's intent for His people and "the intentions of the Bible's framers."

Kugel says he "could not be involved in a religion that was entirely a human artifact." Neither could I. The difference is that I no longer see any reason to believe there is a Holy of Holies in the Bible. I cannot justify viewing the Bible as anything other than an entirely human artifact. And here's the most amazing thing of all: accepting that God and the Bible are man-made has brought me intellectually and personally closer to them than ever before.

Leftovers

I have pre-scheduled two posts for the end of the year, so this is probably the last post I will write and publish in 2011. At work, I am winding down for the year and have vacation coming up in less than two hours.

Notes and thoughts:

• I never got around to finishing my thoughts on moral relativism, as I'd said I would. I tried writing up something earlier in the week, but I had trouble organizing the thing. Basically, I couldn't see how one could finally make the idea of an objective moral fact stick. When I think of objective, I think of something like nature: nature exists independently, whether people exist or not. Information, I have recently come to understand, can also be said to exist independently from people. I don't see how anything like a moral fact can exist independently of people, and if it cannot exist apart from us I don't see how it can be called anything but subjective. I also don't see why subjectivity is such a big negative for some folks. But maybe my little mind has just reached the end of its capacity. I'm willing to be educated if someone has an argument to make.
• My vacation plans include lots of reading. I am especially looking forward to three books: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Rameau's Nephew, by Denis Diderot; and In the Valley of the Shadow, by James Kugel.
• I marvel at what a tumultuous year 2011 has been. When I was younger, the years seemed more like adventures. I felt as though I had time to absorb the things that were happening in and around me. Now, life seems too eventful, too fast. I would prefer a slower, less eventful year in 2012 (I think!).
• My "best of" post on December 31 will announce this also, but I plan to scale back my posting activity dramatically in 2012. Not only because of what I write above, but also because I have a dissertation to complete. I'll be 42 years old next year, and I have some new horizons to travel toward, so I want to finish up the one big project (i.e., the doctorate) that consumed my thoughts from early adulthood.
• On the other hand, I have ideas for new series and new directions for this blog. Stay tuned....
• I am excited to go with my older brother to see the New England Patriots play the Buffalo Bills on January 1.

The last two posts of the years will be short of extended, original content. They will be review and link pieces. Let me use this space, therefore, to wish you and the world the very best of this time. If you are vacationing or visiting family, be safe, be peaceful, be happy and joyous, be helpful, be smart, be free, be honest, be yourself, and be strong.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 11]: Reading the Bible as a Familiar Servant of God

"Please don't stand so close to me." --God

We continue to read Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. This is the eleventh installment of the series.

Last time, Kugel argued that the Bible's ancient interpreters established its real meaning. As I summarized it:

Kugel's position, then, seems to be that modern biblical scholarship may be correct about the history and original meanings of biblical texts, but the scholarly consensus has no effect on what the texts really mean. The texts still mean what the Oral Torah says they do, even if they were originally created to communicate a very different kind of message. At some point in history, ancient interpreters got hold of the texts and were able to integrate them into a philosophy of God and Israel. By doing so, these interpreters brought out divine instructions and moral insights in the texts. The interpreters were building a textual universe predicated on God's relationship with His world, His patriarchs, and His people Israel. Their overriding mission was to help their own world of men and women follow from the textual universe; to make, in other words, the real world live out the model of the Torah.

Kugel allows that the Bible has multiple meanings, and that the texts originally meant something different from what later ancients took them to mean. Yet, he privileges the reading of the ancient interpreters above all others, as when he reasons:

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.

Of course, the argument cuts both ways. That privilege granted to the ancient interpreters sounds pretty good. I'd like to grant the same privilege to Abraham Joshua Heschel, or to the late Christopher Hitchens, or to Augustine of Hippo. My point is that Kugel makes a great case for promoting one interpretative tradition, but other great cases can be made also. When scholarship reveals or develops original meanings of biblical texts, it shatters faith in the interpretive tradition more so than in the Bible. To use one of Kugel's illustrations: one can fervently sing a spiritual yet not hold to a certain religious interpretation of it. One's reasons for singing it, for wanting to sing it, need not have anything to do with its "proper" spiritual message.

I have dwelt on the previous subsection of Chapter 36 because in the new subsection, Kugel leaves behind the argument we just discussed and layers on another one. As Kugel says of the previous argument:

This seems to me a plausible position in 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.

Kugel's new approach--which he says up front "is probably not the sort of answer that will satisfy most traditional readers of the Bible"--has to do with seeing oneself as a servant of God and with seeing orthodox practice in particular as the way of being a servant of God.

In a world where God will not encounter us here in our own reality, we must choose and act to stand close to God. Kugel explains:

The idea of human beings as the gods' servants 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 of the slave who "belonged to the family.") To be God's servant was to be part of his household.

To serve God, one must carry out His statutes in everyday life. Civil law is also Divine law, and people must learn to live intuitively in the ways that God has instructed.

After the Babylonian exile, Kugel says, Israel renews its dedication to God's will, and "it is in this context that one should locate the seeds of the very idea of the Bible, a great, multifarious corpus of divinely given instruction." At this point in time, the knowledge and practices of being God's familiar servants start to be discussed and argued about and codified.

What's more, the Torah is preeminent but not absolutely immutable:

Yet here is a most interesting point: the words of that Torah were 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 example, sometimes (as with "an eye for an eye") actually overthrown.

