by Dave Gregory
Dear Christians
1: this might be unwelcome news, but we’ve been reading the Bible wrong for the vast majority of our history.
1.5 We somehow managed to forget that persecuted, subjugated, victimized peoples wrote the entirety of the Bible; every single iota, every single stroke of the pen, came from the hand of someone who directly knew what it meant to endure invisibilization and onslaught. In the very moment that the Roman Empire became “Holy,” we began to mess things up. That’s when the Christian imagination initiated its descent into amnesia, and the notion of a God whose biblical identity of divine liberator began to fade from Christianity’s collective consciousness. God became a deity of power and might, of conquering victory, forged into a weapon with which we as Christians might assert ourselves over the categorical “Other”. The ramifications of this error have reverberated throughout Christendom, and we have never fully recovered. I do not mean to wholly dismiss sixteen hundred years of religious history in one fell swoop, but damn you, Constantine. Damn you.
Catholicism has been a credally- and sacramentally-based tradition, for its adherents remained largely illiterate until the dawn of the printing press. Part of the reason why our Protestant confreres and consoeurs relied so heavily upon the doctrine of
sola scriptura is because the Reformation took flight during an era of explosive literacy! The common Catholic, by stark contrast, could not read the Bible for the first 1500 years of Christianity’s existence, and therefore remained incapable of exploring Scripture with their own eyes. My, my, how things have changed.
Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation from the Second Vatican Council, called for Catholics to study the Bible through the relatively new lens of historical-critical methodologies,
2 opening up the possibility of reading the Bible with the prospect that it might not all be literal, historical truth. I’ll refrain from rambling on here, but nonetheless we must be aware that in understanding the historical, religious, cultural, and political contexts in which various biblical books were written, the Bible becomes something startlingly different.
If those among us who believe the Bible to be the Word of God can begin to see that rebels produced the Bible, we ourselves will become rebels. I hope this little blog post opens up some of the history and meaning behind biblical composition and formation, and in so doing will ignite some anti-establishment sparks, only because I love Jesus. I mean, a degree of antiestablishmentarianism defined Christ’s own path in many ways; thoroughly rooted in tradition though he was, he sought to remind his Jewish contemporaries of their tradition’s heart. Biblical criticism unveils a world of possibilities through which we can come to know, understand, and fall more deeply in love with Jesus. In studying the context of his own mission, his person grows more radiant, and his purposefulness more potent.
The Boring Historical Stuff, Unless You’re a Giant Dork Like Me
The fact of the matter is this: the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were tiny, powerless (almost negligibly so) nations that existed in the midst of far more advanced (and potentially ruthlessly violent) empires; Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome far surpassed Israel and Judah in economic and military might. These empires constantly fought, trampling over one another, and over Israel and Judah as they swung their mighty fists against one another’s jawbones. On the below map, you can see that the land of Canaan (the “promised land”) occupies a highly desirable tract of geography, sitting along the Mediterranean. Indeed, this was a land flowing with milk and honey.
The Book of Joshua describes the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan following the death of Moses. The chosen people slaughter entire nations, mowing down women and children, destroying crops and agriculture. Cue the walls of Jericho tumbling down. However, archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the narrative of Joshua has no historical basis regarding the image of Israelite military might, for the Israelites did not conquer the peoples who occupied this territory. Jericho had fallen to the Egyptians centuries before the Israelites emerged, and so far as we can tell, Israel and Judah formed from a scattered collection of tribal affiliations. After all, non-biblical texts from these empires mention Israel and Judah, though give their worldly “power” little to no credence. Monarchies emerged over the course of hundreds of years, a Temple in Jerusalem was built in the 12th century, and a degree of relative peace lasted for several centuries. However, wars raged on, and the northern kingdom of Israel succumbed to Assyrian conquest in 722 BCE, and ten of the twelve tribes scattered to the winds; the southern kingdom of Judah suffered Babylonian onslaught in 586/7 BCE, and the Babylonians razed the famed Temple of Solomon, built in the 12th century BCE in Jerusalem, to the ground.
Why All of This Matters
Here we must note a crucial bit of history:
the Babylonian Exile is the single most important event in the history of the Bible’s formation. The Temple was destroyed, Judah and Israel were no more. Fifty years later, Persia completed its conquest of Babylon, and allowed the Judeans to return home. During this period following the Persian rescue, Judeans rebuilt their Temple in Jerusalem and the Hebrew Bible came into formation. Although certain stories and snippets of poetry existed prior to the Babylonian Exile, members of the priestly and political elite wrote the majority of the Bible following their return home. The Torah, Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, and Kings -- those books that speak of the origins of humanity and Israel -- were all either written or finalized
during and
after the Babylonian Exile. Much of the Hebrew Bible, therefore, was written as a form of rebellion against foreign power. The narratives that describe the formation of ancient Israel are inherently political things, establishing a national and cultural mythos through story-telling, long after the events they describe occurred. This people who underwent exile sought to re-create themselves by creating the Bible.
