Bible Books
016
Big Subject, Little Insight
A History of God
Karen Armstrong
(New York: Knopf, 1993) 460 pp., $27.50
Reviewed by Richard Elliott Friedman
This book is an enormous undertaking. Karen Armstrong attempts to explain. “The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” and to analyze the development of the monotheistic conception through its many stages and variations. Armstrong writes with the assurance of one learned in scripture and in a vast range of history literature and language of these religions. She explains the meaning of foreign terms, identifies the authors of biblical stories and reveals their motives, and explains concepts of myth and history in various epochs. Incredibly, the author does not have such learning, nor is she an authority in these subjects.
Armstrong makes errors here that many BR readers would readily catch. She says that in the Bible “El tells Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whom to marry.” He does not. She pictures Abraham “serving the King of Sodom as a mercenary.” The text explicitly excludes this (Genesis 14:22 and following). She says that God “sent the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians.” There is no “Angel of Death” in the Hebrew Bible (the term appears in post-biblical Rabbinic literature). She says that at the Red Sea God “drowned the Pharaoh” and his army. There is nothing in the Book of Exodus (or even in the movie) about the Pharaoh drowning. Referring to the Temple, she says “the place reeked with the blood of the sacrificial animals,” unaware that sacrifices were performed outside, not in the Temple. Referring to Hosea’s wife Gomer the prostitute, Armstrong says, “The text makes it clear that Gomer did not become an esheth zeuunim [prostitute—misspelled] until after their children had been born.” The text makes no such thing “clear.”
She makes repeated mistakes in Hebrew and other ancient languages. She calls the abyss in Genesis 1, “
It would be petty to list such errors, except that Armstrong makes seemingly authoritative pronouncements like “Hebrew did not have such a metaphysical dimension at this stage…” Likewise, I would not recite her mistakes in scripture, except that she makes declarations such as: “The final myth of the Exodus is clearly not meant to be a literal version of events.” And: It is “clear” that “the ancient Israelites were a confederation of various ethnic groups…” But these things are not clear at all.
The author speaks with similar certainty about the religions and history of the ancient Near East while making elementary errors. Armstrong writes, “Sennacherib would… imprison the Jewish king in Jerusalem ‘like a bird in a cage.’” Sennacherib never imprisoned Hezekiah. Apparently she misunderstands the Sennacherib inscription, which refers to the Assyrian siege against King Hezekiah at Jerusalem in the caged-bird simile. She repeatedly refers to Canaanite Baal-Hadad as “Baal-Habad,” to Lahamu as “Lahamn,” and to Anshar as “Ansher.” She falsely equates Inanna and Anat, and describes both as “Mother Goddesses.” They should not be equated, and they are not “Mother Goddesses.”
Armstrong takes strong positions on 017questions of modern critical biblical scholarship, but she unfortunately confuses the texts that scholars call J and P.a She attributes the burning bush to P, for example. Scholars argue over the assignment of portions of it to J or E, but it is certainly not P. She says that E distances God more than J, and so E will have God speak to Abraham through an angel. But the most famous story attributed to E, the sacrifice of Isaac, begins with God speaking directly to Abraham (Genesis 22:1). In fact, the deity speaks sometimes through angels, and sometimes not, in both J and E. In one case she ascribes a classic E passage to P and then uses it to show P’s “exalted and sophisticated” view compared to older texts—like E! (That is like comparing Barbra Streisand to Judy Garland based on Streisand’s brilliant performance in The Wizard of Oz.) Armstrong says that P was “written after the exile and inserted into the Pentateuch.” In the face of all the linguistic evidence to the contrary, which she has no ability to evaluate, she should not feel so free to date this text. And hardly any scholars, critical or traditional, would say that P was “inserted into the Pentateuch.”
Why does Armstrong claim that “When the Israelites recounted the story of the Exodus, they were not as interested in historical accuracy as we would be today,” when she has not studied the best-known works on this question? Indeed, it is frequently impossible to tell when she is recounting history and when she is reporting a story. As the subtitle, “The 4000-Year Quest,” suggests, she takes Abraham as historical; but she views the Exodus account as a myth. On what criteria? By what standard?
