Transcription
This is a lecture by Yale professor of Hebrew Bible, Dr. Joel Bayen, and we're going to do some commentary on this powerful lecture on the creation of the Hebrew Bible. That should give you something for you to think about on your journey and your progress towards entering into the Free World. So here we go.
Before I jump in, uh, let me, uh, say just a little bit about me. Very little, uh, since some of it was just covered. Uh, the most important thing, I suppose, is I am a, uh, Jewish professor at a Christian Divinity School. Um, and I, and I have been, uh, for almost 20 years, uh, at the school. I've been Jewish longer than that. Uh, uh, that's kind of a wild thing to, to do and to be, but it certainly has given me a lot of opportunity to think about, um, what I think we're doing with the Bible. Uh, I teach a community at Yale that is pretty diverse, uh, aside from everyone being Christian. Uh, so not maybe s- s- too unlike, uh, this space. Uh, Yale is not a seminary where we're teaching the students what to think or believe. Uh, I have a classroom full of Episcopalians and Catholics and Lutherans and Presbyterians and evangelicals and so many ex-evangelicals. That means that all the information that we're about to learn in this lecture is exactly what all the Christians learn who graduate from his course at Yale University, and they still go on to teach the word of the Lord if they become pastors or preachers, like many of them do. This doesn't come out of their mouths when they go and teach to people, and therefore, everyone continues to stay in the realm of being just a believer. But not anymore, and not today.
Let's continue going, um, and, uh, there would be no way for me to say something, uh, about what they should all commonly think or believe, even if I were inclined to do so, which, as a Jew, I'm really not. Um, so what I teach is a lot of what I'm going to be talking about, uh, today, which is the history of the text, uh, which we all share, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. Uh, and rather than what to think about the Bible, how to think about it. Uh, I, I think, uh, to be quite honest, that I have the greatest job in the world, uh, and I'm looking forward to sharing a little bit of it, uh, with you.
So my task today, much appreciated, uh, was to speak about creating the Hebrew Bible. And at least I wasn't given a particularly broad topic. Uh, the how to go about how to go about that kept me up at night a little bit. Uh, the various parts of the Hebrew Bible all have different literary histories. The Pentateuch, the first five books, uh, are different in their literary history from the books of Joshua through Kings. The prophets have their own histories, each of them distinct from the others. Psalms are different still, and Proverbs and Chronicles. Not that anyone has ever cared about Chronicles. Uh, I mean, I could have spent, no, I have spent my entire career basically, uh, working just on the literary history of the Pentateuch. Uh, I could give you a 10-lecture series on the Pentateuch alone and still not cover it all. We'll talk about that later. Uh, so while I'm going to touch on all of these various texts over the course of the next, however long I end up speaking, four or five hours, we're all good for that, right? Okay. Uh, this is, this is going to be something of a bird's-eye view, uh, of how the Hebrew Bible came to be. And of course, I'll spend some time, uh, talking about why I think it matters in the end.
Before we get into how the Hebrew Bible came to be, uh, I'd like to take a moment to think about what the Hebrew Bible actually is. Uh, and I don't mean sort of like conceptually, what is the Bible to us, but like literally, uh, when you pick up your Bible here at Watch Hill, and they are sitting in the pews in front of you, don't pick it up now, uh, when you turn to the first part of it, that is the the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, what are you actually looking at? Uh, well, in your Bibles, I'm fairly certain you will see the Book of Ruth, uh, coming after the Book of Judges. Uh, and, uh, I'm pretty sure that you would find that just before you get to the New Testament, you're reading, uh, all the prophets. And that means that you're not reading the Hebrew Bible. That means you're reading the Old Testament. And you might think, well, what's the difference? They are basically the same books, though they are in a different order, uh, arranged, uh, in the New Testament to lead prophetically into, in, in your, your Bibles, rather, the Old Testament is arranged to lead into the New Testament, right? So the prophets come at the end as prophecies of what is about to come. Um, which is not the case for the Hebrew Bible or the Jewish Bible, in which the prophets are smack in the middle, and we end with Chronicles. Um, uh, in short, the Old Testament is a Christian book and leads, it goes before the, the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible is a Jewish book, and it goes before nothing.
More accurately, maybe even, the Hebrew Bible is a collection of ancient Israelite literary works. And that's the context, ancient Israel, uh, in which, and importantly for which, uh, these texts were created. Ancient Israel for which these texts were created. And this is important to clearly understand because a lot of people, they open up the scriptures and they think that the words in there are talking about them today. And so that God in the Old Testament, that was how they perceived God to be. That's why it repeatedly says in the Bible, "the God of Israel," right? That's the deity that they created for themselves. While the other people, they had deities that they had created for themselves as well.
