[T]his year I’m going to spend some time with the book that laid the groundwork for my Jewish life— my faded, tattered copy of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book. Although the publishers likely never intended it, the book has become my own profoundly Jewish text, perfect for Shavuot study and reflection. When I read it, I will relive my first experience of Jewish study. I will picture my small blonde head bent over the text, absorbing a lifetime’s worth of lessons from the stories of my people.

    One more cite. It helps explain why the Old Testament speaks to people, and always will, in ways that others may never understand:

[T]hen there was David, my girlhood crush: David the shepherd boy, David the strong and savvy warrior, David the builder, David the flawed but righteous king. No teeny-bopper idol in Tiger Beat magazine could compete. Most of all, I loved David the poet. A weakness of Egermeier’s was that it did not contain my very favorite part of the Bible: the Psalms. So, I kept my RSV Bible at hand to consult after reading about David and gazing at the illustrations of him in Egermeier’s.

    Read the whole thing. There are Jews who feel threatened by the fact that some Jews are becoming messianic (Christian) Jews (and have the gall to continue to keep a kosher table, or keep one for the first time). There are Christians who feel threatened by the fact that some Christians are becoming Jews. Caution is in order, and if we are friends with the people in question, and we ourselves have strong religious convictions, we might pass on very strong words of warning.

    On the other hand, given the fact that people prefer the devil they don't know to the one they already know (I'm trying to be even-handed here, and bracket out the question of God's leading), conversions in all directions are to be expected.

    My household is bilingual. We go back and forth between languages. The girls had been at it for some time. Betta and Paola are fussing over a seated Anna, busy with her hair. The room is sweet with the smell of bath oils and estrogen. I say to Paola, “Che fai?” She answers in English, laughing, “Embrace yourself!”

    We all laugh. We knew she meant “Brace yourself!” [this is going to take the entire day]. “Brace yourself!” translates naturally and simultaneously into “Preparati!”, which back-translates to “Prepare yourself!”

    There would be a problem if “Prepare yourself!” were thought to be a faithful translation of “Brace yourself!” It is a natural translation, but it is not a faithful translation. By “faithful” I mean faithful to the stylistic choices of the original.

    Literary translation, the translation method usually employed for classics, is a style of translation that pays attention to diction. “Prepare yourself!” eliminates the metaphorical freight of “Brace yourself!” From the point of view of diction, “Prepare yourself!” is not an adequate translation of “Brace yourself!” In the kinetic context I reported, full of long arms and dresses and fingers through hair, “Brace yourself!”, with its undertone of “Back off: you have entered the harem,” “Prepare yourself!” is lame compared to “Brace yourself!”

    Both word-for-word and thought-for-thought translations have a way of mangling metaphors. A biblical example is הֶבֶל, meaning “air, breath, vapor” in Hebrew, as used in Qohelet. To translate Qoh 1:2 הבל הבלים word-for-word, “merest breath” (Robert Alter), is inadequate, since the metaphorical freight of “breath” in English is far from identical to that of הבל in Hebrew. It is not better to translate הבל, Q’s master-metaphor, with a non-metaphor, such as “absurd” (Michael Fox). Abstractions are pitiful substitutes for metaphors.

    In each example below, a word-for-word translation is offered first (Alter); a thought-for-thought translation second (NLT 1996); a metaphor-for-metaphor translation third (my translation).

    In Qohelet, הֶבֶל “air” is a master metaphor that stands for things that are devoid of sense. “Crock” is a comparable metaphor in English. In Qoh 11:8, it is not ephemerality (“mere breath”), meaninglessness, or absurdity that is coming. What is coming is crock; specifically, decrepitude, days of darkness, touched on again in 12:4. Life is a crock according to Q, and he speaks from the point of view of a crock, a man who has seen better days.

    It is not a question non-believers necessarily pose, unless they want to aggravate believers. Ayn Rand atheists in particular are convinced that God does not care, and neither should they. Live and let die.

  An ethically responsible way of approaching the question of God’s justice is to turn the question against ourselves. For example, why don’t we do something about human trafficking, since we can?

    Some argue for a ban on the things that feed the appetite for human trafficking: (1) the sale of sex and (2) the sale of illegal drugs. The facts are clear. Pimps prefer workers they can threaten and treat as slaves. Drug dealers prefer sellers they can throw away if caught: illegal aliens, minors bereft of guardians, and hopeless addicts. Some countries, such as Sweden, ban prostitution. Virtually all countries ban the sale of a cornucopia of drugs sought after by pleasure seekers and addicts. The extent to which said bans are effective is limited.

    Others argue that prostitution should be legal like other for-profit enterprises, and taxed based on the sheep-shearing principle (the principle attributed to the Social Democrat Olof Palme, who famously said that the goal of responsible government is not to kill capitalism, but to shear it as one shears sheep). Supposedly that would make life better for prostitutes and their clients, and less profitable for pimps.

    But Janice Reymond points out that “legalization has failed to protect the women in prostitution … [or] decrease … trafficking from other countries.”

    Tolerance and taxation of prostitution have a long history.¹ The taxation of prostitution in Rome was a significant source of revenue for the See of Peter when occupied by Pope Leo X. For many pilgrims, the theory apparently was: what happens in Rome stays in Rome. The theory, of course, rests on the most wishful of foundations. What about the women and men who serviced the pilgrims? What about the diseases they transmitted to third parties?²

    There is no doubt that Jews and Christians in general, past and present, have considered prostitution to be a necessary evil at best, with emphasis on the evil. In a separate post, I plan to discuss the views of Augustine and Aquinas on the subject, since they are often misrepresented.

    My concern in this post is not prostitution per se, but human trafficking. Human trafficking is a pervasive practice in the modern world. It takes many forms, one of which involves the enslavement of women in order to put them to work in the sex-for-money industry. It will continue regardless of how and whether states clamp down on it.  Here and now, what can we do about human trafficking?  

    The answer is obvious. We can redeem the captives, one person at a time.

    Maimonides is our teacher here. If you are a Christian and think Rambam should not be your teacher, you aren't familiar with the words of your teacher par excellence: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do" (Matt 23:2). Rambam rules that he who ignores ransoming a captive is guilty of violating mitzvot such as "you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand to your needy kinsman" (Deut 15:7); "you shall not stand by idly while the blood of your fellow man is shed" (Lev 19:16); and "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 19:18). He writes that redeeming a captive takes precedence over feeding the poor or clothing them (Hilchot Matanot Aniyim 8:10):

    Not just Rambam, but the Sages in general built Torah on the crowns of the tips of the letters of the cited verses. They developed a policy of redeeming Jews from oppressors with an outlay of significant resources. The outcome is an inveramento, an authentic radicalization, of Torah given through Moses from Mt. Sinai.

    The practical good that authentic radicalization has accomplished is difficult to overestimate. Few will question that good unless they are ignorant of, in recent times, the Soviet Jewry program or the example of Judy Feld Carr.

    There is much to be said for Rambam’s hierarchy of ethical responsibilities. Maimonides himself wrote letters, discovered among the manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah, exhorting his fellow Jews to ransom captives. He collected money to that end. As David Golinkin notes in his animated defense of the redemption of Jewish captives for more than they are worth, Jews did precisely that in ancient times.

    Apart from a celebrated case or two, why then do Jews and Christians invest so little in securing the release of captives? It is as if they too subscribe to a “live and let die” philosophy.

    I have friends who have dedicated their lives to freeing captives of the prostitution industry, one person at a time. Their names: Jason and Lorraine. They have been at it less than a year in Austria, a hub of international prostitution. They have already helped a trafficked woman out of coerced prostitution. She is from Nigeria, is now 20 years old, and had been forced to work as a prostitute for two years. After various setbacks, at a fork in the road, as Jason recounts it, she makes a statement of faith:

She says she wants to get out of prostitution and she tells us she’s ready to testify against her trafficker. She’s scared, very scared. The police tell her she’s lying. The process is long and complicated and messy, fraught with danger and uncertainty, but she goes through with it and names the trafficker. She’s finally FREE! Now [she] is living in Vienna waiting for asylum. She needs food, a job, housing, emotional healing and everything else you can imagine a victim of trafficking would need at this point. She’s starting her life over though, and this is exciting.

For background on the challenging work of creating an anti-trafficking network (ATN), the articles in this issue of “Go East” are helpful. If anyone would like to contribute to the work of Jason and Lorraine and the ATN to which they are connected, do not hesitate to email me.

Notes 

¹ The amount of slipshod research in the field is, truth to be told, enormous. Do not trust what you read unless you have verified it after spending time with the primary sources. A grasp of a diverse set of interpretive approaches to the sources is also essential if missteps are to be avoided. The detailed and source-conscious research of Michelle Laughran is exemplary. A remarkable but widely neglected essay by Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Bishop, Prioress, and Bawd in the Stews of Southwark,” Speculum 75 (2000) 342-388, debunks one half-baked theory after another (pdf available on request).

² The taxation of prostitution in pre-counter Reformation papal Rome is reminiscent of the same in Imperial Rome; for the latter, see Thomas A. J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

    The premier example of the Moshe Held principle involves the interpretation of the grammar of Gen 1:1-3: following the discovery of Enuma Elish (“When on high …”) and the Atrahasis Epic (“When the gods were like men …”), the interpretation of Gen 1:1-2 (“When God began to create”) as stage-setting for the first mainline event of Gen 1, “God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen 1:3), a view already advanced by Rashi, became more plausible.

    A host of modern interpreters, with or without knowledge or dependence on the discoveries, and with or without knowledge of Rashi’s interpretation, construe likewise: among others, Heinrich Ewald, Max Geiger, Karl Budde, William Foxwell Albright, Otto Eissfeldt, Siegfried Herrmann, Harry M. Orlinsky, Ephraim A. Speiser, and Francis I. Andersen. I describe the “new-old” understanding of Gen 1:1-3, with which I concur, in a “Technical Note” here. Robert Holmstedt offers an analysis in terms of a type of relative clause: go here and here for online discussion.

    For a discussion of rabbinic interpretations of the passage in question, see Peter Schäfer, “Berēšit bārā ‘Elōhīm. Zur Interpretation von Gen 1:1 in der rabbinischen Literatur,” JSJ 2 (1971) 161–66. On this view, Gen 1:1-3 finds its closest analogues in Gen 2:4b-7 and Hos 1:4. For variations on this understanding which however miss the fact that the wayyiqtol marks the matrix clause or mainline event, see Ibn Ezra and, among moderns, Paul Humbert, "Trois Notes sur Genèse I," Interpretationes ad Vetus Testamentum Pertinentes Sigmundo Mowinckel Septuagenario Missae ( = NTT 56 [1955]; Nils A. Dahl and Arvid S. Kapelrud, eds.; Olso: Forlaget Land og Kirche, 1955) 85-96 (ET here), repr. in idem, Opuscules d'un hébraïsant (Mémoires de l'université de Neuchâtel 26; Neuchâtel: Secrétariat de l'université; 1958) 193-203; idem, “Encore le premier mot de la Bible: à propos d'un article de M Walther Eichrodt,” ZAW 76 (1964) 121–31; and Walter Gross, “Syntaktische Erscheinungen am Anfang althebräischer Erzählungen: Hintergrund und Vordergrund,“ in Congress Volume: Vienna (John A. Emerton, ed.; VTSup 32; Leiden: Brill, 1981) 131-145. For the alternative view that Gen 1:1 represents an independent clause, see John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011) 123-127, and bibliography cited. I thank James Spinti for sending me a PDF of Walton’s important volume. If blog readers show interest in a review of Walton’s volume, I may very well oblige.

