Ancient Biblical Interpreters vs. Archaeology & Modern Scholars

062

Around 25 years ago, Jim Kugel and I confided to each other that we each wanted to write a book for the general public. We both believed it important to make scholarship accessible to all. As it turned out, we each wrote several such books. His newest is How to Read the Bible. It is an important book.

Kugel here gives a guided tour of the Hebrew Bible, showing both what traditional interpreters said and what critical scholars and archaeologists have discovered. Kugel speaks for the scholars who respect both the old learning and the wonders that archaeology and critical scholarship have wrought. Working through both the ancient and new learning is a glorious process. And it is happening more and more in Biblical scholarship.

But just giving a picture of two ways of reading the Bible—ancient and modern—would not make a book so singularly important as this one is. The special thing here is that Kugel is an Orthodox Jew, and in this book he publicly accepts critical scholarship.He recognizes the strength of the Documentary Hypothesis (which holds that the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, was composed by several authors)—meaning Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible. Kugel also recognizes the validity of archaeological discoveries that challenge the Bible’s account of history. Where past Orthodox Jewish scholars have called critical Bible scholarship names and ridiculed it, Kugel calls it “an extraordinary intellectual achievement,” “little short of dazzling.” He writes that the scholars who made these discoveries compare to Einstein, Freud and Darwin.

In the past Orthodox Jews have steadfastly rejected “modern” scholarship, but what are they to do now? They cannot say that Kugel is a secular scholar or that he is antireligious or anti-Orthodox. They cannot say that his book is by someone less learned than they, because Kugel is the most learned Orthodox scholar of the Bible on earth. They cannot say that he starts with a set of false assumptions, because he takes the evidence as it comes, making none of the assumptions that they imagine modern critical scholars to be making.

Kugel is not the first major Orthodox scholar to face critical Biblical and archaeological scholarship, but his knowledge and acceptance of it is the most far-reaching. (The other eminent scholar to face it, in a somewhat different way, is Rabbi Mordechai Breuer.¹) The Orthodox Jewish community is going to have to confront a difficult phenomenon: that anyone who really learns all of the present state of the evidence may well be persuaded by it.

The achievement of archaeology and Biblical scholarship of the last few 063generations is indeed a wonder, and it is striking that no one has expressed this wonder so fully until now. The archaeological evidence is no longer just a few famous finds. It involves hundreds of cities and towns, masses of inscriptions and thousands of artifacts. It is a window into the world of Biblical Israel—and that world is not the world that the Orthodox Jewish world has pictured. Moreover, the textual evidence is no longer just flimsy identifications of sources based on “style” or on which word a text uses for a maidservant. It is a powerful analysis based on advanced understanding of the stages of Biblical Hebrew, of history, of continuity of texts, and on convergences of many types of evidence all pointing in the same direction. And this is utterly contrary to what Orthodox Jews believe. Who would have thought that an Orthodox scholar would be the proclaimer of this transformation in our understanding of the Bible!

This has comparable implications for fundamentalist or evangelical Christians, but, for the impact to be the same, a book by a fundamentalist Christian scholar would be required. As Kugel indicates at the beginning in a section titled “About the Author,” this is a very personal book. And its implications are, above all, for this particular author’s community. Indeed, he says explicitly that he does not want to take sides in Protestantism’s liberal/conservative debate.

So Kugel is showing “two quite different ways of understanding the Bible, those of modern biblical scholars and [those] of ancient interpreters” (p.xi). He makes explicit the four assumptions on which the ancient interpreters based their readings: (1) The Bible was a cryptic text, saying one thing when it really meant something else. (2) Its lessons were directed to readers in the interpreters’ own day. (3) It contained no mistakes or contradictions. (4) It was divinely given. He identifies the ancient interpreters as “a largely anonymous group of scholars who flourished from around 300 B.C.E to 200 C.E. or so” (p.xii). He is referring to the rabbis in the formative years of rabbinic Judaism.

And then he asks a key question: “Now that modern biblical scholars have come to understand what biblical texts really meant when they were first written down, why should anyone bother with what a group of ancient interpreters thought the Bible meant centuries later, especially if their interpretations were a bit stretched?” (p.xiii). He calls this “an enormous question” (p.xiv). And he’s right. For 34 chapters he shows just how much the early interpreters added to—and sometimes subtracted from—what the Bible said. Biblically, Jacob misappropriates his brother Esau’s birthright 064and blessing, but the interpreters made Jacob the good one and Esau the bad one. Biblically, two laws about guarding someone else’s property contradict each other, but the interpreters claimed that there is a hidden distinction between the two cases, which makes it all work out. In recent years I’ve frequently asked my students and audiences: What is the most violated commandment in the Torah? My answer: “You shall not add onto the thing I command you, and you shall not subtract from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2; 13:1 [Hebrew]). How does this leave room for all the changes that the early interpreters made? Kugel himself cites this bottom-line verse and writes:

An obvious question arises: If the laws and stories of the Pentateuch were deemed to come from God, how dare humans fiddle with them, adding to them, taking them out of context, changing their meaning, or even getting them to say the opposite of what they said? … This, I believe, is the question to ask.

