Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: Zephania

I haven't given up on this eccentric project I set myself. It's just that many of the remaining books are dauntingly long (the Chronicles, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah) or, like Zephania, obscure (and likely for good reason). I think I have around a dozen to go, which means, if the psalmist is right about the years of man being three score and ten, that I need to tackle two per year if I am to brag about having read and commented on every biblical book in my interview with St. Peter six or seven years hence.

Today, Zephania; in six months, Haggai! Maybe "eccentric" isn't the word. 

For me, the Pauline phrase "through a glass, darkly" describes the experience of wading through the three chapters of Zephania. I can make out that God is mad:

"I will utterly sweep away everything
from the face of the earth," says the Lord.
"I will sweep away man and beast;
I will sweep away the birds of the air
and the fish of the sea.
I will overthrow the wicked;
I will cut off mankind
from the face of the earth," says the Lord.

But what is it this time? The commentators concur: it's "religious syncretism" that, according to Zephania, has set him off. The worship of God's chosen, in other words, has been sullied by the incorporation of elements from the religious practices of non-chosen peoples. This explains the references, in the passage following the above, to Canaanite ("Baal"), Ammonite ("Milcom"), and Assyrian ("host of the heavens") religions. To the non-specialist, general reader . . . almost perfectly impenetrable.

Since I haven't much to say about Zephania, let me just point out that the God of the Bible must sometimes confound the theologians. For example, it seems that God's anger does not fit well with his supposed omniscience. Was he surprised that his people would incorporate aspects of Canaanite religion into their worship—or, for that matter, that his directive concerning the tree of knowledge would be ignored? Also, he's hard to please on the details of the worship of him. Amos, Zephania's fellow among the twelve "minor prophets," had inveighed:

I hate, I despise your feasts
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

There is no suggestion here that the worship practices have been adulterated by foreign influence. The various offerings presumably meet specifications. The problem now is that "good worship" results in complacent piety, the enemy of justice and righteousness, which he chiefly desires. This idea is not altogether absent from Zephania:

Come together and hold assembly, O shameless nation,
before you are driven away like the drifting chaff,
before there comes upon you
the fierce anger of the Lord,
before there comes upon you
the day of the wrath of the Lord.
Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
who do his commands;
seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you can be hidden on the day of the wrath of the Lord.

As to the conclusion to the above passage, a commentator directs us to a different parallel passage in Amos:

Hate evil, and love good,
and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,
will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

The strong overall impression one receives is of consuming anger. I hate! I despise! I will sweep you from the face of the earth! The animals, too! And he's not easily appeased. You can be hidden on the day of wrath, perhaps. It may be that the Lord will be gracious. This anger is so obtrusive as almost to obliterate the consistent teaching of Israel's prophets, not ever memorably expressed in Zephania, where it nevertheless is generally still in line with the distillation of, for example, Micah:

He has showed you, O man, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

To give the anger its due, place the emphasis on "showed." God's human, non-omniscient emotion is of exasperation. 

Books of the Bible: Habakkuk

The Book of Habakkuk begins like one of the lament psalms, or a cry from the lips of Job:

O Lord, how shall I cry for help,
and thou wilt not hear?
Or cry to thee "Violence!"
and thou wilt not save?

The complaint goes on for several more lines, very direct and high-pitched, so that one is tempted to quote the whole thing—but, as Habukkuk is only three chapters and four pages long, that would soon tend toward reproducing the whole text of the book, and if that's what you want here you go. As one proceeds, it becomes evident that the first half of the book is a dialog: Habukkuk  questions, God answers; repeat. It isn't evident that Habukkuk is satisfied with the answers, or that he ought to be. The first answer, 1:5-11, is a promise to send the vicious Chaldeans as agents of God's justice. That is, "Don't worry, I've got the guys for the job, they'll fix things up"—and he (God) describes, in the manner of an admiring HR manager, the ruthless efficiency of his designees. 

In the top half of the next and last inning, Habukkuk restates the complaint, perhaps with more vehemence than before:

Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil
and canst not look on wrong,
why dost thou look on faithless men,
and art silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?

Does Habukkuk hurdle past God's promised solution, as if it weren't worth discussing? Has time passed and the Chaldean solution proven deficient? I don't know, but God's answer is this time more predictable:

For still the vision awaits its time;
it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.
Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.

One recognizes the answer that Job finally received out of the whirlwind. It's not your job to ask such questions. It's your job to be faithful and righteous. Things may now look bad to you, but what do you know? In addition to being righteous and faithful, wait.

The HR manager has mounted a high horse. 

The text I'm using—The Oxford Annotated Bible, which I had to buy for a college course about 45 years ago—includes a headnote to all 66 books. I assume these editorial introductions represent something like a consensus of mainline, prestigious divinity-school understanding of the work at hand. The one devoted to Habukkuk concludes: 

The author is confronting honestly the profoundly disturbing problem of why a just God is "silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he" (1.13). To this perennial question the prophet receives an answer which is eternally valid: God is still sovereign, and in his own way at the proper time will deal with the wicked; "but the righteous shall live by his faith" (2.4).

One might timidly advance the notion that there is to this a dose of double think almost comical in its effect. The reason the "answer" is "eternally valid" is that the "proper time" never comes. In other words, the validity of the instruction to be patient terminates only if the burden requiring patience is lifted. For the answer to be eternally valid the burden must also be eternal. Yet God promises to lift it. Yet it never lifts. This it seems is ever and always the result of wrestling with what the editor calls a "profoundly disturbing problem."

That is the first two pages of Habukkuk. There are actually three parts to the four pages. The dialog concerning theodicy ends at 2:5 and is followed by a section of five formulaic "Woes" directed against some unidentified tyrannical nation. The third chapter, called in its first verse a "prayer of Habukkuk," brings the book to a close. Much of the scholarly commentary on the book takes up the question of the relationship between three plainly distinct sections. The consensus is that there is no relationship. The book, according to this view, is a collection of disparate texts. That the three sections belong to different literary forms is the strongest evidence for this conclusion. The "prayer," for example, appears to have been intended for liturgical use and would not be out of place in the psalter. According to the aforementioned headnote, scholarship has also detected in the three sections historical allusions that indicate quite different dates of composition. This raises the question of the identity of Habukkuk and the degree to which he was responsible for any of the work attributed to him in "The Book of Habukkuk." The only references to a Habakkuk in the canonical works of the Old Testament are within the book bearing his name. "Nothing," notes one scholar*, "is known about the prophet outside this book, except in legends which arose at a later time." I wonder whether these later arising "legends" might have resulted in the attribution of written material to a character of legend. It seems that there may or may not have been a Habakkuk, and that, if there was, he could have been responsible for at most a part of the biblical book called "Habakkuk." 

*J.P. Hyatt in Peake's Commentary on the Bible

Books of the Bible: Nahum

The deserved obscurity of the Book of Nahum within the Old Testament canon may be attributed in part to the fact that it is a poem, in Hebrew, and, as has been said, "poetry is what gets lost in translation." Nevertheless it is possible to detect, in the English of the Revised Standard Version, an unrestrained force that might put an American in mind of Walt Whitman:

Desolate! Desolation and ruin!
Hearts faint and knees tremble,
anguish is on all loins, all faces grow pale!
Where is the lions' den, the cave of the young lions,
where the lion brought his prey, where his cubs were, with none to disturb?
The lion tore enough for his whelps and strangled prey for his lionesses;
he filled his caves with prey and his dens with torn flesh.

Maybe you can agree that an exclamatory yawp is here joined to dusky meaning. I’m tempted to say it’s “vivid” despite being in the fog concerning what it might be about. The whole book is only three pages long, so the above lines represent a consequential part of the whole, but the fore and aft don't do much to lighten the shade. A general reader, falling back upon the commentaries, soon learns more about the history of the ancient Near East than she perhaps was curious about. 

The city of Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris River across from present-day Mosul in northern Iraq, was in the middle of the 7th century B.C. the world's largest city and the thriving center of the Assyrian Empire. In 612 B.C., however, the city was sacked by a rainbow coalition of Persians and Babylonians, former subjects of the empire. This ended a long period of Assyrian hegemony in the region and was cause for celebration among peoples, including Israel, who had suffered under  Assyrian domination. The book of Nahum is about the fall of Nineveh. The prophet revels, or luxuriates, in the defeat of the hated Assyrians, who were known for pitiless cruelty. The above passage, featuring lions, is part of the mocking celebration—lions having figured prominently in Assyrian art. The idea is that the marauding beast (the Assyrian Empire), returning to its den (Nineveh), discovers only desolation and waste. That the beast is a lion sharpens the barb, as it would if the target were America and a bald eagle deployed.

But it seems odd that such fare should survive the cut for inclusion in the canon. The Old Testament is the story of God's dealings with the people of Israel, who are here only a geopolitical beneficiary of the action of Babylonians and Persians. In the book of Joshua, one is repelled by the coarse notion that our God is truer and stronger than yours, which justifies our savagery, our strut and swagger. But it is at least part of Israel's story. Israel was in that fight. The fall of Nineveh wasn't Israel's fight, and Nahum's ebullience, instead of being morally dubious, just seems peculiar. It's certainly difficult to locate the religious significance. The book has the form and vocabulary of other works of Old Testament prophecy. The prophet, speaking for God, decries the wickedness of the Assyrians and predicts the destruction of their principal city. All this, however, is to one side of the ongoing story relating to God and his chosen people. 

Perhaps the way to illustrate this point is to recall the opening to the book of Amos. The first chapter is made entirely of the prophet's denunciation of Israel's neighbors. One after the other, they are condemned: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab. The same formulaic phrases are used:

For three transgressions of [place name],
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment. . . .

You grow familiar with the drill, are almost lulled to sleep, and then:

For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of shoes. . . .

The denunciation being introduced with the same formulaic expressions emphasizes that Israel is held to the same standard as its neighbors—and is found deficient. The details are interesting, too. The named offenses of Israel's neighbors are largely geopolitical in nature, or they are charged with excessive ruthlessness in the pursuit of geopolitical goals. But Israel: you have sold out the needy for a pair of shoes. As the indictment is developed, it's clear what repels Amos (and God) about the behavior of the people of Israel: lax morality and cheating put to the service of money-making, no care for social justice, all coated over with shallow, self-satisfied religious observance. It's another installation in the story of God's dealings with his wayward people.

The book of Nahum is the first chapter of the book of Amos. You other people are bad! Our God will punish you! And that is the end of it.

The scholarly commentary devoted to Nahum sometimes seems to me almost humorous. For example, the date of composition must belong to the early 7th century B.C., since Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. But was it written before or after 612 B.C.? There is much discussion of the meaning of Hebrew verb tenses to illuminate whether the "prophecy" of Nineveh's fall came before or after Nineveh fell. The problem of dating the book is complicated by evidence indicating that, notwithstanding its brevity, parts were written after other parts. For example, the first of its three chapters appears to be a poem, inserted by Nahum or an editor at a later date, that introduces the main poem. The text of this introductory poem is a mess. There is enough of it for scholars to tell that it’s supposed to be an alphabetic acrostic: that is, each line begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (such as in a 26-line English poem in which the first word of the first line began with "A," the first word of the second line with "B," and so on). But in the text that has come down to us not all the Hebrew letters are used, and, of those that are, the order is garbled. You can see why a 21st-century general reader of the Revised Standard Version, trying to make sense of it, might feel at sea. Apparently the Hebrew is bad enough. 

Books of the bible: Micah

The book of Micah is sometimes thought of as Amos redux, since he followed the herdsman from Tekoa by a generation or two while, to a significant extent, repeating the message, often in the same tones of caustic bitterness. Amos:    

Come to Bethel, and transgress;
to Gilgal, and multiply transgression;
bring your sacrifices every morning,
your tithes every three days;
offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened,
and proclaim free will offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!

Micah:

Hear, you heads of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel!
Is it not for you to know justice?—
you who hate the good and love the evil,
who tear the skin from off my people,
and their flesh from off their bones;
who eat the flesh of my people,
and flay their skin from off them,
and break their bones in pieces,
and chop them up like meat in a kettle,
like flesh in a cauldron.

I don't think that sarcasm is usually thought of as a tool of the biblical authors, or of God if you prefer to think of him as the author, but in the works of Old Testament prophecy the lip is often curled and the speaker filled with disgust. What disgusts him? Frequently the contrast between a preening adherence to the forms of worship and what the speaker regards as immoral behavior—the idea, in other words, that what pleases God is offerings and the sound of hymns and liturgies rather than . . . what? How to define upright behavior that's pleasing to God? Micah's formulation is one of the most resonant passages in the Hebrew Bible:

With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

I picked the first quotation from Micah to show that he was capable of matching Amos's rage. There is nothing like that in the above passage, however. The form may make one think of a Shakespearean sonnet, with the twist at the end, but it's all quite dignified, stately. That the questions presuppose that the answer certainly has to do with the most pleasing outward signs of devotion is what makes the turn work. Without any knowledge of Hebrew, I'd say that, in the above translation (Revised Standard Version), the first heavy emphasis falls on "showed," so that there is at least a suggestion of exasperation: He has showed you . . . (but still you are obsessed with these trivial matters that don't interest me). 

If you read the passage in its context within the sixth chapter of the book of Micah, you'll see that it's part of an extended metaphor: a trial in which the prophet, representing God, is the prosecutor, the people of Israel are the guilty defendant, and the witnesses are the "hills" and "mountains" of the land that, since they endure, know the whole history of God's dealings with his people. While the law court metaphor might indicate that Israel has violated a written statute, the charge is that it has forgotten, or ignored, the history to which the topographical features of the land could attest. (Yes, the metaphor is arguably strained at its weakest point.) As is always and ever the case, the defining events in that history are the exodus and the establishment, between God and his people, of a covenant relationship that imposes reciprocal obligations on the parties. The prosecutor's case is that God has fulfilled his promises and that his people have defaulted. 

Historical amnesia is the underlying offense. The specific terms of default are more amenable to the lawsuit metaphor. What have the people been shown, to no effect? That they are to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. One might object that they've been shown some other things, too. The story of the conquest of Canaan—see the book of Joshua—does not exemplify the traits that  now are put forward as "what the Lord requires." There are plenty of instructions about how to worship and make sacrifices, though these requirements are now denigrated, sometimes with fury. Perhaps one might with profit regard Micah's formulation of what's required as a kind of triage, akin to the question to Jesus, in the New Testament gospels, about what is required above all else. And Micah says, above all else, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. The part of the tradition elevated by Micah is the one found, for example, in portions of the holiness code in the book of Leviticus:

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Or: 

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17-18)

This is the part of the tradition, elevated by Micah to a position of preeminence, that the people have ignored while worrying about outward ceremonies of worship. The prophet's reaction includes elements of scorn and exasperation. The claim that Micah is Amos redux might be both true and modest, for the more comprehensive application of his prophecy is exhibited, both tone and content, in for example the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus inveighs against "hypocrites" who "heap up empty phrases," "practicing [their] piety before men in order to be seen." He places in opposition those who thirst for righteousness ("do justice"), the merciful ("love kindness"), and the meek and pure of heart ("walk humbly"). 

Books of the Bible: Obadiah

While watching a football game, you never see, as the kicker pumps the extra point through the uprights, some nut in the crowd behind the goalposts holding up a big sign saying "Obadiah 3:16." There could be a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, the book of Obadiah is in the Old Testament, and, though I could be wrong, my sense is that the people displaying these placards are sort of nutty and that among Christians, who naturally prefer the New Testament, nuttiness is more prevalent than it is among Jews. I think I've noticed that Jews do not go in for hunting or fishing or camping, and maybe it's the same good sense that keeps them from buying end zone tickets for football games just so they can hold up a Bible sign directing TV viewers to, maybe, Micah 6:8:

He has shown you, o man, what is good, and what does the Lord require but that you do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God?

Another factor would be that nothing in the book of Obadiah is so plangent and alluringly extractable as Micah 6:8, to say nothing of the ubiquitous John 3:16.

And then the decisive factor: there is no such thing as Obadiah 3:16, not because the third chapter has just 15 verses, but because there is no third, or second, chapter—it's the shortest book in the Old Testament, one chapter, 21 verses, two pages, 1118 and the facing 1119 in The Oxford Annotated Bible that I had to buy in college and have open before me now. If in a spiritual crisis you determined, like St. Augustine, that God wanted you to open the Bible at random, so that he could speak to you through whatever verse your eye happened to fall on first, there's the slimmest chance, mathematically, that he'd speak to you through one of the 21 verses of Obadiah. 

The upside for our imagined "general reader" is that with Obadiah it's possible to sustain one's interest from the beginning to the end and report that the impression made is something other than, or in addition to, languorous incomprehension. It seems, for example, as if there could be two chapters, for there are two parts to the brief book, one about something that has happened, ending at verse 14, and another, starting at verse 15, about something that will as a consequence happen in the future. What's happened is the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, an event known to secular history—it occurred in 587 B.C., so the book was written after that. Instead of condemning the captors, as one might have predicted, Obadiah's judgmental anger is set against the Edomites:

The vision of Obadiah.

Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom:
We have heard tidings from the Lord, 
and a messenger has been sent among the nations:
"Rise up! let us rise against her for battle!"
Behold, I will make you small among the nations,
you shall be utterly despised.

So where is Edom, and of what are the Edomites guilty? The below map shows the area at the time of the divided kingdom. Note that Jerusalem is the capital of the southern kingdom, also known as Judah, and that Edom abuts Judah on the southeast, in what is now southwestern Jordan. Obadiah's "vision," therefore, relates not to the shortcomings of the chosen people but to those of their geopolitical neighbors:

. . . you should not have rejoiced over the people of Judah in the day of their ruin
you should not have boasted in the day of distress.
You should not have entered the gate of my people in the day of his calamity;
you should not have looted his goods. . .

It seems analogous to what, at the level of interpersonal relations, the Germans call Schadenfreude—Edom has too much enjoyed Judah's trauma, has taken pleasure in its neighbor's travail. That's the idea, and to me it's a little odd:

On the day that you stood aloof, on the day that strangers carried off his wealth,
and foreigners entered his gates and cast lots for Jerusalem, 
you were like one of them. . .

The "foreigners" are the conquering Babylonians. Their name isn't mentioned but the Edomites are called out and excoriated for, it seems, cheering on the wrong team. Rooting around a bit in the commentaries, seeking to corroborate this impression, one reads of speculation that the book reflects what would have been news stories of 585 B.C. about Edom taking advantage of disarray on its northern frontier, raiding Judah, "harassing the people and annexing territory."* At verse 15, the focus shifts to what in the future will be visited upon Edom for these offenses:

For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. 
As you have done, it shall be done to you,
your deeds shall return on your own head.

If there are going to be just 39 books to the Old Testament, it seems a waste that one of them is devoted to geopolitical sniping in the Mideast of roughly 580 B.C. The criticism of Edom, even if true, is of the kind that places the critic in an unfavorable light. In the imposing core of Israel's prophetic tradition, the lantern shines inward, as in the memorable opening to the book of Amos. A genius for withering self criticism is an unusual asset. Obadiah is not a contribution to that body of Israel's literature, and one feels it's apt that the prophet himself remains a shadowy figure: no vivid personality is conveyed, and he'd be unknown but for the association of his name with one of the slightest entries in the Hebrew Bible.

*L.H. Brockington in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

Books of the Bible: Joel

If, in a free-association test, the cue was "locust," some significant number of respondents might answer, "Plague of locusts in the Old Testament!" For that, we can credit the relatively high profile of the Exodus narrative, and the fact that locusts were one of the plagues sent by Yahweh to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. But there is no biblical book in which locusts play a bigger role than Joel. It's a very brief book and is dominated by locusts the way that Hamlet is dominated by Hamlet. I don't mean to say that the insects are speaking forty percent of the time (as Hamlet is in his play), but they're usually on stage, and Joel's interest in them raises the question of whether he was, besides a prophet, one of the earliest entomologists:

What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.

Lots of locusts! The commentaries take up the question of whether the different Hebrew words rendered "cutting," "swarming," "hopping," and "destroying" refer to different varieties of an insect species or perhaps different stages of an insect's development. As a Sunday School scholar, I remember out of boredom musing to myself about why they can't just call them grasshoppers. It seems the Bible has to invent new words to make the most common things seem . . . Biblical. (Abraham did more than "know" Sarah.) I see now, however, that "grasshopper" would not be the right English word for what Joel is talking about. A decent definition of "locust" is, according to an article in Scientific American, "grasshoppers gone biblical." Apparently they get serotonin on the brain, which causes them to swarm and ravenously eat, which is what turns the harmless grasshopper into a plague of locusts. There is no other biblical book the consideration of which leads inevitably to zoology. Birds eat grasshoppers, and when serotonin has worked it's magic, they have been known to eat so many of them so easily as to become temporarily flightless: grounded, by a very large meal. Sounds like a possible case of science explaining a bizarre religious "vision." 

The locusts are almost the only vivid thing about the book of Joel. I can understand why the commentaries should discuss elaborately the different Hebrew words for locust, for they can thereby avoid the question of what it all might be intended to mean. That has certainly been my strategy up to this point! Broadly speaking, however, the locusts are, as you'd expect, a visitation from God punishing the people for their sins. That much is clear. What exactly they've done to make God so mad isn't so clear—one is tempted to say the shade cast by the locusts makes everything hard to see. In the most impressive of the prophetic books, God's anger is kindled by Israel's laxity about social justice and, to make matters worse, the laxity is accented by copious amounts of self-satisfied religious observance. "I hate, I despise your feasts," inveighs Amos, "and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. . . . Your burnt offerings and your cereal offerings are an abomination to me. . . . But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!" So clear, forceful, and memorable—nothing remotely like that in the Book of Joel. Indeed, he recommends placating God's anger with the kind of public worship that in other prophetic works is a source of God's nausea (especially if unaccompanied by care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the sojourner from a foreign land):

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the elders;
gather the children. . . .
Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep
and say, "Spare thy people, O Lord. . . ."

Nor does the historical setting or any biographical tidbit lighten the shade. Scholars assign the work to "the Persian period of Jewish history (539-331 B.C.)" (headnote to Joel in Oxford Annotated Bible)—if the window is wide enough, you can't go wrong. The first sentence of the book

The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel

is all anyone knows of Joel—namely, that he was Pethuel's son—but that doesn't help since nothing is known of Pethuel, either. 

So: for our imaginary "general reader," determined for some inscrutable reason to read through the Bible and record an honest impression of all the books no matter their status, what bones of Joel may be inspected for a few strings of meaty interest? There is this:

Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare war, stir up the mighty men.
Let all the men of war draw near, let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weak say, "I am a warrior."

If this sounds at all familiar, it's because in much more famous prophetic oracles the language is identical except for the order of operations being reversed. Here, for example, from the book of Isaiah:

[The Lord] shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.

Regarding these parallel but opposite passages, the conclusions of scholarship relate to questions of dating and historical setting. Joel's parodic sally depends upon the text from Isaiah being well known; therefore, Joel was after Isaiah. Moreover, the international situation when Joel prophesied might have been tense and marked by the threat of foreign aggression. Since one of the themes of these mini-essays relates to the troubles associated with regarding every word of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God, I'd simply observe that centuries hence pious political figures faced with questions of war or peace, aggression or diplomacy, may quote Scripture to their advantage no matter which side they take.  