How did humans dare to intervene in holy writ? What possible justification could they have to change or re-direct the meaning of the text? Kugel responds:

From the perspective offered above, what do we make of biblical scholarship's insights? My own opinion is that the discoveries and theories of Biblical scholarship would not undercut the religious belief and practice emerging out of this perspective. I also think my opinion largely agrees with Kugel's view. Traditional Judaism, Kugel says, is such a set of beliefs and practices deriving from the supreme sense that serving God overpowers everything, including Scripture. Kugel writes:

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.

The Bible, from Jewish vantage, is an expression of apprehending God as His familiar servants. It is one way of apprehending God, the way that came to prominence after the Babylonian exile. In later periods, Scripture would be viewed by different interpretive traditions that would make it undergo three significant revisions:

1. Christian interpretive tradition.
2. Protestant interpretive tradition.
3. Modern scholarship.

Kugel's point here asserts the importance of understanding the sequence of interpretive events, from pre-exile to modern times, that have influenced the way we see and understand both the Bible's words and its role in religious (and scholarly and skeptical) communities. His argument to us, then, is that we should broaden our perspective.

And what of the Bible's divine inspiration? Kugel suggests that our commonplace ideas of divine inspiration are not applied correctly to the Bible:

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....Rather, as some rabbinic texts themselves intimate, it all has to do with the great, single revelation that inaugurated (and on which was predicated) Israel's changed apprehension of God.

Kugel seems to be saying here that we really don't know what specific words or instructions might be from God Himself. Rather, the divine inspiration of the Bible holds insofar as it derives from the authority conferred by the liberation from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel.

Kugel has made a fantastic overall argument in this section, a case that has been developing from the beginning of the chapter. He has built the assertions carefully, balancing fact and opinion as deftly as anyone can do it. We will have time to consider the larger argument and to criticize it as we must, but let's close this installment by appreciating scholarship of the very highest order.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 10]: Judaism vs. Modern Biblical Scholarship

After another too-long hiatus, we return to Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

This is the tenth installment of the series. Last time, we concluded with Kugel again clarifying the problem of the Bible for modern readers, which is whether to accept it as both holy and true when so much of modern biblical scholarship seems to have cast doubt on its holiness and veracity:

Do we wish to follow the way Christian interpreters Paul or Jerome read the Bible? Do we wish to follow the way of the "anonymous group of Jewish interpreters" who in Kugel's special sense created the Bible from 300 BCE to the start of the common era? In any case, we cannot and do not read the Biblical text apart from ways of interpreting.

And what of the historical veracity problem? Kugel's argument here, I think, is that the value and efficacy of the Bible in the great change from 300 BCE onward never relied on faithful historical reconstruction. Historical veracity, in other words, is a serious problem only in a Protestant sola scriptura or text-centric interpretive matrix. The next subsection will present the way of interpretation deriving from Jewish tradition.

Unlike Christian traditions of reading the Bible, says Kugel, the Jewish tradition operates independently of the question of historical truth. This is because the Torah is not the sole or even primary authority in establishing God's instructions to humanity. There is the Torah, that is, the written Pentateuch, but there is also the Oral Torah, which encompasses "the traditions of [Torah's] proper interpretation and application." Both Torahs are asserted to have been given to Moses at the same time.

The Oral Torah includes not just biblical interpretation but also ritual, liturgical, and legal matters. The Oral Torah is said eventually to have become the Mishnah, the Tosfta, the two Talmuds, and various compilations of midrash. It's practical significance and utility in rabbinic Judaism were huge, for the written Torah meant whatever the Oral Torah said it meant.

The two Torah tradition, then, distinguishes Judaism from Christianity and Christian approaches to the Bible:

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 [....] 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.

Kugel argues that the Jewish tradition of interpretation cannot be reconciled with modern biblical scholarship. The Jewish tradition, as he had explained at the beginning of the book, encompasses Four Assumptions that all ancient interpreters seemed to share about biblical texts. I will give these assumption in abbreviated form, but the full text appears on pages 14-16:

1. The Bible is fundamentally cryptic.
2. The Bible is a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day.
3. The Bible contains no contradictions or mistakes.
4. The Bible is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directly or through His prophets.

According to Kugel, the modern scholarly way of reading the Bible rejects the ancient interpretive traditions based on the Four Assumptions. The ancient traditions, on the other hand, do not take the Bible as standalone texts that are to be read at face value (even if they can, in fact, be read in such a way).

In light of the two Torah tradition and the Four Assumptions, what is Judaism's response to the discoveries of modern biblical scholarship?

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.

I wish Kugel had been even more argumentative at this point, particularly about the specific difference between the Jewish and fundamentalist responses to modern biblical scholarship. Kugel clearly thinks fundamentalism is unrealistic and isolationist. Yet he also thinks there is no reconciliation to be had in more liberal approaches, as we have seen in the immediately preceding posts of this blog series. Kugel also seems to agree with the consensus of modern biblical scholarship, which I recorded before from the publisher's book description:

The story of Adam and Eve, it turns out, was not originally about the "Fall of Man," but about the move from a primitive, hunter-gatherer society to a settled, agricultural one. As for the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob and Esau, these narratives were not, at their origin, about individual people at all but, rather, explanations of some feature of Israelite society as it existed centuries after these figures were said to have lived. Dinah was never raped -- her story was created by an editor to solve a certain problem in Genesis. In the earliest version of the Exodus story, Moses probably did not divide the Red Sea in half; instead, the Egyptians perished in a storm at sea. Whatever the original Ten Commandments might have been, scholars are quite sure they were different from the ones we have today. What's more, the people long supposed to have written various books of the Bible were not, in the current consensus, their real authors: David did not write the Psalms, Solomon did not write Proverbs or Ecclesiastes; indeed, there is scarcely a book in the Bible that is not the product of different, anonymous authors and editors working in different periods.