Even beyond the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible nomenclature issue, what is it that you're actually reading? Unless you are an Orthodox Jew, I think I'm in the clear. Uh, you have always encountered the Bible in translation, whether it's English or whatever your vernacular language of choice happens to be. Uh, maybe in Latin, if there's some old-school Catholics out there. Uh, and while you were reading your Bible, uh, you probably thought, "Hey, I'm reading the Bible." But you were reading a translation. Uh-oh. You're reading a translation. And what exactly does this mean? And all translations are interpretations. They all involve choices that are largely invisible to the reader. Uh, what were those translators actually translating? Every modern translation of the Hebrew Bible is based on a single manuscript. It is the oldest complete text of the Hebrew Bible that we have in the world, and it is from the 11th century CE. So like, not BCE, like the recent 11th century. Uh, like less than a thousand years ago. Uh, or to put it another way, around 2,000 years after the earliest biblical texts were probably composed. So your Bible, your text that your Bible is based on, the Hebrew that your translation is based on, is, uh, from the 11th century, uh, 2,000 years after some of the biblical texts were written. And the question is, uh, do we think, what do we think the chances are that that text remained perfectly stable for those 2,000 years between it first being written and, uh, and our, our manuscript? Uh, again, the best bib, the best biblical text we have is from the Middle Ages. Uh, we have really very little way of accessing what the original authors of these texts might have wanted us to read. It's information like this that the average person isn't told before they get conditioned as a child to become a zealous believer.
Another layer of difficulty, uh, that one manuscript that, uh, all of our modern translations are based on, uh, like every manuscript out there, has typos, right? I mean, you imagine having to hand-copy the entirety of the, of the Bible. Uh, it's a mistake here and there. Uh, many modern translations are aware of these, uh, of these mistakes. The modern translators are aware of these mistakes, but the average church attendee is not. And to be honest, most of them, they probably don't care anyways. But these are the things that I would have wanted to know before being sold on the religious idea at an age that I was incapable of properly thinking and making a reasonable decision for myself about these things. Uh, you know, we compare our, that manuscript to other ones and we figure out where something's gone wrong, perhaps. So modern translations often are aware of these and and will correct, correct these, these errors, uh, often without letting you know that they're doing so, without letting you know that they're doing so. Now you have to ask yourself, why would the translators not let you know what they're doing? Think about it. Uh, other translations, like the King James, famously, uh, doesn't fix, uh, those, those errors. One of the errors that the King James version doesn't fix is that last part in Deuteronomy 28:68, where it says, "and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bond men and bond women, and no man shall buy you." And how can you be sold and not bought at the same time? You can't. And so this is one of the typos that the KJV doesn't fix at all. But the NIV does fix it, and it says, "and there you will offer yourself for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you." Right? It makes that correction. So for some readers, uh, what we know as scholars are essentially typos are part of the Bible.
Um, and I don't want to get ahead, I don't want to get ahead of the rest of the lecture series. Uh, but on top of that issue, there's the Dead Sea Scrolls, uh, which are way older, right? Second century BCE, uh, in some cases. So way, way older than our good, our like best manuscript of the, of the text. Um, the problem is, there are a lot of places where the Dead Sea Scrolls version of the Bible differs from our version of the Bible. But that one's older. You'd think maybe it should get more credit than the one from a thousand years later. Uh, and then there's the Septuagint, which is the name we give the, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is from the third century BC, probably. Uh, but it turns out that the Greek translation, this very old Greek translation, isn't even translating the same text that we have as our Hebrew Bible today. For example, uh, in the Greek version of the Bible, the Book of Jeremiah is a sixth shorter than it is in the Bible in front of you, here at Watch Hill, in the pews. Uh, I hope nobody's faith was like deeply based on that sixth of Jeremiah. Uh, uh, point, if it's not clear yet, is that there really is no "the" Hebrew Bible. And that's a major point.
So if we don't have "the" Bible, then what is it that we have? Our English Bibles are modern translations of a single 11th-century medieval manuscript with its typos, 2,000 years after the biblical texts began to be set down, with no recognition really at all that there are older versions of the text out there that have better claims to antiquity and are often starkly different. That's what people are basing their entire faith on and will and will steal, destroy, and defame others over. And so using your intellectual mind, think about how reasonable this is. And also think about what this is saying in the bigger picture of reality.
If that's not enough to shake your confidence in the Hebrew Bible, let's talk about what's in it and where all that stuff comes from. The Hebrew Bible, of course, is not really a book, even though it is bound between two covers. It's more accurately a library. Uh, it's a collection of writings from ancient Israel spanning nearly a millennium of that community's existence. It consists largely of attempts to understand and define Israel's relationship with its God, with its God, the God that belongs to it, the God that it created for itself, the God of Israel, largely. But not entirely. There's love poetry in there, and Song of Songs. There's the Book of Esther, in which the deity makes not a single appearance. Uh, I'm going to talk later on about how the whole thing came together, but for now, I only want to point out that, uh, the literary works that are collected in this library are maybe a little bit more haphazard, uh, than is commonly thought. Uh, to put it another way, not a single book in the Bible was written to be a book in the Bible. They may have ended up there, but they didn't have to. And other works that were written in the same places and times indeed didn't end up in there. Uh, this is due more to historical accident than to anything intentional, some overarching plan. These books happen to be the ones that are in this library, in this collection. More on that in a bit.