Books of the Bible: Hosea

I attribute slow progress in my Bible-reading project to the prospect of I Chronicles and II Chronicles lurking behind II Kings. Thinking about tackling these interminable historical books while stuck at home during the Age of Coronavirus is dispiriting, like trying to see through layers of tedium: a hideous torture concocted by some fiend for a temperature-controlled hell. You'd be tempted instead to request the lake of fire, just so that you could feel something. Maybe by skipping ahead I can recover lost momentum, and the Book of the Twelve, sometimes called the "minor prophets," seems like a good place to start. I think they are called "minor" because they are brief, an attractive feature. Two-thirds of a case, however, might be made for "minor" in the sense of "insignificant." I'm looking at you Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Only the most eccentric enthusiasts would complain if any of you had been consigned to the apocryphal writings. Happily, the Book of the Twelve opens with Hosea, one of the four exceptions.

There are difficulties, however, and a little context relating to history and proper nouns is needed. In his prophetic oracles Hosea repeatedly addresses Ephraim. Who's that?  Ephraim originally referred to one of the twelve tribes of united Israel. But after the death of Solomon, in the tenth century B.C., the kingdom split apart. The details are blurry to secular history. They are also described, not with less blur, in the historical books of the Old Testament that I cannot yet bring myself to tackle. What the lay reader of the Old Testament has to know is that this division resulted in a "southern kingdom," made of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and a "northern kingdom" made of the other ten tribes. Old Testament writings from after the division consistently use "Judah" to refer to the whole of the southern kingdom. The most common proper noun referring to the northern kingdom is "Israel," but sometimes Ephraim, one of the ten northern tribes, is used instead. The book of Hosea uses both "Israel" and "Ephraim" to refer to the northern kingdom. If you're reading along, and think Hosea sometimes is railing against all of Israel and sometimes against a sad sack named Ephraim, that's wrong. We're in the post-division historical period. Hosea is a northerner prophesying to the northern kingdom, which he sometimes calls "Israel" and sometimes "Ephraim." Confusing! Overall Old Testament reading tip: remember that the most commonly deployed proper nouns—including "Israel"!—can refer to different entities, and you too will wander in the wilderness unless you keep at hand your historical bearings. 

Another bar to comprehension—and to enjoyment, since the sensation of incomprehension banishes pleasure—relates yet again to textual problems. The book of Hosea shows signs of being essentially a crude amalgamation of fragments. The content is not continuous, doesn't "flow"; the different sections don't fit together. The alert reader receives almost immediate notice, for the first chapter describes events from Hosea's life, as does the third chapter: why are they separated by the very different second chapter? Well, on closer review, the first and third chapters don't fit together, either. The first—

And the Lord said to him [Hosea]

—is in the form of a third-person biography, whereas the third chapter—

And the Lord said to me [Hosea]

—is in the form of a first-person autobiography. My impression, from having dipped into the commentaries, is that scholarship recognizes the problem, and has sought to answer the question about the relationship between the first and third chapters, but there are only opinions, no consensus. 

There is no doubt, though, that both chapters 1 and 3 concern Hosea's marital history. In chapter 1, his wife is named Gomer, and in chapter 3 she is not named, so there is a question about the number of marriages. But of all possible biographical information it would be possible to relate, the two fragments, whatever their relationship, both zero in on the topic of marriage. That seems significant. Here is how the topic is introduced in chapter 1:

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, "Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord."

A lot of harlotry! I don't know that I've ever seen the word in print, let alone on someone's lips, and here it comes, three times in one sentence supposedly spoken to Hosea by God. On the most literal interpretive plane, the directive is incomprehensible: the people have been faithless, therefore Hosea should marry a faithless woman—what sense is there in that? But the illogic is built upon a kind of syntactical parallel construction that suggests an analogy: God's relationship to his faithless people is like Hosea's to his faithless wife. The corrupt text makes it a challenge to piece together the details of Hosea's purported private history with Gomer, but the general movement is: marriage, "harlotry," anger and judgment and separation, finally a wooing back. 

This implied parable should be kept in mind while reading, in chapters 4 through 14, Hosea's prophetic oracles, which otherwise present a bewildering sequence of wildly discordant pronouncements, judgment and condemnation followed by forbearance and then more denunciations. As a literary composition, the work lacks organization, but it's hard to miss the portrait of a two-minded God who is repelled by his people's apostasy and unwilling to be done with them:

For I will be like a lion to Ephraim,
and like a young lion to the house of Judah.
I, even I, will rend and go away,
I will carry off, and none shall rescue.
I will return again to my place,
until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face,
and in their distress they seek me, saying,
"Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn, that he may heal us;
he has stricken, and he will bind us up."

Last note: speaking from experience, I think one might form the impression that Hosea is obsessed with the sexual immorality of the people, since their "harlotry" is repeatedly decried. In these instances, however, the intent is to recall by verbal association Gomer's faithlessness, and the aptness of the analogical thinking depends not on any specific behavior but rather on the underlying broken relationship: the marital bond is broken, as is the covenant between God and his people. Hosea 6:6 has been the source of much scholarly attention, partly on account of translation difficulties:

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.

God's impatience with the outward forms of devotion is a prophetic theme—sometimes, as in Amos, it elicits derision and nausea as opposed to mere impatience. What does he care for? From the linguistically advanced one learns that the Hebrew words translated here as "knowledge" and "steadfast love" both convey a sense of reciprocal intimacy for which it's hard to find English equivalents. 

Books of the Bible: Proverbs

Proverbs; or, the Poor Richard's Almanack of the Old Testament. 

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise—Poor Richard

A slothful man will not catch his prey, but the diligent man will get precious wealth—Proverbs 12:27

Though the Book of Proverbs resembles an anthology—an assembly of unconnected sayings—it's possible to detect a prevailing theme, and it's this: the prudent and wise live long and prosper, while reckless fools suffer the opposite fate. One recognizes this theme from, for example, the Deuteronomic historian, who describes a period of national hardship leading to obedience and faith, which begets success and prosperity, the enjoyment of which tends to diminish religious devotion, which is the cause of new misfortunes, then another religious awakening, and on and on, an endless cycle and a "theory of history." But notice that, in the world of Deuteronomy, prosperity or adversity is contingent upon obedience to God's commandments, whereas in Proverbs it's quite a secular brand of conformity that is recommended for advancement. It's not as if I had to hunt around to turn up Proverbs 12:27, "wisdom" one might subscribe to without having any particular view about bondage in Egypt, the exodus, delivery into the promised land, God's covenant with his people. Israel's faith is founded upon God's historical acts, which aren't mentioned in Proverbs. According to the  Deuteronomist, you should behave this way and not that way because the former has been commanded by God, the latter forbidden, and he is watching still, active in history, punishing and rewarding. In the Proverbs, God seems at a remove, on sabbatical, and you should behave this way and not that way only because, presumably, you are a prudent person who wants to enjoy an agreeable life.

The Proverbs are open to the same kind of criticism that was leveled at Ben Franklin, the compiler of Poor Richard's almanac. When a statue honoring Franklin was unveiled, James Russell Lowell wrote:

[W]e shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston . . . and that he moved to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance . . . and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind.

Such thin gruel, in other words, that getting the details exactly wrong has no effect. By genre, the Proverbs are, like Job and Ecclesiastes, "wisdom literature," but there the resemblance ends. Here's another representative Proverb (12:21):

No ill befalls the righteous,
but the wicked are filled with trouble.

Isn't it pretty to think so! This is the "wisdom" that is explicitly rejected in those other wisdom books, angrily and defiantly in Job, wearily but firmly in Ecclesiastes. If one were to judge the merits of Old Testament writings by strictly literary standards, the high points would be much of Genesis, the court history in II Samuel, the Book of Jonah, many of the Psalms, and, in the category of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes and Job. The major prophetic works of Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as three of the so-called minor prophets—Amos, Micah, and Hosea—command attention also. In comparison to all of these, the Book of Proverbs sounds like Polonius.

So that would be the brief for the prosecution—which I endorse, but not wholly. One occasionally receives, while wading through, a pleasing jolt. The source, when this happens, is often an unexpected turn.

Like a gold ring in a swine's snout
is a beautiful woman without discretion.

The two-part construction is characteristic, but the effect varies considerably. Very often—too often—part two completes the thought of part one in pat and predictable fashion. It seems there are a million like "the wise do x; the foolish, the opposite of x" or "x yields good results; and nothing good comes from x's opposite." So the jaded reader, coming to

A foolish son is ruin to his father

finds his brain filling in line two with

but a wise son elevates the family

or some such ticky-tackiness, and for this reason the reward is all the greater when, in this case, the eye, catching up, corrects the brain's sneering guess with 

and a wife's quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain.

Maybe it's just me, but, among the more vivid and memorable of the Proverbs, it seems an overrepresented subject concerns relations between the sexes. In chapter 30, essentially an appendix in which the sayings drop the two-part parallel construction in favor of more spacious expression, one reads, at verses 18 and 19:

Three things are too wonderful for me;
four I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a serpent on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.

The Proverbs are frequently quoted by those who wish to endow their prim morality with the authority of Scripture, which I guess is their right, but the tactic may have been anticipated:

Like a lame man's legs, which hang useless,
is a proverb in the mouth of fools. —Proverbs 26:7

Books of the Bible: I Kings

 

Imagine some earnest young theological scholar who, out of a surplus of enthusiasm and devotion, sets himself the task of reading through all 66 books of the Christian Bible, front to back, Genesis to the Revelation to John.  Let's for the sake of a speculative question I mean to pose endow the youngster with more than the usual amount of determination without making him a hero--say, he's in the top quintile for perseverance, but not the top decile.  The betting question is how far will he have proceeded when he gives up on the project.  I think a reasonable estimate would be somewhere in First or Second Kings.  If the bet is of the over-under variety, and the mark set at Deuteronomy, I'd take the over for sure.  Genesis is often sublime, Exodus of intermittent interest, and, by the end of the Pentateuch, which is where Deuteronomy stands, the diminishing returns will not have yet knocked out someone who embarks with enthusiasm and top-quintile credentials.  But if the mark is set at the end of II Chronicles--I and II Chronicles follow I and II Kings--I want the under.  These historical books are oppressively dull, and the division of each into two books can be for no other reason than their oppressive lengths.  To persevere past the Chronicles toward the Old Testament's wisdom literature, the next relief in sight, would require unusual tolerance for boredom, or maybe a mystic's confidence in the favorable effects of forcing one's eyes to move over all the words--something, anyway, not possessed by most of us.

Yet we must acknowledge that, just as some people peruse with avidity the uniform commercial code, others are devoted to biblical literature.  I'm not counting those who profess interest out of religious duty, just those who on Crusoe's island could be employed, happily and for all time, with the part of the Old Testament occupying the bulk between Deuteronomy and Job.  What difficulties have they surmounted?  And, having surmounted them, what view, unobscured by the dreary weather, have they attained?

Many of the challenges are by now familiar, and we may begin with the matter of multiple sources that one could not say have been woven together into a spellbinding tapestry by a skilled editor.  The result is that what one supposes to be "the narrative" is actually several narratives that are constantly interrupting one another and giving a general reader the strong impression of incoherence.  A modest example might be the sequence of stories about the prophet Elijah in chapters 17, 18, 19, and 21 of I Kings.  These four chapters make a single unit that for some reason is presented, on account of the unrelated chapter 20, nonconsecutively.  What the hell, editor?

It is possible to detect in Kings the hand of an unambitious editor, often referred to as "the Deuteronomic editor" because of his evident allegiance to the general outlook of the Deuteronomic source for the Pentateuch.  Recall that, in the Pentateuch, the so-called Yahwist source is responsible for the sublimity--man created by God kneeling in the earth and dirtying his hands, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Sarah, the "handmaid" and Ishmael, and the story of Jacob's family, featuring preeminently the proto-picaresque adventures of Joseph and his brothers.  By contrast, the Deuteronomist's calling card is--well, when I say his hand may be "detected" in I Kings, I'm thinking of chapter 3 concerning the bureaucratic organization of King Solomon's government, and chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 concerning his construction projects, including an extraordinary level of detail on the building specs.  This longueur draws to a blessed conclusion when, in chapter 9, God appears to Solomon in a vision and says:

[I]f you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel for ever . . . .  But if you turn aside from following me . . . .

It's not necessary to continue since anyone may, using their own words, produce an apt paraphrase of the recitation of dire consequences following upon disobedience. 

And what a lot of disobedience ensued!  Not just Solomon, either.  If you can keep your eyes open, you might notice the formulaic phrases with which the deficiencies of successive kings are identically summarized.  They come to power in the nth year of So-and-So, rule for some number of years, fall well short of the example of David, may be read about further in a certain named (but now lost) work, and then "slept with their fathers," necessitating the ascension of a new So-and-So.  Their shortcomings  aren't vivid but appear to arise mainly from excessive libido and excessive tolerance of the religions of Israel's neighbors.  This would be a good time to mention that in about 920 B.C. the United Kingdom of Israel divided into a northern kingdom ("Israel," including the cities of Shechem and Samaria) and a southern kingdom ("Judah," with a principal city of Jerusalem).  More kingdoms, more kings, more unfamiliar geographic references, more insufficiently labeled and alternating histories of north and south--those in the top decile, though soldiering onward, have lost their enthusiasm.

Quite a lot is known of the actual history of this period, and, reading around in it a little, the Deuteronomist turns out to be an unreliable guide.  For example, one would conclude from I Kings that Omri, quite a consequential figure in secular history, was just another in the line of Israel's undistinguished libertine rulers.  Moreover, the effort to make events conform with the notion that God lavished his blessings on his people during the reigns of pious kings but sent hardship during the reigns of the impious required some--shall we say--manipulations.  A careful general reader may catch the scent of this in the bifurcated portrait of King Solomon.  In the early chapters, he's wise and devout--the famous story of his deciding which of the competing mothers should get the baby is in chapter 3--but chapter 11 begins, ominously, "Now King Solomon loved many foreign women."  Predictably, it develops that trouble is afoot in the kingdom, and the explanation appears to be that the king's declining moral status must account for it. 

Is it possible that Solomon, as he approached his dotage, became more randy and cosmopolitan?  If so, he reversed the common trend.  It seems more likely that the Deuteronomist is struggling to make history align with a religious doctrine requiring that God reward good kings and punish the bad.  Viewed in this light, the tedium recedes to some modest degree, and it's possible to sense a bit of life behind the wooden exposition.  More about all the excitement when we progress into II Kings!

Books of the Bible: Titus

We've arrived at the letter to Titus, the last and briefest of the so-called Pastorals and therefore my favorite.  What Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost, Milton's twelve-book epic in blank verse--that no one ever wished it longer--could be said as well of the Pastoral letters, each of which is only a few pages long. 

Scratching around for something to say about Titus, I find that others appear to have had a similar problem.  For example, the section devoted to the Pastoral letters in The New Testament: an Introduction, a work by Norman Perrin that I have turned to for enlightenment and commentary in these mini-essays on New Testament books, is precisely four pages long.  Four pages, on three letters.  His section on the letter to the Romans is eight pages long and could be much longer since, as I pointed out, the profundity of the eighth chapter elicits a Perrin punt:

In what is probably the greatest sustained passage from his letters, perhaps the greatest sustained passage from Christian literature altogether, Paul now depicts the details of the possibilities of the new life in Christ as he understands it in his maturity . . . .  It is a passage to be read and reflected on by the individual reader rather than commented on by the scholar, and the present writer does not propose to make any remarks whatsoever.

The same writer's laconic treatment of Titus and the two other Pastoral letters has a different source.  Reading between his lines, I understand Perrin to be saying something like: these letters might be safely skipped over, but they are in the New Testament, so, in the interests of fullness, I will perform the following perfunctory analysis.  [Perfunctory analysis.]  Actually, one interesting question relating to the Pastorals might be how it is that they made the cut and were admitted into the New Testament canon.  I say "interesting" but I'm not volunteering to study up on it and make a report.

I will say this:  regarding Titus, one might at least clear up some misconceptions by observing that the traditional, formal title--"The Letter of Paul to Titus"--contains three nouns, all of which deceive.  It's not a letter.  It wasn't written by Paul.  And it wasn't meant for Titus.  (The same could be said of the first and second letters of Paul to Timothy, substituting "Timothy" for "Titus.")

I explained in my account of I Timothy why Paul could not have been the author of the Pastoral epistles, but here is a fast review.  Their sleepy serene style is not Paul's.  All the Greek-reading scholars concur on this point, and I think we should believe them, because it comes through in translation, too. Moreover, the subject matter of the Pastorals, which is church organization, was not a subject of the known letters of Paul, and could not have been, since when he was alive "church" referred to individual congregations, such as existed at Corinth and Rome, not one universal Christian church that had to be organized so as to endure into a long future as a world institution.  Paul could have imagined no such need, the expectation of Christ's second coming and the termination of human history occupying too big a space in his brain.  For these and other reasons, the Pastorals had to be written at a much later date, probably around the year 125, well after Paul's race was run, by someone who could not very convincingly imitate Paul, so different were his concerns and outlook--indeed, Paul's great themes, such as justification by faith, are almost absent, and when they do arise, sketchily, the sketchiness betrays the imitation.

That the work is a "letter" to "Titus" appears to be another aspect of the imitation.  We hear whispers of Titus in some of Paul's letters, particularly II Corinthians and Galatians.  As a contemporary of Paul, he could not be the intended recipient of a "letter" written long after the death of Paul.  I suppose that for our fundamentalist friends this is an instance of begging the question, since they are resolved to accept the traditional view that the work known as the letter of Paul to Titus is indeed a letter written by Paul to Titus.  If you don't accept the view that the "letter" could not have been written by Paul, you don't have to reject the view that it was written to Titus.  But is it even a letter?  Once you get past the suspiciously elaborate salutation, it reads more like a short treatise on church organization.  Why would the obscure Titus--who is not mentioned in the Book of Acts, the New Testament's contribution to early church history--receive such a document?  The overwhelming evidence for non-Pauline authorship at a date well into the second century aligns with the theory that Titus and its two companions were intended as a general guide for church leaders and that, as Perrin puts it, "the address to individuals known to be companions of Paul is a literary device to lend plausibility."

I've indicated that the text is flavorless without discussing in any specific way what is set out.  Here's a sample, too memorable to be representative but here goes anyway:

Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to be refractory, nor to pilfer, but to show entire and true fidelity, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior (2:9-10).

Not the favorite passage of the liberation theologians, but critics of Christianity who have troubled themselves to read the New Testament like to call attention to it.  The Bible is long and there's something for everyone!  The passage may be viewed as another piece of evidence against Paul's authorship, for in his genuine letters the topic of slavery is almost always a metaphor illustrating some theological concept.  As an institution in human affairs, slavery arises, somewhat obliquely, in the letter to Philemon, and Paul's oblique treatment suggests that he would not have written Titus 2:9-10. (And he didn't.)

Books of the Bible: II Timothy

 

I don't feel up to the challenge of having something interesting to say about II Timothy, a letter like dreary weather that can muster only a drizzle.  When watching football on TV, you do not see, as a team lines up to try for the extra point, a fan behind the goal posts holding up a placard with the inscription II Timothy 3:1--which, alas, is as viable a candidate as any in this letter and reads (Revised Standard Version), "The saying is sure: If any one aspires to the office of bishop, he desires a noble task."  The bleak quality is conveyed by the New Testament scholar Martin Dibelius, who argued that II Timothy, and the pastoral epistles in general, promote "bourgeois Christianity."  Do not think that I have studied the works of Dibelius.  I am, however, reading Paul and his impersonators in the Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul, edited by Wayne Meeks, who, in his introduction to the pastoral epistles, writes:

The eschatological tension of Paul's authentic letters is almost dissolved here.  We see a "bourgeois Christianity" (Dibelius) making itself at home in the world, equating "faith" with "sound teaching," which is expected to produce a rather conservative and commonplace morality as the mark of "piety" or "religiosity." If this is the work of Paul, then it is of an aging Paul with the fire gone out.

Besides describing the gray weather, this brings us back to the question of authorship, whether the pastoral epistles are from the hand of Paul or a later pseudonymous writer, a topic I've already exploited in order to work up approximately a thousand words on I Timothy, here.  Though there's a scholarly consensus for the pseudonymous author, certain curiosities of II Timothy are the source of a hypothesis concerning how there may be fragments of genuinely Pauline material embedded in the text.  See if you can detect anything unusual in the following passage (4:6-14):

For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. 

Do your best to come to me soon.  For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me.  Get Mark and bring him with you; for he is very useful in serving me. Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus.  When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.  Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm; the Lord will requite him for his deeds.

I don't know that there's any reason to read II Timothy if you haven't set yourself the odd task of wading through the whole Bible, eyes passing over every word, and, in that case, you are likely under the general anesthetic by the midway point of the pastoral epistles and won't notice that the valedictory tone of the first paragraph is a poor fit with, "Come and see me and bring the coat I forgot, as well as the books, and for god's sake don't forget my parchments."  The author of the first paragraph says he's finished the race, but in the very next paragraph he's preparing for the rest of it.  What could account for this?  Well, the second paragraph could bear no literary relationship at all to the first.  It might be just a fragment from some other letter, dropped in without warning and with no transitional material to create the illusion of a seamless flow of words.  The justification for this paste job might be that the fragment had status on account of being from the hand of the master, and call outs to acquaintances is indeed a hallmark of the known letters of Paul.  I don't have an opinion on this,  I'm just reporting the scholarly suppositions.  The strength of the theory is that it does account for the otherwise unaccountable shift in tone, but who knows?  My attention is attracted to poor Alexander, the coppersmith who's done wrong, obscurely preserved through the ages because of a chance reference in a fragment that by chance was not lost and, just because it existed, got inserted in an unrelated letter that was by chance canonized: this coppersmith is the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern of the New Testament.

A theme of these articles is the unreality of the fundamentalist view of the Bible.  If every word is the inerrant and infallible word of God, it would seem to follow that it is all equally sublime--a view impossible to reconcile with any honest reading.  When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, he wrote prefaces for some of the books, most famously for Romans, which begins:

This Epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament and the very purest Gospel, and is worthy not only that every Christian should know it word for word, by heart, but occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul. It can never be read or pondered too much, and the more it is dealt with the more precious it becomes, and the better it tastes.

Therefore, I, too, will do my best, so far as God has given me power, to open the way into it through this preface . . . .

And he then proceeds for fifteen pages or so.  During Luther's time, of course, the pastoral epistles were attributed to the author of Romans, so he could not altogether ignore them, and II Timothy receives a preface of two brief paragraphs, 120 of the most forgettable words he ever wrote.  There will be more to say on this topic if I ever get to the letter of James.

Books of the Bible: I Timothy

The two letters addressed to Timothy, together with the one addressed to Titus, are usually called "the Pastorals," not on account of the subject matter being fields and streams, meadows and brooks, shepherds and their sheep, but because of a common thread relating to the church, its congregations, and congregants--the concerns of pastors.  All three begin with a form of the salutation familiar to New Testament readers.  Here it is in I Timothy:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope,

To Timothy, my true child in the faith:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

This greeting notwithstanding, scholarship has concluded that these letters could not have been written by Paul.  It is almost certain that all three were written by the same pseudonymous author, who, for reasons sufficient to him, wrote in Paul's name long after Paul was dead.  A comprehensive summary of the scholar's brief would be as soporific as the letters themselves, but perhaps a condensed version will have the effect of highlighting the main points of interest, such as they are, in I Timothy.