Kugel's position, then, seems to be that modern biblical scholarship may be correct about the history and original meanings of biblical texts, but the scholarly consensus has no effect on what the texts really mean. The texts still mean what the Oral Torah says they do, even if they were originally created to communicate a very different kind of message. At some point in history, ancient interpreters got hold of the texts and were able to integrate them into a philosophy of God and Israel. By doing so, these interpreters brought out divine instructions and moral insights in the texts. The interpreters were building a textual universe predicated on God's relationship with His world, His patriarchs, and His people Israel. Their overriding mission was to help their own world of men and women follow from the textual universe; to make, in other words, the real world live out the model of the Torah.

I am not entirely comfortable with Kugel's argument here--although we should bear in mind that he has not yet concluded. However, I am struck by the argument because it touches on an observation I have been following during my participation in the Alpha course: what we often mean by religious faith is faith in a group or tradition, rather than direct trust in God, Jesus, or the Bible. In other words, we trust in the Lord to the extent we accept the authority and credibility of church leaders, pastoral organizations, and religious commentators. Kugel's faith lies in the ancient Jewish interpreters and in the rabbinic tradition. The project of these interpreters had no need for the kind of data brought out by modern scholars.

As I said, I am not entirely comfortable with Kugel's argument. It reminds me of the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) view of science and religion advocated by biologist Stephen Jay Gould. But I wonder if the conclusions about the Bible and the methods developed by ancient interpreters really are unaffected by what modern scholars discover about the original meanings of the texts or about the non-historicity and non-authorship of certain biblical characters.

But let's keep going through the chapter and seem how Kugel continues to unfold his argument.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 9): Reading the Bible Beyond the Text

Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg Germany (1517), sparking the Protestant Reformation and transforming sola scriptura into a central idea of the reform. In How to Read the Bible, James Kugel's thesis criticizes the assumptions of sola scriptura about how the Bible was created and how it should be read.

We continue to work through Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

This ninth installment of the series steers us toward the conclusion of Kugel's chapter. We have several subsections yet to go, but the argumentative turn is fully made in this subsection. Last time, we learned about the liberal approach to Scripture, which seeks to reconcile the Bible and the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship. Although we have had quibbles with Kugel in past installments, in the last one, a more serious fissure seemed to emerge. I wrote:

In the end, Kugel is ambivalent toward the liberal stance. It seems not to have reconciled the biblical document and the Good Book, and what's more it seems unable to square that particular circle. Kugel leads us, then, back to the Bible's first readers, back to when the words of the Bible were "all-important." A perceptive reader may detect a hint of sarcasm in my last sentence, as I wonder if Kugel is here lapsing into an idealistic, idyllic picture of a "pre-Fall" Bible, when its words and meanings were united and whole. Now, I am not being altogether fair, as Kugel does not completely make this lapse, yet he certainly seems to approve of the interpretive view that privileges words and meanings. If the liberal view is troubled by the Bible's seeming lack of historical veracity, the ancient interpreters know no such trouble. As Kugel summarizes the ancient view once again: "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."

I note later on in this installment that I probably overlooked the nuance of what Kugel was doing. For now, we will examine "Scripture's Changed Meaning," where Kugel uses all that has come before to start answering the question he had posed earlier:

what do we do now that we are aware that there is more than one Bible? We understand both the original meanings of the texts and the religious meanings later attended to them, so how, then, is one to relate to Bible knowing all this?

Kugel is rightly dissatisfied with attempts by modern biblical scholars and theologians "to build a bridge between the true, historical reality as they [i.e., scholars and theologians] know it, including the original meaning of various biblical texts, and the way of reading those same texts...reading the Bible not as history but 'for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.'"

The bridge succeeds insofar as it connects the modern reader to a mode of interpreting that for a long time has allowed the Bible to remain important and relevant through sweeping social and cultural changes, and across all sorts of societies as well. Yet the bridge wobbles and cracks in light of another assumption often brought to reading the Bible: the absolute border "between the biblical and the postbiblical, between the prophet and the interpreter." To get right to the point, our Bible canon and way of reading it--long-standing and effective though they may be--are postbiblical and subjective. They cannot be claimed as the canon and approach used in the biblical era or by the prophets, and that's a problem because that era and those people are more authoritative. We may be mistaken; their view must prevail, as Kugel puts it:

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 [time periods] cannot take precedence over earlier forms.

The Bible we have and the way we read it, in other words, cannot overcome the problems posed by history and interpretive history. We saw this conflict before in Kugel's discussion of the liberal approach to Scripture, where the biblical text is taken as the primary and sometimes only authority. But if you take the biblical text as absolutely true and inerrant, then what do you do when serious doubts arise about historical accuracy and veracity? If there was probably not a global flood or a real Moses, then can the Bible still be taken as authoritative?

Kugel begins at this point to build his solution to addressing these problems of history. The foundational point--which we have heard before--is that

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.

From this premise, Kugel undoes the idea of "the Bible alone." In other words, he argues that biblical authority, for modern readers who wish to accept it, will rest not only on the Biblical words and meanings but also and very importantly on the "peculiar way of reading and interpreting" brought by the community of believers in the 300 or so years before the common era.

I must admit, then, that my earlier criticism of Kugel was misguided. He was not leading us to earlier texts, forerunners of the canonical Bible. Neither was he leading us to blithely dismiss the serious charge of the Bible's non-historicity--the increasingly clear picture that the Bible does not describe historical reality in many cases. Rather, Kugel was bringing us to a choice. That choice is how we wish to read the Bible. Do we wish to follow the way Christian interpreters Paul or Jerome read the Bible? Do we wish to follow the way of the "anonymous group of Jewish interpreters" who in Kugel's special sense created the Bible from 300 BCE to the start of the common era? In any case, we cannot and do not read the Biblical text apart from ways of interpreting.