This library of the Hebrew Bible is highly varied. There are stories, shorter and longer. There are laws. There's prophecy. There are poems and proverbs and genealogies and lists. There's doom and destruction. There's hope and, uh, even humor. Uh, the Hebrew Bible represents, uh, the vast majority of the existing literature from ancient Israel. So I guess it's a nice thing that it covers so many, uh, genres and styles. This is, of course, in contrast to the New Testament, which is like a tiny little sliver of the entirety of Greco-Roman literature. Uh, so they've got all of this wonderful stuff to compare their texts with, and we really, this is what we got from, from ancient Israel. Um, my point again is that, uh, these ancient Israelites weren't writing, uh, the Bible, right? They were writing literature in their own vernacular, in their native literary genres.
Um, okay, that's enough of generalities. And now I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty, as I'm sure you're all sitting there thinking, uh, "Why doesn't he just get to the good stuff?" And fine, if you're going to be pushy about it, I will. The oldest texts preserved in our Hebrew Bible, the very oldest, uh, probably date from the 11th or 10th Century BCE. So having said that, that's a long time ago. Uh, having said that, let me start with this observation: even if the Hebrew Bible is old, it is not the oldest, nor is it particularly unique. It draws on and imitates, sometimes even almost plagiarizes, uh, ancient Near Eastern literature that predates it, sometimes by more than a millennium. Everyone's favorite creation story, in Genesis 1, "In the beginning," etc., uh, is a clear variant of a Mesopotamian creation myth from the second millennium, BCE. Uh, the story of Moses's birth, right, this, the basket and the reeds and, and all that, uh, is a nearly identical story to an Akkadian legend from 2300 BC. Some of the laws that we find in Exodus are basically verbatim from the famous Code of Hammurabi from around 1800 BC. Some of the rituals we find in Leviticus, and this is where you all have to nod and be like, "I know just what you're talking about. I read Leviticus all the time." Mhm. Uh, rituals in Leviticus are strikingly similar to ones we know elsewhere from the region from the 14th Century BCE. There is literally, there is a section of the Book of Proverbs, it's like three chapters of Proverbs, that are, by as far as you can see, really lifted word for word from an Egyptian, uh, text from the 13th century BC. Uh-oh. Now, where do you hear anyone in the church talking about these things? The Bible is very old to us, but let's not get carried away.
In my opinion, the oldest text in the Hebrew Bible, uh, is the poem that we find in Judges 5, sometimes known as the Song of Deborah. Y'all look at it in your own time, um, or, you know, flip to it if you like. Uh, this is a song of military victory. And most notably, for our purposes, it's a song about how the various Israelite tribes coordinated with each other to fight off their, their common Canaanite foe. And what makes this poem, to my mind, seem, uh, seem quite old is not just its language, though it does have what feels like an older register of, of Hebrew. We have to remember, every language changes over time. Uh, the English we speak today and the English of a thousand years ago are so different as to be, you know, I can't read that stuff. Stuff. Chaucer is pretty tough, right? So Hebrew, Hebrew is the same. You can tell when you're, if you've read enough of it, you can tell when you're reading older Hebrew and new, and, and later Hebrew. So the, the, the Hebrew is, is a little bit older. Uh, but what makes the poem really seem old is that it's, uh, its listing of the Israelite tribes who got together to fight their Kadite enemy is, to say the least, unusual. Uh, we perhaps, uh, are all used to, you know, the standard 12 tribes of Israel, or at least you've got in your head the notion of 12 tribes of Israel, right? It's over and over again in the biblical narrative. You might have learned it in Sunday school. Um, so the list of tribes invoked in, in this old poem in Judges 5, uh, includes familiar ones like Ephraim and Benjamin and Zebulun and Issachar and Reuben and Dan and Asher and Naphtali, great. But also, uh, perhaps less expected, uh, the tribe of Machir and Gilead and, and Me-o. The tribe of Judah makes no appearance, or Simeon, or Manasseh, or Levi, or Gad. So you've got this weird list of tribes participating in this battle, and what this suggests is that this song, this, this poem comes from a period of Israel's history before that 12-tribe system that we're familiar with, uh, came to be solidified.
Now, those of you familiar with the story of the Bible may be thinking, "Hold on, the 12 tribes go back to Jacob's sons in Genesis, all the way back at the beginning." And to that, I will tell you, uh, that there is a pretty significant gap between the history of Israel and the story of Israel's past that the Bible tells us. There's a relatively large gap of centuries where the writers are backfilling a creation narrative on the origins of the 12 tribes. Uh, I don't want to open too big a can of worms, uh, but I will, uh, all I'm doing today is opening lots of cans of worms and letting them loose among you. Um, uh, I will let you, the secret I will let you in on is, there was no idea of this 12-tribe, like, that 12-tribe idea, uh, doesn't exist in the, in history until the reign of King David. But that is, uh, a different lecture, I'm afraid. I have to keep you wanting more.
So this, this old poem, Judges 5, this, uh, this old tribal, uh, military victory poem, it's not obviously just floating in space in the, you know, in the text. Uh, it's been taken up and embedded in a story, the story of the prophet, uh, and judge Deborah. That story is itself part of a collection of stories about Israel's early leaders, these judges. And that collection of stories about judges is in turn part of a longer narrative about Israel's transition from individual tribes to a nation with a king. And that story is finally one of the textual sources for an overarching history, history of the period from the death of Moses through the Babylonian exile. And here's the dilemma that I face: how do I talk about the creation of the Hebrew Bible when even a single chapter is just so complicated? Any ideas? I didn't have one. Okay.