For one thing, the subject matter of I Timothy did not yet exist when Paul was alive and composing his letters. Broadly speaking, New Testament literature exhibits an interest in either eschatology ("a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind") or ecclesiology ("theological doctrine relating to the church").  Those exhibiting eschatological concerns were written before those exhibiting ecclesiastical ones, because an interest in the church and its function in the world was a response to the sun rising and setting, rising and setting, and no trumpet blare to announce the Second Coming.  Eschatology is a frequent theme in the genuine letters of Paul but is absent in I Timothy, which is devoted largely to ecclesiology, an inconceivable topic to someone under the impression that human history is about to end.  Paul's response to what he takes to be aberrant beliefs and practices is to argue for what ought to be orthodox.  In I Timothy, orthodoxy has been defined, and the remedy for the temptation to stray is to submit to the authority of an organized and universal church that did not exist in the time of Paul.  

Linguistic analysis tends to confirm the above conclusion.  Even in translation, one can tell that the meditative style of I Timothy is very different from the vigorous, personal, combative exposition one confronts in, say, Romans or Galations.  Norman Perrin notes that, excluding proper names, the three Pastoral letters use 848 different Greek words, and, of these, 306 do not occur anywhere in the known letters of Paul (which, to review, are: I Thessalonians, Galations, the two letters to the Corinthians, Phillipians, Romans, and Philemon).  Some part of this should be attributed to the invention of ecclesiology after the period of Paul's activity, for in I Timothy there is much talk of church administration, including the place of "bishops" and "deacons"--offices that had not been invented in Paul's time, so of course he didn't use the words.  The different vocabularies reflect the different times and also the different habits of mind of different authors.  It's been pointed out that there are no points of contact between the career of Paul, as described in his known letters and the Book of Acts, with anything that turns up in any of the Pastoral letters. A weightier consideration, however, is just that Paul, to have written I Timothy and the two other Pastoral letters, would have had to suffer some sort of cataclysm that left him functioning but with a completely different personality and cast of mind.

To illustrate this last point, consider how the unknown author of I Timothy, almost immediately after representing himself as Paul in the salutation, proceeds to bungle Paul's teaching on a fundamental point.  Here is I Timothy 1:8-10:

Now we know that the law is good, if anyone uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

Wayne Meeks, editor of The Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul, observes in a footnote that the first eight words are likely "[a] verbal parallel of Romans 7:16, but the following clause is hardly Pauline." It is perhaps useful therefore to set out Romans 7:16, along with the clause that immediately follows it:

Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.¹⁶  So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.¹⁷

For Paul, the law doesn't distinguish the lawful good from the disobedient.  Instead, it is "good" only inasmuch as it shows that no one can live up to it and that all stand in need of grace and the justification that comes from faith.  

St. Paul died in the seventh decade of the first century, perhaps in 65.  A good guess for the date of I Timothy is 120.  In any event, I Timothy was composed long after the death of Paul.  While pseudonymous authorship was common, it's obvious that fundamentalists cannot allow that a letter in which the author falsely represents himself as Paul was admitted into the inerrant and infallible canon of Scripture.  Even worse, the unknown author appears to have endeavored to burnish his credentials with an allusion to a passage in Paul's greatest letter--and then immediately supplied evidence that he has wholly misunderstood the import of the passage.  

A final note: the whole church administration business is a terrible bore, but the reader of I Timothy who determinedly slogs ahead to the end is eventually rewarded with a passage that sounds more like a bit of wisdom literature from the Old Testament:

There is great gain with godliness in contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.  But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all evils. . . .

Just want to point out that the famous conclusion to this passage is routinely misquoted.  It's not money itself that's the root of all evil; rather, the love of it.  

 

Books of the Bible: Ephesians

 

Except for recent immigrants, we Americans are mainly monolingual, and therefore inclined perhaps to overlook certain kinds of questions and problems.  With respect to the Bible, many Americans think its text is divine and, in some meaningful way, dictated by God--it's "God's word," whatever the details.  That God spoke in Hebrew and Greek doesn't seem to concern anyone very much.  Still, it seems worth mentioning that there is a translator, a human intermediary, between American Bible readers and the supposedly inspired text.  Is it the officially approved fundamentalist view that only the original Hebrew and Greek texts qualify as the word of God, or are all the various translators divinely guided in their work so as not to spoil the effect?  

And what does this have to do with Ephesians?

Well, sometimes when you're reading something that's been translated from another language, and you feel that your powers of comprehension are being routed, your suspicions might fall upon the translator.  That's my experience of Ephesians, and, turning for assistance to the people who might be able to render a verdict on the hypothesis, I find that, with one voice, they say that the problem is the other way 'round.  That is, the most widely used English translations--King James and Revised Standard--are actually doing a favor for the original text, which is a shoddy mess.  Ernst Kasemann, for example, said of Ephesians 1:3-14 that "the most monstrous conglomeration of sentences in the Greek language is found here," and that "any successful translation of it is a tribute to the translator's ingenuity." [quoted words are Norman Perrin's rendering, in his Introduction to the New Testament, of Kasemann's German]

This provides a taste of the challenges facing the usually forgotten translator, who, when we think of him at all, is usually imagined marching to and fro on a linguistic cross walk.  But if that was all there was to it, then the opening to Ephesians would be a case of GIGO--garbage in, garbage out.  The real task is to use one's knowledge of Greek to wrest meaning from the mad jumble of the original and then "translate" that into English.  Being "faithful to the original" is widely regarded as the translator's first responsibility, but, in the case of Ephesians, fealty to that principle interferes with another pretty basic obligation: that of producing something intelligible.

To evaluate the merit of the above you'd have to be able to read Ephesians in Greek.  Since I can't, I'm taking on faith the word of scholars, an attractive option inasmuch as it supplies a flattering explanation for my incomprehension.  You can see, however, why the general messiness is embarrassing for our fundamentalist friends.  Honest perplexity lives uneasily with the notion that the text is a transcript of the mind of God intended for our edification, for why then should there be any barriers to understanding?  Did God make a poor grade in freshman composition?  Close textual analysis, and the results it yields, suggest that we're dealing with a text like others instead of with something supernatural--probably that is the root of the discomfort.  

The conclusions of scholarship should at least not be embarrassing for those concerned about the reputation of Paul, to whom authorship of Ephesians has traditionally been assigned.  The known letters of Paul are characterized by a strong, plain, often intimate style--a sufficient reason to doubt he could have written Ephesians.  Moreover, there are in Ephesians, which is only a few pages long, something like forty words that are never used elsewhere in the Pauline corpus.  The whole backdrop is entirely different from what we're accustomed to in Paul's letters, where he is invariably addressing a particular church in a particular location that needs instruction on some particular doctrinal or ethical question.  When the word "church" occurs in Ephesians, the reference is not to the local congregation at Ephesus but to the universal Church made of the body of all Christian believers.  Thus there are no personal touches, such as the greetings and blessings extended to named individuals that frequently occur in Paul's known letters.  Paul's great theme of justification by faith is present, though in a way that might strike some as suspiciously perfunctory, and even for the unsuspicious there is no reason therefore to reject the view that Ephesians was written by a Pauline disciple after Paul's race was run.  There is in Ephesians no discussion of the timing of the Second Coming, a frequent topic in Paul's letters; this absence might plausibly be attributed  to the passage of time and consequent shift in attention away from an imminent conclusion to history and toward a new epoch defined by the activity of the unified Church.  For these reasons, it seems that Ephesians is best understood as a document of emerging Catholicism rather than one from the hand of Paul.

Discarding the notion that Ephesians is another of Paul's letters makes it easier to see that it's not actually a letter at all.  Writing on Ephesians in Peake's Commentary on the Bible, Henry Chadwick notes that the book is "a theological manifesto addressed to everybody in general and to nobody in particular."  It's possible to make out, though with difficulty, that the subject of the manifesto is baptism, and the parts that might sound familiar have to do with a new man who "takes off the old and puts on the new."  Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paul's writings, thinks "Ephesians was intended to be read to new converts in a group of churches in the southwestern part of the province of Asia (modern Turkey), as a written substitute for a personal address by the apostle to the newly baptized."  The specific hortatory advice to these new Christians, supposing Meeks's surmise to be correct, is a mixture of the discredited and dated with the arguably sublime:

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.

Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart. . . .

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Books of the Bible: Colossians

Colossae, in Asia Minor, present day Turkey, was some few centuries before the Christian era a busy commercial center, but by the first century AD it had been eclipsed by nearby towns.  Paul never visited it, and the Colossian church, the recipient of this letter, was founded by his mentee, Epaphrus, a fact alluded to in the introductory greeting at 1:7.  The town seems to have been wiped from the map shortly thereafter, probably by an earthquake that is known to have struck the area during the reign of Nero, whose death in 68 followed Paul's by three or four years.

That the town disappeared seems emblematic of the letter's many obscurities, beginning with its authorship.  Its authenticity as a Pauline epistle has been questioned by scholarship despite the fact that the author refers to himself as "Paul."  The aspect of the debate that seems of most interest to me relates to the letter's style or "tone."  The undoubted compositions of Paul are characterized by strong polemical attacks, the vigor of which tends to illuminate the object of the author's derision.  Sometimes, as in Galatians and the later chapters of 2 Corinthians, he cannot constrain himself at all, and he falls, somewhat to the delight of a dutiful but drowsy reader, into heavy sarcasm.  Speaking for myself, the interest of the Pauline letters may be attributed mainly to the author's vitriol and hate, which naturally arouse human interest.  Why is he so angry?  One begins to pay attention.  With Colossians, the general situation is the same as always--there is some problem in the church there and the purpose of the letter is to set the congregation back on track--but the polemical vigor is missing.  Instead, the author seems more like a stern, wooden lecturer who, were he on the seminary faculty, would have to rely on late registrants to fill his classroom.  The adjective "polemical" is replaced by "admonitory" in commentaries.  It doesn't necessarily mean Paul isn't the author.  It's been suggested, for example, that his never having visited Colossae may have had a subduing effect on his exposition to the church there.  But the letter does not sound like the Paul we know from Corinthians, Galations, and Romans.

Upshot: if you are engaged in a trek through the Bible, just to say you read every word of it, you will likely be thankful that Colossians is brief, only four chapters and probably the same number of pages.

The second chapter is the one in which the trouble in the Colossian church is addressed--"through a glass, darkly," we might say.  For example, 2:16-19:

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.  These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.  Let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

Presumably this meant something definite to the original recipients?  The intervening centuries have rendered it quite obscure, and nowhere is it any more clear than above, where it is possible at least to detect the suggestion of recognizably Pauline themes: distaste for unusual rites and impatience with what might be called spiritual pride.  The rites in question appear to be consistent with those of Gnosticism, a religious movement arising in the first century about which there is an extensive literature, in part because it was first mixed and then purged from developing Christianity.  I mention it only because the prevailing scholarly interpretation of the letter to the Colossians is that it's essentially a rejection of dualistic Gnostic beliefs and a reassertion of the superiority of what, thanks to Paul's success, became orthodox Christianity--though, as we've noted, without Paul's characteristic vehemence.  This conclusion about the author's intention is not one that will be reached by any "general reader" relying only on the biblical text, which is opaque and resistant to comprehension.  

There's another side to the authorship question that is to me anyway intriguing.  I keep noting how in many New Testament writings there is quite plainly an expectation that Christ's Second Coming is imminent, while in other texts it's possible to detect a kind of uneasiness over the evident postponement of this event.  As time proceeds, and it doesn't happen and doesn't happen, uneasiness gives way to an interest in the organization and activity of the early Christian church--a concern that could not have arisen when each day might be the last of human history.  If one were to place the undoubted letters of Paul into one of these categories, the question would be whether they belong in the first or the second.  The letter to the Colossians, however, might plausibly be placed in the third. For the first time, one may detect the concept of ecclesiastical organization--for example, in the titles that are assigned to the named figures: Epaphrus is "a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf" and Paul himself "a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you."  When the author occasionally is echoing  Paul's language from other letters, one might notice what is however new.  For example, Colossians 1:24--

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.

--resembles 2 Corinthians 1:5-6:

For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.  If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation.

What's new in Colossians is the reference to "the church" and its identification with the body of Christ.  I'm not smart or alert enough myself to pick up on these things and so am following the analysis of Norman Perrin in The New Testament: An Introduction.  His conclusion is that the letter to the Colossians was written somewhat later than the authentic letters of Paul and that the author is not Paul but an unknown "Paulinist."  If nothing else, this acquits Paul of having written "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord" (3:18), the inerrant and infallible nature of which has been doubted even by devout, Republican-leaning women.

Books of the Bible: Psalms

 

The Book of Psalms, also known as the Psalter, is sometimes called the hymnbook of ancient Israel.  This isn't meant as a metaphor.  Untranslated terms such as selah--untranslated because the meaning is lost--recur and seem intended to signal a musical interlude or some other liturgical direction.  So the individual psalms were aids to public worship, elements of a liturgy.  They are used for that purpose to this day, and a churchgoer who reads through them might as a result find much that is familiar, even known by heart on account of a thousand recitations, and will be surprised to learn that the words come directly from the Psalter.  For example, here is a portion of Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Perhaps even an outsider may sense here an incantatory power that is achieved again and again within the 150 psalms that comprise the Psalter.  The most common source for the effect is, I think, a combination of solemnity, simplicity, and human feeling.  Colleges offer courses with titles such as "The Bible as Literature," which, were it not for the Psalter, would be more susceptible to charges of special pleading.  

The tone of lofty dignity is not, however, maintained from front to back of this hymnbook.  The base specimens contribute to deplorable Old Testament themes--for example, the violent hatred of enemies, which is usually joined to the notion that God should and will assist in their slaughter.  From Psalm 137:

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, "Rase it, rase it! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

It is a fond claim of fundamentalists that the Bible inculcates a single message, or at least that it doesn't contradict itself, but really there is no way to reconcile the petition for the skulls of the foe's infants to be crushed against rocks with the commandment to love one's enemies.  At least contemporary politicians have options when mining for biblical texts friendly to their preexisting inclinations.  

Scholarship on the Psalms has performed a mighty taxonomic labor, with the result that all 150 may be filed within a half dozen or so phyla.  There are hymns (calls to worship, such as #100); royal psalms (for celebrations related to coronations, a king's wedding, a military victory, etc.: #2, 45 and 110 are examples); psalms of thanksgiving (a worshiper exhorts fellows to heed a personal narrative of deliverance, as in #30, 32, and 34); psalms of trust (among others, the justly famous 23rd, which has not been altogether ruined by the profusion of calligraphic renderings in service of kitschy Christian art); and liturgies (a grab-bag for the most boring ones, so far as I can tell).

I've left out of the above classification system the psalm of lament, which is the single most prevalent type: a full 50 of the 150 psalms qualify as either a communal lament (worshipers petition for relief from a national affliction) or a personal lament (an individual calls to God from "out of the depths" of his suffering).  These psalms seem to me to be of particular interest, mainly on account of the way in which they peculiarly mix very aggressive complaints against divine justice with faith in God's saving action.  Of the personal laments, Psalm 22 is probably the best known, since according to the crucifixion accounts in two gospels (Mark and Matthew) Jesus, on the cross, cried out its famous first words:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The 22nd, though long and meandering, includes the essential elements of the personal lament, which may however be seen most clearly in the stripped down thirteenth:

How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me for ever?
How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him";
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

But I have trusted in thy steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

That is the whole psalm, a template for the individual lament, a skeleton on which to hang elaborations, the absence of which here direct attention to the essential form.  The four-fold "How long" is a variation on "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?": both are complaints, brash and deficiently reverent but born of desperation, lodged against God's injustice.  The petitioner insists upon his pain and also upon an answer, a justification.  But then everything slides away quite unsatisfactorily.  The petitioner's desperation is not made more impressive by the disclosure that its evident source is a version of, "What will other people think?"  And what of the apparently invisible transition between the second and third stanzas?  The petitioner had demanded that God answer him but in the end folds his hand even though there's been no answer.  If the sudden memory of God's past bountiful dealings with him resolves the whole issue, then how is it that he put this history out of his mind for long enough to suffer the agony described in the first two stanzas?  

But these are perhaps the complaints of a rationalist.  Psalms follows Job in the Bible and I didn't find the final resolution to that righteous man's questions very satisfactory, either.  To close on a conciliatory note, however, it is at least satisfying that in the religious practice of ancient Israel the  darkness and disorder in human life is recognized--it's the subject matter of a third of the Psalter.  Whereas in contemporary America the practice of religion often seems roughly analogous to another healthy lifestyle choice, like doing yoga, one more tool to get ahead and not fall into the hole out of which God's people cry to him in fifty of the psalms.  

 

 

Books of the Bible: Second Thessalonians

A little taxonomy.  There are twenty-seven units ("books") in the New Testament.   Of these, four are gospels, one of which (Luke) has an appendage, the history of the early church known as Acts.  And there is the concluding Book of Revelation.  So that makes six.  The other twenty-one are epistles (letters), and of these, thirteen have been attributed to Paul.  Of these thirteen, seven were undoubtedly written by Paul, and a few of them are probably responsible for Christianity becoming a world religion instead of just a footnote in the history of Judaism.  These seven are (in likeliest order of composition) First Thessalonians, Galations, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon.  The other six belong to a "Pauline school" but, with varying degrees of certainty, were not written by Paul himself.  These are Second Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the three so-called pastoral letters--First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus.  We come now to the works of the Pauline school, beginning with Second Thessalonians.

There are two reasons for doubting that Second Thessalonians was written by Paul.  The first is that the author sometimes appears determined to pass himself off as Paul, which presumably Paul would not need to do.  The letter concludes:

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.  This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

You catch a whiff of fishiness without perhaps feeling sure of what to make of this.  One learns from rooting around in commentaries that it was common for letters and legal documents to be dictated to a scribe and then signed by the actual author.  On what might be called the "innocent" interpretation, then, the letter is in the handwriting of someone else and these last sentences were added by Paul, in his own hand, as a kind of seal of authenticity.  It wouldn't be the only instance of this in Paul's letters. For example, in Galatians, which is undoubtedly by Paul, he writes (6:11), as he proceeds to his conclusion:

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

And he goes on for another couple hundred words or so before signing off.  The brief for the opposing side holds that what in Galatians seems plausibly organic is, in Second Thessalonians, too much like special pleading--akin to insisting upon your innocence even though no accusation has been leveled.  According to this view, the convention of offering proof of authenticity is, in Second Thessalonians, copied and rather oddly insisted upon for no evident reason, unless the reason is that Paul is not the author.  Along this line, the striking similarities in phrasing between First Thessalonians and Second Thessalonians have seemed to some peculiar.  The salutation to First Thessalonians:

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy
To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace.

The salutation to Second Thessalonians:

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Authors, of course, have their ways, and fall into certain habits.  On the "innocent" interpretation, that's what's going on here and elsewhere in the two letters: Paul, on a later occasion, sounding like himself on a former occasion--it is, you might say, "the way he writes." 

Or, alternatively, the opposing view: No, this is not a case of one author "sounding like himself" but of one author imitating another. 

Now, no matter one's view of this essentially linguistic argument, it's easy to see what view will be adopted by fighting fundamentalists.  If you are committed to the proposition that every word of Scripture is the inspired word of God, you will reject out of hand the notion that a sentence such as

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand

was written by someone pretending to be Paul.  Since the argument is that the sentence was written by someone misrepresenting himself as Paul, it would be as if at least this one sentence of the Holy Bible was a deliberate lie.  Not permitted.  

As bad as that would be, the second reason for doubting that Paul wrote Second Thessalonians is probably worse, for it relates again to this recurring and vexing question about the timing of Christ's Second Coming.  Recall that, in his first letter to the Thessalonian church, Paul had addressed their apparent befuddlement over the fact that believers were dying without receiving the expected award at the end time.  What would happen to them?  And, more pointedly, why was it taking so long?  The text of First Thessalonians makes it very evident that these early Christians believed they were living at the very end of human history--indeed, that they would "not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come."

Paul's quite heady answer had made use of the simile about the Second Coming arriving "like a thief in the night."  That is, Paul, without denying that the end was (more or less) imminent, indicates that the precise timing cannot be known and that the best course for the Christian is therefore to pursue soberly his duties.  In Second Thessalonians, this whole question is revisited, and the treatment is altogether different:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

So much for the thief in the night!  There will be visible signs, events that must occur before the last event can occur, and of course a cottage industry of theological quackery has arisen around the identification of, for example, "the man of lawlessness" with Nero, or Hitler, or whomever (Obama!), from which the "prophet" then deduces the date on which the elect will be gathered up.  This does not sound like sober Paul, more like the Book of Revelation, and there is a real question about why Paul, in two letters addressed to the same church within a relatively brief period, would treat this same issue so differently.

He almost certainly didn't.  Second Thessalonians was written by someone else, much later, at least a generation after the death of Paul in about A.D. 64.  To the unknown author, it may have seemed a shame that Paul could not update his thinking in light of the fact that the Second Coming still hadn't happened.

Books of the Bible: Philemon

As with Ecclesiastes, an obvious question about Philemon is: How did it get admitted to the canon of Scripture?  Ecclesiastes contradicts Judeo-Christian teaching, but, perhaps boosted by the (false) notion that King Solomon was the author, it slipped past the gatekeeper.  The subject matter of Philemon seems private and secular, but Paul wrote it, and everything in existence that was written by Paul, or that might have been written by Paul, is in the New Testament.  An extant Pauline grocery list would likely have been canonized and subjected to close scholarly analysis for what it might reveal about, say, the relationship between his actual practice and the view of the Jewish dietary laws that he elsewhere expressed.  

The letter to Philemon, however, is somewhat more interesting than a list, and scholarly analysis has revealed a dimension that would never be detected by any general reader of an unannotated translation.  The situation, if not every detail, may be apprehended from the letter itself, which is very brief.  While in prison, Paul has become acquainted with a fugitive slave, Onesimus, whose owner, Philemon, is a Christian.  Roman law, like the American constitution, provided for the return of fugitive slaves to their owners.  Paul, therefore, in order to comply with the law, is sending Onesimus back to Philemon, and he includes this letter explaining his intent and asking for clemency for the slave, who has been "useful" (Paul's word) to him.

Possibly a preternaturally alert reader might pause at this word "useful."  Since the letter indicates that Onesimus has been converted to Christianity, it might suggest that he has also assisted Paul in his missionary work.  And maybe he did.  Still, in a sentence such as--

Formerly he [Onesimus] was useless to you [Philemon], but now he is indeed useful to you and me.

--the meanings of "useless" and "useful" are opaque and the words may appear to be working too hard: there is a sense of straining.  The explanation, for most of us a retrospective one since we will have glided over the difficulty, is that in Greek "onesimus" means "useful."  So Paul is here indulging himself in a bit of word play.  It's like if, in our language, there was a rake named Randy and someone were to say of him--wink, wink--that "he is indeed randy."  

That Paul was capable of a bit of linguistic frolicking is of some modest biographical interest, since playfulness of any kind is not usually associated with his writing--or with the New Testament in general, whose central figure, though "truly human," never laughs.  Recognizing the pun also makes sense of the obscurity in the sentence quoted above.  Paul is saying that the Onesimus known to Philemon is not the Onesimus who is now returning to him.  He's transformed.  Formerly he was useless (not worthy of his name) but he is now indeed Onesimus.