Kugel gives three answers.

The first is about history. He insists over and over that the Bible has, for centuries, meant whatever those interpreters claimed:

“For most of our history, what the Bible meant was what the ancient interpreters had said it meant.”

“Their interpretations became what the Bible meant” (p.xiii).

“The solutions produced by the Bible’s ancient interpreters simply became what the text meant” (p.680).

Kugel discusses the doctrine of the two Torahs that was born among the ancient rabbis. They said that God revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai not just the written text; but also a second oral Torah. It was revealed to Moses and passed down orally for over a millennium to the rabbis. The Bible was thus always to be understood the way the rabbis interpreted it. “Its true significance,” Kugel writes, “usually lies not in the plain sense of its words but in what the Oral Torah has made of those words; this is its definitive and final interpretation” (p.681). Thus, “Today, Judaism has essentially two canons, the biblical one and the great corpus of writings included under the Oral Torah. Although these two bodies of writings were, and are, said to be of equal authority, in practice, the Oral Torah always wins” (p.680).

Comparably with regard to Christianity, Kugel writes that fundamentalists often appear naive to liberals, but ironically:

The fundamentalist stance … has succeeded in preserving much of what is most basic about the Bible, the ancient approach to reading it. By contrast, what now seems naive is precisely the liberal faith that, despite their abandonment of a good bit of that approach, the Bible can somehow still go on being the Bible. (p.674)

Kugel is above-board in saying that he respects the right of liberal and conservative Christians to bring their own defenders to this matter, but, in his view, the Christian issue has a similar bottom line to the Jewish one. Namely, if one fully accepts the new scholarly discoveries in place of the old views, then the Bible is not the Bible anymore.

Now, in looking for a way to live with both Orthodoxy and his recognition of the discoveries that go against it, Kugel has made a valiant but unsuccessful effort. He says outright that Orthodox Judaism and modern scholarship are “completely irreconcilable” (p.681). And so, instead of trying to reconcile the two approaches, he insists that, even though the traditional readings may be factually wrong, they still are what the Bible means because it has been that way for most of our history. But his repeated insistence does not make this so. He says that he has shown it through 34 chapters of treating both the rabbinic and the new answers. But I, for one, don’t see it. If anything, in showing the force of recent archaeology and scholarship, he has made the case for the opposite.

How did all of this ancient misinterpretation become so dominant? Where did the doctrine of an Oral Torah come from? Kugel says that as soon as the sacred Scriptures developed, people turned to interpreters for answers. Thus: “For various reasons, ordinary readers did not feel capable of deciding such things. It was up to the experts—the ancient interpreters—to explain the Bible to them” (p.xii).

“Various reasons”?! “Did not feel capable”?! There is no hint in Kugel’s book of the struggles that went on, of the Sadducees’ opposition, and later the Karaites’—everyone who for centuries found these “experts” to be wrong and 065“Oral Torah” to be false. Not until page 277, where it is part of a passage quoted from Josephus, do we hear of the Sadducees’ opposition and then never again. And the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah, play no role at all in Kugel’s book.

The ancient interpreters did not know more than we do about the Biblical world or about history or about the Bible’s authors. They knew less. But the basis of the system that Kugel favors is a doctrine that the ancients knew more than we do: They had Oral Torah going all the way back to Sinai. To claim, however, that the text means what ancient interpreters held it to mean—even when all the evidence known to us shows that they were plainly wrong—is intellectually indefensible.

He sets the question up as an opposition between what those ancient interpreters said and what the Biblical authors intended. Kugel says: Don’t tell me that the original author’s intention is everything. But his wording there is misleading. Modern Biblical scholars don’t say that intention is everything. And, in any case, that does not justify Kugel’s alternative, which is to follow readings that misrepresent what the original authors meant. Meanwhile, he defends the Oral Torah doctrine, which asserts that the early interpretations really were conveying the original intentions of the Biblical text. He says, “I hope that this book may at least offer some help in finding an escape from the box of original meaning” (p.688). Elsewhere he refers to “the straitjacket of original meaning” (p.675).

I’m sorry he sees the Bible’s original meaning as a confining box. For me—and for most contemporary scholars—getting at the Bible’s primary meaning is not a box. It is not the end goal of what we do. It is the beginning. From there we go on to see how that meaning impacts in real ways on real lives. To judge from my 32 years’ worth of readers and students, I would say that they have gotten that point. Appreciating what a Biblical story or law or poem is all about—with the ancient misunderstandings stripped away—is not a box or a straitjacket. It is a revelation.