Um, let me focus for a second on the basic literary process that I've just described, which is to say, the taking up and reusing of earlier, uh, pieces of literature. All of our oldest Israelite literature is found in this way, as reused text. So the oldest bits we have are all like that, like that poem, right? Uh, and they're mostly all poetry. Judges 5, Exodus 15, sometimes known as the Song of the Sea, Genesis 49, Deuteronomy 33. These are these poems that are, are we find in the text. Uh, they're older, not just, not because poetry is like somehow older as a genre than prose, but because biblical poetry presents itself as having been spoken by someone at sometime, and it just lends itself to, uh, being put into the mouths of characters in stories. It's not so different from, uh, a modern novelist having one of their characters, uh, you know, sing "Rock-a-bye Baby" to a child, right? The lullaby existed before the novel, right? But it's not like lullabies as a genre are older than prose. Um, in any case, what we're really talking about here is how one text takes up another one, building on and around it in the creation of something new. And it's not just old poetry that this happens to. Uh, there's pretty good reason to think that this, this whole cycle of, uh, tales about Israel's judges, right, Deborah, but Samson and, and others in there, uh, that we find now in chapters 3 through 17 of the Book of Judges, that this probably once existed as an independent collection. Right? There's like a cycle of stories about the judges that once had its own individual existence, but now we have it as part of a larger book, and that book is itself part of an even longer, broader history of Israel.
So, continuing to talk about this, this region of the Bible, the books of Joshua through Kings. So you get through the Pentateuch and Moses dies, and you get Joshua, and then Judges, and then Samuel, and then Kings. These books are understood by scholars to be one big literary block, a carefully constructed history of Israel's journey from the conquest of Canaan all the way through the fall of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon. But this history, uh, is constructed out of bits and pieces of pre-existing literary materials, right? This is not like a modern-day historian sitting down and writing. This is like, uh, um, a student plagiarizing, right? Like, find, finding a bunch of books that, uh, that tell that story and then being like, "Well, I'll take this chapter from this one, I'll take this chapter from this one," etc. The historian responsible for these books was essentially a collector, an editor. He took various narratives that covered the time period he was interested in, and he brought them together. Sometimes they contradict each other or create narrative inconsistencies, but he doesn't seem to have cared. The historian seems not to have worried. He tossed stuff from all kinds of sources, royal archives, or, or older collections of, of poems. In fact, he sometimes cites them. He says, you know, "and and here's a thing that I found in this book." And he made it all into a semi-coherent whole by adding his own ideological editorializing statements, uh, at key moments throughout the history.
So, as an example, we read in the Book of Samuel all about this David guy, you might have heard of, who, as far as the story goes, if you have really read your Book of Samuel, uh, was, uh, a traitor and a philanderer and a murderer many times over, an extortionist, basically an all-around thug. Again, that's probably a different talk for a different time. Uh, but that's the story of David that was told by one of the historian's sources, and he found this story of David that told all that stuff and he included it in his, in this, this sort of epic. And it basically, that story of David that he picks up continues uninterrupted from start to finish. But right near the end of it, in the very first chapter of the Book of Kings and the very last chapter of David's life, suddenly this guy David, who has really never shown anything, uh, any interest in anything other than his own power, ends up saying the following words to Solomon, his son: "This is a guy who's murdered everyone, right? Like he's just a terrible dude, and he says to his son on his deathbed, 'Keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his ordinances, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all that you do, in wherever you turn.'" That is the first, last, and only time in the entire multi-book story of David that he ever mentions the law of Moses or any of the other nice things that he just said there. That's not David of the story we've read about David. It's not the original narrative about him. This is the editor, the historian, uh, tying the David story, which he plucked from another source, uh, into his overarching theme that Israel's history has been determined and judged by its adherence or not to the law of Moses. That's the elite's way of getting people to follow the law that they created for their society. You have to understand that government and religion were inseparable at that time. And so creating a law that came from their God was how they implemented the tool of their law and code of conduct. And so it's just how they did it at their time. And understanding how they thought in their world, it helps make sense of what you're reading in the Bible. This is the argument the historian is trying to make because he's writing during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century. He's trying to make sense of how Israel ended up in this terrible position. How do I know that's when he was writing? Because his history ends like on a Tuesday in the middle of the exile. And I'm pretty sure if he had known that the exile was going to come to an end and Israel would return from it, he probably would have said so.
But if the history is from the sixth Century, right, that is the broad sweep of Joshua through Kings, this editorial venture is from the 6th century, and Judges 5, that earliest bit, is from the 11th century. That's still 500 years of textual growth and development to get us from the beginning to the end of just that little piece of the, of the Bible.