More than that, however: perhaps not just this one passage, but the whole letter, is a double entendre, in the sense that it says one thing on the surface even though Paul intends for the recipient to understand something quite different.  I've set out above the surface meaning.  Beneath the surface, Paul is telling Philemon that he wants Onesimus sent back to him--that he is not to be kept by Philemon as a slave.  Usually my mind is set against any interpretation that has to it even a whiff of secret-coded-text intrigue, especially in the Bible.  These are the verbal equivalent of conspiracy theories concocted by industrious enthusiasts determined to arrive at some predetermined conclusion.  In the case of this letter, however, what I'll call the wink-wink interpretation has considerable explanatory power: it makes sense of things that otherwise seem a little odd.  For example, the punning on the name "Onesimus" carries through the letter. The sentence quoted above is verse 11 (the whole letter is a single chapter of 25 "verses").  Here are verses 20-21, the beginning of the conclusion:

Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord.  Refresh my heart in Christ.  Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

The word "benefit" is a synonym of "useful" and an alternate pun on "Onesimus": that is, "I want some benefit from you in the Lord" may be construed as "I want Onesimus from you in the Lord." This does not seem to me to be much of a stretch.  Indeed, under some allegedly more natural interpretation, it is unclear what benefit Paul is expecting to receive from Philemon.  The next sentence, concerning Paul's wish that his heart be refreshed in Christ, may seem like a cant phrase, but in the context of this letter it is notable that, at verse 12, he had asserted that Onesimus was his (Paul's) "very heart":

I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart.

Thus "refresh my heart" acquires an undertone of "reunite me with Onesimus (by sending him back to me)."  And then the clincher, the last wink of the wink-wink interpretation:

. . . I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

Paul is here acknowledging, winkingly, that his real meaning is not the surface meaning.  The "more" that he expects from Philemon is the return of Onesimus.  If you don't understand it this way, then you have to account for what else Paul is expecting from Philemon, for he never plainly says.  Moreover, the indirection is not gratuitous but, considering the Roman law on the status of slaves, quite possibly prudent.  Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical Writings of St. Paul, puts it this way: 

The Roman laws governing fugitive slaves were strict, and Paul observes the legal necessities punctiliously. Anyone aiding a fugitive was liable for all damages due to the master . . . .  Above all, the fugitive had to be returned; and Paul is sending Onesimus back.  At the same time, Paul's half-stated request, the subtle pleas, the almost bantering tone of his several puns, render the legal situation so incongruous as to shatter it.

In other words, the indirection provides a prudent cover, what we now call "plausible deniability."  I don't think it's the reason the letter to Philemon was canonized, but it's nevertheless true that, compared to his doctrinal writings, this more private letter shows Paul's character in quite a favorable light.

Books of the Bible: Philippians

The "general reader" of Paul's letter to the Philippians will be greeted with familiar problems, the solution of which requires the assistance of scholars unburdened by fundamentalist dogma.  It's possible to piece together a candidate for the letter's occasion--it's Paul's version of a thank-you note to the church at Philippi for having sent to him, by the hand of one Epaphroditus, a gift of money.  The passages from which such a conclusion might be formed are found at 2:25-30 and 4:10-20.  In that case, however, why does it take Paul so long--almost two full chapters--to mention the ostensible reason for having taken up his pen?  Moreover, why are the thank-you passages separated by a block of material in a wholly different tone, that of a Pauline screed against the Judaizing proponents of circumcision?  Lest you think I'm exaggerating how abruptly the tone shifts, consider:

So receive [Epaphroditus] in the Lord with all joy; and honor such men, for he nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete your service to me. 

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord.  To write the same things to you is not irksome to me, and is safe for you.

Look out for the dogs, look out for the evil-workers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh.  For we are the true circumcision, who worship God in spirit, and glory in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh.

This is 2:29 through 3:3, a continuous stretch of words made of the conclusion to the first thank-you passage and the opening of the screed.  It's quite a bewildering transition, more of a jump than a transition, and, as with 2 Corinthians, the best explanation for the jumpiness is that the text of the "letter" is not a unity but rather a collection of fragments--three, perhaps, with endpoints at 3:1 and 4:9, though there is a range of scholarly opinion on details and degree of complexity.  Keeping it simple, however, one might usefully think of the "letter" to the Philippians as consisting of:

1. a fragment of a letter of thanks (4:10-20);
2. a fragment of a follow-up letter in which Paul describes his own difficult circumstances before reiterating his thanks and insisting on the rectitude of Epaphroditus, whose tardy return after delivering the gift seems to have been the cause of some suspicion in Philippi (1:1-3:1); and
3. a fragment of a polemic, or screed, against the Judaizing circumcisers (3:2-4:9)

I take it on faith that to adopt such a view you have to reject the notion that every word of Scripture is the inspired and inerrant word of God, but I could be under estimating the ingenuity of the fightin' fundies.  Maybe it could be argued that it was the hand of God that caused portions of certain letters to be preserved, so that they could later be pasted together in a confusing pastiche that would nevertheless be normative for faith and practice, while allowing fragments of comparative chaff to be lost forever.  Though it seems odd that we should have a wispy hint about, for example, the troubles of this Epaphroditus fellow.  The chaff must have been of very little import indeed. 

On the subject of hints, Philippians provides a few about the character of its author, and it's interesting to note that they are pretty much in line with what can be gleaned from Paul's other extant compositions.  He is not warm or in any way effusive, unless you count anger when some theological tenet or question of personal authority is at stake.  Here he is "thanking" the Philippians for their gift to him:

I rejoice in the Lord greatly that at length you have revived your concern for me; you were indeed concerned for me, but you had no opportunity.  Not that I complain of want; for I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.  I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.  I can do all things in him who strengthens me.  Yet it was kind of you to share my trouble. 

One commentator, Ernst Lohmeyer, has glossed this passage as "thankless thanks":  that is, "Thanks, but I didn't actually need it."  The brief for the defense would assert that Paul's peevish manner must here be attributed to ambivalence about accepting money from a church he had established, which might leave him open to the kinds of attacks on his apostolic authority that he particularly detested.  That he's badly conflicted on this question is suggested further by the way in which the passage wherein he thanks his benefactors is also a memorable statement of Christian stoicism, the source of which is a disdain for the things of the world.  He liked the gift.  He should not have liked it.  As he wrote in Romans, he could will what was right but he could not do it.

This theme of what I'm calling Christian stoicism runs through Philippians.  The most thoroughgoing expression had occurred in the first chapter, where Paul debates with himself, apparently for the edification of the Philippians, whether it would be better for him to die now or later:

For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain . . . .  I am hard pressed between the two.  My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.  But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

So he'd die now, in order to "be with Christ," but that would deprive the Philippians of his instruction.  He didn't continuously conceive of himself as "a wretched man"!  And remember how, in the fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians, Paul writes about how those "now asleep" will receive their reward at the Second Coming?  In Philippians, he seems to think he anyway won't have to wait.  Many of the most devout Christians seem cocksure about what they will experience "on the other side" but, judging from his writings, Paul is not among them. 

Books of the Bible: Galatians

Paul's letter to the Galatians: the theme is that of the letter to the Romans, the tone is that of the concluding three chapters of 2 Corinthians.  In other words, "Death to the law, dammit!" The letter combines Paul's chief doctrine with more evidence of something resembling a personality disorder.  You would not say that he is slow to anger.  The converts, whether it be in politics or religion, tend to run a temperature, and casual readers, if there are any, must be relieved that most of these letters are brief.  Dr Johnson said of Edmund Burke that anyone taking shelter with him in a doorway during a rain shower would comprehend before it passed that they were in the presence of genius.  With Paul, you would venture back into the rain before being able to make such a determination.

The letter begins:

Paul an apostle--not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead--and all the brethren who are with me,

To the churches of Galatia:

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself [etc., etc.] Amen.

The et ceteras are just meant to shorten the formulaic salutation that begins Paul's letters.  What seems noteworthy is that the author's irritation could not here be restrained until the niceties were done. He's Paul, and he speaks for God.  There cannot be a question of mere disagreement.  The salutation complete, the body of the letter commences:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel--not that there is another gospel . . . .  As we have said before, so now I say again, If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.

You see what I mean about preferring to be out in the rain.

The careful reader will be able to make out in the second chapter something about circumcision and a controversy about what the commentators now call "table fellowship,"--that is, who can eat with whom.  The point of this brings us back to the fact, noted previously in connection with the letter to the Romans, that these early Christian communities were made of both Jews and Gentiles, with the result that the place of the Jewish law was somewhat ambiguous.  Did the Gentile Christians need to be circumcised?  Were the Jewish dietary laws in abeyance or not?  That the Galatians had adopted, or were adopting, the wrong answers to these questions is what set Paul off.  The wrong answers were Yes on circumcision and No on table fellowship between Gentiles and Jews.  The Judaizers, in other words, had gained the upper hand in Galatia.  Had they prevailed, Christianity, instead of becoming a world religion, would likely have been relegated to a sect within Judaism that either would or wouldn't have survived. 

But Paul won.  I don't think it's on account of the argument advanced in Galatians, for which the cliché about emitting more heat than light might almost have been invented.  Paul huffs and he puffs but makes almost no sense at all.  Exhibit A would be 3:10, when he's in the midst of ransacking the Old Testament for material with which to bolster his argument:

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them."

The quotation is from Deuteronomy 27:6, where it means exactly what it seems to mean, which is exactly the opposite of what Paul seeks to prove.  I mean to say that this passage, applied to the controversy between Paul and the Judaizers at Galatia, would require that the law be observed, that the Gentiles be circumcised, and that the dietary laws remain in force.  Yet Paul cites it as if the words meant the exact opposite of their plain meaning.  The reconciling commentaries aren't very persuasive but perhaps there are textual problems, such as a missing segment of the argument.  No one really knows. 

Frustrated by the mostly futile effort to comprehend the argument, you might turn to commentaries, which, if they're any good, will likely persuade you that it's worse than you'd thought.  There's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem connected to the question of whether the text seems boring because it makes so little sense, or makes so little sense because the reader is too bored to extract meaning.  I had assumed the latter but the former may actually be more plausible.  Here is the scholar Norman Perrin on the aforementioned section on circumcision in chapter 2:

This passage is extraordinarily difficult to translate, probably because Paul is wrestling with the fact that he actually circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3), and it is affecting his grammar....

I take this to mean it's hard to translate because it's impossible to understand what the text means.  In a footnote to 4:25, Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical edition of The Writings of St. Paul, comments:

The text is uncertain, another major group of manuscripts reading "For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia"; copyists have evidently tried to help out Paul's limping allegory by adding notes.

Scanning Meeks's notes, one is struck by the deployment of "baffling" and "puzzling" and "hardly intelligible" and "ambiguous" and "grammatically incomplete" and "logically confusing," in addition to "limping allegory," to describe different portions of the relatively brief letter.  Meeks was professor of religious studies at Yale so you can imagine what troubles await the non-specialist.  I've given it my best so that you can skip Galatians and do a Sudoku. 

Luther had a different opinion. Galatians is second only to Romans in the category of usefulness for his fixed idea, which is forcefully expressed at the conclusion to the third chapter:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed.  So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith.  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Not sure I understand that either, but, as it sounds bold and free, doesn't involve a tortured analogy, or betray the author's hurt feelings and high self-regard, we may trail off on a high note.  

 

Books of the Bible: 1 Thessalonians

Regarding Romans, I noted how in the Bible Paul's letters are generally printed in descending order of length, which does not correspond in any way to date of composition.  Thus the earnest reader determined to rip through the whole thing, front cover to back, meets Paul first in the longest and fullest expression of his mature thought--the letter to the Romans--before experiencing a series of diminishing returns.  We've arrived now at 1 Thessalonians and things are getting fairly skimpy.  Five chapters, probably about four pages in any Bible you might own, so it comes in toward the back despite being widely regarded as the earliest of Paul's extant writings.  Putting together secular history with the description of Paul's career set out in the Book of Acts, the likely date of composition is the year 50 or 51.

Paul's mission to Thessalonica is described in Acts 17.  After preaching and teaching there for three weeks, he was run out of town by "wicked fellows of the rabble" organized by some ignoble Jews who were offended by his teaching (17:1-10).  It's understandable, then, that Paul should feel some anxiety about the fate of the converts left behind there.  Probably expecting the worst, he sent Timothy back to reconnoiter, and was obviously pleased and relieved when, upon returning, Timothy reported that the church there persisted in "faith and love."  This is all described in chapter 3 of 1 Thessalonians.  The letter might be brief but it takes a while to get going. 

We may surmise, from the content of chapters 4 and 5, what other news Timothy bore about the Thessalonians.  To put it bluntly, while the church might have survived, individual members had not--people continued to die.  This was perplexing because the expectation had been that the apocalypse was imminent and that Christian believers would then be rewarded for their faith.  But now some were dying before the reward could be claimed.  What's their status?  And, thinking about ourselves, the living, how long till we can collect?  When's it going to happen?

It wasn't only Thessalonian Christians who believed they were living in the end times.  The imminent Second Coming is a pervasive theme in early Christian literature, including in Paul's own epistles.  So it seems the rhetorical task was to tamp down an expectation that his  own preaching and teaching may have helped to create.  That the deaths of individuals should suddenly and unexpectedly create a new class of Christian souls shows just how keen the expectation was.  It's now a little hard to enter into this way of thinking, the grip and slog of twenty centuries having pretty much removed the need to tamp down the expectation.  But it was what the Thessalonians were thinking.

Paul's response to the first issue, concerning those who die before the Second Coming, is found at the end of the fourth chapter:

But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

 

What to make of this?  The scholar who wrote the section on Thessalonians for Peake's Commentary on the Bible sounds sheepish.  "Paul's intention is to comfort the Thessalonians, " he writes, "not to supply a literal description of the end of the world."  So it seems the scholar isn't buying it but for some reason the Thessalonians should.  Forgive me, but there is something unintentionally comical about the whole situation.  The Thessalonians were concerned about the fate of those who do not live till the Second Coming, and Paul says: No, no, don't worry, it's totally fair--in fact, the sleepers will be raised before the living, no need to be concerned. 

 

It's not like the fundamentalists, sunk in their left-behind fantasies, have necessarily strayed from Scripture.

 

The fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians is also of interest, at least to me, on account of the light it sheds on something I've occasionally puzzled over, though not during baseball season.  On the one hand, I was told that grandma and mom's uncle were now "in heaven."  On the other hand, I was, or became, dimly aware of depictions of the Second Coming, in Christian art, that highlighted the bright sky, the trumpeter, and the people popping out of their popped caskets.  It didn't seem they both could be true and I wondered which was the sanctioned version.  On the authority of 1 Thessalonians, I think now I probably worried too much about being monitored by grandma on Friday and Saturday nights. 

 

Paul's answer to the Thessalonians' other question, about the timing of the Second Coming, is possibly canny.  It will come "like a thief in the night," when least expected.  One may detect in this formulation a whispered answer to a related and possibly embarrassing question concerning why we're still waiting:  it can't happen when you're expecting it, and you've always been expecting it, so naturally it hasn't  happened--and won't, so long as you keep looking for it (which, however, is what you're supposed to do).  The question weighs heavily on nascent Christian ethics, because obviously the way to live in the world depends somewhat on how long the world is going to last: you act one way if it's a month or a year, quite another if it's a few or twenty millennia.  Here is Paul's specific advice, from the conclusion of the letter:

 

And we exhort you, brethren, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.  See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.  Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.  Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.

 

It seems to me that the way of being in the world that is here recommended presupposes that the world might go on for awhile--else, why admonish the idle, or be patient with everyone?  The last sentence is consistent with Paul's barely suppressed skepticism about spiritual gifts that becomes  more pronounced in letters not yet composed.  Don't reject them outright, but test everything (the scientific spirit!), with the implicit teaching that some of it will turn out to be b.s.  It's this side of Paul, I think, that has made him a favorite of Scandinavian Lutherans, who at least in the stories of Garrison Keillor have adopted a similarly jaundiced view of all statements requiring an exclamation point.  The world is about to end?  Ya, shoor, but I t'ink I'll still plant da corn.  ("Admonish the idle.")

Books of the Bible: II Corinthians

Paul's "second" letter to the Corinthians is almost wholly incoherent.  Now that I understand why, the issue reminds me of something that happened when I worked on my college's newspaper.  We'd written an editorial that we were proud of.  It was for the third or fourth issue, and all its predecessors had been milquetoast--conventional opinions supported by cliches of thought.  This one was different.  It had three paragraphs.  The first described the conventional wisdom concerning some campus issue, the second and longest explained what was wrong with the widely accepted view, and the third was a terse and possibly surprising conclusion that nevertheless followed necessarily from the argument of paragraph 2.  The space allotted for the editorial was too long for this jewel of brevity, so we filled the column by making two cuts to the galley copy and laying it down with breaks between the paragraphs.  So obsessively was this spacing work achieved that no one noticed that the second and third paragraphs switched places.  And that's the way the page looked when delivered to the printer--the ringing conclusion as the middle paragraph, followed by a "conclusion" that was actually the logic behind the real conclusion.  The editorial filled the space perfectly and made no sense at all.

People suffering from the delusion that our student journalism was some kind of inspired text, if there had been any such people, might have read the editorial over and over again before finally hitting upon the solution to the puzzle of its incoherence: the paragraphs are printed in the wrong order.  And so it is that scholarly attention to 2 Corinthians has focused on the highly problematic text, which is beset by a bottomless barrel of trouble that blots out meaning.  An imaginary general reader with almost preternatural perceptive powers could theoretically notice that there are layers of difficulty.  One reads word by word and sentence by sentence, so the first thing you might notice is that the line of thought and logic often does not proceed in any comprehensible way between small compositional units (as would be the case, also, when you came to the paragraph transitions in the college editorial described above).  Though frustrated by the difficulty of extracting any definite meaning, you might still be conscious of a certain ambient tone, which, in the first nine chapters of 2 Corinthians, may be described as friendly, grateful, warm, sometimes perhaps relieved.  Then you come to chapter 10 and without warning it's suddenly the opposite of all that.  Anger.  Acrimony.  Sarcasm.  You seem to be in the middle of an ugly dispute of indefinite origin.  Nothing that had come before prepared the way for this.  The only point of consistency is the steady impossibility of grasping any logical connection, line-by-line.  So there is incoherence at the micro and macro levels.

The explanation for this is that it's a complete misnomer to conceive of 2 Corinthians as a "second" letter to the church at Corinth.  Rather, it's a collection of fragments of many different Pauline compositions set down in confusing order and sometimes interrupted by yet other fragments that weren't even written by Paul.  Unlike the student editorial, this biblical text is too much of a muddle to admit of a single elegant solution, but the theory that it's a mishmash of fragments is almost universally acknowledged.  The scholarly disagreement is over how many fragments there are, and whether it's possible to fit them together in some plausible fashion, or whether the potentially interlocking parts require other texts that have been lost altogether.

You can just imagine what this means for the experience of an ordinary reader.  Lost at sea.  It's also true, I think, that the only way to make sense of 2 Corinthians is incompatible with fundamentalist notions concerning how the Bible is an inerrant, infallible transcript of the mind of God.

Since the scholarly consensus will be resisted by fighting fundamentalists, let's just note one detail of the scholars' brief that I think is recommended by its explanatory power.  At 2:4 Paul alludes to a certain "painful letter" he has already written and delivered to the Corinthians: "For I wrote you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you."  The only other known letter is 1 Corinthians and it does not at all fit this description.  But there is extant something that does fit the description--chapters 10, 11, and 12 of 2 Corinthians.  That is, the verse from chapter 2 of 2 Corinthians quoted above is from a letter that refers to an earlier letter, a fragment of which is printed out of sequence as chapters 10, 11 and 12 of the very "letter" known as 2 Corinthians.  This ingenious conjecture, or insight, associated most closely with the work of Gunther Bornkamm, provides a satisfying solution to several difficulties, including: 

Why does 2 Corinthians 2:4 give such a seemingly false account of the prevailing sentiment of I Corinthians?  (It doesn't.  It's describing a different letter.) 

Why do chapters 10 through 12 of 2 Corinthians differ in tone so dramatically from the first nine chapters?  (Because chapters 10 through 12 are a fragment, or possibly a reconstructed remnant, of an altogether different letter--the one that is referred to at 2:4.) 

The concluding paragraph to the headnote to 2 Corinthians in my Oxford Annotated Bible states:

Because so much of 2 Corinthians is a  response to the words and feelings of others, which are not recorded in the letter, it is difficult sometimes to follow the apostle's argument.  Its pages preserve much, however, that illuminates Paul's own life, ministry, and the concern which he felt for the churches he had established.

The first sentence seems to me an understatement and perhaps a way to admit the obvious difficulties without diving into textual problems.  (Most readers of the Bible are loath to allow that its text is frequently a mess.) The second sentence is also at least rooted in truth and deserves mention.  I noted how in 1 Corinthians Paul appears to glower at every Corinthian enthusiasm.  What they regarded as "spiritual gifts" he regarded as a falling away from his crucified Christ.  Whatever the details of the hot controversy at the center of the last three chapters of 2 Corinthians, it seems clear that there were at Corinth rival apostles who, on account of their visions and revelations and mighty works, claimed for themselves an authority they thought Paul lacked.  He reacted not with serenity but vitriol.  He seems in some respects a prickly and unpleasant person, not at all serene in his convictions and too quick to take offense.  Or we might say, by way of defense or mitigation, that he was insulted by people claiming to have from Christ special powers, since to him the crucifixion was a rebuke to strength and all worldly advantage.  Though it's hard to  make much sense of 2 Corinthians, it's not hard to believe that the man who wrote most of it also wrote Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galations, &c.

Books of the Bible: I Corinthians

Corinth was--is--on the narrow isthmus connecting the main part of Greece to the Peloponnese.  It had two busy harbors, one on the Saronian Gulf, to the southeast, the other on the Gulf of Corinth,  to the northwest.  The city had been famous, or notorious, in the time of the great Greek playwrights for the kinds of entertainments favored by sailors on leave; Aristophanes, notes Wayne Meeks, in an introduction to Paul's first letter to the church there, had coined the term korinthiazesthai, "to practice fornication."  It's not just a stray remark, for we may infer from the content of the letter that the church members (as Meeks rather delicately puts it) "suffered some confusion in sexual matters." Paul's effort to straighten them out has in America raised the profile of I Corinthians almost to the level of Leviticus.  Indeed, were the letter any more famous Donald Trump would probably know to say "First Corinthians" instead of "One Corinthians."

It's a little disappointing, therefore, to discover only one mention of homosexuals, and that in a list:

Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

By one reading, this means that Ken Mehlman, manager of George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004 and chair of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007, is no worse than a greedy reviler.  To me it seems the case is even weaker if one takes account of the context.  The chapter (sixth) containing the verse quoted above is followed, in the seventh, by a small treatise on marriage and human sexuality.  American culture warriors often place the reviled "gay lifestyle" (of the Devil) against marriage and the family (ordained by God).  That is emphatically not Paul's view:

It is well for a man not to touch a woman.  But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. . . .  I say this by way of concession, not of command.  I wish that all were as I myself am.  But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.

