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September 26, 2007
Good Book Reviewin'
David Plotz on James Kugel's How to Read the Bible:
God himself has an equally murky personal history. At the start of the Bible, God is often viewed as just one of many gods. Only later in the book does he become the sole deity. More confusingly, he doesn’t even seem to be the same god throughout the book. Mostly, God is called YHWH, but sometimes, especially in the earlier books, he’s known as El. According to Kugel, these are probably two different deities fused into one: El may have been a god in the Canaanite pantheon, while YHWH may have been a Midianite god imported, via nomads, to the early Israelites, who made him their only god.
One purpose of “How to Read the Bible” is to recapture the Bible from literalists, and Kugel certainly succeeds. His tour through the scholarship demonstrates why it makes no sense to believe that every word of the Bible is true history. Piling on, he also contends that modern Bible literalism, that brand of six-day-creationism favored by fundamentalists, is wildly out of step with traditional Christian interpretation. Such monomaniacal focus on the Bible’s literal truth is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s not so much that readers of yore didn’t believe the Bible’s truth; they just didn’t waste a lot of time trying to prove impossible events like the Flood.
But vanquishing the literalists is only half of Kugel’s project. He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers. In other words, having broken all the windows, trashed the bedroom, stripped the wires for copper, sold the plumbing for scrap, and jackhammered into the foundation, Kugel proposes to move back into his Bible house.
Tyler Cowen also loves it.
September 26, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Once upon a time...
I took an elective course at my loosely Methodist-related college (DePauw Univ. in Greencastle IN) on the old testament. At the time I didn't know that scholars of the bible had been teasing apart - for a very long time - the strands of authorship (and time of authorship), verse by verse. So we did a goodly amount of this in class, to the enlightenment of most of the class.
We learned the things that theologians have known but are rarely hinted at in church services, and that among those things was the truth that 'spinning' (the word wasn't in use at that early moment in my life) was always and often deployed by the various sources and editors over time. The bible is/was not literal history, and wasn't intended that way. The truths are moral truths, not anything more in most cases. That isn't to say that some historical events (but not all of them - those that didn't fit the plot outline were omitted) are not portrayed with some fidelity. But the bottom line for me was probably very different than what was intended for the course - I came away feeling that the bible was a notable literary work that reflected not just on the times mentioned and described but on events that occured deep in the past when oral story telling and tradition provided the thread of social and religious community. But the central claim that some make - that a god is speaking through these words, or that it was devinely inspired is very unlikely to be true.
As a rough analogy, reading the US Declaration of Independence or the Constitution without some fairly deep knowledge of the historical (in some cases reaching back hundreds of years), philosophical and personal attitudes and beliefs of the time, gives a very distorted view of what the words in those documents 'really' mean, if a single meaning can be ever determined, which is unlikely. You really do need the Federalist Papers, and a lot more, to fill in those concepts and ideas. And then the more pertinent question can be addressed: what if anything can be learned from this past that provides guideposts for today while recognizing we all live in our own time and must take responsibility for our own acts. We shouldn't and can't point to a book and say that's how we should live.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Sep 26, 2007 2:33:40 PM
But vanquishing the literalists is only half of Kugel’s project. He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers. In other words, having broken all the windows, trashed the bedroom, stripped the wires for copper, sold the plumbing for scrap, and jackhammered into the foundation, Kugel proposes to move back into his Bible house.
This paragraph makes me wonder if Plotz actually read the book, or if it all just flew over his head. After spending all this time in his review talking about all the people who don't take the Bible literally and how biblical literalism is a recent and marginal viewpoint within Christianity, Plotz then relies upon the truth of the biblical literalists' claims about the Bible to suggest that Kugel "trashed the bedroom" and "sold the plumbing for scrap."
It's a stupid and wrong metaphor, and Plotz should be embarassed by it. Perhaps in the future he'll resist the urge to be clever, but I doubt it.