Kugel’s second answer goes beyond history. He says, “the ancient interpreters’ way is crucial for what most people still wish to believe about the Bible and its message” (p.xiii). With due respect, that just isn’t so. Even if we leave out everyone who is not Christian or Jewish, it is not even true of most Jews or Christians. The variety of Christian views is beyond my ability to capture, and the majority of Jews could not tell you what the doctrine of Oral Torah is or when it began. Kugel says that people still owe to the ancient interpreters the idea of the Bible’s “very standing as the Word of God, and its role as a guide to daily life.” But early interpreters derived those concepts from passages in the Bible itself. It was the Bible’s legacy to them, not their legacy to us.

Part of the problem is that Kugel frequently says “Judaism” when he means “Orthodox Judaism.” Examples:

Precisely because this book deals with modern biblical scholarship, many of the things it discusses contradict the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity … (p.xiv)

the whole attitude underlying such speculation is altogether alien to the spirit of Judaism … (p.681)

And, regarding Oral Torah having equal authority with the written text, he writes, “this idea has remained a central tenet of Judaism to this day” (p.680).

It has not. It has remained a central tenet of Orthodox Judaism. Most Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews would not follow it. He uses “Judaism” six more times this way in the following paragraphs.

This book is much more about Jewish Orthodoxy than it may appear to be. The use of the terms “traditional Judaism” and simply “Judaism” overshadow both its real subject and its significance. When he speaks of “traditional Jews,” this will be misleading to thousands of Jews who thought of themselves as traditional but who do not believe the things he describes. I am not accusing him of misleading deliberately. I don’t know if he is trying to avoid the word “Orthodox” or if he is concerned with trying to include the right wing of the Conservative movement or if it is for some other reason. At the beginning of the book, he describes himself as an Orthodox Jew, not using the word “traditional,” but at the end of the book, the “O” word has metamorphosed into the “t” word.

He says that, for a traditional Jew, taking the text without what the Oral Torah says about it would be like telling a Christian to take the Old Testament 066without what Paul says in the New. But those two are not the same at all. He says, “I do not know any Christians who would accept such a proposition.” And that’s just the point: I do know many Jews (in fact, most, but not most Orthodox Jews) who would take the Bible without the Oral Torah. Indeed, it’s not just that his Christian analogy isn’t a very good one. The analogy reveals the real point: Christianity is different because its formulation is found in Scripture. Its New Testament is part of the Christian Bible itself. The ancient interpreters in Judaism never went so far as to make their words part of Scripture itself. They appealed to “Oral Torah.” They sometimes even overpowered the Bible’s plain meaning with their interpretations of laws and stories—as Kugel frequently points out. But they remained just what Kugel calls them: interpreters. Not authors.

I am not insensitive to what is at stake for Orthodox Judaism. This moment is possibly the biggest challenge that their world of beliefs has faced. I feel for Kugel in the dilemma that he himself faces in this. It is obvious that he is the kind of scholar who does not separate his scholarship from his real life (which is the kind of scholar I respect the most). But I just cannot imagine that his answer will satisfy anyone outside of a handful of Orthodox intellectuals. And, frankly, I don’t see how it is satisfying to him. By opting for the central tenet of Orthodoxy, when he has shown a world of facts that say that it is wrong, he is trying to move around the elephant when he is the one who just admitted it to the room.

And, in any case, Kugel says (on the very first page) that he means to educate people about the Bible’s contents and how it is to be read. My reaction is: All right then, accept that responsibility—to educate. Don’t defend a system of incorrect beliefs on the grounds that it is tied to things that people still think.

Kugel gives still another—a third—answer: He says that something is considered even higher than the Bible; namely, serving God. He says that this was the original idea of the Bible. The Bible is just the beginning of a trajectory toward coming closer to God as his servants. He asks how else could we explain that the ancient interpreters treated the sacred text as they did. How could they fiddle with its stories and change its laws? He notes that this tendency has continued through present times.

Can he really think of no other explanation for why people would drastically reinterpret the Bible? Power? Authority? Honest error? Working from mistaken assumptions? Good motives: to make the religion more meaningful to people, to adapt the religion to new life situations? Mixed motives: to support positions in struggles for power and leadership?

He sees the ancient interpreters’ answers as participating in this trajectory in a way that critical scholars do not. Reading Kugel, one would think that ancient scholars cared about moral and spiritual matters while the scholars of recent generations care just about data: Who wrote this? In what century? What actually happened?

He especially emphasizes the study of origins, etiology, as the task of the modern scholar. That is, they look for origins of customs and names of places. I don’t think I’ve heard the word “etiology” as much in a decade as in this book. I am sure that his characterization is true in the case of weaker, less-imaginative scholars. But I also know that Kugel has sat at the table with scholars who are no less spiritual than the rabbis of the Mishnah or the great medieval commentators on the Bible.