And what of the historical veracity problem? Kugel's argument here, I think, is that the value and efficacy of the Bible in the great change from 300 BCE onward never relied on faithful historical reconstruction. Historical veracity, in other words, is a serious problem only in a Protestant sola scriptura or text-centric interpretive matrix. The next subsection will present the way of interpretation deriving from Jewish tradition.

Kugel's How to Read the Bible: Index of Posts

Here is the current list of posts in the series on Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

• James L. Kugel's How to Read the Bible
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 2): The Achievement of Modern Biblical Scholarship
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 3): What Were Modern Biblical Scholars Thinking?
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 4): Why You Read the Bible the Way You Do
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 5): How the Bible Became the Bible
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 6): The Cost of Modern Biblical Knowledge
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 7): Enter Fundamentalism
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 8): Can You Have Your Bible and Criticize It Too?

More to come!

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 8): Can You Have Your Bible and Criticize It Too?

Which is the more alien, the Bible's "original meaning" or the interpretations of liberal theologians?

After a brief hiatus because of my intense workload, I want to continue reading through the subsections of Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

We'll look now at a subsection discussing what Kugel calls the liberal approach to Scripture. Unlike the approach taken by Fundamentalist Protestantism, the liberal view has sought to reconcile the Bible and the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship.

Kugel points out the diverse forms that liberal approaches can take, yet he notes that overall these approaches accept the Bible as something less than absolutely true in its historical facts. This Bible, embellished here or taking certain narrative liberties there, has more abstract value in this approach. The Bible is about not history but faith, and theology, and more.

Its truth operating at a more abstract level--some might say a "deeper" level, but this is perhaps a biased view--the Bible cannot be apprehended by only a mere surface understanding of its text. The Bible's liberal champions used such assumptions to distance themselves from biblical details such as Israel's nasty wars against neighbors or God's demands for revenge or so-on-and-on. These scholars focused instead on biblical "themes" and theological "centers."

In short, the liberal approach sought to de-emphasize the plain meaning of at least some biblical passages, placing them in the interpretive background or to render them altogether unimportant. Freeing the Bible from its details also allowed liberal theologians to detach it from potentially troublesome items in modern science, common sense, or our contemporary knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history and civilization. The Bible wasn't really talking about that, that nature, that miracle, that event--so just ignore it and focus on the larger or deeper spiritual "truth." This was the liberal approach.

Kugel notes that liberalism joined with broader scholarly discussion over hermeneutics, "the nature of a text's signification and meaning." Without going into detail on specifics of the discussion, suffice it to say that liberal theologians generally felt justified in developing their own understanding of the Bible as an alternative to the Bible's "original meaning"--insofar as that original meaning could be clarified at all by modern scholarship.

Kugel also highlights the connection between liberal approaches to scripture and gradual movement away from the idea of the Bible's divine inspiration. In fact, liberal theologians developed several understandings of inspiration. Some of them:

• Limited verbal inspiration
• Strict verbal insipration
• Nontextual inspiration
• Content inspiration
• Inspired experiences
• Social inspiration

It should be acknowledged that the liberal stance is not defensive. Its proponents do not consider the approach to be a reaction against modern scientific, philosophical, and historical knowledge. It's not designed to "protect" the Bible for religion. Kugel says that adherents of the liberal approach often see themselves liberating (ahem) the Bible from "the straitjacket of original meaning." The liberal approach, they surmise, reads the Bible as it really is, for what it really means, and is therefore superior to an approach that demands belief in the unbelievable.

Kugel criticizes the liberal view somewhat. He says that the liberal approach doesn't really have a claim to unbiased or artificial interpretation, at least no more a claim than ancient interpreters (we may note that this is a rather postmodern stance from a scholar who seems to disdain "postmodernism."). He also points out the rather thorny problem that the Bible of liberalism is somehow lesser than the Bible of fundamentalism. The liberal Bible is "more of a human document than ever before, which is to say that its power to command and even instruct has been diminished." Liberalism, Kugel suggests, accepts two fundamentally opposed ideas: the Bible is more human and less divine than it has historically been taken to be, yet the Bible can continue to act in society as a spiritual (and, one suspects, a moral) guide containing teachings of relevance in the modern world.

In the end, Kugel is ambivalent toward the liberal stance. It seems not to have reconciled the biblical document and the Good Book, and what's more it seems unable to square that particular circle. Kugel leads us, then, back to the Bible's first readers, back to when the words of the Bible were "all-important." A perceptive reader may detect a hint of sarcasm in my last sentence, as I wonder if Kugel is here lapsing into an idealistic, idyllic picture of a "pre-Fall" Bible, when its words and meanings were united and whole. Now, I am not being altogether fair, as Kugel does not completely make this lapse, yet he certainly seems to approve of the interpretive view that privileges words and meanings. If the liberal view is troubled by the Bible's seeming lack of historical veracity, the ancient interpreters know no such trouble. As Kugel summarizes the ancient view once again: "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 he next section, Kugel discusses the "change back" from liberalism, a change bypassing fundamentalism too.

Israel's God: A History

Tablets from the Enuma Elish, the ancient Babylonian creation myth.

I have been a long-time fan of Evid3nc3's video series on his de-conversion from evangelical Christianity.

His latest installment, derived from his reading of Karen Armstrong's A History of God, talks about the history of the monotheistic god, Israel's polytheistic past, and the ongoing construction and re-construction of the Bible.