This being said, the prophetic literature (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, et al) came into existence during the time periods immediately surrounding the Assyrian and Babylonian victories over Israel and Judah. Ever wonder what these texts were about, what drove them to speak so passionately of despair and hope? In the original Hebrew Bible, prophetic literature comprises the Bible’s tummy, before the Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, et cetera).
3 Seriously, read that footnote.
The prophets rebelled against the existent order, condemning the fact that the religious establishment of the Temple had built itself upon the blood of the
anawim (“the weak”); the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner had been exploited in order for the Temple -- littered with the presence of foreign idols by the time of the Babylonian conquest -- to exist. As a consequence, the people would invite Exile upon themselves, as much of the prophetic literature asserts.
Amos, writing as Israel began to descend into sacreligiosity and exploitation in the mid-eighth century BCE, boldly proclaims in chapter 5
4 (vv. 10-12):
They hate the one who reproves in the gate,
and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.
Therefore because you trample on the poor
and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
but you shall not drink their wine.
For I know how many are your transgressions,
and how great are your sins—
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
and push aside the needy in the gate.
And at the beginning of chapter 8 (vv. 4-6) he writes:
Hear this, you that trample on the needy,
and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
saying, “When will the new moon be over
so that we may sell grain;
and the sabbath,
so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,
and practice deceit with false balances,
buying the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals,
and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”
Reading Amos as a 21st century American makes my blood run cold; the gap between the super-wealthy and the increasingly desperate middle-class grows insurmountably large, and the prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen and company tightens its grip around the throat of American Christianities. The prophet Isaiah
5, who knew a similar situation as the shadow of Babylonian armies loomed over Israel, declares in chapter 3 (vv. 13-15):
The Lord rises to argue his case;
he stands to judge the peoples.
The Lord enters into judgment
with the elders and princes of his people:
“It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
by grinding the face of the poor?” says the Lord God of hosts.
And he continues to warn against the unjust excesses of the rich in chapter 5 (vv. 11-13):
Ah, you who rise early in the morning
in pursuit of strong drink,
who linger in the evening
to be inflamed by wine,
whose feasts consist of lyre and harp,
tambourine and flute and wine,
but who do not regard the deeds of the Lord,
or see the work of his hands!
Therefore my people go into exile without knowledge;
their nobles are dying of hunger,
and their multitude is parched with thirst.
Now here is the truly remarkable thing:
when Isaiah speaks of the Messiah, he does not predict Jesus. Rather, the prophet boldly announces that Cyrus, the king of Persia, is God’s “anointed” (in Hebrew, the
mashiyach, and in Greek, the
christos). As it turns out, Jesus was not even a twinkle in the prophet’s mind. Don’t believe me? Here’s the opening of chapter 45, in which Isaiah identifies Cyrus directly as the messianic figure who would rescue the Judeans from Babylonian captivity (vv. 1-6):
Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus,
whose right hand I have grasped
to subdue nations before him
and strip kings of their robes,
to open doors before him—
and the gates shall not be closed:
I will go before you
and level the mountains,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the Lord,
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
and Israel my chosen,
I call you by your name,
I surname you, though you do not know me.
I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me,
so that they may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is no one besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
Yeesh. Isaiah had some high hopes for this Cyrus guy, whom Ezra later depicts (following the return from exile) as bankrolling the rebuilding of the Temple. We’ve been misconstruing the prophets for hundreds of years, reducing the role of prophecy to nothing more than crystal ball predictions. Prophecy, as properly understood, was far more concerned with addressing the political, religious, and cultural catastrophes surrounding the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests than forecasting events that might unfold hundreds of years in the future. Go read the prophets for yourselves with this in mind, and they become something entirely new: the champions of those who have been systematically marginalized.
Even the very first story of the Bible, God’s creation of the world in seven days, contains echoes of the Exile. With the Temple destroyed, ancient Israelites could no longer offer sacrifice in the Temple, and therefore their entire basis for worship vanished. In exile, however, YHWH’s people began to congregate in local communities (synagogues), under the guidance of rabbinical teachers, and began to practice the Sabbath day of rest. What does one have to engage relationship with God when one has no altar to sacrifice upon? Nothing other than one’s own self. What is the Sabbath? The act of remembering whence one has come and whither one goes, one’s divine origin and destination, partaking in the very process of creation. How does the first creation myth of Genesis end? With the Sabbath.
6
The Bottom Line
When the nation of Israel came into existence following the Second World War, Zionist leaders spoke of their exile ending. In this, they did not refer to the atrocities of the Holocaust, but to the exile that began two and a half millennia prior. Through the time of Jesus, Israel remained under foreign occupation; their rulers changed, but the fact of captivity never ceased.