I have concentrated on the Hebrew Bible because that is my own specialty, but one can observe such errors in other areas as well. Armstrong covers Rabbinic Judaism without treating the Oral Torah, the central concept of Rabbinic Judaism. In her section on Kabbalah she cites only Gershom Scholem and one book edited by Arthur Green. She calls Kabbalistic doctrines “myths” without distinguishing the term here from what she meant by it in the Bible. In her section on the “death of God,” she covers Nietzsche in a page and a half, Freud in a paragraph and Dostoyevski in half a paragraph.
Armstrong takes very strong stands for someone so weak in preparation and coverage. Of fundamentalists, she writes, “The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God.” I am not a fundamentalist myself, but I have never found it necessary or appropriate to speak of their beliefs with such condescension. Similarly with regard to Orthodox Jews in modern Israel, she comments, “The devotion to the Holy Land would give birth to the idolatry of Jewish fundamentalism in our own day.” That remark is not only ignorant, but disgraceful.
Armstrong speaks of the Hebrew Bible’s “vengeful theology,” “the fearful theology of election,” an “abuse” of the notion of God, of the deity in the Hebrew Bible as a merciless God, “a despotic and capricious sadist,” “the cruel and violent god of the Exodus. It is as if she has read only half of the Hebrew Bible: When the deity is pictured as strict she notes it; when the deity shows compassion, forbearance, abundant kindness, grace and mercy (which is more common), she misses it. “It is very difficult,” she writes, “to find a single monotheistic statement in the whole of the Pentateuch”—but she hasn’t the linguistic skill to know whether she is right. She says, “Strange as it may seem, the idea of ‘God,’ like the other great insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.” Come again?
Armstrong frequently returns to her basic view that people reformulate in each age an idea of God that “works” for them. There may or may not something to that, but not at the uninformed and simplistic level at which she develops it. For example: “Abraham and Jacob both put their faith in El because he worked for them” and “The Greek Fathers were simply trying to make the Semitic concept of God work for them.” She concludes with the notion that “we” might create a new faith for the 21st century. Does she think that faiths are “created” that way? It feels as if she pictures a committee convening to discuss what will “work.”
Why should we have a lower standard for learning about the history of beliefs about God than for learning about cars or chemistry or pickling peppers? Why should we trust someone who makes such elementary mistakes to be a guide through Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Armstrong, an ex-nun with an undergraduate degree in modern literature, is presenting herself as someone who knows, and she speaks with authority, so that an unwary reader may think these facts, or at least well-founded views. What they are is a group of gleanings that she has selected from various books and re-mixed, without the training necessary for such judgments. Having an undergraduate degree in modern literature does not qualify one as an historian of religion. A History of God leaves me surprised, frustrated and disappointed. A book like this could be so helpful, so enlightening, even inspiring, but this attempt has fallen far short. Armstrong needed more exchange and advice from knowledgeable persons in the fields she studied, more reading of basic works on the subjects and more care in reading scripture. The author may be well-meaning and hard-working, but regrettably she has not succeeded in her project.
Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible
Brevard S. Childs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) 745 pp., $40.00
Reviewed by Ronald S. Hendel
Brevard Childs has spent much of his professional career wrestling with the problems and possibilities of doing biblical theology in the modern age. His call for a “canonical” approach to the Bible has met with much enthusiasm in recent years, as well as much criticism. The problems Childs engages concern a central dilemma of modern biblical scholarship: How does one 018study the Bible in a fully modern way, participating in the rational and empirical modes of thought of the modern university, while at the same time preserving the authority of Holy Scriptures as God’s inspired and normative word? There is no easy solution to this dilemma, yet for religiously motivated biblical scholars (which includes nearly all) it is a matter of paramount importance.
Childs’s call for a “canonical” approach has been widely misunderstood, primarily because his formulations are often vague and rambling. The present work represents his clearest reflections so far, and offers a massive presentation of canonical theology at work. The results are both magnificent and, for those interested in the rationale for his approach, somewhat disappointing.