The narrative here touches on several themes that have come up in my series on James Kugel's How to Read the Bible. One theme is that we can look outside the Bible and see how its contents have many historical connections and sources. Another theme that while the Bible on its own is fairly dry, its history and evolution is exceedingly interesting. A third theme goes to the question that Kugel asks, which I'll paraphrase as what do we do with the Bible once we know (and perhaps believe) the hypotheses about its origins and development? Do we use it as the basis of religious worship and daily living? Do we consider it alongside other religious works of other cultures, that is, as interesting and valued but not as communicating a special truth about the nature of the universe?

Like Evid3nc3, I felt the second path was probably correct. Once I realized and accepted that it was unreasonable to take the Bible seriously as an authority on the nature of the universe and my personal obligations in the world...well, it became impossible to look at Judaism or religious figures the same way as before.

Related to the above video is another from earlier in Evid3nc3's series.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 7): Enter Fundamentalism

The Fundamentals, a twelve-volume publication that defended the Christian faith and was the foundation of the fundamentalist Christian movement.

We continue to read through the subsections of Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

In the last subsection, we pondered Kugel's question:

[N]ow that the genie is out of the bottle and modern scholarship has discovered everything it has discovered about the [biblical] text's original meaning, what is to become of the Bible?

In the present subsection we start to answer the question from the standpoint of Protestant fundamentalism--Kugel later will deal with other standpoints.

Fundamentalism, Kugel observes, emerges in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to modern biblical scholarship, the German "higher" criticism that developed a picture of the Bible's human sources and human fallibility. The fundamentalist stance, that the Bible is literally true and the product of divine inspiration, has remained fairly consistent to present day from its origins and from its articulation in the twelve volumes of The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915.

I must say here, however, that as a matter of convenience my summary oversimplifies this stance. I advise the curious reader to learn more about The Fundamentals from appropriate primary and secondary sources.

I also want to pause at the idea that fundamentalism is a reaction to modern scholarship and developments. Sociologist Alan Wolfe, in reviewing a new book by Oliver Roy called Holy Ignorance, hones in on a different model of fundamentalism:

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society. Whether it takes the form of the Christian right in the United States or Salafist purity in the Muslim world, fundamentalism is not about restoring a more authentic and deeply spiritual religious experience. It is instead a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile. The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.

Now, I have not read Holy Ignorance, but if I understand Wolfe's summary correctly, the key difference between reaction and symptom is one of necessity. Fundamentalism, the thesis seems to be, is an expected if not inevitable consequence of cultural shift. It is not so much a critique of the shift as an acknowledgment that certain desired cultural norms and values are being disenfranchised, in part or in whole. Fundamentalism is the attempt to insulate these norms and values, to prevent them from being altered or scrutinized.

I personally am not yet comfortable with subscribing to Roy's thesis, via Wolfe, but it's worth considering and gives an interesting perspective on the question, what is to become of the Bible? From the fundamentalist perspective, I think, the very emergence of the question is part of the problem. Fundamentalism is both a product/symptom of this sort of question and a desire to eliminate that question, to remove it as something that could legitimately be asked.

In this context, it is perhaps less surprising to observe with Kugel that both fundamentalism and modern biblical scholarship emerge as Protestant phenomena. Earlier installments of this series have mentioned, albeit briefly, the Protestant beginnings of modern biblical scholarship. Fundamentalism, however, emerges not just to oppose modern biblical scholarship but also to resist the troubling questions and conclusions of both science and arguments from reason (as distinct from divine revelation).

Yet, conservative as fundamentalism is, it does not completely align with the approach of the Bible's ancient interpreters. The fundamentalist assertion "that almost everything Scripture says is literally true" departs from the traditional approach in an important way, for ancients viewed the Bible as a text that often hides its most important messages and true meaning. The fundamentalist drive for literal meaning would have been considered myopic to the point of debilitation by ancient interpreters.

Fundamentalism, Kugel says, starts from the idea "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." This starting point is not so far from that of modern biblical scholars, who also have sought to view the Bible apart from traditional interpretations and ideologically-motivated exposition. The difference between the fundamentalist path and the modern scholars' has been that modern scholars have read the text with a more historical emphasis. We could express the modern stance by re-writing Kugel's voicing of fundamentalism: "Scripture speaks directly and literally to us today about the world of its original production, reception, and dissemination." Modern scholars have thus seen the text as an instrument for learning about the culture(s) that produced the Bible.

Fundamentalism therefore has interesting connections and departures from both ancient and modern approaches. We have seen several ironies already. Fundamentalism is conservative yet avoids the approach of the ancients; it shares a modern distaste for unaware artifice and for ideology yet rejects modern inquiry into textual function and history. And in another irony, fundamentalism maintains an important link with the past:

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 naive 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.

Thus, we are back to Kugel's question on what is to become of the Bible now that we know what modern biblical scholarship says about the Bible's original meaning. It seems at this point that Kugel suggests that the Bible cannot remain the Bible unless it is understood as its ancient interpreters understood it. That we have the intended understanding of Kugel here seems supported by how he closes this subsection, noting that both liberal and conservative strains in Protestantism lose a bit of the Bible:

What liberals and conservatives generally share (although there are, of course, exceptions) is a profound discomfort with the actual interpretations that the ancients came up with--these have little or no place in the way Scripture is to be expounded today. Nidrash, allegory, typology--what for? But the style of interpretation thus being rejected is precisely the one that characterizes the numerous interpretations of Old Testament texts by Jesus, Paul, and others in the New Testament, as well as by succeeding generations of the founders of Christianity.