¹ Daniel Bodi, The Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story (Hebrew Bible Monographs 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010) 4, cited by Jeremy Hutton in a review.  

    The press release is riddled with statements and conjectures that are unlikely to stand the test of time. Todd Bolen takes issue with this press release statement:

The biblical tradition presents the people of Israel as conducting a cult different from all other nations of the ancient Near East by being monotheistic and an-iconic (banning human or animal figures). However, it is not clear when these practices were formulated, if indeed during the time of the monarchy (10-6th centuries BC), or only later, in the Persian or Hellenistic eras.

Bolen pushes back:

In other words, the presence of cultic material outside of Jerusalem challenges the biblical claim that Israelites worshipped only one God in one place. But there is no such biblical claim. Scripture is very clear that though the Lord commanded the Israelites to worship only at the central altar (Deut 12), the Israelites perennially failed to keep this command. … What discoveries like these from Qeiyafa show is not that monotheism evolved only late in Israel’s history but that God’s covenant people failed to worship in the prescribed way, just as the Bible records.

    The trouble with Bolen’s pushback is that the prescriptions of Deut 12 as usually interpreted (it’s about time that Adam Welch’s work is dusted off and read again; go here) and the cult centralization program initiated under King Josiah stand in contradiction to prescriptions found in Exod 20:21-22 (“in every place”). It is not a question of prescription in contradiction with description. It is a question of prescription in contradiction with prescription. Given Exod 20:21, it comes as no surprise that an 8th cent. BCE prophet like Amos demonstrates no awareness of a “one place of worship” rule. His critique of goings-on at Bethel, Gilgal, Dan, and Beersheba has nothing to do with a “one place of worship” rule.

     George Athas on his part takes issue with the ark of God nonsense. Then he turns around and offers speculation that is no better grounded:

The most likely explanations for this state of affairs [the fact of the single stratum at KQ datable with some plausibility to ca. 1000 BCE] are that either there was a localised authority in the Shephelah region (cf. David Ussishkin’s perspective), or someone up in the highlands of Judah had a hand in this. Are the spotlights converging on us finding the kingdom of David in archaeology? Well, if there was a House of David (which I argue is another name for Jerusalem) that could be a player on the international stage in c.800 BC as per the Tel Dan Inscription, and there is an organising authority in the Valley of Elah in c.1000 BC, it’s not inconceivable that the two entities could end up aligning, such that we eventually have some strong evidence for a Kingdom of Judah in the time of David and Solomon.

What? Now we have two entities? The House of David is another name for Jerusalem? Hurowitz (fifth comment on the thread) calls him on it: “I think both you and Yossi have gone overboard.”

    What should we conclude in the wake of the finds of Khirbet Qeiyafa? The best anyone can do is offer controlled speculation of the kind that clearly distinguishes premises and conclusions. I herewith offer my own controlled speculation in interaction with that of Sanders, Suriano, and Vayntrub, whose post is the most substantial to appear so far.

    SSV note first of all that the press release’s claims about the new discoveries might easily be characterized as “exaggerated, self-contradictory,” “fundamentalist,” and “hasty.” As if the claims were designed to launch sales of a new book about KQ, Footprints of King David.  It is hard to argue with SSV on this score.

    SSV go on to note:

if the new object is a temple model from around 1000 BCE, and Judahite, it suggests people here were already aware of, and perhaps worshipped in, temples before the Jerusalem one. This is the world that was drawn on, and rearranged, to produce Samuel and Kings' memories of an earlier Jerusalem

    But it would be more accurate to say that (premise 1) if the 1000 BCE date for the Iron Age I terminal/Iron Age IIA initial stratum of KQ with which the inscription, the gates, the clay shrines, and the other blockbuster finds are associated is correct, and (premise 2) if KQ is a Judahite site, both reasonable but not indisputable premises, the world said stratum at KQ presents to us was, to conclude, that “drawn on, and rearranged, to produce Samuel and Kings' memories of” realities in ancient Israel before Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem.

    SSV go on to note:

if the excavators are right in dating it [the said stratum and associated finds; in particular, the inscription] so late -- against the paleography and probably the pottery -- it shows that the writer of Qeiyafa was nearly contemporary with, but separate from the standar[d]ized scribal culture that spread from the Phoenician coast to Israel and Judah.

    However, one might just as well note that (premise 1) if the stratum and associated finds, including the inscription, reflect the culture of a perimeter site of a polity which ran from Beersheba in the south to Beth-Shemesh to the north, the center of which and eastern limits of which cannot be pinned down on the basis of archaeological finds alone, a polity that (premise 2) contended with another, that of the Philistines, another polity for which we would not have a name if we did not credit biblical literature with at least some degree of accuracy in terms of its passed-down cultural memories relative to a time frame with a conceivable lower limit of 970 BCE, both reasonable but not indisputable premises, said finds, including the inscription, are compatible with the notion that, to conclude, a standardized scribal culture did not spread from the Phoenician coast to the aforementioned non-Philistine and non-Canaanite polity before the reign of King Solomon (or someone with a different name who did things similar to those attributed to him in the Bible).

    Why will some scholars balk at the formulations just offered? Some scholars, Israel Finkelstein in primis, are heavily invested in a theoretical framework in which the biblical sequence Saul-David-Solomon is deliberately called into question. Fine. Bring it on. But many others, with greater justification in my judgment, will counter that the Saul-David-Solomon sequence and the specific cultural transitions the sequence implies is one of the things biblical tradition is unlikely to have gotten completely wrong.

    My take: the finds from KQ Yossi Garfinkel and his team continue to present to the public with great fanfare are boring. They are compatible with biblical traditions about the time period in question. They also fail to confirm those traditions in the sense of proving that, for example, someone named Saul based in the northern highlands contested the Philistines, only to be succeeded by someone named David based for a time in Hebron and then in Jerusalem, to be succeeded by someone named Solomon who developed organic ties with the Phoenicians of Tyre and endowed Jerusalem with a state-sponsored temple.

    NOTE: A number of statements I make in this post will be hard to follow by anyone who has not read the relevant bibliography by Kang and Garfinkel, and the relevant articles by Singer-Avitz and Finkelstein in recent issues of Tel Aviv. Those who want pdfs of said articles are free to email me and ask for them. Further background reading, with bibliography, is available at Avi Faust's place. Note especially his article entitied "The Archaeology of the Israelite Cult." For Nadav Naaman's (far from convincing, but interesting) take on the recent finds, go here. For comment by qualified archaeologists, check out Aren Maeir here, and Owen Chesnut here.

    Jonathan Paradise has been kind enough to allow me to include here a pdf of the text of a lovely poem by Amichai, with commentary by him. The poem is the latest example of a weekly poetry column Paradise has put together for some time. If you would like to receive a Hebrew “Poem of the Week” with commentary from Paradise, email him at the address provided on his University of Minnesota faculty page, where he teaches in the Classics and Near Eastern Studies department.

    Cristian Rata (evedyahu) remarks that in many cases “dismissed professors knew that they were stepping outside the confessional statements they signed (or assented to) when they got hired.” When this happens, it is the duty of the institution’s administrators to protect the institution’s commitment to a particular confession and affiliated religious polities. Hurtado replies to Scot McKnight’s defense of the idea of a Christian college/university by agreeing that “Christian institutions have the right to maintain their religious integrity, including core faith-and-ethical commitments. But there are cases I know where issues not a part of the terms of employment, not clearly a feature of any faith-statement, have led to the summary dismissal of academic staff.” That is a key distinction. John Stackhouse notes that faculty at a state university do not always appreciate the contribution of avowedly evangelical or Christian faculty to public and academic debate. Stackhouse himself came close to being drummed out of the corps for the crime of being an evangelical Christian.

    Deane (Galbraith, whom many know from his blogging as NT Wrong, at Equinox, and at the Dunedin School) suggests that “True intellectual debate can never have limitations agreed in advance, whether the ‘secular’ or ‘Christian’ limitations you [Hurtado] mention. Conversely, to the extent that there are any such limitations, these institutions fail to be academic, and indeed compromise the entire endeavour. Some institutions fail in this regard to a greater extent than others, of course – such as those institutions which require faculty members to limit themselves to intellectual positions which are rightly considered absurd (e.g. esp. the profession of biblical inerrancy).”

    I profess to what Galbraith considers absurd, and am proud of it. Still, I agree with him that true intellectual debate requires a forum in which a wide spectrum of views is accorded a hearing. But the fact of the matter is that at most universities a wide spectrum of views on given topics does not find expression. Some views are heavily promoted, others squelched or caricatured. With exceptions, state and private universities alike tend to be good at protecting the freedom of expression of some faculty but not others, and to look kindly on some points of view, academic, political, religious, gender theory wise, and not others.

    The litmus test in my view is not whether a given institution contains within itself the widest possible spectrum of viewpoints on any given topic (though some universities model this ideal, to at least some extent). The litmus test revolves around the capacity of an academic interlocutor (individual or collective) to interact with positions she or he rejects with fairness and perspicacity.

    I have no reason to doubt that Hurtado is reacting to actual examples of academic injustice and shameful cowardice, even if he does not offer actual examples. But it would be more useful to discuss examples on the public record, both at state and private universities. 

“I have a lot more faith in the American criminal justice system than I do in Saudi Arabia’s ‘art therapy’ program.” - Charles Johnson.

I would add, sadly, “not by terribly much.”

    Those who take issue with Jamie Smith's critique include J. Daniel Kirk, Steve Douglas, and Michael Heiser.

    My agreements and disagreements with Peter Enns, Bruce Waltke, John Walton, and the reviewers just noted run deep in the case of things like the genres of Genesis 1 and 2-3, the historicity of Adam, and the nature of myth. Within the evangelical world, this is an intramural debate of great significance. A sampling of my take on these topics can be found here.

    On another level, the three constituencies ask different questions. For example: How can I get a merciful God? How shall we then live? What distinguishes the biblical understanding of divine benevolence from that of texts which bring other ANE and Mediterranean religions to expression?    

    It is possible for one and the same person to grapple with all of the above questions. It is in fact productive to do so. But it is not easy to weave the entire range of questions and answers together in a single cloth.

    Bell's trichotomy is of interest to students of biblical literature because lectio divina is a rite in Judaism and Christianity.