Perhaps a more famous example of textual reuse is the formation of the Pentateuch. And maybe I should have started there, uh, because, you know, that is the beginning, after all. And we all know, uh, beginning is a very good place to start. But I did get distracted by the whole Judges 5 oldest text thing, and so anyway, here we are. So, just to get it out of the way, for whatever it's worth, despite what tradition has taught, the Pentateuch was not written by Moses. Readers have been aware that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch since the medieval period, and scholarship had basically given up on the idea by the 17th century. One of the people who knew about this during the medieval times was the Jewish rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, and he told people to keep their lips shut if they figured this out too. And so scholars, they've known this for over 400 years. But who are the people who have no clue at all about this? We're talking about the average, everyday Bible believer who doesn't do any research on these particular topics at all. When they open up the Bible and open up the scriptures like this, when they grab this and they open this up, it's like a miracle in here. All-powerful, right? They believe every word in here, right? That's how they do it. And that's why they don't know about any of these other things that we're talking about right now, right? They just go in here and "every word, thus saith the Lord, we shall do and we shall obey." That's the difference. And that's one thing that I had to do is I had to educate myself out of that particular way of thinking, right, many years ago.
There are lots of reasons for thinking Moses didn't write it, not least that the text narrates Moses's death, which is a tough trick to pull off. Um, and there are references to historical events that took place long before the time or long after the time of Moses. I will admit, my favorite reason for not attributing the Pentateuch to Moses is that it includes the following sentence, which would be truly hilarious had Moses been the one to write it. Now, Moses was the most humble man on Earth. Anyway, not going to worry about Moses having written the Pentateuch. What I will say is that the Pentateuch is not so unlike the history from Joshua through Kings, uh, that we just talked about. It's a mushing together of previously independent texts to tell a continuous story. In this case, the story from the creation of the world through the death of Moses. Unlike in the books that follow, however, the editor of the Pentateuch, whoever it was who put this all together, didn't feel the need to imprint his own, uh, literary, his literary creation with his own editorializing comments. So, like that line I quoted from, that is put into David's mouth, there's nothing like that in the Pentateuch. There is no overarching ideology to be found in it. It is rather merely the story of Israel's early history as told by multiple divergent, contradictory sources, which have been combined into a running narrative.
The example, uh, you know, I give of this, uh, is if you were to ask, um, if you were to ask somebody from Watch Hill and somebody from Alabama to give you a history of the Civil War, you'd get two pretty different stories. They'd agree on a bunch of the stuff, but, you know, the emphases would be different, and the who's right and who's wrong, lots of stuff would be different. And, uh, now imagine that, you know, you had each of those two histories and you were trying to write your own history, somebody many years from now, and they found the Watch Hill version and the Alabama version and they said, "I don't know, okay," and put them both together. That's how you end up, uh, with, for instance, two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. They cannot possibly go together. This is how you end up with a flood story in, uh, a few chapters later in Genesis, right? The, uh, our story of Noah and the flood, a story that is so riddled with internal inconsistencies that despite the song, you know, "the animals they came on, they came on by twosies, twosies," right? That song, despite the song, no one could actually tell a biblically accurate story of the flood when you want to, on your own time, go ahead and open to Genesis, uh, 6 and read chapters 6-9, and then you come back to me and you, and you try and tell me the story, and, and good luck to you. Uh, this is how we end up with things like Moses getting water from a rock in the middle of the wilderness twice, in two different places, at two different times. This is how we get law codes in the Pentateuch that blatantly contradict each other over and over again. Uh, I could go on, like I said, I could do 10 lectures on this and and not be close to done. My point is the Pentateuch, it turns out, is a combination of four once-independent sources that have been interwoven into a new unity that none of those sources themselves could possibly have imagined. I happen to think that trying to disentangle those sources from each other is just about as much fun as solving any mystery, which is why this is what I do professionally. But we don't have time for that here. That is now a third different lecture that I'm not giving. For those who are keeping score.
Okay, here's where it gets complicated. Okay, more complicated. I can tell you basically when the Pentateuch was put together. Right? I, I told you before, Joshua through Kings was put together in the exile, and I know that because that's when the story ends. But I can tell you when the Pentateuch was put together, and the answer is actually sometime in the fifth or fourth Century BCE. How do I know that? Because the only other texts in the Bible that seem to have any idea that there was such a thing as a Pentateuch are from that, that time. And here's, here's my favorite example. Uh, I, I said a minute ago that the Pentateuch is full of contradictory laws. So one of those contradictions comes, uh, in terms of how it is that you are to prepare the, uh, the, the lamb that is sacrificed on Passover. In Deuteronomy, we are told you are to boil the meat. And in Exodus, we are told explicitly, you may not boil it or eat it raw, you must roast it in fire. What are you going to do? No one cares about that until we get to the Book of Chronicles, around 400 BC. We, I told you Chronicles, I knew Chronicles was going to come back. Uh, uh, uh, Chronicles comes to tell the story of its great, one of its great heroes, the King Josiah. And Josiah, Chronicles tells us, offered the Passover sacrifice. How did he do it, one might ask? And it tells us, "Josiah boiled the lamb in fire according to the law." Right? So you can, I mean, you can see right around the time that we get, we suddenly get texts, uh, that not only refer to the Pentateuch as a piece of literature, they're also clearly trying to figure out what to do with this weird text with all of its contradictions. So we can see when the Pentateuch emerges onto the, onto the scene for, for other biblical writers. Okay, so roughly the fifth, uh, or 4th Century BCE. That's fine for the Pentateuch, like the whole thing. What about the sources, the pieces that went into making it? Here's where it gets hairy. I can tell you that they were all obviously completed by the time the Pentateuch was put together, but when did, were they started? I could venture some guesses. One maybe in the 9th century, maybe one in the 8th century, maybe one in the 7th century. I'm not just making, like, I actually think that's when. I wasn't just counting down. Um, uh, but we would be mistaken if we thought about these literary works as the products of, like, a single person sitting down and writing a thing from start to finish and sending it off to the publisher and then seeing it on Amazon, right? That's not, uh, that's not how things worked back then. Every one of these sources of the Pentateuch, these four previously independent texts, has its own complicated literary history. We can see layers of editing within them, sometimes relatively minor expansions, a verse or a word here and there, sometimes nearly full-scale revision, including the, I mean, the addition of multiple chapters. These works, like most biblical books, were the products of schools, not of individuals. Schools that were active over many generations and even many centuries.