Speaking for himself, he says he will sketch out “one or two of my own thoughts about how a person might go about honestly confronting modern scholarship and yet not lose sacred Scripture in the process” (p.46). Speaking for myself, after being as deeply involved in that scholarship as anyone for so many years, I can testify that the Bible is still alive, well, and sacred on its own terms, not through the eyes of ancient interpreters. He says that modern scholars’ persuasive explanations “seemed to have stripped the Bible of much of its special status.” I can only say that after teaching between five and ten thousand students, I don’t see that at all. I’ve rarely seen students go away feeling that their Bible had gotten stripped of its sanctity. More often it was the opposite: The Bible was more special in their eyes as a result of what they had learned. And I don’t think that my experience is unusual. I’d bet that most of my colleagues in Bible and archaeology would say the same. I’d bet that most readers of BAR would 067say the same. And one more thing: I’d bet that Professor Kugel’s own students at Harvard and Bar-Ilan University in Israel would say the same. His introductory course on the Hebrew Bible at Harvard was well known for its tremendous enrollments. I hope that both sides of what he was teaching inspired them.

Peter Steinfels, in a review of Kugel’s book in The New York Times, had a similar reaction to mine, writing:

The ancient interpreters’ boldness in rewriting was motivated and justified, Professor Kugel writes, by a fresh apprehension of God and the corresponding need to flesh out the command, found in the Book of Deuteronomy and elsewhere, “to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul.” Is it so impossible that modern scholarship, too, could be put to that service?

My discussion here is more personal than one normally gets in a review of a scholarly book, but that seems to be called for in this case because that is how Kugel presents it himself. This personal book begins, as mentioned above, with a section titled “About the Author” and later says, “That puts me right in the middle of the dilemma to which this book is devoted.” How much more up front can a scholar be than to say, “No small part of my purpose in surveying this scholarship’s scope and conclusions is to lead into some consideration of their implications for people such as myself”? One senses that he feels it deeply when he asks, “Now that the genie is out of the bottle and modern scholarship has discovered everything it has discovered about the text’s original meaning, what is to become of the Bible?” (p.672).

Jim and I both feel how significant this moment in archaeology and the Bible is, but our responses are precisely opposite. For me, it is an opportunity of opportunities, a moment of return to a great world that was lost to us for two millennia. For him it is a threat to the picture of that world that, he believes, served Jews—and, in a different way, Christians—for 2,000 years. His integrity moves him to seek a way to retain that picture in the face of these challenges. Mine moves me to accept the truth and embrace the return. Jim and I are as opposite as two scholars can be. Our disagreement is essential. And it makes a real difference as to how we live our own lives and what we teach—because we both want to do real scholarship, from real life. I welcome, applaud and admire his honesty and his courage in facing truths that are tremendous challenges to the life he has chosen. But I don’t think that his answers will be sufficient. I think that he may well have achieved the opposite of what he set out to achieve. In showing the Bible’s riches and scholars’ insights, he has brought his students and readers to appreciate the Bible itself—far more than the reinterpreted Bible that he believes is the Bible.

Maybe the solution to the question is for contemporary scholars to set their scholarship in the context of those ancient and medieval interpreters. That is in fact what I did in my Commentary on the Torah. It is what modern scholars from Nahum Sarna to Moshe Greenberg to William Propp have done as well. We didn’t come out of a vacuum. We are not opponents, or even an alternative, to the traditional commentators. We are their heirs. If that goat had found the Dead Sea Scrolls 900 years sooner, Rashi and Ibn Ezra would have used them. If those ancient and medieval interpreters had known what we know about pagan religion in the ancient Near East, they would have discussed matters involving pagan religion differently. We have not thrown out what they said. We have continually refined it. We do not reject their main assumptions because we wanted to bring forth a revolutionary set of new assumptions. We have rather moved on from their assumptions because the textual and archaeological evidence revealed that their assumptions were not correct.

I realize how hard all of this is for Orthodox Jews and possibly for fundamentalist Christians. I have sat and studied with them, not as opponents but with mutual respect. If there is any meeting point between them and the people who are persuaded by critical scholarship, it should be that both recognize the Bible’s value and both are committed to the truth. Kugel’s book can be an exceptional starting point for that discussion.

Around 25 years ago, Jim Kugel and I confided to each other that we each wanted to write a book for the general public. We both believed it important to make scholarship accessible to all. As it turned out, we each wrote several such books. His newest is How to Read the Bible. It is an important book. Kugel here gives a guided tour of the Hebrew Bible, showing both what traditional interpreters said and what critical scholars and archaeologists have discovered. Kugel speaks for the scholars who respect both the old learning and the wonders that archaeology and […]