    Bell’s take on the differences that distinguished early Christianity from coeval Judaism is debatable but worth considering for the kind of details it emphasizes:

As befits an alternative sectarian group outside mainstream Judaism and critical of Judaism’s accommodations to a worldly ethos and political necessities, Christians made a sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders—the “way of life” and the “way of darkness”—and ritually guarded it with rites rich in the symbolism of death and rebirth. By the early 3d century in Rome, the initiate had to prepare for three years by taking religious instruction and concentrating on prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. During this time, the initiate, known as the “catechumen,” was expected to change his or her life by withdrawing from all non-Christian relationships and abandoning certain professions abhorred by the Christian community. The baptismal rite was eventually held on Easter night in commemoration of Jesus’ own passage from death to new life. The early-3d-century Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of Saint Hippolytus of Rome describes the ritual.

And when they are chosen who are set apart to receive baptism let their life be examined, whether they lived piously while catechumens, whether “they honoured the widows,” whether they visited the sick, whether they have fulfilled every good work. If those who bring them bear witness to them that they have done thus, let them hear the gospel. Moreover, from the day they are chosen, let a hand be laid on them and let them be exorcised daily. And when the day draws near on which they are to be baptised, let the bishop exorcise each one of them, that he may be certain that he is purified…. And let those who are to be baptised be instructed to wash and cleanse themselves on the fifth day of the week. And if any woman be menstruous she shall be put aside and be baptised another day. Those who are to receive baptism shall fast on the Friday and on the Saturday. And on the Saturday the bishop shall assemble those who are to be baptised in one place, and shall bid them all to pray and bow the knee. And laying his hand on them he shall exorcise every evil spirit to flee away from them and never to return to them. And when he has finished exorcising, let him breathe on their faces and seal their foreheads and ears and noses and let him raise them up [sign of the cross]. And they shall spend all the night in vigil, reading the scriptures and instructing them…. And at the hour when the cock crows they shall first pray over the water … [which should be] be pure and flowing. And they shall put off their clothes. And they shall baptise the little children first…. And next they shall baptise the grown men; and last the women, who shall have loosed their hair and laid aside [their] gold ornaments. Let no one go down to the water having any alien object with them. And at the time determined for baptising the bishop shall give thanks over the oil and put it into a vessel and it is called the Oil of Thanksgiving. And he shall take other oil and exorcise over it, and it is called the Oil of Exorcism. And let a deacon carry the Oil of Exorcism and stand on the left. And another deacon shall take the Oil of Thanksgiving and stand on the right hand. And when the presbyter takes hold of each one of those who are to be baptised, let him bid him renounce, saying: “I renounce thee, Satan, and all thy service and all thy works.” And when he has said this let him anoint him with the Oil of Exorcism saying: “Let all evil spirits depart far from thee. [Turning to the East, saying] I consent to Thee, O Father and Son and Holy Ghost, before whom all creation trembleth and is moved. Grant me to do all Thy will without blame.” Then after these things let him give him over to the presbyter who stands at the water. And a presbyter takes his right hand and he turns his face to the East. Before he descends into the water, while he still turns his face to the East, standing above the water he says after receiving the Oil of Exorcism, thus: “I believe and bow me unto Thee and all Thy service, O Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” And so he descends into the water. And let them stand in the water naked. And let a deacon likewise go down with him into the water. And let him say to him and instruct him: “Dost thou believe in one God the Father Almighty and His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ our Lord and our Savior, and His Holy Spirit, Giver of life to all creatures, the Trinity of one Substance, one Godhead, one Lordship, one Kingdom, one faith, one Baptism in the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church for life eternal?” And he who is baptised shall say thus: “Verily, I believe.” And when he who is to be baptised goes down to the water, let him who baptises lay hand on him saying thus: “Dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty?” And he who is being baptised shall say: “I believe.” Let him forthwith baptise him once, having his hand laid upon his head. And after let him say: “Dost thou believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, Who was crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate, and died and was buried. And rose the third day living from the dead and ascended into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?” And when he says: “I believe,” let him baptise him the second time. And again let him say: “Dost thou believe in the Holy Spirit in the Holy Church, and the resurrection of the flesh?” And he who is being baptised shall say: “I believe.” And so let him baptise him the third time. And afterwards when he comes up from the water he shall be anointed by the presbyter with the Oil of Thanksgiving, saying: “I anoint thee with holy oil in the Name of Jesus Christ.” And so each one drying himself with a towel they shall now put on their clothes, and after this let them be together in the assembly.

The many successive phases of the catechumen’s initiation into the Christian community described in this account emphasize the closed and sectarian nature of the organization. By the 3d century, the orthopraxy of the early phase of Jewish Christianity, already somewhat relativized by the importance of belief in Jesus Christ, began to give way to an emphasis on orthodoxy. In answer to a growing crisis in the Christian community about the middle of the 1st century, Paul decided that Gentiles (persons who were neither Romans nor Jews) who wanted to become Christians did not need to convert first to Judaism and obey all its laws; they simply needed to profess belief in Jesus. With this decision, Christianity took a decisive step toward distinguishing itself from Judaism and asserting more orthodoxic practices over orthopraxic ones. This step effectively made the message of belief in Christ independent of the cultural practices of a particular group, although Christianity continued to appropriate both Jewish and non-Jewish practices as its own and, as Hippolytus made clear, did not disregard rules and ritual. Indeed, there is evidence that many aspects of Jewish life, including food regulations and circumcision, were quite attractive to Gentiles at various times and places. Nonetheless, what it meant to become a Christian was consciously streamlined and simplified; Christianity was deliberately distinguished as a new dispensation of personal faith in contrast to the old order, now depicted as involving excessive “empty” ritualism. The act of defining Christianity in terms of a few fundamental beliefs made it possible to spread the message by missionary efforts to all sorts of cultural groups within the loose grasp of the Roman Empire. In fact, the Roman Empire had done much the same thing by recognizing local legal and religious systems wherever it went, as long as they did not fundamentally oppose Roman interests and were ready to acknowledge the central Roman cult. While Judaism essentially remained an orthopraxic system committed to preserving a holistic religiocultural way of life threatened by the diaspora, the historical situation of Christianity encouraged this new synthetic religion to define itself in more belief-oriented terms. This can be seen in the emergence of rules of faith (regula fida) that served as declarations of commitment to a developing creed and in a series of doctrinal controversies that were the vehicles for defining orthodox practice as well as heterodox practice, or heresy.

Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 5751-5819). Oxford University Press (2009). Kindle Edition. [The text Bell copiously cites, The Apostolic Tradition, deserves an online multiglot edition. The edition prepared by Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips for the Hermeneia series (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) is an excellent point of departure.]

    I have issues with Bell’s analysis. But she asks important questions and zeroes in on a text of central importance. The centrality of rite in the lived faith of most people is undeniable. Since that is the case, the details of The Apostolic Tradition ought to be known by heart by scholars of Greco-Roman Judaism and Christianity. Yet the composition is widely neglected and remains an unknown quantity to many.

  Many of us belong to several, overlapping communities.  Moreover, our location in a community may put us at odds with other members of the same community. So it went with Amos, a rancher and orchard keeper who became an itinerant prophet and clashed with Amaziah, the plenipotentiary of a state temple (Amos 7:10-17).

    Amos and Amaziah belonged to the same community, the b^ene Israel (Amos 3:1), but they did not see eye to eye. On the one hand, if Amos 2:9-10 is taken as a guide, they both would have thought of the patron deity of the nation as the one who had allowed their community of reference to dispossess the Amorite and establish themselves in the land. Nonetheless, as will be clear in a moment, when it came to the question of cui bono in the here and now, on behalf of whom one speaks and acts, they gave different answers.

    They also asked different questions. Amos developed etiologies of crime and punishment in the name of the national deity. He found the national elite wanting. Amaziah asked questions of process, and found Amos wanting.

וַיִּשְׁלַח אֲמַצְיָה כֹּהֵן בֵּית־אֵל

אֶל־יָרָבְעָם מֶלֶךְ־יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר

קָשַׁר עָלֶיךָ עָמוֹס

בְּקֶרֶב בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל

לֹא־תוּכַל הָאָרֶץ

לְהָכִיל אֶת־כָּל־דְּבָרָיו

כִּי־כֹה אָמַר עָמוֹס

בַּחֶרֶב יָמוּת יָרָבְעָם

וְיִשְׂרָאֵל גָּלֹה יִגְלֶה מֵעַל אַדְמָתוֹ

וַיֹּאמֶר אֲמַצְיָה אֶל־עָמוֹס

חֹזֶה לֵךְ בְּרַח־לְךָ אֶל־אֶרֶץ יְהוּדָה

וֶאֱכָל־שָׁם לֶחֶם

וְשָׁם תִּנָּבֵא

וּבֵית־אֵל לֹא־תוֹסִיף עוֹד לְהִנָּבֵא

כִּי מִקְדַּשׁ־מֶלֶךְ הוּא

וּבֵית מַמְלָכָה הוּא

וַיַּעַן עָמוֹס וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל־אֲמַצְיָה

לֹא־נָבִיא אָנֹכִי

וְלֹא בֶן־נָבִיא אָנֹכִי

כִּי־בוֹקֵר אָנֹכִי וּבוֹלֵס שִׁקְמִים

וַיִּקָּחֵנִי יהוה מֵאַחֲרֵי הַצֹּאן

וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי יהוה

לֵךְ הִנָּבֵא אֶל־עַמִּי יִשְׂרָאֵל

וְעַתָּה שְׁמַע דְּבַר־יהוה

אַתָּה אֹמֵר

לֹא תִנָּבֵא עַל־יִשְׂרָאֵל

וְלֹא תַטִּיף עַל־בֵּית יִשְׂחָק

לָכֵן כֹּה־אָמַר יהוה

אִשְׁתְּךָ בָּעִיר תִּזְנֶה

וּבָנֶיךָ וּבְנֹתֶיךָ בַּחֶרֶב יִפֹּלוּ

וְאַדְמָתְךָ בַּחֶבֶל תְּחֻלָּק

וְאַתָּה עַל־אֲדָמָה טְמֵאָה תָּמוּת

וְיִשְׂרָאֵל גָּלֹה יִגְלֶה מֵעַל אַדְמָתוֹ

Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent this message
to Jeroboam king of Israel: 

“Amos has conspired against you
in the midst of the house of Israel.
The country is unable
to contain his pronouncements.
Just for example, Amos said,
‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword,
Israel be displaced from its land.’”

And Amaziah said to Amos: 

“Seer, off with you to the land of Judah!
Earn your living there!
Prophesy there!
But at Bethel never prophesy again!
It is the king’s sanctuary;
it is the state temple.”

Amos replied to Amaziah: 

“I am not a prophet
nor am I a member of a prophetic guild.
I am a rancher and a tender of sycamore figs.
But the Lord took me away from the flock,
and the Lord said to me:

‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’
So now hear the word of the Lord.

You say:
‘Do not prophesy regarding Israel
 and do not preach regarding the house of Isaac.’