Posted by: Stephen | Sep 26, 2007 2:50:00 PM
There are others. One that I like is by Peter Gomes. It's called "The Good Book."
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Book-Reading-Bible-Heart/dp/0380723239
What makes it really effective is how it looks at different groups, and how Biblical language has been used by literalists at different periods to justify whatever prejudice they happened to be peddling.
Posted by: akaison | Sep 26, 2007 3:07:17 PM
Catholics never believed the Bible was literal truth. That is reserved for whatever crazy thing the Bishop of Rome says when he is sitting on the magic throne.
Posted by: blame the Jesuits | Sep 26, 2007 4:15:51 PM
That is reserved for whatever crazy thing the Bishop of Rome says when he is sitting on the magic throne.
That's dumb. I'm getting pretty sick of dumb statements like this.
Posted by: Stephen | Sep 26, 2007 4:30:02 PM
Such monomaniacal focus on the Bible’s literal truth is a relatively new phenomenon.
And the history of that phenomenon is itself fascinating. It's all about the Enlightenment squeeze, with rationalism on one side and individualised faith on the other.
You have to wonder what a 'Homeric literalist' movement would be like were there people who still worshipped the Greek gods.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Sep 26, 2007 5:08:35 PM
The Flood was impossible? Really?
Posted by: Garuda | Sep 26, 2007 6:08:29 PM
He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers.
"Rationalist believers?" A contradiction in terms.
Criticizing biblical literalism is easy, which is why liberal Christians do it. Defending the proposition that the Bible is worthy of respect even if understood as metaphor or parable is much harder. The God of the Old Testament is a cruel, vindictive monster whether the scriptures are supposed to be literally true or just fictional stories to illustrate God's character.
Posted by: JasonR | Sep 26, 2007 7:29:11 PM
It's been known for well over a century that the story of the Deluge predated Genesis, and was a Chaldean myth.
Some have suggested that the Chaldean myth was based on a huge flood that is alleged to have occurred in Mesopotamia, but that's about it. No worldwide Deluge.
Another point. The Bible contains too many internal inconsistencies to be taken literally. More over, there were more than a few passages that were added to the various books by much later generations for them to be taken seriously.
Posted by: raj | Sep 27, 2007 9:23:10 AM
Kugel has long been teaching a very popular class based on this material at Harvard. He opens the first lecture by telling his audience that literalists who do not want to have their beliefs in literalism shaken might want to leave, no hard feelings. One of the things that was particularly interesting to me was discovering how much of the familiar bible stories I thought I "knew" were actually textual gloss that filled in the gaps and papered over the inconsistencies in the actual verses to create coherent, non-contradictory narratives.
Posted by: M. Gemmill | Sep 27, 2007 11:43:05 AM
Claims to a "Literal" Reading are almost universally bullshit. Those claiming to read the Bible "literally" almost invariably mean "I interpret it, but my interpretation is correct".
The God of the Old Testament is a cruel, vindictive monster whether the scriptures are supposed to be literally true or just fictional stories to illustrate God's character.
The "old testament" was compiled over a long time and their understanding of god grew along with it. The tribal vengeful and jealous God is mainly a product of the earliest parts. The later parts however, even of the OT, were written as the Jews gained exposure to the the superior religious outlook of the Greeks and Iranians, and show the resulting advances in Jewish thought.
There are deeper philosophical messages in the Bible. One can safely say that the authors of the bible largely did not intend, or want, for it to be taken "literally".
Posted by: r4d20 | Sep 27, 2007 12:48:23 PM
No sign of an exodus from Egypt;
Actually, there is quite a bit of evidence that the exodus story is, at heart, based on the Hiksos expulsion.
Posted by: r4d20 | Sep 27, 2007 1:09:08 PM
Not to detract from the considerable and important work done by James Kugel, but a lot of this territory was covered in "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" by Isaac Asimov, written in two parts in 1967 and 1969. Check it out.
Posted by: Dean Austin | Sep 27, 2007 5:31:45 PM