So, we're left with the sense that the fundamentalist approach to modern biblical scholarship is rather unrealistic and intellectually isolationist (I am trying to be polite), while the liberal approach bowdlerizes the Bible. Not a great choice.

In the next subsection, Kugel examines more liberal approaches to the Bible, beyond only liberal Protestantism, and how they have dealt with modern biblical scholarship.

Seven Is Heaven

Huzzah!

I just found out that my post, "Kugel's HTRTB (Part 4): Why You Read the Bible the Way You Do," hit #7 on the Biblioblog Top 50 for December 2010.

Thanks to all who made this happen, especially good Professor Kugel!

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 6): The Cost of Modern Biblical Knowledge

Knowing what we do about the Bible, can we approach and understand it as we did before such knowledge?

We continue to read through the subsections of Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

After leading us through his high-level conclusions about the achievement of the ancient biblical interpreters, Kugel asserts the proper frame for understanding both ancient interpretation and the Bible-as-Scripture. Largely through the wisdom mentality, ancient interpreters transformed the texts of Israel’s library--stories, laws, prophecies, songs--into moral instruction and “metaphors or timeless examples of the ways of God and men.”

Kugel says, “One would not be wrong to think of this transformation as, in effect, a kind of massive act of re-writing.” Indeed, I myself have made an analogous argument regarding the Christian Old Testament: I argue that the Old Testament is a different book than the Hebrew Scriptures because of the way in which the collected (and collective) texts are approached and understood by Christian believers.^1,2

The Hebrew Scriptures, then, are the product of the way they were approached and understood by ancient interpreters. This thesis is one of the main ones that the first 35 chapters of the book aim to demonstrate. In those chapters, Kugel says, we see “the biblical texts in their original settings and meanings,” on the one hand, and “what those texts were later made out to mean by Jewish and Christian authorities,” on the other hand.

Modern biblical scholarship has been able to excavate the original meaning of these texts. This scholarship began with the aim of uncovering the “real Bible,” but that never happened. The “real Bible,” we will recall, was imagined to be still-Scripture but apart from any doctrinal approach and understanding.³ Instead, researchers discovered that Scripture was both the texts and the religious ways they were understood.

The question thus becomes what do we do now that we are aware that there is more than one Bible? We understand both the original meanings of the texts and the religious meanings later attended to them, so how, then, is one to relate to Bible knowing all this?

Kugel’s answer is quite wise and appropriately nuanced, yet not free of problems:

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.

We might also add Atheists to this list. I like Kugel’s answer because it seems correct that different religious or non-religious macro-groups will have distinct assessments of what the Bible is; what its role can be in individual, communal, and national cultural life; and what its role should be. I also like that Kugel’s answer suggests that an individual must actively and knowingly determine her or his answer; that is, “what is to become of the Bible for me?”

But Kugel’s answer also seems problematic, at least at this point in our reading. Kugel has clearly distinguished between several Bibles:

1. The biblical texts in their original settings and meanings.
2. The Bible as a set of texts and a way of approaching them in religious traditions.
3. The “real Bible,” the unfiltered communication of God to man, and the record of that interaction.
4. The Bible as a set of texts and a way of approaching them to study their historical and cultural sources.

As I read him, Kugel’s main concern is Bible #2, the Bible of religion. Yet, I’m uncomfortable to think that we can simply acknowledge these other Bibles and then just disregard all but one. Instead, I think the consequence of having the genie out of the bottle (to paraphrase Kugel) is retaining all of the Bibles. Just as we cannot separate the Biblical texts from the way of approaching them, as in Bible #2, so too I don’t think we can separate Bible #2 from Bibles #1, #3, and #4. I think this is the cost of knowledge.

But Kugel has much more to say on approaches to the Bible, so it will be worthwhile to hold onto this problem and see how it plays out in the rest of this fascinating chapter.

Footnotes:

1. Historical Jesus: No Clear Picture
2. Biblical Translation: Why It Matters
3. Kugel's HTRTB (Part 2): The Achievement of Modern Biblical Scholarship

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 5): How the Bible Became the Bible

King Solomon, by Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1308-11)

Last time, we learned from James Kugel that ancient biblical interpreters changed the whole character of ancient Israel's library. These interpreters developed a set of assumptions about the texts that yielded a rich body of interpretations. These interpreters and their interpretations together made the Bible into a coherent and holy text.

In the subsection "How It Happened" (Chapter 36, How to Read the Bible), Kugel goes into more detail about how ancient interpreters and their interpretations came to change what the Bible was, what it meant, and how it signified.

One way ancient interpreters were able to re-define the Bible was by resolving apparent contradictions in biblical law. This happened fairly early. As an example of an apparent contradiction, Kugel gives Exodus 12:8 and Deuteronomy 16:7, which concern the Passover sacrifice:

• Exodus 12:8 -- And on this night, they shall eat the flesh, roasted over the fire, and unleavened cakes; with bitter herbs they shall eat it.
• Deuteronomy 16:7 -- And you shall boil [it] and eat [it] in the place which the Lord, your God, will choose, and you shall turn away in the morning and go to your dwellings.

These and other, more complicated examples show how ancient biblical interpreters reinforced their axiom that the Bible did not and could not contradict itself. Because they were able to produce cogent interpretations supporting the axiom, interpreters developed the view that the Bible often does not say what it means; rather, it contains many hidden implications.

Another way ancient interpreters were able to change the Bible was by establishing the view of some texts as timeless ethical instruction. This view prevailed for the prophetic texts. Toward the end of the biblical period, the rise of apocalyptic writings aided the sense that the prophetic texts retained contemporary messages and, hence, real value for the day.