To the unmarried and the widows I say it is well for them to remain single as I do.  But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry.  For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

For anyone who may wonder about the source of this rather dim view of matrimonial love, the answer is farther down the page: the second half of the chapter makes plain that Paul's view on these questions derives from his conviction that the Second Coming is "impending" and that "the form of this world is passing away."  It follows that one thing is needful, "undivided devotion to the Lord."  Marriage is a distraction; on the other hand, so is sexual desire, which, for some, may be curbed by marriage.  So, "let them marry--it is no sin."  It would be easier to like those who rely in part upon I Corinthians to cause trouble for homosexuals if they ever exhibited an ounce of perplexity over the author's grudging acceptance of heterosexual marriage--not to mention his evident large error concerning the timing of the Second Coming. 

Probably I've been lured into making too much of this.  It's the inherent, enduring interest of all things sexual.  But my point is really that it's the conservative evangelicals who make too much of it.  Paul's ethics are all about how to live in the world at the end of time.  Since the Corinthians weren't living at the end of time, everything he says along this line is suspect.

Anyway, the letter, one of Paul's longest, has sixteen chapters, and not many of them rely upon his peculiar sexual views for whatever interest they possess.  He moves rather woodenly from one topic to the next, with not much in the way of connecting tissue.  The thirteenth chapter, the famous prose poem on love that's read at 107% of church weddings, seems out of place, like it was discovered in Paul's desk drawer and inserted at random toward the end of I Corinthians.  Some scholars think the text of the letter as a whole is not a unity but an amalgam of scraps assembled at a later time.  Others argue, I think persuasively, that the text itself explains why it may seem like bullet points from unrelated sermons.  Paul divulges that he's received a letter from a Corinthian delegation.  He has also heard rumors about their troubles from "Chloe's people," who are referred to explicitly at 1:11 (their, and Chloe's, identity remain unknown).  This letter is his response to the matters raised in these two sources, and he moves through them methodically, taking up first one and then another.  The main division may be detected at the beginning of the seventh chapter: "Now concerning the matters about which you wrote."  So the first six chapters, according to this view, are Paul's response to the issues raised by "Chloe's people"; most of what comes after chapter 6 is his response to the issues raised in the letter delivered by the delegation headed by Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaichus, who are called out at 16:17.

If, however, one felt compelled to search out a unifying theme to I Corinthians, the leading candidate, in my estimation, would be the dour consistency with which Paul rejects Corinthian enthusiasms of all kinds.  It's there in the sex and marriage sections.  In chapters 12 and 14, the theme is "spiritual gifts," preeminently "speaking in tongues," which receive another of Paul's sulky imprimaturs--you can almost, but not quite, make him out to be saying that this kind of "gift" is rooted in the psychological desire to be above other people.  There is a Pauline strain of religious triumphalism notable for seeming untriumphant: 

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles . . . .

He's saying that the world will not recognize his boast as a boast.  Guy on a cross, kind of a downer.

Books of the Bible: Romans

One way to study an author is to read the works straight through in the order in which they were written, so as to obtain a sense of his development.  Reading the New Testament straight through, that's not how you get to know Paul, whose letters, or epistles, are presented pretty much in descending order of length.  This means you come first to Romans, which, besides being the longest, is pretty widely regarded as the crowning achievement of extant Pauline theological writings.  It was composed in about A.D. 57, relatively late in Paul's career, possibly before Phillipians but after Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence.  Martin Luther's preface to Romans begins:

This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian's while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well. The more one deals with it, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.

More than a thousand years before Luther, St. Augustine had reported, in his Confessions, that his conversion to Christianity had been consummated when, outside in a garden, he had heard a child's voice singing, "Take up and read."  He therefore opened a Bible and by chance his eye fell upon a passage from Romans 13 that spoke directly to his own wavering reflections.  (There are no known instances of anyone performing a similar exercise and opening, say, to a passage about the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant.)  I have a book, The New Testament: An Introduction, by the 20th-century scholar Norman Perrin: it's very sober and learned but I see now, scanning the "exegetical survey of Paul's letter to the Romans," that he is evidently struck mute by the  profundity of Romans 8:

In what is probably the greatest sustained passage from his letters, perhaps the greatest sustained passage from Christian literature altogether, Paul now depicts the details of the possibilities of the new life in Christ as he understands it in his maturity as a Christian missionary.  It is a passage to be read and reflected on by the individual reader rather than commented on by the scholar, and the present writer does not propose to make any remarks whatsoever.

To mimic Paul, "What then am I to say?"  Well, the general reader, handicapped by twenty centuries of intervening time, not to mention the elastic meanings of such terms as "sin" and "law" and "justification," is going to want some explanation for the grounds of the letter's reputation. I'm not sure that the following would satisfy Karl Barth, but I think it's in the right direction, and anyway who can ever tell what someone like Barth is talking about? 

Suppose you think of yourself as an enlightened, forward-thinking kind of person whose closest colleague in Cubicleland happens to be an observant Jew.  He has several habits that you view with disdain, none more perhaps than his way of noisily putting away his work things before the official quitting time on winter Fridays.  You know he does this so that he can make it home before the sun sets, thereby satisfying a Jewish law about Sabbath observance.  There's at least a couple of things about this that annoy you.  One, you strongly suspect that all the noise is meant to call attention to his departure, which everyone knows is connected with  religious observance.  It pleases him that he's observant.  Worse, it pleases him even more that you will have to notice that he is observant, a "good Jew."  Second, assuming for the moment that there is a God, it's ridiculous to think that He should concern Himself with when people get home from the office on Friday.  You suspect the purpose of such "laws" is to set before people a series of trivial hurdles that, when overcome in an endless sequence of mildly taxing acts of piety, has the desired effect of infusing every detail of life with fake religious significance.  Thus religion is enthroned.

Now, you might think of this as a thoroughly secular critique, but it is in line with the general outlook advanced by Paul in the letter to the Romans.  Following the religious law is a mirage, a futile dead end.  Obey all the teachings, observe the Sabbath, love your neighbor as yourself, all of that--useless.  This is because sin represents not ethically dubious acts but rather an inescapable state of being.  You can perhaps grasp something of what Paul means if you are brutally honest about the motivations of all the dear devout people: the self-seeking, the desire to be esteemed, the quest to acquire a reason for flattering oneself about one's goodness.  That Paul calls himself in this letter a "wretched  man" does not mean he thinks the rest of us are any better. 

Yet, while there is plenty to say against our kind, "if God is for us, who is against us?"--from chapter 8, revered by Dr Perrin.  Oddly, though, it seems to me that Paul in Romans is a little hazy on the details concerning redemption.  Yes, it's accomplished, but how?  At least one commentator, Wayne Meeks, seems to agree, for he remarks that in Romans we do not have "a systematic summary of Pauline theology--his Christology, for example, is presupposed, not described."  As we shall see when we come to our consideration of the randy Corinthians, Paul's evident preoccupations in a particular letter are generally attributed to the controversies besetting the original recipients.  But, having founded and visited many of the Christian churches to which he wrote letters, Paul knew firsthand what troubles they faced.  He'd never been to Rome.   Why did they get the letter they did?

No one really knows, but the Roman church of the first century was probably representative of other Christian communities that occupied some not easily defined place on a spectrum--something arguably more than an apocalyptic sect within Judaism but not yet anything like an identifiable world religion.  One characteristic of these early Christian communities, including the one at Rome, would have been a mix of Jewish and Gentile communicants, and it is reasonable to suppose that the place of the Jewish law might be a source of confusion to them.  Paul's solution to the problem signals a decisive break with Judaism.  A leading feature of this new faith would be its insistence on quite a severe anthropology.  Humanity has fallen too far to be able to help itself.  Its estrangement from God can be ameliorated only by God.  Everyone, friend and foe, recognizes this as Christian orthodoxy, but it wouldn't have had to turn out that way.  It's because of Paul that it did turn out that way.  The gospel narratives came later and don't require it.  As Luther indicates, the letter to the Romans has the strongest claim to being the urtext of the Christian religion.

Books of the Bible: Acts of the Apostles

Readers of the Acts of the Apostles might keep a good atlas nearby, for it often reads like a travelogue: the adventures of the first Christians, especially Paul, as they travel about the Near East, Asia Minor, and, eventually, to Rome.  If nothing else, you will learn some geography, and maybe amaze your friends at the next trivia night. 

This travel theme, which will be noticed by even so drowsy a reader as I, has attracted the attention of scholars, too.  There are the inevitable questions about historical accuracy.  Did Paul actually go to this place and that one, get thrown into prison here, receive a sympathetic hearing there, etc., etc.?  Textual scholarship, meanwhile, advances the theory that the travel narratives, whatever their historical value, are best understood as a literary device and organizing principle that provides insight into the mind of the author.  Acts, remember, is the second part of Luke-Acts, and the gospel of Luke makes more of the travels of Jesus than do the others.  Most of the second half of Luke--chapters 10 through 19--is made of a rambling travel section introduced by the statement (9:51): "When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem."  In Acts, the activity of the apostles begins in and around Jerusalem before their travels take them far and wide.  At a high level, we may say that the movement of Luke-Acts is from Jerusalem to Rome, which is to say, from the capital of the Jewish world to the capital of the Gentile one.  In Luke, Jesus "sets his face" to go to Jerusalem, where he is rejected and crucified.  Acts opens in Jerusalem and ends with Paul in Rome, "preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered." 

I suggested, in discussing Luke, that its evident concern for outsiders and losers is an attractive feature of that gospel.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, the two pious Jews make a point to pass by on the other side of the road from the seriously injured man, but the despised Samaritan gives assistance.  By the time you come to the end of Acts, this parable, found only in Luke, seems less remarkable and perhaps less attractive, too.  If Christian concern for outcasts may be traced to the author of Luke-Acts, so too may the ugly strain of anti-Semitism in Christendom.  Looking back at Luke from the endpoint of Acts, the parable of the Good Samaritan resembles yet another episode with Jewish villains and a Gentile hero.  It's a leading theme of the work, as impossible to miss as all the traveling.  Indeed, the point of all the traveling is to reinforce the idea that the Christian message was rejected in the Jewish world and accepted by Gentiles.

The conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus--this, the most famous event described in Acts, doesn't seem, from a psychological standpoint, very credible to me.  The arduous intellectual journey described in spiritual autobiographies, most famously in Augustine's Confessions, is absent.  He was a good Jew, an oppressor of the members of this heterodox new sect, but then he heard a voice--"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"--and, sha-zam, he's Paul, the leading author of the New Testament and, as much as Jesus himself, the founder of Christianity.  How did that happen?  It's not only the conversion that one views, as it were, through a glass, darkly.  While Paul is the most prominent figure in Acts, the reader may feel that he never becomes a vivid character.  It's different in his own writings.

. . . I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. . . .  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. . . .  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Any account of the man who wrote those words from the pen of a contemporary observer is going to be of considerable interest--unless, it turns out, that contemporary observer is the one we in fact have, the author of Luke-Acts, a work in which Paul, notwithstanding a long flow of discourse concerning his activities, remains a shadowy figure.

It doesn't seem likely that creating a vivid character was beyond the powers of the author of Luke-Acts, whose Greek, if we may trust the testimony of scholars, is fluid, graceful, more sophisticated than what prevails in the other synoptic gospels.  The occasional oddity intrudes, such as the aforementioned sentence introducing Jesus's journey to Jerusalem:

When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

This seems a little off, in the same way as, say:

When the sun rose, he set his face and determined to eat a glazed doughnut. 

That is, the phrase "set his face" suggests an approaching ordeal that doesn't fit with flying up to heaven in the seam of a cloud (which is what Jesus does in Acts 1:9).  This sentence has no parallel in Mark and it is fair to say that the author of Mark would never write those words.  His version of the sentence would make more linguistic sense:

When the time drew near for Jesus to be crucified, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

In Mark, the emphasis is on the crucifixion, which is understood as being redemptive for humankind.  In Luke, the emphasis is on the resurrection, which is viewed as something that God does for the man Jesus.  The evidence for such a conclusion again involves close readings of parallel passages, together with the theory that Mark is a source for Luke.  When in Mark Jesus predicts his passion and resurrection, the recurring verbal phrase is "rise" and "rise again," which, in Luke, slides into the passive voice:

The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

The Markan source for the above reads:

The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.

Note that Luke, in addition to suggesting that Jesus might be unable to raise himself, characteristically includes the (Jewish) credentials of those who reject Jesus--Mark's generalized "hands of men" becomes "the elders and chief priests and scribes."  With respect to the crucifixion, Luke consistently avoids indicating that it was more than an act of service.  The Markan phrase "ransom for many" is elided, and Mark 10:45--

For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many

--is rendered by Luke, at 22:27:

For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves?  Is it not the one who sits at table?  But I am among you as one who serves.

Luke's outlook, we may say, is ethical, not theological.  Jesus, in Luke-Acts, is an ideal man.  The home for the doctrine of the atonement, however, is the gospel of Mark. 

Now, as we shall soon see, it is not hard to know on which side of this divide to place the New Testament's most brilliant author.  Though the order in which the books of the Bible are arranged tends to seduce us into errors of chronology, the "Markan view" was actually invented by Paul, who was also its most accomplished and insistent partisan.  The author of Luke-Acts shows over and over again that he regards with suspicion, if not outright distaste, the Paul-Mark view of things.  This must account to some considerable degree for why Paul, so vigorously present and alive in his own writings, is so vague a character in the Acts of the Apostles--like Barnabas, only with more inches of copy.

Books of the Bible: Luke

We've noted that scholarship accounts for the similarities between the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke--the "synoptics"--by postulating that there is a literary relationship between them.  This theory, known as "the priority of Mark," holds that Mark was composed first and was a source for the authors of both Matthew and Luke.  The theory has considerable explanatory power, including the way in which it makes sense of why Mark's expectation of an imminent end to human history is blunted in both Matthew and Luke--it's because Matthew and Luke were writing later, and Mark's prediction hadn't come true.  I suppose it's obvious that this is not a conclusion that our fundamentalist friends can tolerate, but it's a widely accepted tenet of New Testament scholarship. 

Let's look rather closely at some of the textual evidence as it relates to a comparison between Mark and Luke.  In Mark, the beginning of Jesus's ministry is described, at 1:14-15, in the following manner:

Now after John [the Baptist] was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel."

The parallel passage in Luke (4:14-15) goes like this:

And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country.  And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

The Markan emphasis on the content of the teaching--the time is fulfilled! the kingdom of God is at hand! repent!--is in Luke excised.  If you lay the texts side-by-side, you see that this happens consistently.  Perhaps the most startling example occurs near the end of the respective gospels, when Jesus is warning his followers about the end time.  Mark (13:5-6):

And Jesus began to say to them, "Take heed that no man leads you astray.  Many will come in my name, saying, 'I am he!' and they will lead many astray."

Luke (21:8):

And he said, "Take heed that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name, saying, 'I am he!' and 'The time is at hand!'  Do not go after them."

Mark has Jesus say, "The time is at hand!"  Luke has Jesus say, "Don't be led astray by anyone who says, 'The time is at hand!'" 

What's often called "the Gospel of Luke" is actually the first installment of a two-part work that may be designated "Luke-Acts."  The second part, the book known as the "Acts of the Apostles," or just "Acts," is a history of the early church.  There is no question but that Acts is from the same hand as Luke and that the two books were conceived as a single composition.  While deferring our discussion of Acts, let's just note that its very existence is of a piece with the theory that its author was concerned to defer the Second Coming to some indefinite future time, with the result that an interim period not foreseen in Mark could be filled with a narrative about the activities of the early Christian heroes.

Paying close attention to how the author of Luke-Acts handles, and alters, source material from Mark is one fruitful interpretive strategy.  But of course not all of Luke has a source in Mark, which is by far the briefest of the four gospel narratives.  The story of Jesus's nativity--the announcement to Mary, the census, the angels, the shepherds, the manger and the wise men bearing their gifts, all of that--is not found in Mark.  Neither is there in Mark any appearance of the resurrected Christ.  Another interpretive tool, therefore, is to separate out  the portion of the Lukan  narrative that has no parallel in the other gospels.  The idea is that, to comprehend an author's cast of mind, pay close attention to what he says when he breaks away from his source.  With regard to Luke, this approach yields quite a dramatic result.

Everyone knows that Jesus taught in parables.  Which are the most famous and loved?  The parable of the good Samaritan?  It's found only in Luke.  The parable of the prodigal son?  It also is found only in Luke. The parable of the prodigal son closes out a chapter--chapter 15--that contains only material unique to Luke.  The first half of the chapter is made up of the parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep.  The widespread notion that Jesus has a particular concern for lost causes and outcasts--that he came "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"--isn't made up by bleeding hearts.  It comes from somewhere--mainly, from Luke.  It's this aspect of the third gospel that stands behind the story of the priest who, accused of being a Marxist, replied that he was "Marxist as Luke."   

The parables of the good Samaritan and prodigal son have attained such a degree of cultural familiarity that their sharp edges are now somewhat smoothed.  The context for the former is a question from a lawyer about what is necessary to attain eternal life.  Jesus asks him what the religious law requires.  The lawyer, quoting Leviticus 19:18, answers perfectly--you are to love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  When Jesus concurs, the lawyer asks, "But who is my neighbor?"  The parable of the good Samaritan is Jesus's answer to that question.  The priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side of the road from the injured man are conventional figures of religiously reputable Jews.  It is the Samaritan, a despised gentile, who goes out of his way to assist.  In the parable of the prodigal son, the "good son," who resents the joyful welcome his father gives the prodigal, is more or less in the role of the priest and the Levite, now with a voice:

[H]e answered his father, "Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment of yours, but you never gave me a goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.  But when this, your son, came, who has devoured your living with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him."

It is easy to think of this other son as the villain, but, really, who is being honest while congratulating himself for not being like him?  His offense may be detected in his verbal constructions, for another way for him to say "this, your son" would have been "my brother." 

Books of the Bible: II Samuel

By taking a long stride across the latter portions of I Samuel, I skipped one of the most famous--well worn and assimilated--Old Testament stories: David versus Goliath.  Read in the context of what surrounds it, this incident is just one of many in a rather shapeless glob of material concerning the rivalry between Saul, Israel's first king, and David, its second.  Much of this matter, including David and Goliath, seems as if it might have been written by, say, David's mother, for the evident intention is to make of David a species of fair-haired boy--he's always standing on a higher riser than the neurotic Saul, who ends a suicide.  If you wanted to try and summarize I Samuel chapters 13 to 31, you could perhaps do no better than to quote the celebratory song sung by some Hebrew women after a military victory (I Samuel 18:7):

"Saul has slain his thousands,
And David his ten thousands."

Since one of my themes has been the implausibility of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, I should observe that many details in the history found in I Samuel are contradicted by the history found in II Samuel.  And they aren't necessarily trivial ones. For example, I said Saul committed suicide.  That's true, according to the last chapter of I Samuel, in which the king is wounded in battle by Philistine archers.  Unwilling to allow the enemy the pleasure of finishing him off (and then perhaps having some fun with his corpse}, Saul instructs his "armor-bearer" to run him through with a sword; when the armor-bearer declines to raise his hand against the king, Saul falls on his own sword.  In the very next  chapter, the  first in the book of II Samuel, Saul dies again, and, according to this account, it was not by his own hand but by that of an Amalekite man who obeys an order similar to the one Saul gave the armor-bearer in the previous chapter. The famous story of David and Goliath is subject to the same kind of contradictory double-telling.  The familiar version is found in I Samuel 17.  But in II Samuel 21 Israel is beset by Philistine giants, including one "who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot."  (Sure he did!)  The telling of this tale includes the detail that "Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam."  The editor of the The Oxford Annotated Bible explains, "It may be supposed that this name [i.e., Goliath] became erroneously attached to David's victim, whose name was unknown." 

So, to be strictly accurate, "David versus the Giant erroneously referred to as Goliath"?  I am sure that the fighting fundamentalists would say that once you are talking about "what may be supposed" to be errors in the biblical text, the next step is to deny that any of these tales concerning preternaturally imposing foes who are miraculously vanquished in battle belong to history.

Although I think you'd make fewer mistakes if you did just that, it's also true that the heart of the book of II Samuel is a sustained, wrought narrative on the history of King David's reign.  Considering the royal hagiography that precedes and follows, the author's objectivity about the king's  personal failings make for something like what lawyers call a "statement against interest," the probative value of which is high.  Few have doubted that the broad outline of the narrative is historically accurate, that the narrative is the work of a single author, and that this author was a writer of considerable skill who also may have been a member of the king's court (such is his evident access to, and sure handling of, intimate details).  Some have gone so far as to call him "the father of historical writing," and his "court history," as it's called, which comprises chapters 9 through 20, is regarded as "the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament."  (I'm putting quotation marks around phrases that tend to recur in the commentaries.)

The story moves very swiftly, especially at the outset.  David happens to see a beautiful woman--Bathsheeba, the wife of Uriah, a soldier.  He arranges for her to be delivered to him, they have sex, and she conceives.  The pregnancy is a problem that David attempts to resolve, first, by calling Uriah home from the war.  But he's a good soldier and honors the code of abstaining from sex while his fellows remain at war--to such a degree that he doesn't even go into his home.  David then wines and dines him, in the expectation that a  little buzz will help him forget his scruples.  Uriah eats and drinks but, when the fun is done, he sleeps on the step outside the door of his house.  David sends him back to war carrying a written order that he be placed in the front of the fighting, and that his fellows then suddenly retreat, so that Uriah will certainly be killed.  This scheme works.  Upon receiving word of Uriah's death, David takes Bathsheeba as his wife.

If challenged to state what is so remarkable about this, I think I'd say that it's the effect made by the sensational subject matter together with the author's restraint. You'll notice that he is silent about such details as David's state of mind as his successive plans are foiled by his dutiful victim.  Is it  with exasperation or a shrug that the king gives up on Plan A and Plan B and simply orders the man to be killed?  There is no access to David's mind, only to his deeds, and one feels that if it were otherwise some of the chill would be lost. 

God has a low profile in the court history--that's another area in which the author exhibits artful restraint.  At the beginning of Genesis, God is depicted as walking to and fro in His garden, and His interrogation of the first humans commences about three seconds after Their First Big Mistake.  And that is pretty much the way it goes until we arrive at the court history, the economy of which is abetted by God's absence from the narrative.  Only that isn't quite right.  When Uriah is dead and David married to his widow, so that he would appear to be in the clear, God finally gets a mention:

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.

This is a hinge.  The door swings open on the second part of the narrative, about rebellion and death within David's own family, including preeminently the story of his son Absalom, all of which is accomplished in the same swift, vigorous, secular-seeming fashion.  The Deuteronomist's wooden theology of rewards and punishments isn't rejected but the wooden story-telling is replaced by . . . the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament.

Books of the Bible: I Samuel

The first half of the first book of Samuel describes the creation of Israel's monarchy under its first king, Saul.  Our imaginary "general reader" is apt to be confused for a familiar reason: there are two different sources that, in the canonized text, exist in side-by-side, alternating fashion, and the details of the history laid out in the two traditions could hardly be more incompatible.  In one, the establishment of the monarchy is viewed as a good thing.  In the other, it's very  bad.  You can imagine reading along, doing your best to comprehend, and being rewarded with a clanging bell of dissonance.  The more you notice, the louder the ringing. 