Therefore, this is what the Lord has said:

‘Your wife shall become a public harlot,
your sons and daughters fall by the sword;
your land divided up with a measuring line.
You yourself shall die on unclean land;
Israel shall be displaced from its land.’”

    Questions form communities. Questions divide communities.

    Alisa Harris criticizes Driscoll for this very thing. “Don’t do it, Mark!” she cries.

    Why? One of the most godly things a father can do with a son or daughter is thrust them onto the stage of life. This past year was crunch time for me to do that selfsame thing for my daughter Elisabetta. She was 16 a year ago. Now she is 17. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are pics of the two teenagers I discuss in this post.

    Things I encouraged Betta to do in the past year, and which she did, include the following: (1) co-teach confirmation class with me; (2) start a service club at her high school, a junior Rotary club, with me as advisor; (3) take first and second semester college Latin through a University of Wisconsin-Extension program, with me going over her assignments before she hands them in.

    All of these commitments were costly for the both of us. They occasioned plenty of fights and disagreements. She is headstrong. So am I. Did I push her to do things she did not want to do? Yes, I did. Did I sometimes put my foot down? I did. Did she sometimes stand up to me? She did; occasionally, with success. I would not trade these fights for the world.

    Two other things I encouraged Betta to do, which will shape her life in ways that are beyond my ability, and her ability, to fathom: (4) apply to the university of her dreams; and (5) study abroad for a year.  

    Elisabetta wants to be a missionary doctor. Paola and I, who are both pastors, are a little bit proud of how she wants to carry on the “family business” in her own way and wed it with a passion for children and Africa and an Albert Schweitzer-like love of all things bright and beautiful. Including knowledge, STEM knowledge for goodness’ sake. Including God. As she began to apply to universities and we talked about those she might apply to –Duke, Emory, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Calvin College, Wheaton, NYU (she loves NYC), Washington University in St. Louis -  I asked her where she really wanted to go. “Johns Hopkins,” she said, “but Dad, I have no chance of getting in.” She was right, but a challenge is a wonderful thing.

    The least I could do was help her try to enter the top school in the world for what she wants to do, which I did, and it probably made a difference, because I know how academics think - I are one - and what admissions officers of a school like JHU are looking for. Moreover, Betta has the very things JHU looks for in a prospective student.  And she was accepted into JHU. The day she received the email to that effect will always be remembered by us all as one of the happiest, most astounding days of her life.

    A year of study abroad. The usual window in which high school students study a year abroad is their junior year. I have issues with this, since high school is, for students with strong academic discipline, a commitment to one or more sports, and an active social life, an intense experience that is perhaps best not to cut apart in the middle (though Betta switched high schools, hometown, and friends between her sophomore and junior years, a decision made over her head by her parents which she never forgave us for, until she realized, despite all the collateral damage, that it was the best thing that ever happened to her). I can think of few things more life-changing and valuable than that of spending an entire year (but not less than a year) in a language and culture that differ from one’s own. A year between high school and college is an ideal window to accomplish that very thing. Here is Betta explaining herself to her future host families. After an orientation period at Calvin College this summer, she will go to Peru for 11 months, under the competent auspices of Rotary International.    

    On the back cover of an excellent little book the subject of which is the reason why mission-minded, service-above-self Christianity has an extremely bright future ahead of it, Mark and Ashley Driscoll are quoted as follows: “This is a readable and enjoyable biographical introduction to some great Christian leaders. We really enjoyed this book and will be giving away numerous copies.” Mark Driscoll, pastor, Mars Hill Church, Seattle, Washington, and his teenage daughter Ashley Driscoll

    Yeah, but the endorsement would have been better styled as coming from “youth leader Ashley Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, Seattle, Washington, 14 years old, and her father and pastor, Mark Driscoll.” After all, nerdy, passionate-for-God teeny boppers have an authority of their own, a distant relative of the authority of which Isaiah spoke, “a little child shall lead them.”

Fleming Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament (Kindle Locations 197-198). Kindle Edition. The print version was published by Eerdmans in 2011; Lauren Winner offers a crackerjack review in Books & Culture here.

    The first thing I want to say about Tim’s podcasts is how much I admire the clarity and concision of the five minute presentations. That said, the picture of the raptly attentive children in a public library, the teaser graphic associated with his who is the audience for Genesis post, had me hoping that he would address the question of children as an audience for the book of Genesis, which I think is an interesting topic. My 8 year old daughter is mesmerized by her Manga Bible version of the Genesis narrative. Anna not only pays attention to the fine details of the graphics and dialogue boxes, but enjoys getting the genealogies right: the genealogy of the patriarchs and matriarchs is laid out graphically in the Manga version. I like what Fleming Routledge has to say on the subject:

In the case of Old Testament stories taught to children, we are constantly tempted to moralize them, to make them teach a useful lesson according to our own ideas of what we should be imparting to students. Not only does this domesticate and tame the unruly “strange world of the Bible”; it is also boring for children. … The pastors of congregations can help to guide the teaching of children by delivering sermons in the adult congregation which seek to impart a sense of wonder and amazement. Over time, the adults who teach children will pick this up.

Fleming Rutledge. And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament (Kindle Locations 360-366). Kindle Edition. The print version was published by Eerdmans in 2011; Lauren Winner offers a crackerjack review in Books & Culture here.

    For the rest, I wonder whether it would have been more fruitful to take a concrete example of how Genesis was heard from within the Hebrew Bible rather than speculate, as Tim does in his podcast, about Ezra and the Samaritans vs. the Yehudians of the mid-Persian period as audiences of the book of Genesis. Speculation about the reception history of the Torah in the mid Persian period continues to enjoy a vogue among biblical scholars. I am not against the thought experiment. I am as convinced as the next student of the Bible that the book of Genesis, more or less in the form we have it, was read by Ezra, the inhabitants of Yehud and Samaria, and their respective diasporas, in the mid-fifth century BCE. My point is another. We have hard evidence for how it was read from substantially earlier and substantially later periods (for the latter, thanks to 1 Chron and extrabiblical parabiblical writings).

    For example, several interwoven themes of Gen 32:10-13 are reprised, not just in Isa 48:19 but in the larger whole of Isa 48:1-21; in fact entire passages from the Jacob cycle and beyond are reprised in Isa 48. Israel’s triumph through an act of God is at stake. In Isa 40-55, Israel’s vindication in the court of history – its ṣ^edāqă – is understood, without remainder, as God’s vindication of Israel; very often God is, without remainder, Israel’s vindex, the one who rectifies an intolerable situation. Isa 48, along with 46:12-13, aligns itself with the sola gratia and sola fide themes that reach expression in Gen 12; 15; 32-33; 35; and Isa 40-55 generally: the command to leave one’s home (Isa 48:20-21; Gen 12:1-3; 15:7); otherwise put, the command to return to the land of one’s ancestors (Gen 32-33; 35), along with God’s promises of success (throughout Gen 12-35 and Isa 40-55), are benevolent divine provisions the appropriation of which is contingent upon responding to the divine word with faith. Faith in the sense of reliance on God’s promises is expressis verbis in Gen 15. It is also clear that virtually every pericope of Isa 40-55, not to mention Gen 12:1-3 and parallels, aims to elicit faith. In Isa 40-55, divine benevolence, the call to faith, and the expectation of salvation construed as justification cohere.

    If I have not misunderstood, we know quite a bit about the audience of Genesis at one juncture: Jacob/Israel in exile in the 530s BCE. Otherwise said, we know quite a bit about how some of the survivors and descendants of the deportations of 598 and 586 BCE – the author of Isa 40-55 in primis - understood the book of Genesis: as a template of hope of palingenesis in the midst of exile, want, and suffering.

    Some people will be disappointed to hear that Isa 40-55 is about the divine gift of rectification received in faith, but that is, it seems to me, the long and short of it, even if a great deal of the Hebrew Bible has very different emphases.

    The long and short of the book of Genesis is different. Originating sins and originating acts of divine promise are the heart of the book of Genesis. I would say that “original sin” as it would later be called, with an almost obsessive focus on the narrative of Gen 3, does not consist of the creature wanting to be like his Creator. Rather, it consists of pursuing something that is a right and proper end in itself – in fact, the most laudable end of all, to be like God – by forbidden means.

    The proper way to become like God is not through knowing more or knowing good and evil. The proper way to become like God is by being solicitous in all of one’s relationships. For the first couple that meant, within the purview of Gen 2, to cultivate and tend the garden they were given and to exist in mutuality with one another to a degree unlike what is possible between man and beast. Within the purview of Gen 1-3, mankind is meant to dominate his surroundings in full awareness of the goodness of all of God’s creation. He is meant, as are all other living creatures, to procreate in imitation of, dependence on, and distinction from, his Creator.¹ He is like God precisely in his vocation to creative activity and power. He is meant to be God’s viceroy on earth. Instead, as Gen 3 points out, he allows a power other than God to dominate him, a trickster.

    To be sure, the plot of Gen 3 is more complex than that. It is the woman God gave man who is the focus of the story. Her desire, aesthetic and intellectual at the same time, awesome in itself, is the occasion of her downfall as soon as she acquiesces to a power at odds with the power who gave her life and breath. “Her command over her passive cohort,” as Ronald Hendel puts it, leads to his demise as well. When they do precisely what they were told not to do, their eyes are opened, just as the trickster predicted. But what they see, Hendel points out, “is an ironic surprise – their nakedness, of which they are now ashamed.”² Beyond the terrible and enduring consequences of the original sin, the narrative zeros in on God’s solicitous care for the creatures who defy him: “The Lord GOD made garments of skin for the man and his wife, and he clothed them” (Gen 3:21). They are banished from the place God originally gave them following their act of seeking to be all that one can be and to have all that one can have – by a prodigal path.

    Yet banishment is a far cry from death, the consequence God warned of should they do precisely what he told them not to do (Gen 2:17). The God who punishes is, at one and the same time, merciful and solicitous.

    The pattern is repeated in the case of fratricide (Gen 4). Cain is not repaid in the same coin. A reality external to the transgressor is once again the instigator: "If you do not do right, sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward you" (Gen 4:7). Primal sin in Gen 3 and 4 has to do with humanity’s proclivity to allow itself to be dominated by a power other than God. The phenomenology of wrongdoing the episodes encapsulate is comprehensible to modern no less than ancient human beings who know themselves, no less than Luther, to battle demons who threaten to undo them.