The ancient texts changed meanings in other ways. Newer psalms seemed to encourage private, ritual recitation, while original psalms had been used in temple worship. Kugel gives Psalm 119 as an example of this new kind of psalm:

Praiseworthy are those whose way is perfect, who walk with the law of the Lord. Praiseworthy are those who keep His testimonies; who seek Him wholeheartedly. Not only have they committed no injustice, they walked in His ways. You commanded Your precepts, to keep diligently. My prayers are that my ways should be established, to keep Your statutes. Then I shall not be ashamed when I look at all Your commandments. I shall thank You with an upright heart when I learn the judgments of Your righteousness. I shall keep Your statutes; do not forsake me utterly. (Ps. 119:1-8)

Examples like this show the development of a perspective in which reading and studying texts, done in the right way, became a form of offering to God. Kugel points to the Song of Songs as another vivid example of a text that must have undergone radical reinterpretation. By around 180 BCE, Kugel suggests, the great literary heritage of Israel's past was discernibly becoming Scripture, as these texts became seen as metaphors and timeless examples for moral and religious conduct.

So how did it happen? Kugel's main answer seems to be "wisdom writings and the wisdom mentality." He says:

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.

The Bible as we know it today very much consists of not only the texts but also the wisdom mentality used to read the Bible. Together, the texts and the wisdom mentality have produced very many individual motifs--all of this is the legacy of the ancient biblical interpreters.

I am struck by the magnitude of the achievement of ancient interpreters. Their attention to detail and their creativity are amazing, and I'm impressed with not only the changes of meaning for Israel's ancient library but also the accumulation and expansion of meaning over time. Surely, Kugel means to have us appreciate the ancient interpreters as no less sophisticated and innovative than the modern biblical scholars. The accomplishments of both are great and admirable in their own ways.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 4): Why You Read the Bible the Way You Do

Manuscript of the Apocryphal work 'the Wisdom of Ben-Sira' (Ecclesiasticus) from the Cairo Genizah, now in the Cambridge University library.

Modern biblical scholarship wrought a new way of reading the Bible. OK, but what was the old way and where did it come from?

In How to Read the Bible, James Kugel describes this old (or rather, traditional) way of reading the Bible--as well as the new way developed by modern scholars. Kugel's Chapter 36, the book's final chapter, sums up this traditional approach with several examples:

• The story of Isaac foreshadows the crucifixion of Jesus.
• Psalm 137 was a prophetic piece written by David.
• The prohibition of child sacrifice to the worship of the pagan god Molech was a reference to intermarriage (see Leviticus 18:21).
• The different texts of the Bible completely agreed with one another on fundamental matters.
• In all the Bible there were no inconsistencies, factual errors, or scribal mistakes.
• The biblical texts, no matter how many centuries earlier they were composed, were addressed to readers today.

As we see, in the traditional way the Bible is viewed as saying and meaning much more than is apparent at the text's literal level. For many of us, the traditional way is a familiar approach to the Bible. We understand the Bible as having layers of meaning, as requiring teachers and commentary to help us decipher messages that we cannot access simply by reading the Bible's words and stories. In addition, the traditional approach invests the Bible itself with an authority and timelessness that reflects a particular understanding of its divine source--the Bible becomes an embodiment of the ideal wisdom and order ascribed to Israel's God. This traditional way of reading the Bible and understanding what it really is, says Kugel, derives from the efforts of the Bible's earliest interpreters:

[T]his 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....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 to full flower in the closing centuries BCE.

Kugel describes the traditional way of reading as having evolved gradually over several centuries. I choose the word "evolved" deliberately to evoke the natural and naturalistic process outlined by Charles Darwin as well as to allude to memetics, the cultural corollary to Darwinian evolution. My point in this choice of diction (I don't see that Kugel uses the word) is to suggest that the traditional way of reading is not "better" or "more correct" or "natural" for having developed and solidified as it did. If were were to "rewind the tape" of events--to borrow a thought on biological evolution from Stephen Jay Gould--the traditional interpretations of the Bible might have been different, even wildly different, than the ones we actually inherited.

If I may depart from Kugel even further, I think we can and should consider the traditional approach to reading in terms of two distinctions made by Jacques Derrida in his "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." One distinction is the "ethic of nostalgia for origins," which "dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay." Another distinction, however, "affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism." This mode of interpretation has no tether to an "author" or an "original intent." The interpreter in this mode works creatively and unbound by one text; this reader selects, breaks apart, moves, and reconfigures meaning by using outside materials and internal connections.

My point is that ancient interpreters--and modern biblical scholars, too--employ both modes of interpretation. At least, I see these two modes in what Kugel has been describing. The ancients seek both to reveal the hidden mysteries of the Bible, a Bible that is intentional in every word and even every letter. They also delight in "hard interpretations," readings that are not obvious at all from what might seem the likely sense of the text. In his typically eloquent way, Kugel characterizes this predilection of the ancients in another excellent book of his, The Bible As It Was:

Sometimes they [ancient biblical interpreters] depart from the straightforward meaning because they feel they have to: the text as is appears to them illogical or seems to contradict something else in the Bible. And sometimes, they take an apparent pleasure in willful, even playful, distortion--as if the interpreter were saying: "Look, read the text my way and you will see that this or that surprising conclusion can be derived from it." (56)

We can trace these two modes of interpretation in modern biblical scholarship, too, from the quixotic quest for the "real" Bible to the creative analyses and hypotheses produced from reading the texts alone, at first, and then from engaging knowledge produced from other disciplines relevant to biblical study.