The scholar Bernhard Anderson, in his book Understanding the Old Testament, writes that in I Samuel 1-12 there are different sources that "can be traced rather easily."  This seems to me evidence of the chasm between mainline biblical scholarship and the dogma of our fundamentalist friends.  The different sources can be traced "rather easily" in the biblical text only if you are willing to drop the notion that the whole thing has one divine and inerrant Source.

If, however, you do dismiss the fundamentalist fiction, I Samuel gains considerably in coherence and human interest.  The opposite views of the two sources are not very different from a perpetual American argument about the power and scope of the federal government.  We have seen how Israel, in the years when it was first trying to establish itself in Canaan, was essentially a loose confederation of tribes.  There is a lot of persuasive evidence, including in the Old Testament itself, indicating that the decisive victories of Joshua should be attributed to nationalistic enthusiasm instead of assigned to history.  Israel's "conquest" was actually more like an infiltration.  Its military was hampered  by technological backwardness and the lack of anything like a command center.  The nation's success in Canaan required unification, and that it achieved success is to be credited to the founding of the monarchy.  That is one tradition.  The other is that Israel, by becoming like all the other nations, turned its back on its covenant relationship with Yahweh, who was naturally displeased.  In the long run, the result was ruin.

The core of the pro-monarchy tradition is found in chapters 9 through 11, which narrate a story that contains elements of the tall-tale.  Saul is an obscure young man who nevertheless possesses a striking physical presence: he is "handsome" and "stood head and shoulders above" everyone else.  He sets out to find some asses that have strayed from his father's land and, accidentally but providentially, becomes king.  The unlikely sequence of events is set off when, discouraged by being unable to find the lost asses, he consults Samuel, a local "seer" who, it develops, is also a kind of disguised prophet who had received from God the power to anoint a king.  Detecting in Saul the requisite characteristics, he does just that in a private ceremony that is followed immediately by a military crisis.  Saul, whose recently acquired eminence was not public knowledge, responds decisively:

He took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying, "Whoever does not come out after Saul and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!"  Then the dread of Yahweh fell upon the people, and they came out as one man.

God's plan, then, called for the unification of Israel, because it was the means of vanquishing its foe, and, the battle won, this tradition ends with the public acknowledgment of Saul's kingship:

So all the people went to Gilgal, and there they made Saul king before the Lord in Gilgal.  There they sacrificed peace offerings before the Lord, and there Saul and all the men of Israel rejoiced greatly.

This rather fanciful and engaging story is preceded, in chapter 8, by the first movement of the opposing tradition wherein the people of Israel approach Samuel and demand a king.  Samuel, who is here not a local clairvoyant with secret powers but rather the last judge of Israel (else the people would not have known to come to him with their demand), prays to God, who replies:

"Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.  According to all the deeds which they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods. . . .  [H]earken to their voice; only, you shall solemnly warn them the ways of the king who shall reign over them."

On this advice, Samuel delivers a long speech in which, inveighing against the tyranny that will surely follow upon the establishment of centralized power under a king, he sounds a little like an ambitious Republican politician kissing up to the tea-party faithful.  Chapter 8 ends when the rebellious people persist in their request for a king, which is followed, abruptly and disorientingly, by the pro-monarchy tradition of chapters 9 to 11 described above. Only, what I hadn't mentioned before, the pro-monarchy story is itself interrupted, at 10:17-27, by the conclusion to the anti-monarchy story about how Saul became king--not at Gilgal, but at Mizpah, and not by any supposed merit confirmed by battlefield success, but, consistent with the notion that Israel can have only one rightful king, by simple lot.

I lay all this out partly because I think it's the only way to understand what's going on in the first half of I Samuel and partly because I think it's interesting that subjecting the Bible to the same kind of scholarly analysis used to interpret other ancient texts yields results.  In every realm there is an alternative to magical thinking.  Evolution by natural selection has carried the day because it explains so convincingly so much of observed reality that otherwise makes hardly any sense at all.  The text of the first twelve chapters of I Samuel is like observed reality and the two-source hypothesis is like the brilliantly illuminating theory that, however insulting to the fundamentalist cause, provides a comprehensive account of what is otherwise a confusing morass of contradictory parts. 

The second half of I Samuel is concerned preeminently with the personality of Saul and his rivalry with David.  Since "The Book of David" would be an apt alternative title for the second book of Samuel, let's for now reserve that discussion.

Books of the Bible: Ruth

The bedraggled reader of the Old Testament, arriving at the book of Ruth and paging forward with trepidation, will experience relief upon discovering it's barely four pages long, too brief to be tedious.  This first, favorable impression is too faint.  The book of Ruth is actually entertaining, artistic, and, in its way, uplifting, an inspired counterpoint to all the killing of the various foreign-ites that figures prominently in Joshua and Judges.  Its placement in the Bible is also chronologically incorrect, so, to grasp its import, we glance fore and aft.

The first seven books of the Bible tell a story that may be outlined as follows: primeval history, the adventures of the patriarchs, bondage in Egypt, the exodus, the wilderness years, and the conquest of "the promised land."  At the end of the book of Judges, Israel has gained at least a foothold in Canaan, where as a loose confederation of tribes it is coexisting with other peoples.  Then comes Ruth, which is followed by the historical writings collected in the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.  The historical books carry the story forward and, in their most memorable sections, describe Israel at its zenith of power and prosperity, a united kingdom under King David's rule.  By the end of Chronicles, however, the former conquering Israelites are themselves conquered by the Babylonians, the temple at Jerusalem is sacked, and Israel suffers a second captivity.  The books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which amount to an appendix to Chronicles, predictably attribute the Babylonian captivity to Israel's worldliness and falling away from the Mosaic faith.  The recommended reforms involve a re-emphasis on Israel's exclusivity as the chosen people of God.

So, with that in mind, here is what happens in Ruth.  An Israeli family of four--father, mother (Naomi), and two sons--is forced by a famine to travel to Moab.  The sons each marry a Moabite girl, one named Orpah (no, not Oprah) and the other, Ruth.  Within ten years, the three men all die.  Naomi thus finds herself in a foreign land, alone except for her foreign daughters-in-law, who are themselves widows. Hearing that the famine at home is ended, Naomi determines to return, and she sets out with Orpah and Ruth.  The text quite skillfully conveys, without explicit statement, Naomi's complicated feelings toward her daughters-in-law.  They are her closest remaining human contacts, and she loves them.  She also thinks that their prospects, including for marriage, are better in Moab.  Along the way, therefore, she has a wrenching conversation with the two younger women in which she urges them to go back to Moab.  She prevails with Orpah, but Ruth, having heard her out, replies:

Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.

And so Naomi and Ruth set up what might be called a nontraditional household in the Bethlehem area--as timing has it, just as the barley harvest is beginning.  While working in a field, Ruth attracts the attention of the landowner, a certain Boaz, a prominent citizen and a relation of Naomi's dead husband.  Intrigue ensues, the resolution of which is prelude to the following coda:

So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. . . .  Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse.  And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, "A son has been born to Naomi."  They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.

Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez was the father of Hezron, Hezron of Ram, Ram of Amminadab, Amminadab of Nahshon, Nahshon of Salmon, Salmon of Boaz, Boaz of Obed, Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of David.

The Bible is full of genealogical fill.  In the part behind us, it's invariably a sign of the tiresome, officious priestly source.  Listen to the roll of names, our proud heritage, the generations of God's elect brought up to current times!  Every detail in the unassuming book of Ruth appears calculated to upend this tendency.  I say "unassuming" because, up to the conclusion, the details are drawn entirely from ordinary, private life.  When, for example, Naomi reflects that Ruth's chances for marriage are better  in Moab, the reader must feel that she's right--a conclusion that tends to place Israel in an unfavorable light.  There are other details that my rough summary of the plot skips, such as the way Naomi advises her foreign daughter-in-law about what little tricks might be deployed to encourage Boaz.  It's a story of everyday life that, emphasizing as it does what seem like ordinary (but attractive) human ties between people from different places, implicitly criticizes the view that Israel is set apart.

But the heaviest blow falls at the very end. The scope widens and the author, whoever he was, rather casually lays out a family tree that, without calling out the name of Ruth, reveals that this woman from Moab was a great-grandmother of King David.  It would be a little like if Thomas Jefferson, instead of just sleeping with a slave and siring what under the Constitution was three-fifths of a person, had been an eighth African himself.

Books of the Bible: Judges

The English title, with its jurisprudential atmospherics, might lead the contemporary reader astray: better would be "Leaders." But the kings are yet to come.  In Israel's early days in Palestine, it was not a nation or kingdom but a confederation of tribes, and the leaders, or "judges," are unfamiliar to all except those who, for whatever odd reason, know about another of the Old Testament's many unenjoyable books.  Gideon would be a  small exception to the general anonymity of the judges.  He must have been the inspiration for the group that makes sure your motel room has reading material.  Samson is a more significant exception.  His story is found in the later chapters of Judges.  More about him and his treacherous girlfriend, Delilah, to come.  Here, so you can verify that we're not talking about figures the stature of Abraham and Moses, is the roll call of the judges: Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Jair, Jephthah, Samson.  I'm probably forgetting a few but I can't stand the thought of combing through the drear text again.

The problem, at a high level, is the consistent difficulty of comprehending what's going on.  Stories of war and battle possess inherent human interest, but in Judges you feel as if you are viewing it through frosted glass a half hour past sunset.  Is it the  reader's fault?  No, I think the issue has to do with the text, which is a messy amalgam that doesn't hang together very well.  That you might credit this opinion, here is a passage, by no means unique in character, from the section on Judges in Peake's Commentary on the Bible--it's the commentator's introductory remark to chapters 6 through 8, about Gideon:

It is clear that, as in [chapter] 4, two different stories have been combined, but there is also much evidence of editorial additions, often obscured in [the Revised Standard Version] by inconsistency in translation of singulars and plurals.

This business about two stories is perhaps "clear" only to scholars, but it helps account for the unmerry slog through Judges.  I always wonder what those who regard every word of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God make of the conclusions of scholarship--in this case, that  we have before us for long stretches in Judges an ineptly knit conglomeration of stories, augmented by tenuously related "additions," with an overlay supplied by editors with  yet other concerns, all of which is then inexpertly translated (though, in fairness, an intermittently incoherent text confronts the translator with an Olympian degree of difficulty).  This brings up another   question relating to chronology.  According to I Kings 6:1, the fourth year of Solomon's reign was the 480th year after the exodus from Egypt.  Since the text of Judges painstakingly sets out  the number of years between sequential events, the sum of which is 410, to which must be added not only the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness but also the years of Joshua's activity, and of the reigns of kings preceding Solomon--you see that this is leading to a problem for our friends, the fighting fundamentalists, whose resultant legerdemain is more proof of the general principle holding that simple explanations are to be preferred to ones that have a lot of moving parts. The simple explanation is that the Bible isn't a divinely inspired, inerrant transcript from the mind of God.  (There is no book like that.)

For those not predisposed toward veneration, there is a continuing problem relating to the character of God.  If you have ever wondered, while listening to a baseball player thank God for allowing him to hit a homer, whether the pitcher who served up the hanging curve is a Hindoo, or a campaigning atheist, then you have an idea what I'm talking about.  The God of the Book of Judges is Israel's God.  When His people listen to Him, they are rewarded with victory; and, when they don't, the fight turns in favor of the Moabites and Ammonites and Amalekites and Midianites and assorted other Canaanites, all ciphers who seem to exist only so that Israel can be alternately elevated or laid low.  You really cannot read the biblical story of Israel's conquest of "the promised land" without thinking of the current situation in Gaza, the occupied territories on the west bank of the Jordan, and politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu.  "A land without people for a people without land"--but then who were all the above-named defeated and slaughtered -ites? the ancestors of the non-persons crowded together in Gaza?

There isn't a single coherent biblical teaching or tradition.  What a distance it is between what we read in Joshua and Judges and, say:

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 29:33-34).

On the evidence set out in the Bible, however, you'd have to conclude that Israel fared better under Pharaoh than did the Canaanites who found themselves under attack by Joshua and the judges.

The Samson story, in chapters 13 to 16, seems discontinuous from the rest of the book, mainly because he is not a military leader and his tribulations are personal rather than connected to the fate of a people.  In some respects, it's not a very artful story.  After a whole chapter given over to the events preceding his birth (to a barren mother, a continuing theme), he is without warning suddenly a young adult insisting that his parents assist in his first conquest:

Then he came up, and told his father and mother, "I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah; now get her for me for a wife."

Such a fine way of talking to the 'rents!  In his defense, the narrative has elements of the tall tale, what with the supernatural powers that eventually permit him to pull down whole buildings with his bare hands (if his hair is long), so we need not be offended by the insolence of an actual historical person.  There I go again!  The background to the story, I hasten to add, in which the Hebrews appear to be living uneasily beside the Philistines, who entered Palestine from the west at about the same time Israel was infiltrating from the east, matches what we think we know about the history of the region early in the eleventh century B.C.  For students of English literature, there is a question about why John Milton would choose a galoot like Samson for the subject of a tragic drama.  The only thing I can think of is that he (Milton) was attracted to stories in which men fall after being beguiled by the women in their lives.

Books of the Bible: Joshua

Back in Genesis, God had promised Abraham that He would give his descendants a land and a nation and that they would be a blessing to all people.  But the promised land, modern-day Palestine, was inhabited by other people who worshipped other gods.  Naturally, they had to be slaughtered so that the first part of the promise, concerning a land, could be kept.  The book of Joshua tells the story of a bloody, one-sided territorial conquest.  The third part of the promise, about being a blessing to all people, was no concern of the author. 

And who was the author?  The preponderance of scholarly opinion holds that Joshua is continuous with the five books of the Pentateuch, which is why one sometimes hears the term "Hexateuch" applied to the first six books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch plus Joshua equals Hexateuch).  In that case, we have in Joshua a composite of the four sources of the so-called documentary hypothesis.  This would explain the familiar problem of contradictory details (caused by the coexistence of unedited material from different sources within the same narrative) and long, boring stretches (our old friend, P).  An example of the former occurs when the Israeli fighting force is crossing the Jordan.  In one detail, the presence of the Ark in the river acts like a dam, the water is stopped up, and the Israelites cross on dry land, whereupon  the Ark follows them out of the river bed and the water flows again.  In another detail, we are told that the Ark and the priests led the procession across the river.  These details appear contradictory.

Most of the second half of Joshua, about the partition of the conquered territory, with its numbing geographical lists and confusing tribal names, is an instance of another longueur courtesy of the Priestly source.

Unless you are determined to give it a pass since it's been canonized as Holy Writ, it's hard to find anything to like in Joshua.  The title character is plainly meant to be Moses's successor, but he is not a vivid figure.  There is nothing analogous to the attractive scene in which Moses protests his lack of eloquence to God.  The battle of Jericho, which the Negro spiritual may have persuaded us to anticipate, disappoints.  The city's fortifications fell flat when the Israelites, having encircled it, let out a shout?  Sure.  I've alluded to an obvious moral problem.  The only excuse I can think of for the bloodthirstiness of the Israelites is that it's actually the bloodthirstiness of their God.  And it is the reader who has to supply the excuses, because the text seems unaware of any problem at all.  The headnote to Joshua in The Oxford Annotated Bible allows that "many have felt--no doubt rightly--that the God of Joshua is infinitely remote from the God of Jesus."  A smart aleck might call this an instance of damning with faint praise the God of Jesus.  The editor's conclusion is that "[i]n this book Israel's God appears as a purely nationalistic deity, a God of Battles whose power is chiefly manifested in the prosecution of Holy War."  And all this pertains to the part of the book that is relatively lively.  Having survived the killing fields, the reader comes to the attention deadening second half of the book.

But suppose you had to find merit in something.  I'd choose the story line about the Israelite spies who put up in the house of Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute.  Her shielding of the Israelites is the source of a popular tradition in which she is exalted as a faithful hero.  Christians, for example, see in her a forerunner of the Good Samaritan, an outsider who apprehends the true God and His teaching.  But I wonder whether it's not possible to detect in her actions some enlightened self interest.  She might have understood better than the spies whether the loose confederation of peoples inhabiting the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean stood a chance to turn back Israel's incursion.  In any event, it seems she chose wisely, for her life is spared by invaders who killed practically everyone else they came upon.  I am pleased by the prospect of a prostitue making judicious geopolitical calculations that succeed in the very personal matter of saving her life. Rahab signed up to be on the winning team.  A world in which "true God" means nothing more than "most powerful national deity" invites such an arguably cynical interpretation.

The question of the book's historical accuracy has been the subject of much inquiry.  Modern archaeology has uncovered evidence of ruined Palestinian cities from the latter part of the thirteenth century B.C., which coincides with Joshua's time.  But the details of time and place don't always line up,  and one is, moreover,  suspicious of a Jewish document that reports a series of overwhelming Jewish victories that decisively established the chosen people in the promised land.  It all seems too neat, and indeed other biblical texts at least suggest that Israel's hegemony in the promised land was achieved much more gradually.  The book of Joshua is followed by the book of Judges, which begins with the question of who, after the death of Joshua, "shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?"  This suggests that Joshua's victories were not as decisive as depicted in the book of Joshua.  Later, but still in the first chapter of Judges, we're told:

And Yahweh was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.

Note the impossibility of avoiding the conclusion that, according to this text, Israel attempted but failed to "drive out" a technologically more advanced foe.  That Israel might by stymied by chariots of iron is completely foreign to the account of the conquest found in the first half of the book of Joshua, where God, who presumably could overcome the military hardware of the thirteenth century B.C., fought on the side of His people. 

The tentative conclusion of much mainline scholarship holds that the military campaigns as described in Joshua didn't actually occur.  Instead, the "conquest" of the promised land occurred over a few generations, and the military part of it mattered less than the gradual infiltration of the Jewish people into Palestine.  But to the Deuteronomic writer responsible for much of the book of Joshua, such a story lacked drama and glory.  The source material at hand was therefore embellished to create a work more flattering to national and religious enthusiasms.

Books of the Bible: Deuteronomy

Deutero-nomy: Greek for "second law," which is suggestive of redundancy and therefore unpromising, the reading experience having been dull enough the first time around. With Israel encamped in Moab, poised to attack Canaan from the east, we are treated to a retrospective from a source, D (for "Deuteronomist"), that isn't a lot more entertaining than P.  The battle stories are coming, but first, the rules and regulations, again.

The conceit is Moses's farewell.  In three long discourses, he addresses his people and reminds them of their recent history before they embark on a venture--holy war in Canaan--on which he will not accompany them. The main theological theme of the book may strike a general reader as crude and oversimple.  It's baldly stated several times, including at 28:1:

"And if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.  And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God."

The predictable corollary, concerning how disobedience will result in calamitous misfortune, is by no means abjured.  In our time, manifest religious hucksters are sometimes criticized for putting forward a rewards-and-punishment theology that is said to be "unbiblical."  But the notion that the healthy and wealthy are enjoying God's favor, while the impoverished sick must have done something to deserve their misery, qualifies as "Deuteronomic" and is therefore biblical. 

This motif of a rewards theology is sufficiently prominent in Deuteronomy to have caused embarrassed commentators to discover mitigating circumstances.  One of these is worth mentioning since it sheds light on the book as a whole.  Just a wee bit of biblical literacy tempts one into thinking of the Pentateuch as a unified whole set off from the rest of the Old Testament.  It has, after all, its own names--"Pentateuch," "Torah," "Five Books of Moses"--and is the  subject of sections  with titles like "Introduction to the Pentateuch" in study Bibles.  It should follow that Deuteronomy functions as a  conclusion to the Pentateuch, a view that is neatly confirmed by the way in which it ends with the death of Moses, its leading character. 

Scholars, however, attribute to the D source much of the historical material that follows the Pentateuch, especially in the books of Judges and Kings.  Since the D tradition is more recent than either J or E, it seems we have in Deuteronomy, not the conclusion to the Pentateuch, but the opening of an ambitious historical work that covers, not the forty days of Moses's fifth book, but time stretching from Egyptian bondage to national power under King David and onward toward exile in the sixth century B.C.  This history is deeply concerned about the fate of the Mosaic faith, established among wandering nomads in the wilderness, after  Israel attains prosperous nationhood in a new land.  The Deuteronomist's interpretation of history involves a repeating cycle that goes like this.  Obedience to God's commandments is the cause of prosperity and good fortune, which is the cause of apostasy, which is the cause of affliction, which is the cause of repentance, which is the cause of prosperity and good fortune. 

The rewards for obedience, and tribulations for straying, that the reader of the book of Deuteronomy may find rather too tidy is actually a miniature version of a sweeping historical process described by the Deuteronomist.  I don't understand, however, why this should make anyone less skeptical about the tidiness.  It's true that, when things are going well in this tradition, there is an unattractive sheen of national and religious triumphalism that then gets rubbed out when the inevitable catastrophe chastens the celebrants.  But making the story less repugnant doesn't make it more believable.

Anyway, there is still a lot that's repugnant.  Plowing through Deuteronomy is a lot like plowing through Leviticus and Numbers, which is to say, you are occasionally jarred awake by lurid passages that are, or ought to be, more of an embarrassment than all the emphasis on rewards.  There are few  constraints imposed upon those about to wage "holy war" against the inhabitants of Canaan:

"When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.  And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. . . .  Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.  But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded. . ."

American Christians would probably be more familiar with such a passage if it occurred in the Koran.  Cruel and unusual punishments persist:

"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of is mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.' Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

Concerning this passage, the editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible helpfully observes that "the law is severe."  I had to read the following several times:

"You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement.  Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to save you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, that he may not see anything indecent among you, and turn away from you."

An irreverent comedian could have some fun.  What?  God did not want to be reminded that his chosen people were the kind who? . . . you know.  Then, pantomime. 

It seems it shouldn't be so hard to persuade people that we are separated from these texts by a great gulch of time and culture and that it's sort of childish to regard the whole shooting match as an inspired transcript from God.

Books of the Bible: Numbers

"Numbers": because it begins with a census.  It may seem odd that God should command Moses to count the people, since according to a certain view He could instead simply consult His omniscience.  The A student, however, will detect in this bureaucratic activity not the mind of God but the Priestly source (P), which, alas, is behind at least three-fourths of the book of Numbers.  "Our interest," John Updike once wrote, in a review of a new translation of the Pentatuech, "trends downhill." It's not the translator's fault.  One of the greatest of Old Testament scholars, Gerhard von Rad, describing P in his Old Testament Theology, speaks of "[t]he coldness and stiffness of the presentation, which gives the appearance of an utter lack of interest in ordinary humanity, psychology, and the poetry of the situations."  Jawohl. 

The Hebrew title, "In the Wilderness," might be more apt, but let us pause to register the results of the census. The P source's report is somewhat more elaborate than would be necessary, but it wouldn't be P if we were just given the number.  So there is a roll call.  In repetetive, formulaic phrases, we learn, one at a time, how many men of military age are in each of the tribes.  It turns out that there are 603,550 men over the age of 20.  If this were true, as it plainly cannot be, the number of all the people alternately encamped and marching in the desert would have been around two million.  Suppose they marched a hundred abreast with the length of a single stride between rows.  The entire column would then have been more than ten miles long.  Yet this throng, about three times the population of Boston, could, according to 10:2-3, be summoned to the entrance of the tent of meeting by the blowing of two trumpets.  I point this out only because there are millions of Americans who believe that the whole of the Bible is the literal, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

At least in Numbers the story of the exodus continues, with the result that there is some relief from all the business about cereal offerings and sin offerings, etc.:

In the second year, in the second month, on the twentieth day of the month, the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle of the testimony, and the people of Israel set out by stages from the wilderness of Sinai; and the cloud settled down in the wilderness of Paran. (10.11-12)

The windy officiousness permits a preternaturally attentive reader to construct a timeline, for at Exodus 19.1 we had been told, "On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone forth out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai."  So it took three months to get to Sinai (according to P), where the people were then encamped for almost a year.  Before undertaking this project, one of the few things I thought I knew about the Pentateuch was that the people had wandered in the wilderness for either "forty years" or, if "forty years" is figurative, a hell of a long time.  Now, here we are, well into the fourth of Moses's five books, and only about fifteen months have passed since the first Passover.  Is the pace about to quicken?