    Beyond that, the Torah hardly stops the account of original sins with the first pair. Nor does it immediately lunge forward to the designation of blood to atone for blood in Lev 4-5 and to the provision for expiation of wrongdoing through a blood rite, a transference rite, and acknowledgment of wrongdoing on an annual Day of Atonement, per Lev 16. The connection between the blood of Abel, the offence (ḥaṭṭāʾt) it represents, and the blood of the slaughtered animal which serves to purge (ḥiṭṭē’) the sanctuary of defilement through contact with a people of unclean hands and lips is salient, and is rightly highlighted in a recent biblical theology,³ but there are other originating sins to which Genesis bears witness: that of the divine beings who mated with humankind and produced the nefarious heroes of old (Gen 6:1-4); that of the entire earth the inhabitants of which devise nothing but evil all day long (Gen 6:5); that of the residents of Babylon who sought to build a city able to dominate the four corners of the earth, and a tower able to reach into the heavens (Gen 11); that attempted by the men of Sodom, young and old, against innocent strangers (Gen 19); that of Sarah against Hagar and her son (Gen 21:8-21); that of Jacob against Esau, which triggers Esau’s fury (Gen 27); that of the brothers of Joseph who try to rid themselves of Joseph’s existence (Gen 37). The parade goes on in Exodus and Numbers. Everywhere we see a God who by no means clears the guilty. At the same time, he mitigates punishment, forgives, and blesses (Exod 33-34). Moreover, said God gives gifts of great substance to those who put their faith in him (Gen 15): the promises of progeny and land; provisions of deliverance, a singular locus of God’s presence, a priesthood, and an array of moral and religious norms that cry out for contemporization.

    Such is the God of the Torah. That said God continues to offer these gifts to the people that understands itself to be addressed in the “Hear O Israel” of Deuteronomy is the premise of Judaism to this day. That said God continues to offer vindication to those who receive his promises in faith, promises that are thought to be renewed and re-oriented in Jesus as presented in the New Testament, is the premise of Christianity to this day.

Notes

¹ Paul Niskanen, “The Poetics of Adam: The Creation of אדם in the Image of אלהים,” JBL 129 (2009): 417-436.

² Ronald Hendel, Genesis: Introduction and Notes, in The HarperCollins Study Bible Revised Edition (Harold W. Attridge et al., eds.; New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 3-82; 9.

³ Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine biblische Gottslehre (Topoi Biblischer Theologie 1; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 309-310; ET idem, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology (tr. Mark E. Biddle;  Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011) 309-310.

    For example, a strong case has been made to the effect that the OT Peshitta, the Old Syriac Gospels, exegetical traditions attested in Ephrem and Aphrahat, and other features of Syriac Christianity bear witness to a species of Jewish Christianity with demonstrable roots in Judaism as reflected in a variety of sources; the elements in question are nonetheless not attested in the Jewish Christianities reflected in Matthew’s Gospel, the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and the Clementine Recognitions.¹

    To be sure, the dynamics and timing of the negation and partial retention, as one element in a larger synthesis, of Osrhoene/Adiabene Judaism by Christianities of the same region - with the catholic Christianities of Ephrem and Aphrahat negating less and retaining more than the Christianities of Tatian, Bardeisan, Marcion, and Mani - are no clearer to us than are the processes by which Enoch literature in the form of 1 Enoch came to be treasured among Greek-literate Christians and included among the scriptures of Ethiopic Christianity; Ezra literature in the form of 4 Ezra came to be integrated into a larger work transmitted among Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian Christians; a set of Jewish Sibylline oracles came to be integrated into a larger collection of Sibylline oracles by Greek-literate Christians; Tobit, a novella full to the brim with conflicts and concerns and conceptions of the battle between good and evil with which many Jews must have identified, came to be widely read by antique Christians; and Matthew’s Gospel came to express both great deference and great antipathy for Pharisaic Judaism.

  Nonetheless, that such occurred can only be attributed to an understanding among tradent communities that the purposes of God who is the first and the last and there is no other (Isa 44:6; 45:5) come to expression in all of these texts and all of these streams of tradition.

   Given advances in the fields of Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Samaritan, Peshitta, Old Syriac, Targum, “Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,” New Testament, and early Christian literature studies, it is possible to explore the history of the text of the Old and New Testament and the reception-history of OT and NT theology in antiquity across a wider set of text forms and a wider set of ancient Jewish and ancient Christian texts than ever before.

    When that is done, the results are interesting. For example, an understanding of repentant prayer, fasting, and good deeds as God-given means of atonement is an emphasis that is indigenous to a large cross-section of Judaisms and Christianities in antiquity. “The world belongs to grace (ṭaibuthā),” affirms Aphrahat, “until its perfection, repentance (tyābuthā) [i.e., prayer, fasting, and other fruits of repentance] is to be found in it” (Demonstration 7.27).² In particular traditions, the emphasis on said means of atonement sometimes stood in tension and sometimes went hand in hand with a recognition and emphasis on other means of atonement, including but not limited to temple sacrifice, acts of martyrdom, and other examples of suffering endured by some for the sake of others.

    A form of faith that privileged practices of contrition and mercy was constitutive of Matthean and Jacobean Christianity, many Palestinian and Babylonian synagogues insofar as they followed the teaching of the Sages, and other varieties of antique Judaism. Said understanding of faith deserves a closer look than most people are willing to give it. Ray van Leeuwen’s summary of one of Gary Andersen’s key theses in a recent monograph (Gary A. Andersen, Sin: A History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 135-51) is to the point: “almsgiving became “the commandment” for Judaism and early Christianity alike … the hands of the poor are as a sacrificial altar through which one stores up “treasures in heaven,” … alms have salvific consequences for this life and the next” (Raymond C. van Leeuwen, “Toward a Biblical Account of Sin?”, JTI 5 [2011]: 133-44; 136-37).

    Jesus’ teaching about almsgiving, prayer, fasting, and treasures in heaven as reported in Matthew 6:1-21 reflects this understanding but has been dismissed as inauthentic by some critics because the emphases enunciated are not dissimilar from those held by majority coeval Jewish teaching and later Christian teaching. To be blunt, that is an incompetent style of argument from a historical point of view.

    At the same time, the choice of many contemporary versions of Judaism and Christianity to regard such emphases as “proper” (insofar as they reflect biblical and/or traditional teaching) but not “correct” (insofar as they are incompatible with a commitment to individual autonomy or an emphasis on divine benevolence falsely so-called) amounts to a betrayal of significant proportions. The ability of religious traditions to effectively set aside key components of received heritages is enormous, but not always healthy by any means. Still, the way forward, given how far Judaism and Christianity have strayed from their roots on these matters, is not at all clear.  

¹ Sebastian P. Brock, “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” JJS 30 (1979) 212-32; “A Palestinian Targum Feature in Syriac,” JJS 46 (1995) 271-82; “The Peshitta Old Testament between Judaism and Christianity,” Cristianesimo nella Storia 19 (1998) 483-502; Gerard Rouwhorst, “Jewish Liturgical Traditions in Early Syriac Christianity,” VC 51 (1997) 74-82; Michael P. Weitzman, The Syriac Old Testament: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” JECS 9 (2001) 483-509; Bas ter Haar Romeny, “Hypothesis on the Development of Judaism and Christianity in Syria in the Period after 70 C.E.,” in Matthew and the Didache: Two Documents from the Same Milieu? (Huub van de Sandt, ed.; Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) 13-33.

² For the quote and a discussion of Demonstration 7, see Cornelia B. Horn, “Penitence in Early Christianity in Its Historical and Theological Setting: Trajectories from Eastern and Western Sources,” in Repentance in Christian Theology (Mark J. Boda and Gordon T. Smith, eds.; Collegeville: Liturgical Press / Michael Glazier, 2006) 153-187; 180-182; 182. Good deeds in the sense of care for the poor are treated separately by Aphrahat, in Demonstration 20. On care for the poor according to Aphrahat, see Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313-450) (Oxford Classical Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 125.

    On a more serious note, a commentary I wrote on Habakkuk for the open access Bible Brief series is now available. You are welcome to download it from this site. The editor of the series is Stephen L. Cook, who blogs at biblische Ausbildung.

    For everything you wanted to know about the name of Habakkuk, but were afraid to ask, see John F. Hobbins, “Il nome del profeta Abacuc,” Rivista biblica italiana 35 (1987) 307-311. I wrote that article when I was 8 years old.

פדיה נעה בין אמונה עמוקה, כמעט נאיבית,

באל כל יכול ומקיף הכול,

עד לשיח אינטימי ומתגרה

עם בורא עולם על בריאתו הבלתי מושלמת בעליל.

Pedaya moves between deep, almost naïve faith
in an omnipotent, all-encompassing God,
and an intimate, provocative dialogue
with the creator of the world regarding his plainly imperfect creation.

    Pedaya’s poetry often takes the form of prayer. The poem I present below is entitled “strength.” Devoid of punctuation in the original, with lines of irregular length, its taut energy and daring inversions will burn on the ears of any reader familiar with Jewish prayer and expectation the springs of which are found in the Tanakh. Genesis 1:27; Psalms 19, 23, and 27; Habakkuk 2:3; and morning prayer - for example - stand in the background of “strength.” The poem was previously set in English by Harvey Bock and Peter Cole. With small success, I have sought in translation to allow the traditional springs of the poem to reach the surface.

כֹּחַ

אָנָּא בְּרֹךְ

אָנָּא בְּכֹחַ

תַּתִּיר נַפְשִׁי צְרוּרָה

אָנָּא גַּעְגּוּעִים וְהֶמְיָה

דְּרוּשִׁים לִי יוֹתֵר מִן הַקַּיִָּם

שֶׁאֶכְסֹף

אֲבָל שֶׁלֹּא אַפְסִיק לְבַקֵּשׁ

אָנָּא הַחְזֵר בִּי מִלִּים שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי פַּעַם טְהוֹרוֹת

וְאֹמַר

אָנָּא רַחֵם

הַיּוֹם הַיּוֹם וְלֹא מָחָר

אָנָּא בַּשֵּׂר שֶׁגַּם אִם אֶתְמַהְמֵהַ

בּוֹא אָבוֹא

וּבִדְבָרִים עַצְמִי אֶתֵּן אָנָּא

זְכֹר אוֹתִי

עַל אֲשֶׁר אֵחַלְתִּיךָ לִי וָלֹא

עַל אֲשֶׁר אָדָם אֲנִי וּמֵת

עַל אֲשֶׁר קִירוֹת הַגּוּף נֶפֶשׁ מַכָּה

רוֹצָה תֵּעָקֵר

מַכָּה עַצְמַהּ צֹווַחַת

אָנָּא בָּרוּךְ

אָנָּא בָּרֵךְ אָנָּא

הָבֵן אוֹתִי שֶׁאֲנִי עֲרִירִית

שֶׁאֵין לִי לְמִי לְגַלּוֹת מַחֲלָתִי

שֶׁלֹּא הֵבַנְתִּי בִּזְמַן שֶׁגּוּפִי הוּא אֲנִי

וּכְשֶׁהֵבַנְתִּי לֹא יָדַעְתִּי נַפְשִׁי

לֹא מָצָאתִי מוֹצָא לַבֶּכִי כִּי יַכֶּה

כִּי אֵין

אָנָּא הָבֵן אוֹתִי שֶׁאֲנִי צְרִיכָה קְצָת זְמַן

לְחַשֵּׁב אֶת סִכּוּיֵי הַפְּרִיחָה

אִם יֵשָׁם עוֹד

וְשֶׁאֲנִי מֵאֵימָה נוֹבֶלֶת

וּבֹקֶר לְבֹקֶר מְקִיאָה

וְלַיְלָה לְלַיְלָה יְאַיֵּם גַּעַת

וְדַעַת שְׁאוֹל לִשְׁאוֹל יַגִּיעַ

וְאֵין לִי סִכּוּי עוֹד לִבְרֹא מִלִּים בְּצַלְמִי וּבְדָמִי

וְלָתֵת בָּהֵן נְשָׁמָה

אַחַת שָׁאַלְתִּי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ

שִבְתְּךָ בִּי תִּתְּךָ נְשָׁמָה

אַחַת בָּכִיתִי בְּזָכְרִי אוֹתִי

שֶׁאָז כְּשֶׁהִתְפַּלַּלְתִּי מְאוּם לֹא חָסַרְתִּי

וְעַתָּה שֶׁכְּלוּם לֹא אֹבֶה

הַכֹּל בִּי נִרְמַס אָנָּא חֹן אוֹתִי וְרַחֵם

בָּרְכֵם יָמַי טַהֲרֵם

כְּבַת גַּדְּלֵם בּוֹכָה עֲלֵי בָּבַת

אָנָּא אִם תּוּכַל

strength

please with gentleness
please with force
unwind my bound soul
please, groans and sighing
are sought by me more than what exists
that I may yearn
though nothing come,
that I not stop seeking nonetheless
please restore to me words you once put in me, pure
and I will say
please have mercy
today today not tomorrow
please give me the good news that even if I tarry
I will come
and I will put myself in things please