Biblical theology in a canonical mode, according to Childs, “has as its fundamental goal to understand the various voices within the whole Christian Bible, New and Old Testament alike, as a witness to the one Lord Jesus Christ, the selfsame divine reality” (p. 85). It is a normative task, not merely a descriptive one. In this task, “the term canon…functions as a theological cipher” or “a rule-of-faith” proclaiming “the church’s special relationship to its scripture” (pp. 721–23). The reality and redemptive power of Jesus Christ is both the beginning of the task (since the interpreter must have a prior faith commitment to this) and its final proclamation. The goal of a canonical biblical theology is the “basic Christian confession that all scripture bears testimony to Jesus Christ” (p. 725).
If the confession of Jesus Christ is the essence of the task, then what difference does the concept of “canon” make? Presumably all Christian theologians would agree with this confessional goal, so what is new or different in Childs’ approach? The answer is not clear, but the drama of this book lies in watching Childs try to make a difference. The move that seems to make Childs’ approach novel is his earnest attempt to join modern biblical scholarship with Christian confession in Jesus Christ as the subject of the Bible.
Perhaps surprisingly, he is just as emphatic about the history and redaction of various biblical texts (their pre-biblical life) as he is about their function as God’s Word in the Christian Church. The problem is, of course, how to join the two—how to make the pre-biblical history of J or P (two of the authorial strands of the Pentateuch) or a discussion of the redaction of the Pentateuch relevant to the confession of Jesus Christ. This is a trick that Childs, continually attempts but perhaps never quite brings off. It may in fact be an impossible task, since historical-critical scholarship and confessional theology may be two modes of discourse that are logically and contextually distinct. Nonetheless, Childs makes a valiant attempt to join together these discourses, or at least to place the two in a sequence in which the confession is the ultimate goal.
Childs tries to join scholarship and Christian confession by various means, at times proposing that they belong to different steps or levels of biblical interpretation. In one of his formulations, historical critical scholarship belongs to the domain of “explanation,” while theology belongs to the domain of “understanding” (p. 83). Later he describes the task as “a multiple-level reading of scripture according to different contexts.” The interpreter is first directed to “interpret each passage within its historical, literary, and canonical context” and “not to confuse the biblical witness with reality itself” (p. 379). This is ordinary scholarship. Only after this does one “extend” the literal/historical reading by looking at the New Testament and the reality of Jesus Christ as the subject of the Bible. Yet according to Childs, the latter task does not replace or dissolve the historical/literary 019inquiry. The two steps are part of a whole, a hermeneutical circle, in which the parts command the whole each have integrity. But can the two go together at all without affecting their respective truth claims? Further, how do we know that biblical scholarship is at all relevant for Christian confession, or vice versa? How do we know that the two discourses are not mutually exclusive? Childs’ only answer to these questions goes back to the rule of faith in the interpreter’s soul, to “the interpreter’s fuller grasp of God’s reality” (p. 382).
To someone who does not share Childs’s prior faith commitment and his confidence that Athens and Jerusalem can be so joined, the prospect of a canonical biblical theology may look dubious. But for those who agree with Childs, his book offers a wealth of insights and is brimming with religious and intellectual zeal.
The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History an Thought
Robert L. Wilken
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 371 pp., $40.00, $16.00 paper (1994)
Reviewed by F. E. Peters
Can anything new be said about Jerusalem, one of the oldest and most celebrated cities in the world? Archaeological excavations can certainly set off skirmishes over political and religious views, and new finds provide continual sources of debate. For most of us, however, excitement comes from new light cast upon familiar landscapes, even on one as familiar as Palestine and its premiere city.
In A Land Called Holy, University of Virginia historian Robert Wilken looks at Christian Jerusalem and its place in Christian Palestine from the time of Jesus until the arrival of the Muslims in the 630s AD. A narrative history filled with insights and understanding, Wilken’s work displays the same easy mastery and understated elegance that distinguished his earlier books.
Jerusalem and Palestine are holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, in interestingly different ways. In this volume, however, Wilken confines his discussion to Jews and Christians, considering the diverse ways in which they view Jerusalem holy. Christians venerate Jerusalem and Palestine because of the places where Jesus lived, preached, performed his miracles, suffered, died and ascended to heaven. Wilken argues that Palestine has been the area of a profound contest between Christian and Jew for spiritual possession of the Holy City and Holy Land, a contest in which Christians sought to establish their own identity in response to a more deep-seated and historically confirmed Jewish claim to those same places. This dialectical tension between the Jewish Eretz-Israel and the Christian Terra Sancta, runs through the book from beginning to end, adding a layer of interest even for those already familiar with the land and its history.