Not really, but more years pass in fewer pages, and events of genuine human interest soon occur: a spying expedition, followed by military operations!  The reconaissance mission is ordered by God, which to me seems like another instance where He maybe could have just used his God-power and told His chosen people what they would discover in the land He had promised to give to them.  But, no, the spies go out, come back, and report that the land is inhabited by impressive, intimidatingly large specimens of humanity.  This news brings to a climax the theme of the people murmuring against God and Moses.  All this way across the desert only to face fortified cities defended by giants!  We should never have left Egypt!  It would have been better if we had perished in the wilderness, before we got this far!  That is the gist of it; you can read chapter 14 if you think I might be overstating the complaint.  The people are at the point of stoning Moses when God rouses Himself, and boy is He pissed.  He's ready to kill all the chosen people right there in the desert, but Moses, knowing God's weaknesses, points out that this would cause the Egyptians to conclude that He wasn't able to lead His people into the land He had promised them.  God seems to see the sense in that and, instead of killing everyone, decides that the punishment will be forty years in the wilderness, so that no member of the current faithless generation will ever set foot in the promised land.  The people repent, and, that God may have evidence of their faith, an attack upon southern Canaan is ordered.  But the action doesn't have His favor, for success would now contravene the verdict requiring forty years' of wandering penance, and "the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill country came down and defeated them and pursued them, even to Hormah."

One is pleased that the story is not a monochrome of obedience, rewards, and triumph.  The character of God, however, has troubled some readers--and by "character" I refer not to one of the dramatis personae but to the question of whether He deserves veneration.  Moses, who at his first calling had protested his lack of eloquence, manipulates God by playing to His vanity.  Maybe it would be wrong to make too much of this crude anthropomorphism, but it's hardly the only item in the bill of particulars.  I've downplayed the dullness of Numbers, which for considerable stretches rivals Leviticus for P-source tedium.  But this tedium is punctuated by bursts of grotesque violence that have the divine imprimatur.  You are just reading dully along when your drowsiness is suddenly cured by, for example:

While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day.  And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation.  They put him in custody, because it had not been made plain what should be done to him.  And the Lord said to Moses, "The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp."  And all the congregation brought him outside the camp, and stoned him to death with stones, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Not much of an advertisement for Sunday liquor sales--or for the moral stature of the God of Israel, either. 

Books of the Bible: Leviticus

The book of Leviticus is read today by scholars, by weirdos like me who have determined to read the whole Bible, and, if cherry-picking skimmers count, by Christianist crackpots looking to excuse their homophobia.  The rest of the population has better things to do, such as washing the car.  Exodus began to suffer on account of the prevalence of the priestly source, and the trend continues in Leviticus, whose stolid readers are subjected to long passages concerning the elements of an acceptable animal or cereal offering, the remedies for ritual uncleanness of diverse etiology (such as those associated with "emissions" from the reproductive organs), sexual proscriptions enshrouded in euphemisms that may or may not be attributed to stiff translations ("uncover the nakedness of" means "have sex with"), calendrical considerations, crazy dietary rules that make distinctions between the flesh of cloven-footed animals that chew their cud and . . . etc., etc.

I suppose I should try and give the flavor of it, but I'd rather you just open and start reading at random. You will then almost surely see what I mean.  In what follows, I'll try to provide a quick tour of why it is arguably  necessary to include the weaseling "almost" in that last sentence.

Regarding the offering recipes: some are so bizarre as to be sort of intriguing.  (Something similar might be said of the whole book, if you wanted to defend Leviticus against the charge of uninterrupted dullness.)  For example, this

But if he cannot afford a lamb, then he shall bring, as his guilt offering to the Lord for the sin which he has committed, two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering.  He shall bring them to the priest, who shall offer first the one for the sin offering; he shall wring its head from its neck, but shall not sever it, and he shall sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar, while the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar; it is a sin offering.

is usually, in the commentaries, put forward as an instance of God's accommodation of the less fortunate.  I, however, wonder what page after page of such bloody minute instruction says about God's character.  Why does it matter so much to him what animals are offered as a sacrifice and the manner in which the whole dumb procedure  is executed?  Of course it doesn't.  It matters to some people, the ones whose view of things comprises the priestly source to the Pentateuch.  A psychological theory for this material might point out that it is pleasant to imagine that your acts are pleasing to God, but to make it believable the tasks can't be too easy to achieve.  Thus the elaborate rules.  When we come to the prophets, we will see that, as with so much else, the Bible is many-minded on the topic of these offerings.  Amos:

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

It is hard to see how the book of Amos is not a gob of spit in the face of the book of Leviticus. 

Other highlights--the term is relative--likewise possess a certain interest either for a weirdness quotient or for their uneasy relationship with other Scriptural teachings.  An instance of the former:

And the Lord said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, None of your descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God.  For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord's offerings by fire; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God.

Aaron was the first High Priest of the Hebrew people, and in the Oxford Annotated Bible this passage is glossed: "Just as the sacrificial offering must be unblemished, so the priest who offers it must be without bodily defect."  One wishes the editor had shed some light on what activities resulted in "crushed testicles" being sufficiently widespread in the population to earn a mention in this list of unacceptable deformities.   If nothing else, reading Leviticus helps one to see that Jesus's foes, several of whom criticized the company he kept, were not necessarily mean or obtuse--or, at least, if they were, could have countered that in that case following Scripture is mean and obtuse. 

Leviticus is also, not surprisingly, the source of the following familiar ethical theory:

He who blasphemes the Name of the Lord shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.  He who kills a man shall be put to death.  He who kills a beast shall make it good, life for life.  When a man causes a disfigurement in his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has disfigured a man, he shall be disfigured. 

A popular bumper sticker argues that this principle "leaves everyone blind."  It is also explicitly rejected by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38).  In the light of this and many other examples that could be adduced, the claim that every word of the Bible is the God-inspired truth seems problematic.  If p, then not the opposite of p.

The 17th through 26th chapters of Leviticus, from which an-eye-for-an-eye comes, comprise the so-called Holiness Code, the only break in the long block of priestly material that makes Leviticus.  Scholarship is more certain that these chapters are an insertion from a different source than it is about the source of the insertion: it is probably an amalgam of miscellaneous laws that has been edited and added to by editors sympathetic to the priestly view.  (The eye-for-an-eye teaching is a prime candidate for being a priestly addition to the material.)  I think the honest, modern reader, if there were any, would find these chapters to be a puzzling mix of the high and low, the sublime and the stupid. I'll conclude by setting down a few excerpts from the Holiness Code.  See if you think they are in descending or ascending order of moral import.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (18:22)

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (21:10)

 You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (19:18)

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (19:33-34)

Books of the Bible: Exodus

While the so-called culture war has in our time elevated the status of Genesis, it is the second book of the Bible, concerning the exodus from Egypt and the sojourn in the desert, during which God established at Sinai a covenant with Abraham's descendants, that has (by far) the most significance for Judaism.  The original authors seem to have shared this view of what's most important.  The Yahwist's narrative about Joseph and his brothers, which I skipped over in my post on Genesis, is characterized by brilliant storytelling, our appreciation of which is augmented by the creeping recognition that its function is largely utilitarian:  it gets the people into Egypt, where they have to be in order to proceed with the crucial part of the story.

If we find the set-up more interesting than the main event--and I do--then I think it is because in the book of Exodus the work of the Yahwist is eclipsed by the material from the priestly source. Especially in the book's second half, while the people are encamped at Sinai, the determined reader faces the stultifying task of wading through considerable evidence of the priestly writer's interest in the building specs for two objects of worshipful veneration, the "Tent of Meeting" and the "Ark of the Covenant."  Thus we meet page upon page of this kind of thing:

They shall make an ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height.  And you shall overlay it with pure gold, within and without shall you overlay it, and you shall make upon it a molding of gold round about.  And you shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the side of it, and two rings on the other side of it.  You shall make poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold.  And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, to carry the ark by them.  The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.

That's concerning the ark.  Let us not give short shrift to the tent, also known as the tabernacle:

Moreover you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet stuff; with cherubim skillfully worked shall you make them.  The length of each curtain shall be twenty-eight cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits; all the curtains shall have one measure.  Five curtains shall be coupled to one another; and the other five curtains shall be coupled to one another. . . .

Had enough?  Multiply by fifty or more. While the Jews are stuck at Sinai, Bible readers are stuck with the priestly writer.

By default, the first part of Exodus is of more interest.  It describes how, after the death of Joseph, the people of Israel were reduced to slave status in the reign of a less friendly Pharaoh.  There is a charming account of the unusual circumstances surrounding the birth and youth of Moses, who, before God recruited him to intercede with Pharaoh on behalf of the enslaved Hebrews, had been raised in Pharaoh's own house.  These intercessory interviews do not go well, for Pharaoh continually and formulaically "hardens his heart," and, despite the afflictions wrought by a series of successively more baleful "plagues" meant to impress upon him the strength of Israel's God, does not relent.  A contrarion may feel a grudging admiration for the willful Pharaoh, but I do not think that is the intent of the narrative. 

I should say that, as we progress through the first couple books of the Bible, myth begins to merge into historicity.  Searching for "the historical Adam" makes about as much sense as scouring records in an effort to discover who Tantalus really was.  But the nomadic way of life depicted in the second part of Genesis, including customs connected to marriage and hospitality, is in line with what we know about human culture in the Mideast, circa 2000 B.C.  When we come to the exodus from Egypt, we are plainly meant to regard it as an actual event.  This is where brisk modern rationalists might begin to rebel.  The annals of ancient Egypt have been searched in vain for even a fleeting allusion to the contretemps with the Hebrews.  The identity of the Pharaoh with the hard heart has been the subject of scholarly inquiry.  Ditto for the body of water (it could not have been the Red Sea) that swallowed up Egypt's finest after miraculously "splitting" to allow the Hebrews to flee.  Various naturalistic explanations have been advanced to account for the plagues, for the mysterious pillars of cloud and fire that showed the way in the wilderness, for the manna and quail that fed the people--and for that great escape at the Sea (wherever it was).  To me, it all seems sort of silly and unsatisfying.  Shouldn't God, being God, have foreknown Pharaoh's hard-heartedness and just cut to the chase with the death of all the first-born?  And speaking of things that God should know, why the instruction that Hebrews smear animal blood on the lintels of their homes, so that they would be  "passed over"?  Might God otherwise be confused about addresses and kill someone innocent?

But weren't Egypt's first-born innocent?

It seems to me that it's not advisable to spend a lot of time trying to distinguish what actually happened from the subsequent embroidery supplied by authors rendered unreliable by their passionate devotion to Israel's cause.  There is also the removal in time to consider.  Many of the laws set out in the book of Exodus are evidently designed to regulate life in a settled, agricultural state.  Since the people of the exodus would have been wholly unacquainted with such a way of life, it appears that the biblical authors imposed current concerns on centuries-old "historical" material.  Yet we are told to take it all as the inerrant and infallible word of God.

On the other side of the ledger, there is in Exodus a leitmotif relating to the wavering faith of Moses's people--and of Moses himself--that I find very attractive.  When the people are on the march in the wilderness, they regularly complain about hardships--the lack of potable water, of tasty food, of all creature comforts.  The bluntness of the complaint can hardly be overstated:

And the whole congregation of the people of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and said to them, "Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger."

Moses's reaction to God's voice from the burning bush is likewise unheroic.  If I may paraphrase:  No, not me!  I won't know what to say.  The people won't believe me.  I am not eloquent.  Please, someone else.  Anyone else!  It's a little humorous, actually.  Moses argues with God, is not satisfied with the assurances he receives, raises new objections, receives more assurances but persists with his complaint, until finally "the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses."  The upshot is that his brother Aaron is appointed his aide.  Imagine George Washington receiving that kind of treatment.  Or the gallant soldiers with whom he crossed the Delaware on Christmas. 

 

 

Books of the Bible: Genesis

To most Americans, the Bible in general, and the book of Genesis in particular, is known, if it is known, as a document in the culture war, the chief adversary of On the Origin of Species.  Since Genesis was composed between 2500 and 3000 years ago, I guess you could say it has enjoyed continued relevance, but not for the right reasons.  There are different levels of absurdity in the view pressed upon us by the fundamentalists.  It's pretty crazy that millions believe that Genesis relates a straightforward, literal account of how the world came into existence.  But, even if we were to entertain that possibility, a cursory perusal of the text reveals big problems.  For example, the opening chapters relate not one but two creation stories that are different in their particulars.  There is the one commencing with the first verse of the Bible, wherein God creates by oral command, first light, then on successive "days" the seas and the sun and the moon and the flora and fauna and, finally, after all that, human beings.  When this has been accomplished, the six days of creation are up, God rests on the seventh, indent, new paragraph, and:

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground--then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

So which is it?  Did things spring into being from the speech acts of God, or did God crouch over the dirt and form us with his own hands before breathing life into our nostrils?  And were we human beings made before or after the plants and animals?  The further we read into the text, the more questions like these arise.  Were men and women made at the same time, or did God, seeing that man needed a helper, make woman afterwards?  If Adam was the first man, then where did the women his sons married come from?  Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?

These are questions for fundamentalists, and their answers involve them in deeper perplexities.  At their best, the explanations possess a certain charm.  I might as well not reserve my favorite.  Against the Jewish tradition that the whole of the Pentateuch--the first five books of the Bible--was written by Moses, it has been pointed out that this cannot possibly be true, since the Pentateuch includes the story of Moses's death.  The rabbis have two solutions.  The first is that the whole Pentateuch was written by Moses, except for the part describing his death, which was written by someone else.  The second is that the whole Pentateuch was written by Moses, including the part describing his death, and that when he wrote that part he wept. 

It only seems, however, that the explication of biblical texts is mainly a matter of magical thinking.  Regarding the Pentateuch, mainline scholarship holds, at a high level, that an ancient Semitic people had stories that were orally transmitted over centuries before being set down in writing by different authors whose work product was edited before being spliced together into a single narrative that was eventually canonized despite bearing everywhere the marks of what modern users of word processing software call "cutting and pasting."  So there are in Genesis two different creation stories because--there were two stories, by two authors, both of which were incorporated into the text known as the book of Genesis.  This "documentary hypothesis," though possibly lacking in veneration for the Word of God, has the merit of supplying a coherent explanation for what we in fact discover while reading Genesis.  And perhaps we can be acquitted of irreverence if we admit straightaway that the contribution of one of these authors--the one called the Yahwist because of the word he uses to refer to God--is a good part of the reason why at least parts of the Bible qualify as masterpieces of the world's literature. 

A quick word about the four documents of the documentary hypothesis before we examine more carefully the work of the Yahwist (or Jahwist), usually denoted J.  There is also the Deuteronomist (D), whose work, as you might guess, is mostly confined to the book of Deuteronomy and is no part of Genesis.  Then there is the Priestly writer (P).  This material displays a strong interest in worship and other "priestly" matters, including genealogy.  Generally speaking, we are pretty safe in concluding that, if our attention is waning, we have come to a block of P material.  For example, the story of the Tower of Babel, in Genesis 11:1-9, comes to its conclusion and we then read, at verse 10:

These are the descendants of Shem.  When Shem was a hundred years old, he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood. . . .

And there follows a long, boring section of the nature A was the father of B, who was the father of C, etc., etc.  A freshman composition teacher might be tempted to write in the margin, "transition weak"--and indeed the explanation is that the Yahwist's account of the Tower of Babel is followed by a priestly block of material and that no editor was sufficiently offended by the abrupt shift to provide a few transitional lines.  The fourth document, that of the Elohist (E), because it applies the word Elohim to God, is the most difficult to distinguish from the Yahwist.  The serious student of the Pentateuch will pore over tables setting out which sections come from which documentary source, and some of these tables assign the designation JE to certain sections, to indicate either some merging of the sources or just uncertainty.  The E document is more fragmentary than J and, geographically, exhibits more familiarity with the traditions of northern Israel.

The Yahwist's work was likely accomplished during the Davidic era, in the tenth century B.C., when Israel was enjoying a period of national unity and prestige unknown to that time.  It's conceived on an epic scale and addresses the primal past forward to the conquest of the land of Canaan.  The portion of the work contained in Genesis falls nicely into two sections: primal beginnings (ending with chapter 11) and the patriarchal period, concerning Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and their wives, "handmaidens," and children (chapters 12 to 50).  Let us try to say something sensible about each section in turn, the relationship between the two, and the author's evident intent.

The Yahwist's creation story is the one found in Genesis 2.  It's distinguished from the priestly account, in Genesis 1, by a certain earthiness--God getting his hands soiled and forming the dirt instead of creating by fiat from on high--that is representative of his work.  There follow the stories that must sound familiar even to biblical illiterates, so dispersed are they in the air of our civilization: the fall of man, expulsion from Eden, Cain's murder of his brother Abel, the flood, the tower of Babel.  These are not the creations of the Yahwist but his versions of circulating stories that have the pretty clear intent of supplying answers to such basic questions as: Why do we feel the need to wear clothes?  Why must there be so much misery connected with birthing children and getting food?  Why are men and women attracted to each other?  Why do people speak different languages?  The broad import is overwhelmingly pessimistic, a long catalog of humanity's disobedience and rebellion eliciting God's disgust. He made humanity but it looks like a mistake.

The stories concerning Abraham and his descendants, therefore, are set against a backdrop of brokenness.  Instead of pronouncing "turn off the light," God makes a promise to the patriarch of a single family through whom he will continue his work with humankind:

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves."

The interest of the succeeding stories derives largely from the possibility that this threefold promise--a land, a nation, a reciprocal blessing--will be added to the heap of broken things.  You know the broad outline to a thousand Hollywood movies.  The first movement establishes the worthiness of some person, group, or cause, which, in the second movement, is besieged by an escalating threat--and then, at the last moment, when all had just seemed lost, there is a dramatic and satisfying intervention that sends  the audience home happy.  I'm not saying that the Yahwist invented this plot but he was an early and skillful practitioner. 

The first crisis concerns Abraham's difficulty in getting a legitimate heir.  He cannot very well be the father of a great nation if his line dies with him.  But time keeps passing and when his wife, Sarah, concludes she will never conceive, she suggests that Abraham get a child with Hagar, her Egyptian maid.  To the embarrassment of our fundamentalist friends, this plan is acted on.  Hagar bears a son, Ishmael, "a wild ass of a man" who, not being a fulfillment of God's promise, qualifies as a prototypical outcast (as Herman Melville well knew).  In one of the Yahwist's many vivid, human details, Sarah nags Abraham after Ishmael is born--apparently forgetting that it was not his but her idea that he sleep with Hagar--and his short reply identifies one of literature's first put-upon husbands: "Behold, your maid is in your power; do to her as you please" (16:6).  So Sarah "deals harshly" with Hagar, who flees.

This misadventure, a small jewel itself, heightens the tension created by the theme of the still unkept promise.  The next development occurs when God pays Abraham another visit and repeats the promise regarding a son, this time with more detail: it will be next spring.  In another memorable detail, Sarah is eavesdropping on this conversation between God and her husband:

The Lord said, "I will surely return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son."  And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.  Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.  So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"

There's not a lot of laughter in the Bible and one therefore takes note of Sarah.  The son she finally bears is named Isaac, yitzhaq in Hebrew, and, reading around in the Commentaries, one learns that titzhaq is Hebrew for "she laughs." So it seems that verbal playfulness was another tool in the Yahwist's kit.  Though no one would call Sarah a "knight of faith"--as Kierkegaard did her husband--she is, especially considering how few words are spent on her, one of the most attractive and fully realized characters in the Bible.  One of her rivals in this category is another creation of the Yahwist: Joseph, a grandson of Isaac, who figures in the later chapters of Genesis.  I have a cunning plan to use his story as an introduction to the book of Exodus.

 

 

 

Books of the Bible: Matthew

The Gospel according to Matthew; or, the church's book.  The word "church" does not occur in Mark, Luke, or John, but it occurs twice in Matthew, most famously when Jesus says to his most prominent disciple, "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail upon it" (16:18).  A translation cannot really capture it, but we have here a rare instance of verbal playfulness in the New Testament, which was written in a language (Greek) where the word for Peter (Petros) is very close to the word for rock (petra): "You are Petros, and on this petra I will build. . . ." 

The Catholic Church of course regards this passage as the commissioning of Peter as the first pope, the founder of the Christian Church.  One can't help observing, therefore, that the narration of the incident continues with Jesus teaching the disciples that he "must suffer many things, and be killed, and on the third day be raised."  The recently commissioned Peter doesn't care for it, and begins to remonstrate with Jesus, thereby eliciting a strong rebuke: "Get behind me, Satan!  You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men" (16:23).  To us outsiders, it appears to have taken about twenty seconds for the first pope to supply proof of his fallibility.

One difference between Matthew and Mark, its chief source, will be evident to anyone who grew up with one of those Bibles that print Jesus's words in red.  There is comparatively little red print, either by volume or percentage, in Mark.  But most of the red print in Matthew can also be found in Luke.  The probable reason for this is that Matthew and Luke, in addition to following Mark, had in common a second source, often denoted Q by scholars, which must have been a collection of sayings and parables of Jesus.  Matthew arranges this Q material into five separate discourses.  Of the five, the most loved and quoted is the first, the Sermon on the Mount.  It may well be that the five discourses are intended to parallel the Five Books of Moses, and that Jesus's first discourse is delivered from a "mount" in order to suggest the proclamation of a new law, the old having been delivered to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of those texts that  will sound familiar even to those who've never read it, for the same reason that a silly lady is supposed to have liked Hamlet "because it has so many famous sayings."  It is in this discourse that Jesus says "Blessed are the meek" and "Blessed are the peacemakers"; where he tells his disciples to pray what is now universally known as "the Lord's prayer"; where he instructs those who have been hit on the right cheek not to respond in like manner but to turn to their foe also the left; where he lays out what everyone now recognizes as "the golden rule"; &c. 