So this process, that is the revision of existing literature, this is a process we see across the entire Hebrew Bible, and it's actually very, it's central to understanding what it is that we're reading, uh, in our biblical text. We tend now, for our own reasons, to think of the Bible as like a timeless text, right? But we can't forget that it was written and revised in specific historical and cultural circumstances and contexts. It was written and revised in specific historical and cultural circumstances and contexts, which is why it talks about using crops and animals as the tithe. That's relevant to their cultural context at that time, right? And today, it's irrelevant because the Jews, they don't raise, most of them, at least, they don't raise crops and animals, right? And so they had to modify it to make it mean something else, to fit this cultural context that we experience in the world today. Understand what we're looking at in the Bible isn't just an attempt to explain the world, right, or to understand Israel's relationship with its God. What we're looking at is actually the constant drive to make sense of everything that's happening in the world as it, as the world changes around, uh, around Israel.
This is probably nowhere clearer than in the prophets, and particularly in the Book of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah is introduced for us at the beginning of the book, uh, as having operated in Judah, that is the southern part of Israel, uh, in the 8th Century BCE. And indeed, the first half of the Book of Isaiah, roughly, is clearly speaking from and about that time and place. Their references to historical events and persons that make sense only then and there. All fine and good. But then we hit chapter 40, uh, which is the, you may actually know relatively well. It's the one that begins, uh, uh, uh, "You know, a voice cries out in the wilderness, prepare ye a highway in the desert." We get to chapter 40, and suddenly we are in a completely different world. The Isaiah who had been prophesying doom for Israel on account of its many violations of social justice is gone, replaced by an Isaiah who is now declaring wonderful things, highways in the desert. Most prominently, the highway in the desert, a return for Israel from the Babylonian exile, which is a, again, a tough trick for the 8th Century Isaiah to have pulled off. Uh, this "Second Isaiah," and that's what we call him in scholarship, Second Isaiah, builds on the language and themes of First Isaiah, but dramatically recontextualizes them. Now, the historical reference, references are naturally to the sixth Century. Second Isaiah explicitly mentions the Persian king Cyrus, for example. So what you're seeing is a later author, for whom the original Isaiah's prophecies were important, maybe even authoritative, but for whom they were also sorely out of date. What good is the prediction of Israel's doom when that doom has already arrived? How can the words of First Isaiah from the 8th Century speak to a community that's now in exile in Babylon? Those words are taken up and then built on, expanded, made to speak in a different way. And, and what happens when this community in exile actually returns back to, to Israel, to its homeland, and suddenly faces an entirely new set of social problems? Now, neither First Isaiah nor Second Isaiah will suffice. And thus, the last 12 chapters of the Book of Isaiah, we get a third perspective, still building on the first two, but speaking now in light of its own contemporary issues. There, the Book of Isaiah is the record of a community trying to make sense of itself, adjusting its theology to conform to the ever-changing waves of history on which Israel was, uh, was born.
So think about that. The scholars recognize three separate hands in the Book of Isaiah, all of whom adjust their theology to deal with what is happening within the society that they find each of themselves in, right? And so three Isaiahs at three different times within one book. This is the information and the conversations that are happening behind the scenes in the world of scholarship, right? And there are also pastors in the world of religion who know this stuff too, but they don't bring this information over into the, the, the, the religious community, right? And they don't do it for various reasons. Isaiah is maybe the most dramatic example, example of this, but it's visible in other prophets as well.