Ultimately, the entire Bible -- both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament
7 -- posits an act of political and theological rebellion. It is no wonder that the spirituals of African slaves drew inspiration from the story of Exodus literature, the famed (though historically inaccurate) story of returning home, or that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted the prophets throughout his speeches and writings, condemning the “filthy, rotten system” that Dorothy Day also despised. Our sacred Scriptures ought not be read as anything other than profoundly subversive, as intentionally dangerous to the established order of things. The Bible instructs that our theological and political selves are one and the same.
Taking the Bible seriously necessitates that we take its history seriously, that we learn
how and
why it came to exist in the midst of such profound suffering. The implications for reading the Hebrew Bible rebelliously -- that is, in a manner departing from conventional standards within Christian circles -- are manifold. If we see that the primeval
8 mythologies of Genesis rebel against other ancient Near Eastern mythologies, transforming human understanding of the Divine, our own images of God will be refined. If we know that Israel and Judah never sought the mass conversion of non-Jews to belief in YHWH through force, but rather through witnessing by their very lives to a God of love, perhaps we as Christians might be more willing to do the same. If we can stop reading the prophets solely through a typological lens, as predicting the coming of Jesus of Nazareth and foretelling how he would be killed, we can rediscover the radicality of their call to justice. If we look beyond reading the Song of Songs as a metaphor for God’s relationship to the Church, and read it for what it is (popular love poetry that never mentions God), maybe we’d begin to view sexual intimacy a bit more positively, as a means of experiencing the very life of God.
If we cannot learn to read the Bible rebelliously, insisting that we continue along the path of blasé complacency in ignorance, we might as well not call ourselves Christian.
1 In using the term “Christians,” I do not mean to target non-Catholic Christians: I include the vast landscape of all those who identify as followers of the Christ.↩
1.5 Editor's Note: We here at The Restless Hearts do love and value our readers, even though our posts - especially Dave's - may sometimes, as Rob so well put, talk about something we're doing that sucks and is wrong but isn't totally our fault. Please continue reading as we agitate you nonetheless.↩
2 In short, beginning in the mid-to-late 19th century, non-Catholic Scripture scholars came to study the history behind the Bible’s composition, which has enormously aided our understanding of its contents.↩
3 The Hebrew Bible is divided into three sections: the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim (the Instruction [not “the Law”], the Prophets, and the Writings). God establishes the heart of the Covenental promise in the Torah and informs Israel how to keep this covenant, the Prophets detail Israel falling away from the covenant, and the Writings are a collection of literatures depicting the human struggle to exist within and rebuild the covenant. A lovely organic structure persists in the Hebrew Bible’s internal organization, which Christianity systematically dissected and destroyed. Christians have read the prophets as simply “predicting” Jesus, and therefore removed them from the middle of the Bible and toward its end, right before the Gospels.↩
4 In the following passages, I have taken the liberty of placing the most crucial phrases in bold.
↩
5 My personal favorite, namely because I wrote my master’s thesis on Deutero-Isaiah and this prophet’s invention of monotheism as a theodicy. More on this later, but it’s good to know a bit of background on the book. Traditionally, it has been held that one individual penned the entirety, however, modern scholarship of the past half-century has come to a consensus that the text was comprised in three distinct periods: Proto-Isaiah (chapters 1-39) pre-date the Babylonian Exile; Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40-55) were written immediately prior to and/or during the Exile; and Trito-Isaiah (chapters 56-66) arrived following the Exile. This explains their characteristics. The first thirty-nine chapters speak of impending doom, the next fifteen speak of suffering in the midst of exile, and the final ten focus on hopefulness.↩
6 If you want some more detail on this fascinating subject, here’s a long footnote for your pleasure. The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, posits that the world was created through violence between deities. The god of the storms and air, Marduk, vanquishes the goddess of the waters, Tiamat, and tears her body in half; with one half, he forms the heavens and with the other he forms the oceans. Her corpse becomes land mass, and humans are formed out of mud and divine blood to feed the feisty collection of Babylonian gods. Sound familiar? In Genesis, the “wind” of God separates the chaotic waters, forming the heavens and the earth. Genesis rebels against Babylonian mythology, insisting that creation was an act of love on the part of a single deity, and that humans were not created to be servile to God, but rather stewards of creation as God’s cooperators. However, we were made out of mud as well. Weird, huh? What is truly remarkable about the Genesis mythology is not that similarities persist from its Babylonian origins, but that it transforms the pre-existing narrative so thoroughly. Oh yeah, and what happens to Adam and Eve? They go into exile.↩
7 I refer to the “Old” and “New” Testaments with this terminology, because naming these two halves of Scripture with the traditional temporal designations reeks of supersessionism, the overcoming of Judaism by Christianity.↩
8 The “primeval” histories are those stories narrating the origins of the world and humanity before getting into the tales of Israel’s origins: Genesis 1-3, Noah, Babel, et cetera.↩