remember me
because I wished you for me, and not
because I am a human being, and dead
because the walls of the body a soul strikes
wishing it were uprooted
striking itself, crying out
please o blessed one
please bless please

know that I am destitute
that I have no one to whom I might reveal my sickness
that I did not understand in time that my body is me
and when I understood I did not know my self
I did not find an outlet for my crying when it strikes
because there is none

please, understand me, that I need some time
to calculate the chances of blossoming
if it will be still more devastating
and though from terror I wither
and morning by morning I vomit
and night to night threatens touch
and knowledge of the netherworld touches the netherworld
and I do not have a chance anymore of creating words in my image and in my blood
of putting breath in them

one thing I asked for, that will I seek
that you may dwell in me, give me breath
one thing I cry for when I remember myself
that when I prayed, of nothing I had want
and now that I do not desire anything
everything in me is trampled, please be gracious to me have mercy
bless my days make them pure
like a daughter make them strong crying over the apple of
please if you can

Source: מתיבה סתומה (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002)

    Haviva Pedaya is a scholar of the origins of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. For Helit Jeshurun’s interview with Pedaya, translated by Peter Cole, go here. 

    Cynthia Nielsen ably introduces Gadamer’s method to the general reader: Part I: An Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer; Part II: An Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer; Part III: An Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer; Part IV: Hans-Georg Gadamer; further (with reliance on a brilliant essay by Charles Taylor): Part I: Toward an Archaeologico-Hermeneutical Fusion; Part II: Toward an Archaeologico-Hermeneutic Fusion; Part III: Toward an Archaeologico-Hermeneutical Fusion; Part IV: Toward an Archaeologico-Hermeneutical Fusion. A very short but lucid introduction: Gadamer on Language and Being. In M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, now in its ninth edition (2009), the entry entitled interpretation and hermeneutics discusses the following theorists of interpretation in the following order: Schleiermacher and Dilthey; Betti and Hirsch; Heidegger and Gadamer. To be sure, the Glossary also notes the New Critics, structural and poststructural theories, deconstruction and reader-response criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and the new historicism. But Gadamer is the first point of destination of the entry’s discussion of the history of the discipline of hermeneutics.

    There are several reasons why Gadamer’s theory of interpretation is of general interest. For Gadamer, the goal of interpretation is to understand a text and to be open to the contribution it might make to an understanding of the humanity of others, one’s own historicity, one’s self-in-community. Even if one’s ultimate goal is to neutralize, subvert, or co-author the biblical text to the point of devoicing it and replacing its voices with one’s own, I would argue that Gadamer’s vulnerable, holistic approach to interpretation remains the proper point of departure.

    According to Gadamer, reading is not about "me, the text, and I," not even about "me and the text that I revere." It is about reading in the sense of understanding and experiencing a text with full consideration of context. Gadamer’s theory of interpretation eschews the prescription of particular methods beyond a general method based on a phenomenological description of effective and self-aware reading.  it is possible to approach the text from a number of complementary points of view. One may read the text with acute attention to its inner dynamics, transitions, and fractures. One may concentrate on its use of sources. One may reconstruct, with fierce dedication to detail, the sense the text would have had for its original author and pre-canonical implied readers. One may read the text canonically, as constituting you and calling you, with scripture interpreting scripture in light of a rule of faith and a larger tradition. A text, at least not a biblical text or any other traditional text, is not an end but a means. A traditional text is taken seriously insofar as it is seen as a pointer and an interpreter of realities beyond itself. There is an external standard of truth to a traditional text; often, there is more than one external standard: a larger tradition; reason; experience; other truths and realities to which the text is thought to point. At the same time, the traditional text itself may be viewed as the window par excellence through which all of the external standards are best understood. In that case, the traditional text becomes the norm which norms all other norms (a norma normans as opposed to a norma normata).

    Gadamer might be described as both a diachronic and synchronic interpreter. He thinks of diachrony as an uninterrupted continuum which extends from, for example, the time Psalm 137; Lam 1, and Isa 40 were composed in the 6th cent. BCE to the present, within a larger horizon that continues to expand. In that sense, he might be labeled an anti-synchronic interpreter. One might just as well affirm that he is a truly synchronic interpreter.

    Here is a favorite Gadamer quote:  

Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one forces me to do so. This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition's claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts "historically," it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian's own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naïve mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th "Lyceum Fragment" by Friedrich Schlegel reads: "The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this." By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it. (P. 355 of Truth and Method, see below, note 1, for details.)

¹ According to Gadamer, art (and literature and therefore biblical literature) discloses truth through non-mimetic means. It presents (darstellen), not represents (vorstellen), reality. For the distinction, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr, ¹1960; ⁶1990, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke); ET Truth and Method (2nd ed.; trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall; New York: Crossroad, 1989); Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage (essays originally published between 1958 and 1992; vol. 8 of Gesammelte Werke; Tübingen: Mohr, 1993); partial ET The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (trans. Nicholas Walker.; ed. Robert Bernasconi; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011), 256-92. To the “right” of Gadamer are those who concentrate on the recovery of authorial meaning without denying the truth of Gadamer’s observation that interpretation is ultimately about dialogue. For a hermeneutic intent on recovering authorial meaning, see E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976). To the “left” are methodologies which treat the biblical text as a sounding board for modern theories and ideas, or as a foil to those ideas. 

Discussions of this post elsewhere: Duane Smith; Celucien L. Joseph

    If the church is a transgenerational community spanning cultures and ages, then it makes sense for scripture and liturgy to sound the same, as much as possible, from age to age and language to language. Of late, it is the Catholic Church that has been the most intentional in revising translations and the diction of the liturgy in accordance with an ideal of faithfulness to, on the one hand, the diction of an original in a foundational language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, or Latin), and, on the other hand, long-standing traditions of interpretation.

    Unlike a number of church movements of recent coinage, the megachurch movement included (the components of which are almost fated to follow the boom and bust cycle of Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral Ministries), the Catholic Church is in it for the long haul. This is reflected in the way it has come to sponsor and prize conservative, non-paraphrastic translations like the revised edition of NAB in English (NABRE 2011, online here) and the analogous revision of the official translation of the CEI (The Italian Conference of Bishops) used, among other things, for the purposes of worship (2008, available online here).

    Orthodox churches and Protestant churches in it for the long haul also favor, with reason, translations that err on the side of formal equivalence. The new Zürcher Bibel in German, a Protestant effort and instant bestseller, embodies a similar choice in which the strangeness of the Bible is deliberately left as is in translation. I discuss the matter here, here, and here.

    At the time of the Reformation, a host of translations of the Bible in European vernaculars were produced by movements of dissent all of which adhered to an "as literal as possible, as free as necessary" ideal. In the English language, a high water point was reached In the case of the King James version, whose translators built on a tradition - Tyndale, Geneva, etc. - which placed a premium on faithfulness to the wording of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek originals; uniformity of translation across the canon (concordance); and theological perspicuity. All of the above was in line with the Renaissance ideal of a return to the sources (ad fontes).

    I am often astounded at how unaware people are about what the translation of the Bible they prefer says about their proximate goals and ultimate values. For further reflections, see my comments here and here. 

    It is not the case that people of faith take things on faith, without testing the assumptions they make, and people of science take nothing on faith, and test everything until they prove it. On the contrary, as every epistemologist knows, knowledge of all types is set within a framework of a web of belief. With the demise of positivism, it is understood that a stock of indubitable certitudes from which we might deduce all necessary knowledge does not exist. Instead, theories are devised by taking as data some of one’s beliefs about entities deemed within a theory’s scope. It is possible to back-track, but one must start there.

    As Fish aptly remarks,

with respect to a single demand — the demand that the methodological procedures of an enterprise be tethered to the world of fact in a manner unmediated by assumptions — science and religion are in the same condition of not being able to meet it (as are history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and all the rest).

    Admittedly, it is possible to define science in such a way that everything about which human beings make non-probabilistic judgments stands outside the purview of science. In that scenario, all of the really interesting questions, what Pinker refers to as imponderables - subjective experience, the self, free will, conceptual meaning, knowledge, and morality - are questions of faith, not science. Not to mention the same questions brought down to a personal level, such as, does she love me? What is the purpose of my life? Why did that happen to me?

    Though it may be the case that Pinker and Dawkins are convinced that they have no need of hypotheses relative to said questions in order to contribute to the progress of science as they understand it, they continue to slip into a discussion of the very questions which preoccupy philosophers and theologians. Regardless, as a student of literature, history, anthropology, and theology, I am thankful that I can eat my cake and have it, too. Truth, beauty, and right and wrong fall within the domain of conceptual meaning. There is no way one can converse about them except within a web of belief in which certain ideas about subjective experience, the self, free will, and knowledge are open to debate, and, at the same time, foundational to the pursuit of further knowledge. In other words, I get to ponder Pinker’s imponderables all the time. I pity him since he cannot.

    I see a banquet spread out before me. One would have thought that the dogs under the table would have wished for a few crumbs to come their way. Apparently not. They refuse even the crumbs.

    If Dawkins is satisfied with being a strident atheist and, in his own words, a “cultural Christian,” the choice is his. Fine, but it seems to me that a less fractured life, in which means and ends bear a debatable but strong relationship to one another; a more thoughtful life, in which imponderables are pondered and specific working hypotheses about the same gather up and purify our most basic hopes and fears, will continue to be found attractive by the vast majority of those who belong to that odd species with an oversize brain, homo sapiens sapiens.

    It’s ironic if you will. This is a fight between epistemologically self-aware atheists like Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton, and Jürgen Habermas, and “blinded by the light” atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Pinker. In my judgment, the self-aware are winning the argument hands down.