As a process, revision of texts is a reminder that the Hebrew Bible is not just a library, but a living library in which the texts that make it up are treasured, yes, but are also in need of regular refreshing so they can continue to speak to a new world. And we see this not just within, but across books. Jeremiah famously predicts that Israel will be exiled to Babylon for 70 years. Now, Jeremiah was written right at the beginning of the exile, so 70 years is what we in the industry call a wild guess. But actually, it wasn't too far off. It was actually closer to 50 years. Um, in any case, some 400 years later, the Book of Daniel took up Jeremiah's prophecy. It cites it explicitly. "Do the Prophet Jeremiah say 70 years of exile?" But then explicitly reinterprets it. "Oh, when Jeremiah said 70 years, what he meant was 70 weeks of years, that is 490 years." Which is to say, right around when Daniel was written. Why would someone do such a thing? Well, because for Daniel, Jeremiah's prophecy hadn't actually come true, at least not entirely. Israel, in the time the Book of Daniel, which is to say the 2nd century BCE, Daniel's the latest book in the Bible, probably the Hebrew Bible, in the 2nd century BC, Israel was being pretty badly oppressed by a foreign empire. Just, it wasn't Babylon as it had been in the time of Jeremiah, but again, that's just a matter of reinterpretation. I'll say Babylon, but you'll know I'm really talking about, uh, Rome. And people today, they'll continue to reinterpret the scriptures to make the scriptures fit them. And so you even have people who will make, uh, Babylon mean something that came way later on, like America, right? People, they keep refreshing the meaning of the scriptures to keep the scriptures alive. And this is something that they've been doing. Just as the professor is explaining. In other words, what good is a prophecy about Babylon to someone who's living centuries after Babylon has ceased to exist? It had to be about something else, something contemporary to its audience. Honestly, as an interpretive practice, that ought to feel relatively familiar. After all, what good is prophecy about the imminent birth and reign of an Israelite king from the 8th Century BCE to someone living, I don't know, 700 years later? That's how "a child has been born for us" in Isaiah 9 becomes understood not to be about the Israelite king Hezekiah, as it originally was, but about a Messianic figure from Nazareth. That's how they squeeze Jesus into this prophecy, right? They keep refreshing and remixing the prophecies over and over and over. And some people, they get so drowned in the text that they can't even recognize that this is what they're, that they're doing, right? And they become delusional at a certain point. And this is the scary thing to me. And this is one of the reasons why I make these videos to help the people who are actually questioning what it is that they're believing and who actually have some type of desire to climb out of the bottomless pit. Because it's a bottomless pit. It keeps going over and over. And it's okay to do that, like to re-interpret things, but it's a different thing to actually really believe that what they're reinterpreting is actually what the text really means.
Again, the literature of the Hebrew Bible was written for its own time and place, but readers for whom that literature became authoritative or even sacred have always looked to make it about their own time and place. And some of those readers were also biblical authors, like Daniel or Second Isaiah, or all the people in the New Testament. Perhaps the most striking example of a text that combines both reuse and revision is Chronicles. Right, all your eyes just glazed over. Um, uh, Chronicles is not the most compelling reading, but it is a pretty revealing piece of literature. For the most part, the Book of Chronicles retells the history that we find in Samuel and Kings. And when I say retells, I really mean like retells. It's very often a word-for-word, verbatim repetition of the earlier books. You can see where it just copied line by line. But again, there's a time gap, right? Samuel and Kings from the 7th Century, Chronicles from the 4th. And that time gap covers a pretty major change in Israel's fortunes and even in its identity. Here's an example of what I mean. I'm going to go back to my favorite friend, David. The story of David in the Book of Samuel is, as I mentioned, pretty full of some not-so-nice stuff. Lots of people dying around him, lots of conflict, a whole mess surrounding who would succeed him on the throne. And a brief, a very brief mention of the idea that David wanted to build the temple in Jerusalem, but God said no, I'm leaving that for your son. That's the story we get in Samuel about David. Fast forward some hundreds of years to Chronicles, and now the text is emerging from a period of Israel's history when David had become not known as just the first great king, but really as a symbol of the nation, a legend. And Chronicles was written at a time when there was no longer a king in Israel. All of the power instead was located in the temple in Jerusalem and with the priests who served there. So when Chronicles, in that context, comes to retell the David story, what we get is a king who encounters no conflict of any kind whatsoever. There is no antagonism with Saul or his son Absalom. There are no murders of political opponents. There is
No funny business with who's going to succeed him. David in Chronicles has the easy reign of a legend. And what takes up actually the vast majority of Chronicles' description of David's reign is amazingly his preparations for the building of the temple.
Now, Chronicle knows David didn't build the temple. Everyone knew it was Solomon's Temple. But Chronicles spends chapter upon chapter telling us how David designed the architecture, implemented the sacrifices, appointed the priests and the singers. Right, goes on and on and on. And this is how, for this, this version of his story, David becomes the patron saint of the Jerusalem Temple because the priests who are writing his story now, some hundred years later, have made themselves part of his legendary legacy. Part of what I'm trying to get at in these last couple of examples is the way that the Hebrew Bible is a rolling corpus, one that builds on and reinterprets itself, both within individual books like Isaiah or across books, as with Chronicles.
There are also places where we can see this process of accretion, uh, in perhaps more straightforward ways. Uh, the book of Psalms is obviously a collection, right? Each individual psalm, uh, is its own independent composition, and we still treat them that way. But Psalms provides us with ample evidence for its internal growth. I suppose I ought to say, for the record, as I did earlier with Moses and the Pentateuch, that despite what tradition holds, David did not write the Psalms. Uh, and while I'm here, Solomon didn't write Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. Uh, I'm trying to think if there's anything else I can ruin now. I'll stop there. Uh, okay, back to Psalms.
There are five separate little books within the book of Psalms, marked by what look like, uh, at the end of each one of them, benedictions like "Blessed be, uh, Lord forever. Amen and amen," which comes at the end of Psalm 89, for example. There are lots of smaller units in Psalms, uh, groups of Psalms that share features like this. A series called the Song of Ascents, or the Songs of Asaph, or the series that starts "Hallelujah," right? They're all clumped together. Uh, these were probably once distinct small collections brought together over time into the big sort of bucket of Israelite poetry that the book of Psalms is.