Two introductory chapters provide the context of Jewish regard for the land, from Abraham down through the kings and prophets. Most of this narrative is familiar, but when Wilken discusses post-Exilic times and the rise of apocalyptic worldviews, Jesus’ life comes into new, arrestingly vivid focus. Next, Wilken discusses the early Church Fathers and continuing Jewish claims that Israel, spiritually at least, still belonged to them. Later chapters consider Constantine, the swelling parade of pilgrims, monks and theologians who made Jerusalem and Palestine into a Christian Holy Land, and such figures as Origen, Jerome, Theodoret and Cyril of Scythopolis. The work ends with the destructive Persian conquest of the early seventh century and the elegiac sounds of the first Muslim troops advancing on Bethlehem on Christmas Eve in 638 A.D.
This is a splendid book, told in fascinating detail and backed by impressive learning.
The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible
Joseph Blenkinsopp.
The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 273 pp., $28.00
Reviewed by Thomas B. Dozeman
The study of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible traditionally attributed to Moses, has never been an undertaking for the faint of heart. In the early part of the modern era, fierce debates arose over questions concerning the creation of the Pentateuch, debates often characterized by opposition to the received notion of Moses’s authorship.
Out of these controversies emerged the so-called documentary hypothesis. According to this view, strands from four separate writers or compilers—designated J, E, D, P—were woven together to form the Pentateuch. Although not all scholars and religious communities accepted this hypothesis, it received enough backing to provide a framework for interpretation and debate. In recent decades, however, support for the documentary hypothesis has eroded and pentateuchal scholarship is once again in state of conflict (if not chaos), with no single authorship model able to attract a broad consensus or focus the debates.
Joseph Blenkinsopp’s The Pentateuch is useful addition to the debate. Before considering the text of the Pentateuch, Blenkinsopp sketches the history of pentateuchal scholarship, outlining the recent controversies in the field. He then lays out the plotlines and chronology of the entire Pentateuch, giving us the framework for interpreting smaller sections. Genesis is discussed in two chapters, one focusing on human origins (Genesis 1:11–11:26) and the other on the story of the ancestors (11:27–50:26). The literary structure of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers as a journey from Egypt to Canaan, and the role of law in Exodus 19:1–Numbers 10:28 are the subject of the next two chapters.
Two interpretative principles influence Blenkinsopp’s analysis: one, that the Pentateuch in its final form takes precedence over reconstructing earlier editions that can no longer be clearly discerned; two, that the present form of the Pentateuch cannot be understood apart from the social situation that generated it. Thus, Blenkinsopp’s aim is to describe the formation of the text in its social context in enough detail account for its varying interpretations. He concludes that at the very least the Pentateuch contains two extensive histories, D (deuteronomic) and P (priestly). The D history may have come into formation in the late monarchy period, but Blenkinsopp believes that the Exilic period (approximately 587–539 B.C.E.) is the more likely time. The P history is also a product of the Exile, written in the Babylonian diaspora. The combination of the two is a social, political and religious compromise that was achieved during the period of Persian rule the post-Exilic period (after 539 B.C.E.).
These and other discussions make this introduction a stimulating tour through the Pentateuch, one that fulfills the aim of the Anchor Bible Reference Library series present “the cutting edge of the most recent scholarship” to “the broadest possible readership.”
Big Subject, Little Insight
A History of God
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Footnotes
The Five Scrolls has been published in three editions: The congregational edition (reviewed here) includes both the translation of the five books and prayers to accompany the reading of the books in the synagogue on the holidays when it is traditional to do so; the next version, without prayers, in a larger format than the congregationnal ($60), and the special limited edition in large format printed on rag paper with a hand-pulled Baskin etching, signed and numbered by the artist ($675). In all three versions, Baskin’s 37 watercolor illustrations are included.