Despite its status, or maybe in part because of it, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount has its detractors.  Committed Christian moralists, perhaps guarding against the charge of hypocrisy, have edged toward admitting a certain impracticality--no one seems to think, for example, that Jesus would require us to turn the other cheek toward al-Qaeda.  The celebration of meekness has contributed to the complaint that the whole religion will be attractive mainly to small souls too afraid to fight back--that the ethic of meekness, in other words, was invented to make a virtue of a fatal flaw.  This criticism is associated most closely with the philosopher Nietzsche's repudiation of Christian ethics, and it seems to me that, in our time, it may be extended to the observation that a chastity rule will have the effect of attracting psychological cripples who have no interest in forming open, "normal" sexual relationships. And, as long as I've blundered into the topic of human sexuality, the Sermon on the Mount also includes the following problematic pronouncement:

You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery."  But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. (5:27-29)

Yikes!  You might think that morality is largely a matter of beating back your inclinations in order to make your behavior conform to basic ethical precepts, but Jesus flatly rejects the distinction between impulse and action.   Moreover, the recommended remedy for having the inclination is--what to say? Let us only point out that anyone who followed through on it in an advanced country would soon find himself in the psychiatric unit of a hospital.  We are back, it seems, at the question of practicality, without even having taken up the question of the golden rule, and whether Jesus's "positive" version of it is really to be preferred to, "Don't do to another what you wouldn't want done to you." 

These questions, whatever their merits, are of no concern to the author of Mark.  If the end of the world is at hand, you really do not need instructions on how to live in it.  You don't need to found a church, either. The Gospel according to Matthew concludes with what is known as "the great commission"; Jesus, having been raised from the dead, appears to his disciples and says:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age (28:18-20)

Unlike in Mark, "the close of the age" is not imminent.  The "church's book" was written later.  The idea of the time of Jesus being the end time has to blunted, because time has passed and the end hasn't come.   So the time of Jesus is instead a time for revelation and instruction.  He taught his disciples and now they must teach others, making new disciples.  There is time for human activity.

To come to a true understanding of the gospel narratives, it's necessary to drop the notion that they promulgate one true theology. 

Books of the Bible: Mark

The first three books printed in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they tell essentially the same story in the same way, often with almost identical words.  (Syn-optic: "to see together.")  One way to account for the similarities is to hold that God dictated the same words to three evangelists, who, being all capable secretaries, took it down accurately and thus ended with very similar results.  There is another explanation that arises when one places the texts side-by side and reads very closely.  Almost all of Mark's content is in both Matthew and Luke.  Most of the remaining part of Mark--the part that's not in both Matthew and Luke--is in one or the other.  Further, when Mark and Matthew differ with respect to sequence, Luke invariably follows Mark; and when Mark and Luke diverge, Matthew also follows Mark.  Scholars thus posit that the similarities between these three gospels are the result of a literary relationship known as "the priority of Mark."  It means only that Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke, working independently, both used Mark as a source. 

Though it's embarrassing for fundamentalists, subjecting the gospel narratives to the methods used by scholars of other ancient texts gets results.  (The magical thinking, on the other hand, is a dead end: all you can do is keep invoking the magic.)  We learn something of the mind of Shakespeare by comparing the plays he wrote with the sources from which he drew the plots.  What themes does he bring to the fore?  What does he omit?  If a character is changed, in what way?  When the source is left behind, so that events are being invented by Shakespeare, what do we then observe?  The literary relationship between the Synoptic Gospels makes them amenable to this kind of analysis.  If we know Mark, it will help us to comprehend the distinctive traits of the gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke.

So what should be said about Mark?  Such an obvious point as its comparative brevity is a good place to start.  The beginnings and ends of the other synoptics--the nativity stories and the appearances of Jesus after Easter morning---are absent.  The ending of Mark is problematic.  It's widely recognized that what follows 16:8 is from a later editor who was put off by the abrupt, bewildering conclusion.  Three women go to the tomb to anoint the body.  We shall only note in passing that, since Jesus had supposedly been dead already for a day and two nights, it seems they were tardy.  They worry about how they will deal with the gigantic stone that blocked entry to the tomb, but, upon arrival, find that it has already been rolled away.  A man dressed in white is inside and announces that Jesus is risen.  Then the last words we have from the pen of the author of Mark: "And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Well, even if they hadn't been afraid, who would believe them?  Some scholars think the real ending to the gospel has been lost, or that Mark for some reason couldn't finish it, or that something about it caused it to be suppressed, but I have to declare my allegiance to a conclusion that acknowledges we are at a remove from ordinary human experience.  The women were stunned and afraid, then: Curtain.  This is the ending for those of us who were always annoyed by the way the preachers and Sunday school teachers made a villain out of doubting Thomas.  We are just to accept with equanimity?  Really?  It seems you should have to allow that the story has some highly unusual elements. 

The jump-stop ending is matched in its way by the opening in which Jesus, already an adult, is baptized by John the Baptist and then begins his ministry immediately upon the arrest of the Baptizer.  There is a certain parallelism at work here, for of course Jesus too will be arrested,and both men are killed.  The author deploys the same somewhat idiosyncratic diction when describing what happens to John and Jesus.  In 1:7 John "preached" and at 1:14 he is "delivered up," at which time Jesus immediately begins his "preaching" before he is himself "delivered into the hands of men" (9:31) and "delivered to the chief priests" (10:33).  (The Revised Standard Version alternately renders the same Greek verb as "deliver" and "arrest.")  Then, in the thirteenth chapter, which forms an apocalyptic discourse, Jesus says that before the end of time

. . . the gospel must first be preached to all nations.  And when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious. . . .

So there is this recurring pattern of preaching and being delivered up--first John, then Jesus when John is gone, then the first Christians when Jesus is gone. This is a distinctly Markan characteristic and it seems to be of a piece with the rush, rush, rush of his brief narrative.  Jesus is perpetually busy, preaching and teaching and healing, out on the water in a boat or being transfigured in the hills, always on the move to a new place.  It has become almost a commonplace to note that one of the author's favorite words is "immediately": in 678 verses, it occurs about forty times in the Revised Standard Version. 

Why the hurry?  It's because the time is short.  "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power" (9:1). The other gospel narratives allow for a longer view.  There is a straightforward reason for this.  They were written at a later date, and it hadn't happened.

The preponderance of scholarly opinion assigns the authorship to an unknown Christian writing in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.  The pithiest statement of this view is from the New Testament scholar Norman Perrin, who, citing the opening of chapter 13--

 As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

--observes that "it is standard to date an apocalyptic work by the latest historical incident it refers to as prophecy." If the Gospel of Mark was off on the timing of the Second Coming, it at least was inerrant when predicting events that had already happened. 

 

Books of the Bible: Job

Its reputation is such that it pops up on lists of the masterpieces of world literature, such as the Guardian's compilation of "the top 100 books of all time," where it checks in alphabetically between the Book of Disquiet (never heard of it!) and The Brothers Karamazov.  Thus W.A. Irwin, author of the Job section in Peake's Commentary on the Bible, begins gushingly:

Of the greatness of the Book of Job it is unnecessary to speak at length.  Every informed person recognises that it is one of the classics of our heritage. . . .  The literary skill of its authors, their deep feeling of the essential poetry of nature, animate and inanimate, the glory of the heavens above, the mystery of the cycling seasons . . . the deep understanding of human motivation--its wisdom and its foolishness--and most of all the exaltation and universal appeal of their theme and the profound insights which one at least of them brings to it: all these and much else combined in one brief document from the ancient world suffice to establish it as one of the high achievements of the human spirit.

It's therefore disapponting to be reading along in the masterpiece itself and, aware frequently of a certain opacity, turning for assistance to Dr Irwin's own commentary and finding:

Dubious text continues through Job's speech.  Careful study reveals that omissions have almost certainly occurred, and that some words are corrupted.  Yet through ch. 16 the meaning is in general clear, the worst uncertainty, unfortunately, occurring at the high point of the speech.

Or:

At [verse] 25 we come to one of the great enunciations of the Dialogue.  But unfortunately after 25a the text becomes uncertain.  Of 25b little more may be said than that it may be right and we must seek to expound it as though it were.  26a is completely irrational. . . .  Happily 26b commends itself, and thus provides an index of the movement of thought.  27 may in general be accepted, except that c is apparently a gloss.  28-9 give no relevant idea; whether corrupt, or composed entirely of glosses, we cannot draw them into the advance of thought.

Again:

The text of the chapter, notably of 16-19 and 27-33 is bad; RSV [that is, Revised Standard Version], in common with the practice of translators, obscures real difficulties under a deceptive lucidity.  The most to be said is that in general it gives the best guess possible. . . .  21 is logically difficult; a warns against turning to iniquity, but b states the choice has already been made.  Perhaps the meaning is. . . .

And so on.  I trust it's obvious how problematical this is for the fightin' fundies (fighting fundamentalists).  Does God mumble?  Are the divine stenographers incompetent?  What to say when a respected biblical scholar so frequently assigns the adjective "corrupt" to passages of the inerrant and infallible word of God?  It's embarrassing when careful scrutiny of biblical texts, such as scholars apply to other ancient writing, detects the hands of several authors, some of them in dire need of an absent editor.

If read as a single unified work, the Book of Job is deeply unsatisfying.  After a prose prologue that seems a written version of a folk tale in which a favored hero of faith retains his piety in the face of unreal calamities, the text turns to poetry, and Job's patience comes to an abrupt end.  He curses his life.  He says he wishes he hadn't been born.  He insists upon the justness of his complaint with God.  The injustice, he says, is all on God's side.  In his bitterness, he goes so far as to mock Scripture.  Whereas the psalmist had marveled that God, in all his glory and might, should still care for such a small thing as a man--

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

--Job deploys the same phrases to say he wishes the Almighty would leave him alone:

What is man, that thou dost make so much of him
and that thou dost set thy mind upon him,
dost visit him every morning,
and test him every moment?
How long wilt thou not look away from me
nor let me alone till I swallow my spittle?
If I sin, what do I do to thee, thou watcher of men?
Why hast thou made me thy mark?

He is visited in turn by three friends who defend God with various predictable arguments, such as one hears to this day from professors of divinity.  Job's impatience turns to anger: "I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all."  He would speak directly to God.  A fourth apologist has his say, then finally God, out of a whirlwind, speaks to Job.  Alas, it turns out that He doesn't have anything to say beyond what had been advanced by the miserable comforters.  Nevertheless, when God comes to the end of his windy discourses, Job is completely transformed.  His defiance has vanished and is replaced by craven capitulation: "Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know."  There only remains for God to restore him to his former wealthy, happy state.

It's ridiculous that such a tale should be regarded as a great work of literature.

It qualifies as an irony, I think, that to esteem the Book of Job one is obliged to reject the fundamentailist line and to adopt the view that it's a human document, the sound interpretation of which requires not religious veneration but scholarly attention.  Such an approach detects several, perhaps five, different authors, four of whom were (shall we say) uninspired.  The fifth was original, daring, profound, dazzling--what is often called a genius.  This was the author of the long poetic section, extending from the third through the thirty-first chapters, in which Job curses his life, charges God with cruelty, defends himself, and angrily rejects the orthodox notions of his "comforters."  The only thing to regret about this section is that we don't seem to have it all.  Did the author leave it unfinished?  Has part of the work been lost?  The only certain thing is that the conclusion we have--trite and tame, pious and prim--was supplied by another author (or authors) of a sensibility less like that of  the principal author, more like that of the miserable comforters.

This conception of the Book of Job as a hodgepodge produced by splicing second-rate material onto a chipped jewel will naturally be rejected by most Americans who have any interest in the Bible.  They have too much invested in their untenable position to be persuaded by evidence. Moreover, the only parts with merit aren't very uplifting.  I'm going to conclude by setting down a few more passages from the author of chapters 3 through 31.  See if you don't find them bracing--and incompatible with the damp tissue appended at the end. His comforters argue that God is just, that Job (or maybe his relatives) must have given offense, that no man can judge God, and that suffering should be borne with reverent piety.  Job:

I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;let me know why thy dost contend against me.
Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands
and favor the designs of the wicked?

The antipathy with which he regards his comforters and their emollients is hard to overstate:

No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you.
But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you.
Who does not know such things as these? . . .
Will you speak falsely for God, and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him, will you plead the case for God? . . .
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay.

Regarding the view that his suffering is deserved:

Far be it from me to say that you are right;
till I die I will not put my integrity away from me.
I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go;
my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.

This passage, and others, makes me wish I knew Hebrew.  In the rendering of the RSV, there are in the above speech 45 words, of which 40 have a single syllable.  The sturdy march of defiant monosyllables is an implicit rebuke to his interlocuters and their oily come-ons.  Not that they aren't explicitly rebuked, too. His rebellion extends so far as to deny that life is good, a "blessing":

Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?
Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should suck?
For then I should have lain down and been quiet;
I should have slept; then I should have been at rest,
with kings and counsellors of the earth who rebuilt ruins for themselves,
or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.

The thought here is: my plight is dismal, my life a burden; if only I had died at birth I'd be as well off as the rich and mighty (who also are dead).  His sorrow is not for himself but for the human condition:

Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He comes forth like a flower, and withers;
he flees like a shadow, and continues not. . . .
there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that its shoots shall not cease.
Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the ground,
yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant.
But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he?
As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up,
so man lies down and rises not again;
till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep.

 

 

Books of the Bible: Amos

Begins with the prophet denouncing, in formulaic phrases, the wickedness of nations that experts in ancient Mideast geography will recognize as neighbors of Israel.  The first auditors would have nodded in dull agreement.  You don't think twice about agreeing with your enemies' critics.  But then, without warning:

Thus says the Lord:
"For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes--
they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and turn aside the way of the afflicted. . . ."

It is as if, when the revolving light lands upon Israel itself, the high beams click on.  For its neighbors, the language is flat and general: even upon repeated readings, you receive no vivid idea of the nature of the offenses.  Then Israel is called out, and now if you read twice or three times it is not to try to extract meaning.  God's chosen people have sold the needy for a pair of  shoes!  They have trampled upon the poor, grinding their  heads into the ground!  Amos is only warming up.

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan,
who are in the mountain of Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to their husbands, 'Bring, that we may drink!'
The Lord God has sworn by his holiness
that, behold, the days are coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks.
And you shall go out through the breaches,
every one straight before her;
and you shall be cast forth into Harmon,"
says the Lord.

This is the Revised Standard Version; I haven't chosen a translation that strives to be colorful.  Since no place called "Harmon" has ever been identified, and the Hebrew characters that spell out that  place name diverge only slightly from those for  "dung-heap," some scholars have suggested that a better translation would have these Israelite women of ease suffering a distinctly shitty demise. 

So Israel cares not for the plight of the poor.  What does it care about?  Religious observance, worship services, displays of religiosity.  According to Amos, it fills God with disgust:

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

The book states, at 7:10, that Amos was active when Jeroboam was king of Israel, which places it in the middle of the eighth century B.C.  In The Oxford Annotated Bible, the introduction to the book of Amos, by Old Testament editor Herbert May, notes that this was a period when "israel attained a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity never again reached."  It is hard to refrain from drawing historical parallels, and I'll save time by not even trying.  It seems unlikely that Amos would approve of Israel's treatment of the non-Jewish population of Palestine.  In our country, he would denounce the growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor; the alternating thumping of the Bible and coddling of the rich that characterizes the modern Republican party he would regard as an abomination.  Certain trends in evangelical Christianity, such as the preaching of a "prosperity gospel" by the pastor of a suburban megachurch here in Minnesota, would trigger a torrent of judgmental abuse. The book includes a biographical snippet that, as it describes Amos's brush with the political authority of his day, is in this regard of interest.  One Amaziah, priest of a sanctuary at Bethel, complained to Jeroboam that "the land is not able to bear all [Amos's] words," which of course included the prediction of Israel's--and therefore the king's--ruin. This may have been beneath Jeroboam's notice, but Amaziah, referring to Amos sarcastically as a "seer," bid him to "never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom."  Amos had earlier in the book expressed his opinion of the activities at these "temples":

"Come to Bethel, and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression;
bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days;
offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened,
and proclaim free will offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!"
says the Lord God.

He now answers Amaziah:

"Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.
You say,'Do not prophesy against Israel,
and do not preach against the house of Isaac.'
Therefore thus says the Lord:
'Your wife shall be a harlot in the city,
and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,
and your land shall be parceled out by line;
you yourself shall die in an unclean land,
and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'"

When conservative, upstanding Americans speak of the infallible and inerrant word of God, they do not have in mind the prophet Amos.

Jonah

Perhaps no biblical book has suffered more than Jonah from the depredations of fundamentalists.  (I acknowledge the competition is fierce.)  The whole question has become whether Jonah was "a literal man in the belly of a literal whale," and the answer--"Yes"--has been augmented by zany disquistions on topics tending toward the zoological.  Granted, it would be impossible to live nowadays even for a few hours, let alone three days, in the belly of a great whale, but back in the days of Jonah the seas were populated with species of monsters unknown to modern science, and--it turns out that the whole story is the literal truth.  Fundamentalism self selects the crazies.

Jonah is a story about a recalcitrant, sulky prophet.  Since it is very brief, let us just lay out what happens.  Jonah is called by God to travel to Nineveh and prophesy against the wicked, heathenish ways of that city's residents.  Jonah doesn't want to do it, so boards a ship bound for Tarshish, which is in the opposite direction from Nineveh.  God, however, pursues Jonah with a violent storm.  There is on the ship a somewhat cosmopolitan crew of mariners, and they regard the storm as the judgment of the angry god of one of their number.  A game of lots determines, correctly, that it's Jonah who has given offense to his God.  (I said it's a story but maybe "tall tale" would be better.) Jonah goes overboard, the storm leaves off, and the heathen mariners are impressed: They "feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows" (1:16).

Meanwhile, Jonah is swallowed by a great whale.  Incongruosly, he sings a psalm of thanksgiving from the whale's belly.  After three days, the whale vomits him up on dry land, which has the effect of making the psalm of thanksgiving retroactively appropriate. God reissues the directive regarding Nineveh, and this time Jonah obeys.  It requires one speech act on his part for all in the city, "from the greatest of them to the least," to repent and turn to God, Who in turn determines to spare the city from what He otherwise had planned.  Jonah sulks over his success, explaining to God in a prayer that he had wanted the city to be destroyed.  He sits broodingly on the edge of town, the sun beating down on him, and God raises a plant over his head for shade.  But the next day God kills the plant and Jonah's anger is rekindled.  The story ends with God's admonition: "You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night.  And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

It's an artful story, in many ways.  Despite his intentions, Jonah is twice successful as a missionary to people he sees as outside God's care.  Trying to avoid the commission to Nineveh, he unwittingly converts the foreign mariners, who begin worshiping the God from whom he is himself fleeing.  Having been saved at sea, he finally does travel, however reluctantly, to Nineveh, where he is disappointed at his success: he thought the city should be razed.  The author hits the reader in the head, hard, twice, with his theme, but all they want to talk about is the whale.

It's easy to scoff at the notion that the Jews are God's chosen people.  What would  be surprising, I suppose, is if having thought it over from every angle the Jews had come to the conclusion that God had chosen some other people to call His own.  One's satiric impulse is checked by the way in which claims of Israel's exclusiveness are treated in the Jewish Bible.  Jonah makes the same  point, though with more humor, that is made repeatedly in the Pentateuch, perhaps most memorably in Leviticus, where it is written, after homosexuals have been duly cursed: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God" (19:33-34).

This is loftier than the dead fall that brings the book of Jonah to a close.  But in a curious way the mention of the cattle of Nineveh may count as a sharper barb aimed at those who, confident of their own place in His affection, stand ever ready to condemn the foreigner and the stranger.

Ecclesiastes

First in a series introduced here.

About Ecclesiastes, the general reader whose powers of comprehension are not routed by the radiant glow of Holy Text will have a question: How the hell did this make it into the Bible?  As an editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible observes in a headnote, the book is "at variance [with Scripture's] dominant teaching."

What is the dominant teaching of Ecclesiastes?  In brief, that life is meaningless.  The remedies are all cheats, "vanity of vanities."  Money, power, hedonism, learning, self-abnegation, wisdom, piety, working for justice--they are considered in turn and the conclusion is: vanity (in the sense of "worthless").  And it's not as if any is better, less vacuous, than another:  after all, one end awaits both the wise man and the fool.  It's this levelling power of death, understood as a dateless night, that makes the whole human enterprise such a poor farce.  The language is dignifed but you can hear the rasping voice of Samuel Beckett.  "If I don't kill that rat he'll die." 

Speaking of rats may remind us that, in the author's bleak view, it is not just that rich men and wise men have no advantage over poor fools.  It is also that there is no advantage to being human, or alive:

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.  They all have the same breath, and one man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.  All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. . . .

And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has not seen all the evil deeds that are under the sun.

To quote is to indicate the literary merit of the work, which derives to considerable extent from the way in which the march of tolling monosyllables conveys the author's stolid conviction.  Rooting around in the commentaries, one hears and easily believes that it's even more impressive in Hebrew, which is especially amenable to terse expression (because there is no necessity of dispersing meaning across prepositional phrases).  It's not surprising that Ecclesiastes seems to have been a favorite of some of the twentieth century's best writers. It receives a tribute in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again.  For an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway chose a passage from its opening (King James version):

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . . The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . . The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. . . . All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

As with the natural backdrop, so also with human beings.  The appearance of portentous activity obscures the essential facts of the case.  That's the idea that meant something to Hemingway, and one of Housman's most memorable poems is a summarizing paraphrase:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

Despite the sorry state of biblical literacy in our pious country, a portion of Ecclesiastes is known to almost everyone.  That's because the lyric to Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!(to Everything There Is a Season)," which is drawn wholly from Chapter 3 of the biblical text, became an international hit when covered by The Byrds in 1965.  See if this doesn't  sound familiar:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up . . . . [Etc., etc.]

In the popular culture, these words indicate that at different times people should make different choices, and that now is the time to choose healing and peace.  When considered within the context of Ecclesiastes, however, it's pretty clear that they were intended by the original author as an expression of thoroughgoing determinism.  People may be under the impression that they are steering their ship, avoiding the rocks and shallows though possibly suffering calamity if they make a poor choice.  But the truth is that everything happens at the time fixed for it to happen.  Turn, turn, turn through the insults to your Sunday school teacher's most cherished beliefs.

The literary excellence of which I spoke applies only to individual segments.  The book as a whole seems disjointed and lacking in coherent transitions. Scholars have attempted to discover whether we are missing parts of the text, or we have separate texts that have just been spliced together without benefit of editorial additions, or what.  Moreover, the logical connection from sentence to sentence sometimes seems weak.  Since this occurs frequently when the text edges away from its unorthodox teaching, scholarship has detected the hand of a scandalized editor.  There is no question that the conclusion--

The end of the matter; all has been heard.  Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.  For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

--was not written by the primary author.  The less tactful version is: "Finally, it's over!  The heretic has been heard to the end.  Now forget what he says and instead fear God, keep His commandments, and [drifts toward incoherence but with the dark suggestion that the author will receive his just deserts]."  It is not really known to what degree this, or another, orthodox glossator may have tinkered with the words of the author.  Not very much, it seems to me, for, once started, why stop?  Yet the corpus of a memorable and offending text remains intact.

So, how did Ecclesiastes make it past the gatekeepers and into the canon of sacred texts?  The most usual answer concerns a tradition that attributes its authorship to King Solomon.  For many reasons, this is impossible.  There are very good reasons to suppose the book was composed in the Hellenistic Period, long after Solomon was dead.  Peake's Commentary on the Bible adds, "The author also, incongruously for Solomon, refers to a number of royal predecessors in Jerusalem (1:16, 2:9), writes in the vein of subject rather than of ruler (3:16, 4:1), hints at anarchy in the contemporary scene (4:13-16, 10:16-20), and in the epilogue (12:9-14) is not referred to as a king."

The inclusion in the Bible of the Book of Ecclesiastes strikes me as an attractive mistake.