    Stanley Fish’s reflections are found here and here.

    It is now incumbent on politicians, entertainers, athletes, and, God forbid, academics, to articulate their faith or lack thereof. The use of explicit theological (and anti-theological) language is less and less unusual in the public square. What hath confrontational secularism wrought? Precisely this. It's called the law of unintended consequences.

    The current President, far from stepping back from the trend, rides the shark of public God-speak like a pro. He does so, not only because it is politically expedient to do so, but because it suits him.

    There is no cleavage in Obama between his public choices and his private faith. Long before his inauguration, Obama made his faith public in several ways (for example, in his The Audacity of Hope). Obama’s recent Passover/Easter message is proof that he will continue to articulate the relationship between religious faith and public virtues.

    The amount of detail in the  Passover/Easter message, in which Obama makes specific mention of “a second Seder,” “the story of the Exodus,” “the all-important gift of grace through the resurrection of His son,” is, as far as I know, unparalleled in the annals of presidential speeches.

    The speeches of Barack Obama prove that civil religion is alive and well in the United States of America. His latest Passover/Easter message is in keeping with that trend.

    You may or may not agree with Obama’s politics. You may or may not agree with the way he chooses to "hide it under a bushel no." Regardless, Barack Obama is developing his presidential persona at the intersection of faith and politics in ways that are bound to affect presidential politics for decades to come.

    Here is the text of the president's message:

    For millions of Americans, this weekend is a time to celebrate redemption at God’s hand. Tonight, Jews will gather for a second Seder, where they will retell the story of the Exodus. And tomorrow, my family will join Christians around the world as we thank God for the all-important gift of grace through the resurrection of His son, and experience the wonder of Easter morning. 

    These holidays have their roots in miracles that took place thousands of years ago. They connect us to our past and give us strength as we face the future. And they remind us of the common thread of humanity that connects us all. 

    For me, and for countless other Christians, Easter weekend is a time to reflect and rejoice. Yesterday, many of us took a few quiet moments to try and fathom the tremendous sacrifice Jesus made for all of us. Tomorrow, we will celebrate the resurrection of a savior who died so that we might live. 

    And throughout these sacred days, we recommit ourselves to following His example. We rededicate our time on Earth to selflessness, and to loving our neighbors.  We remind ourselves that no matter who we are, or how much we achieve, we each stand humbled before an almighty God. 

    Christ’s triumph over death holds special meaning for Christians.  But all of us, no matter how or whether we believe, can identify with elements of His story.  The triumph of hope over despair.  Of faith over doubt. The notion that there is something out there that is bigger than ourselves. 

    These beliefs help unite Americans of all faiths and backgrounds. They shape our values and guide our work. They put our lives in perspective. 

    So to all Christians celebrating the Resurrection with us, Michelle and I want to wish you a blessed and Happy Easter.  And to all Americans, I hope you have a weekend filled with joy and reflection, focused on the things that matter most.  God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. 

Here is the text of separate, Passover-only message:

I'd like to wish a happy holiday to all those celebrating Passover.

The story of the Exodus is thousands of years old, but it remains as relevant as ever. Throughout our history, there are those who have targeted the Jewish people for harm - a fact we were so painfully reminded of just a few weeks ago in Toulouse. Just as throughout history, there have been those who have sought to oppress others because of their faith, ethnicity or color of their skin.

But tomorrow night, Jews around the world will renew their faith that liberty will ultimately prevail over tyranny. They will give thanks for the blessings of freedom, while remembering those who are still not free. And they will ask one of our life's most difficult questions: Once we have passed from bondage to liberty, how do we make the most of all that God has given us?

This question may never be resolved, but throughout the years, the search for answers has deepened the Jewish people's commitment to repairing the world, and inspired American Jews to help make our union more perfect. And the story of that first Exodus has also inspired those who are not Jewish with common hopes, and a common sense of obligation.

So this is a very special tradition - and it's one I'm proud to be taking part of tomorrow night, at the fourth annual White House Seder. Led by Jewish members of my staff, we'll retell the story of the Exodus, listen to our youngest guest ask the four questions, and of course, look forward to a good bowl of matzo ball soup.

Michelle and I are proud to celebrate with friends here at home and around the world, including those in the State of Israel.

So on behalf of the entire Obama family, Chag Sameach

    It might also be important to try again to conceive of a history of the religion of Israel, a history of emergent Christianity and normative Judaism, insofar as they can be constructed from biblical, post-biblical, and non-biblical sources. Now is an inopportune time to walk away from the questions which have animated modern biblical studies from the beginning.

    Passover and Easter allow further formulations. Beyond Hegel, beyond the Shoah, in light of the “unbearable lightness of being” (Milan Kundera), it is still possible to pose the question, with Emil Fackenheim, of “God’s presence in history.”³ The sense in which the following statement was meant to be true also remains of interest: “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and handled with our hands … we declare to you” (1 John 1:1-3).

    A sense of history and historicity is as important today as it has ever been. A historical approach to the Bible adequate to its object might provide insight into the shape of life not only then and there, but here and now.

    Raymond van Leeuwen⁴ has recently seen fit to point out the gross inadequacies of approaches to the Bible which judge its contents on the basis of the following modern ideas: (1) the idea that the master narrative of history consists of an enfolding of freedom and progress (“historicism” in the terminology of van Leeuwen); and (2) the rival (or complementary) modern idea, that the particular approach to reality of science and technology is the key to human flourishing (“scientism”).

    The point is cogent. Historicism and scientism so defined are modern myths. In the diction of Bruce Lincoln, they are ideologies in narrative form.⁵ Both stand in contradiction to the narrative of the Bible in which everything hinges on a vital relationship with a singular principle of truth, justice, and goodness which occurs to people as a God of great power and beauty.

    Van Leeuwen goes on to argue for a reorientation of academic biblical interpretation in which the long-standing emphasis on things like elucidating the history of the religion of Israel and delimiting the date, provenance, and historical matrix of the Bible’s component parts would be replaced by an approach to the text in which the truth it tells is seen to reside in the text and not outside of it. In particular, a literary critic of the stature of Meir Sternberg is thought to illuminate the text and attend to its truth claims more adequately than a text critic, source critic, and historian of religion of the stature of, say, Julius Wellhausen.

    There I would hesitate. With Gadamer,⁶ it seems better to insist on the historicity of all understanding, that of authors and readers first of all, and aim for dialogue. Author, reader, text, and the realities the text points to, all require attention. Each deserves to be honored and “defended” from the other terms of the equation. In my judgment, the methodologies of a source critic like Wellhausen and a literary critic like Sternberg, along with those of an archaeologist like Avraham Faust, a biblical theologian like Bernd Janowski, a scholar of cultural history like Seth Sanders, and a scholar of comparative law and religion like Jacob Finkelstein – each approach has important contributions to make if the truth claims of biblical literature are to be given their due rather than swept under the rug.

    To put it in the sharpest of terms, I cannot follow van Leeuwen when he states that “the historical quest of the sources of a text is incompatible with experiencing the text as … a ‘discourse’ that mediates the world and its significance, by stylizing it, by fashioning it into a mode of being that is not the world but communicates the world’s meaning to its readers. The proper stance before any great text or object of knowing is humility and reverence, even delight and love.”

    On the contrary, if a text presents itself to a reader as the sum of a variety of precursor texts, the whole is unquestionably greater than the sum of its parts, but an understanding of the whole is enhanced to the extent that a reader can take the text apart and put it back together again.

    Moreover, if a particular textual component corrects or contradicts another, why is it irreverent or unloving to point it out? The point is obvious in the case of the book of Job. The truth it mediates lies at the intersection of not one contradittorio (cross-examination, debate) but many. It is no less true in the case of the Pentateuch, if one treats it, as one should, as a literary whole. For example, the treatment of specific topics across the various legal corpora, the Covenant Code, Deuteronomy, and the Holiness Code, embodies a debate, the sum of whose parts must be constructed beyond the bounds of the text. There is a strong sense in which the truth Torah tells inevitably resides, not in the text before us, but outside of it.

    One must look beyond the text again insofar as the attributes of God revealed in Exod 34:6-7 are at stake. They are at stake, whenever anything happens in this world, unless the text is void of significance.

    Thus, if one treats the Tanakh as a literary whole, as one should, the controversy over the cross-generational transfer of the consequences of human behavior, per Exod 34:6-7, to the point of whole scale destruction, exile, and the end of any semblance of self-rule to which torah, prophecy, and lament bear witness has to be seen in terms of sources and specific historical situations. The texts themselves so see it. A truncated list of relevant texts: Lev 26:27-45; Deut 29:2-30:10; Lam 5:7; Isa 40:2; 43:26-28; 50:1; 53-1-12; Jer 31:27-30; Ezek 16; 18.

    The truth claims of Exod 34:6-7 were thought to hold water outside of the singular world of a singular text. In point of fact, the attributes of God revealed in Exod 34:6-7 were thought to be universally valid, however problematic such a claim was in practice (so, e.g., the book of Jonah). No wonder, then, that the divine middot of Exod 34:6-7 find a place in the Ten Words. 

    Source citation is occasionally explicit in biblical texts (Ezra 5; Matt 5:17-48; 1 Cor 7). More often, the sourcing is implicit (e.g. the selective citation of Exod 34:6-7 in Jon 4:2). Even if it is covert (e.g., the case of Amenemope and Prov 22:17-32:11), it is not a sign of suspicion or irreverence to bring it to light and establish meaning on that basis.

    Van Leeuwen's description of the Bible as a text which seeks to communicate the world's meaning to its readers is eloquent. With that in mind, it seems all the more appropriate to approach the biblical text with humility and reverence from every point on the methodological compass, not just one.

    I am aware of how sleep-inducing source-criticism often is. By definition, it is a thought experiment of grand proportions built on tenuous foundations. Source-critics, furthermore, often seem to have a cruder grasp of inner textual dynamics than critics who leave diachrony to one side.

    I cannot forget a conversation I had with Rolf Rendtorff less than a decade ago. Forget about source criticism, he said, with considerable vehemence. The sentiment is understandable, but the paradox is this. The day will soon arrive in which most details of the source-critical and redaction-critical work of the last 50 years will fade from memory, but the task of writing a history of the religion of Israel, the grand project of Wellhausen, will remain. No attempt to proceed with the project will be taken seriously if questions of date, author, provenance of biblical writings, and emplotted sources and traditions are bypassed.

    There are fundamental questions which stand no chance of being adequately addressed apart from a discussion of the source-, tradition-, and canon-consciousness the texts reflect. These questions include: what a biblical understanding of history and of the historicity of the human subject look like. If that is the case, the need for a historical approach to the Bible that is adequate to its object is as pressing as ever.