I've introduced this "post-structuralist" sensibility here to normalize interpretation as something that adheres to both the ancients and ourselves in much the same way, if not in the same details. On the other hand, the details remain exceedingly important and interesting. We cannot dismiss or trivialize the special history of the traditional approach to the Bible. Understanding that history is critical for understanding the Bible and its significance, as well as for understanding the pleasures and perils of interpretation.

We return, then, to Kugel's narrative on the evolution of the traditional approach to the Bible. For Kugel, the traditional way of reading the Bible becomes more formalized and normalized in the centuries around the BCE-CE line:

This is the period in which, in the interpretations found 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.

Kugel cites this period as having had a "radical" effect. The biblical texts change little. What changes and becomes systematized are the assumptions that readers bring to the task of reading the Bible.

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.

Ancient interpreters, through their assumptions, gradually changed the whole character of the biblical texts. In the next section, Kugel goes into more detail about how and where--where textually, that is--the changes happened.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 3): What Were Modern Biblical Scholars Thinking?

Raphael's Isaiah, circa 1511. The image conveys a traditional view of the prophet's divinely inspired authorship of the text bearing his name.

"From the start," says James Kugel, "many of the greatest modern scholars suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding of what their discipline was about and where it would eventually lead." Modern biblical scholars such as the American Charles Augustus Briggs thought their historical criticism would sift out the Divine word from "the debris of the traditional interpretations of the multitudinous schools and sects." In other words, scholars thought they were recovering and rescuing the real Bible.

Instead, modern scholarship became a vehicle for undermining the idea of a divinely given or inspired Bible. Historical criticism determined that the books of Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so forth were not written by these people. The picture of composition that emerged had anonymous editors or scribes inserting "large chunks of their own or other people's thoughts into the text." Divine inspiration became seen as a poor explanation for the seemingly different and even contradictory conceptions of obligated and prohibited behavior in the text groups J, E, P, H and D. Scholarship never seemed to fail at highlighting textual disagreement between parts of the Bible.

Also undermining a divine origins view of the Bible were "resemblances between specific laws and proverbs or stories in the Bible and similar ones discovered in Egypt or Mesopotamia." Very many examples--such as the similarities between the names and form Israel's commanded sacrifices and those of ancient Canaanite religion that Israelites were told to uproot utterly from their midst--seemed to bespeak of very human processes of cultural translation and borrowing rather than divine inspiration or guidance.

The reading approach adopted by modern biblical scholars served to render the notion of God's authorship of the Bible highly problematic. Scholars read the Bible in "human terms," as a collection of texts in history. What earlier theologians has seen as mysteries, these scholars saw as contradictions, inconsistencies, and duplications. The possibility began to be taken seriously, in other words, that the Bible contained errors, a notion that had obvious incompatibilities with the notion of divine authorship. By focusing on understanding the Bible within its historical context, modern scholarship illuminated the world behind the Bible but also eroded the idea of prophecy. Jeremiah's "evil from the North," for example, could be seen as referring to an immediate threat from biblical Babylon rather than as a cryptic message of the end times.

The humanity and historicity of the Bible, Kugel notes, drove scholars to adopt learning about the Bible as their main relation to it, as opposed to learning from it. The shift here is significant:

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 the all the reader's, not the text's, and anyone can see the results.

Along with this shift in tone and perspective came an unsavory view of the Bible, its writers, and its readers. Tales such as Cain and Abel revealed "an almost childlike simplemindedness" on the part of the ancient Israelites. Others, such as Jacob and Esau, indicated a willingness by the ancients "to distort the truth or lie outright."

If modern scholarship has been reaching the goal it unwittingly set for itself, to uncover the "real" Bible, then the real Bible is not so special. Instead, it is a human composition, a creation of ancient Near eastern literature. Interestingly, Kugel describes the persuasiveness of modern biblical scholarship's arguments as a "problem." This description is, of course, a matter of opinion, since I don't see it as a problem at all. Kugel seems to me to be on shaky ground to imply that the Bible ought to be regarded as having special status. Why should it? Because it had been so regarded before and for a long time? Because of its undeniable influence in human civilization and history? But perhaps Kugel here is not speaking for himself but rather for a traditional mindset that surely would have seen modern biblical scholarship as yielding problematic insights. Indeed, I now think that's precisely what Kugel's doing...yet, I also know that this problem is Kugel's problem, too.

I have more concern, however, with Kugel's distinction between learning from the Bible and learning about it. His suggestion seems to be that learning from is the more humble relationship, perhaps even a subservient one. In this relationship, the interpreter is like a lens; his commentary is the refraction of the text's wisdom onto another page.

Although I appreciate the picture Kugel draws to explain the shift in tone and approach that modern scholars took to their study of the Bible, I see this picture as too idealized: the "smaller" interpreter seeks biblical knowledge and crouches in studious attentiveness. But any interpreter relating to the Bible--regardless of how she or he imagines the relationship--can speak about it, analyze it, and act upon it. Again, I tend to think that the distinction is Kugel's explanation rather than his personal view of modern biblical scholarship. Certainly, we can agree that modern biblical scholars gradually shed a disciplinary reverence of biblical authority. Other than this important result, however, were moderns so different from earlier scholars, theologians, commentators, and interpreters? At least, did they not share the larger banners of scholarship, analysis, rigor, commentary, collaboration, and interpretation?

Hopefully, the next section in Kugel's chapter--and my next post of the subject--will illuminate matters a bit. In this upcoming section, Kugel discusses the ancient interpreters of the Bible and the development of the traditional views that modern scholarship altered.

Till then....