But this corpus wasn't ever really complete. Uh, our Bibles, the ones in front of you in the pews, have 150 Psalms because that's how many are in our 11th-century manuscript. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible has 151, and some of its Psalms are in different order or combined differently. The Dead Sea Scrolls seem to have another five or so that aren't in either the Greek or our modern, uh, Bibles. In short, as an anthology of Israelite poetry, the Book of Psalms was an open one.
The same was probably true of Proverbs, which has its own indications of, of being a once independent collection of sayings, uh, or there being multiple of those within it that have been aggregated together, basically, you know, united by common genre. And if you come up with a collection of Proverbs, where else is it going to go? To tie it all back, uh, the open nature of Psalms as a book, that is to say, its continual revision over time, is in fact a feature of virtually every biblical text. I may be overstating, but not by a lot, when I say that there is probably not a single book or purpose of the Hebrew Bible that didn't undergo editing, revising, updating, or expanding between the time that it was written and when it reached the form that we have it in today.
And think about exactly what that implies. The Lord must love a whole lot of revisions and a whole lot of inaccuracies, and must really love testing the faith of a lot of people. Or this is just simply the product of another human process, just like everything else that we see written, and anything else that we see that's made by the hands of a human. The one exception might be the book of Obadiah, but it's only a chapter long and no one reads it, and I kind of can't believe I even brought it up. Uh, other than that, we have no pure biblical texts. Everything we read has undergone change.
And I want to suggest that this process of change should be more interesting to us as contemporary readers than is the question of original authorship, who wrote the biblical texts and when. It's not that this is not interesting, because surely it is. It is rather that the answer is almost random. We have only the texts that have survived. There were surely many times over more texts that have not survived. But these texts in our Bible have survived not because they were written, but because they were read, because, because they were read and interpreted and updated and made relevant for the next generations.
I'll give you a quick counterexample, actually. Uh, some of you may be familiar with the book, uh, of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus, which is part of the Catholic canon and is sometimes included in the Apocrypha, um, of the, of the, the biblical canon, Protestant canon. Now, Ben Sira is a book that was widely read by early Christians, which is why it is often found in Christian Bibles. But even though Ben Sira is a book that was written by a Jew in Hebrew at the same time, basically, as the Book of Daniel, that is still squarely within the biblical period, Ben Sira was not read by early Jews. So it's not in the Jewish Hebrew Bible. It is not cited by the rabbis of the first millennium CE. It forms no part of modern Jewish heritage. It was out there, but if it weren't for Christians reading it, we wouldn't have it anymore.
All that to say, what makes a text biblical isn't its having been written, but its having been read. Uh, this is perhaps as good a place as any to talk about how we ended up with this particular Bible. Taking what I've just said as a basic principle, you realize that this Bible wasn't designed, despite what you sometimes may hear. There was no council to determine which books were in the Hebrew Bible and which books were out. The Hebrew Bible is a library, and like every library, what's in it is determined by what people were actually reading. It's not a top-down collection, it's a bottom-up one. It's a grassroots collection. These books are what makes up the Hebrew Bible because these are the books that were read by, in this case, the classical Jewish rabbis of the first millennium CE. That's the reading community that determined which books were in and which, like Ben Sira, were not.
But even they weren't determining which were in and out by voting or anything, right? They were just the books that they used, that their inherited reading community found to be authoritative, or maybe even just useful. And we know this in part because, again, with apologies to the next speaker in the series, uh, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with evidence of a different library for a different reading community. Our Bible is what it is not because it's better or more authentic, but because we have happened to be the cultural descendants of this group of Jews, and not that one. Had the vicissitudes of history been different and the Dead Sea community survived rather than the rabbis, we'd be reading a different Bible, and we'd still think of it as the Bible.
The Bible, uh, is full of evidence of its own self-reading, as I've tried to describe. I realize all too briefly, texts that have been revised, texts that have been reused, texts interpreted and reinterpreted. The earliest readers of the Bible were within the Bible itself, and they have left us in our Bibles a legacy of what it means to read a biblical text. All too often, I see people arguing that some community's interpretation of the text is wrong because it's not accurate to what the original author meant. Setting aside the difficulty of accessing an author's intent across a 3,000-year time gap, that entire approach seems to me to run counter to what the Bible actually says about itself. It is precisely because these texts were created in and for specific historical circumstances that they've always needed to be newly interpreted as time and circumstance has changed. The Hebrew Bible is an object lesson in the practice of interpreting older texts in light of new historical and cultural developments. When we do that today, we're not violating some biblical truth. We are, in fact, acting biblically. The Bible isn't a text that we need to go back to. It's a text that we take with us, as indeed the Bible's own authors did. For nearly a thousand years, the creation of the Hebrew Bible is indistinguishable from the use, the reading, and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. And we create it anew every time we read it.
And there are no shortages of new creations coming from the many people who believe that they have the one and only true faith found within their own modern interpretation of the Bible. And so, hopefully, you've enjoyed this lecture by Professor Joel Baden. And hopefully, you have been provided with something that allows you to think and analyze and and to use in your walk and progression towards the journey of coming out of the pit and entering into the free world where life is much better and it makes more sense. And so I want to thank you for watching all the way into the end. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the free world.