    Benjamin Sommer also seems to want to see a shift of attention away from the typical questions a historical critic poses in order to focus on the timeless dimensions of the text, a grasp of which, he comes close to saying, does not depend on getting to the bottom of the kind of questions over which academic biblical study has heretofore labored with passion and energy.⁷

    Sommer does an excellent job of pointing out how weak and ineffectual arguments made for dating a particular biblical text often are. The irony is this. His latest volume, of blockbuster importance, marries an interest in history, history of religion, philology, and archaeology with an interest in theology, in the hallowed tradition of the much despised biblical theology movement.⁸ It turns out that Sommer qua biblical scholar is a gregarious matchmaker. He himself offers discussions of “timeless” (one might prefer more precise qualifiers, such as “perennial,” or “of long duration”) dimensions of textual meaning that depend on determinations of date, authorship, genre, historical context, and social location. To be sure, Sommer's determinations are grounded in a helpful sensitivity to anthropological and historical constants.

    Sommer is good at pointing out that great swathes of biblical narrative, law, prophecy, psalmody, and instruction are just as credibly dated to the 8^th or 7^th century as to the 6^th, 5^th, or 4^th century. However, when he gets down to brass tacks, he correlates texts with delimited historical contexts ranging from pre-8^th century, 8^th century, 7^th century, and so on, down to the 2^nd century of the former era. As it should be.

    In a volume rich with acute methodological considerations, Angela Roskop seeks to read select itinerary notices in the Torah with a focus on the added value scribes built into the fabric of the narrative. But she refuses to play off a concern for reading the composite text as a unified whole against the traditional concern of elucidating the composition history of the text. I also see her as choosing not to privilege one of the terms of the following binaries over the other: historical veracity over fictional versatility (“fictional” of course is not the opposite of truth nor even of fact, insofar as art by definition reveals the truth or truth which comes to expression, not in one set of facts but, at least potentially, in many); reason over myth; and argument over metaphor. The takeaway of Roskop’s volume may seem meager, in that she does not offer the Pentateuchal equivalent to a Theory of Everything capable of unifying all the fundamental interactions of nature. But she is clearly working on it, as must any self-respecting student of the Pentateuch who has read widely in the field.⁹

    What do van Leeuwen, Sommer, and Roskop have in common? An openness to the possibility that biblical literature contains truths of perennial validity. In my judgment, an interdisciplinary approach to the biblical text, as opposed to a purely source-conscious, purely literary, purely anthropological, purely political, or purely theological approach, stands the best chance of ensuring that such openness is fecund.

Notes

¹ Robert Kawashima, in his review of Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), remarked as follows:

“what distinguishes this view of kingship from Hammurabi’s ‘imperial ideology’ is” that “[b]ehind the apparent hubris of Hammurabi’s fantastic claim to have assumed the throne at the time of creation lies the mythic idea that human institutions are nontemporal, i.e., aspects of the unchanging cosmos. Behind texts such as 1 Samuel 8 and Deuteronomy 17 lies the revolutionary idea that such institutions are temporal, originating in the flux of human existence. Biblical literature not only introduced the people into history; it invented the concept of history itself.”

² Arnaldo Momigliano wrote extensively on the notions of history and universal history in Greek, Roman, and Jewish antiquity. He also wrote with great insight on modern historiography. It is best to read Momigliano wherever possible in Italian. The long awaited Decimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, edited by Riccardo Di Donato, has just appeared (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2012). The other nine contributions remain in print. The biblical scholar will want to read widely in his Contributi. Failing that, the best two places to begin are The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Sather Classical Lectures 54; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Pagine ebraiche (ed. Silvia Berti; Torino: Einaudi, 1987; ET Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (ed. Silvia Berti; trans. Maura Masella-Gayley; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Berti’s piece for the centenary of Momigliano’s birth (1908/2008) is stupendous; go here. A favorite quote: “Perché — così mi disse durante una conversazione pisana — un problema storico, se è vero problema storico, e non un semplice accertamento di fatti, te lo porti dietro tutta la vita.” The following essays by Momigliano deserve to be mentioned in this context: “Il tempo nella storiografia antica [1966],” in La storiografia greca (Torino: Einaudi, 1982) 64-94; ≈ “Time in Ancient Historiography,” History and Theory 6 (1966) 1-23; “Le origini della storia universale,” in Tra storia e storicismo (Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1985) 25-55; ≈ “The Origins of Universal History” in On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987 [1979]) 31-57; “Il posto della storiografia antica nella storiografia moderna,” in Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Torino: Einaudi, 1984) 46-69; ≈ “The Place of Ancient Historiography in Modern Historiography,” in Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (storia e letteratura; raccolta di studie e testi 161; Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984) 13-36; “Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi,” and “Profezia e storiografia,“ in Pagine ebraiche (Torino: Einaudi, 1987) 33-39 and 109-116, respectively; ≈ “Daniel and the Greek Theory of Imperial Succession” and “Prophecy and Historiography” in Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (ed. Silvia Berti; trans. Maura Masella-Gayley; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 29-35 and 101-108, respectively; “Storiografia pagana e cristiana nel secolo IV d.C.,” in Il conflitto tra paganesimo e cristianesimo nel secolo IV (ed. Arnaldo Momigliano; Torino, Einaudi, 1975); ≈ “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977) 107-26; repr. from idem, The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) 79-99. A key statement:

“The Hebrew historian never claimed to be a prophet. He never said ’The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.’ But the pages of the historical books of the Bible are full of prophets who interpret events because they know what was, what is, and what will come to pass. The historian implicitly subordinates himself to the prophet, he derives his own values from him. The relation between the historian and the prophet is the Hebrew counterpart to the Greek relation between historian and philosopher. But, at least since Plato decisively formulated the antithesis between time and eternity for which he is noted, there could be no collaboration in Greek thought between history and philosophy as there was in Hebrew thought between history and prophecy” (“Time in Ancient Historiography,” History and Theory 6 [1966] 1-23; 20; I have tweaked the ET here and there in the interests of greater perspicuity).

³ Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (Charles F. Deems Lectures; New York: New York University Press, 1970; repr. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1999).

⁴ Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, “The Quest for the Historical Leviathan: Truth and Method in Biblical Studies,” JTI 5 (2011) 145-58. Online here.

⁵ Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 147.

⁶ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr, ¹1960; ⁶1990, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke); ET Truth and Method (2nd ed.; trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall; New York: Crossroad, 1989). Gadamer’s project revolved around examining how hermeneutics post-Heidegger “can do justice to the historicity of understanding” (268).

⁷ Benjamin Sommer, “Dating Pentateuchal Texts and the Perils of Pseudo-Historicism,” in Thomas B. Dozeman, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch J. Schwartz, eds., The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research (FAT 78; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 85-108. Online here. 

⁸ Benjamin Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

⁹ Angela Roskop, The Wilderness Itineraries: Genre, Geography, and the Growth of Torah (History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 3; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011).

Additional Bibliography

Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006); The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, forthcoming);, Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming); Jacob J. Finkelstein, “The West, the Bible and the Ancient East: Apperceptions and Categorisations”, Man 9 (1974) 591-608; “The Ox That Gored,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 71/2 (1981) 1-89; Bernd Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen. Traditions- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zur Sühnetheologie der Priesterschrift (WMANT 55; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2000 [¹1983]); Gottes Gegenwart in Israel. Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments 1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2004 [¹1993]); idem, Stellvertretung. Alttestamentliche Studien zu einem theologischen Grundbegriff (SBS 165; Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelwerk, 1998 [¹1997]); Die rettende Gerechtigkeit. Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments 2 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999); Der Gott des Lebens. Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments 3 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2003; Konfliktgespräche mit Gott. Eine Anthropologie der Psalmen (3d ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2009 [¹2003]); Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Traditions [gen. ed., Gregory Nagy; editorial board: Olga M. Davidson, Bruce Lincoln, and Alexander Nehamas]; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. Mit einem Stellenregister (De Gruyter Studienbuch; Berlin: de Gruyter, ebook 2012; ≈ 2d ed.; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1883; revision of Geschichte Israels. In zwei Banden. Erster Band; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878; ET of 2d ed., Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Meridian Books, 1957; repr. of Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel; trans., J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies; Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885; trans. of Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, idem, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (10th ed., a reprint of the 7th ed. [1914], with a foreword by Rudolf Smend, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981; 1^st ed., Berlin: G. Reimer, 1894), idem, Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments (4th ed., a reprint of the 1963 repr., Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012; 1^st ed., Berlin: G. Reimer, 1876/77; 3^rd ed., 1899)

    People long to do whatever they want. They don’t want anyone to tell them what to do or what to say. But they also long to order their lives in accordance with a concept of right and wrong, and join forces with others who have a same or similar concept of right and wrong. People are in search of a constitution, a commonwealth, that suits them. The contradiction is blatant.

    The Bible clashes with a libertarian point of view. The Bible is a conglomerate of texts assembled at the intersection of ancient polities, movements, institutions, and traditions. It is full of liberty-restricting provisions and considerations in the service of the long-term viability of said polities and traditions. The Bible simply is an illiberal book. At times it takes an anthropologist to point this out. In her still important critique of Jacob Neusner’s The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism, Mary Douglas pointed out that the rule-making that is part and parcel of biblical exhortation and, specifically, of Torah, both in and beyond the Bible per se, is coercive in intent. That is, biblical instruction is about a polity's self-definition over against the perceived identities of competing polities; in other language, it is about vocation and election. Douglas on Lev 18: “to declare adultery and all improper sex impure, is not that a blow struck in defense of marriage and the family?”¹ It is such a blow, and those who value individual freedoms above all will look elsewhere for a constitution and a res_publica. They will look for a framework that privileges and protects a more expansive concept of res privata than that found in biblical literature, Judaism, and Christianity.²  

    If libertarians get bent out of shape by the responsibility clause³ of the “Affordable Health Care Act,” then the very numerous responsibility clauses in the Bible must throw them for an absolute loop.

    Perhaps, just perhaps, a libertarian might argue that not all responsibility clauses are created equal. Perhaps there are responsibilities a government or religion might propose as incumbent on everyone. Perhaps it is all right for governments to make some responsibilities incumbent on all, such as taxes, and military service in a time of invasion. Perhaps it is all right for religions to propose a very broad set of responsibilities to any who will accept them, and regulate membership to a particular organization on the basis of adherence to them.

    Perhaps. But in that case, I want to hear arguments to that effect from a libertarian point of view. I am a convinced communitarian. I believe in social construction, and see the public square as the place to argue for particular social constructions. Still, I want to get along with libertarians. It would help if they provided arguments for their position, rather than slogans such as “don’t tread on me,” and “give me liberty, or give me death.”

Notes

¹ Mary Douglas, “Critique and Commentary,” in Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1973) 137-142; 141.

² The amazing thing about the Bible, to be sure, is that it has authority apart from any coercion beyond the pristine force of its language. On that topic, go here.

³ The affordability clause is that part of the AHCA which requires that everyone buy health insurance. To be clear, it seems idiotic to require people to buy anything. If that part of the AHCA intends to enforce a social responsibility, not unlike that of paying into Social Security and contributing to Medicare, then it would have been wise to legislate it as a tax, rather than base the responsibility clause’s constitutionality on the commerce clause. So, at least, it seems to me.