Bible Books

040

Reading the Lines: A Fresh Look at the Hebrew Bible

By Pamela Tamarkin Reis
(Hendrickson Publishers, 2003) 239 pp., $24.95 (hardback)

If Pamela Tamarkin Reis is right, then the great majority of scientific Bible scholars of our time are wrong. They say that the Bible is a composite of materials that come from many different sources, pasted together by a redactor, and that this accounts for the repetitions and the discrepancies within it. She says that the Bible is the work of a literary genius, and nothing is included in it without a reason. What makes her work so interesting is that she has no union card, that is, no Ph.D., and no formal training in biblical studies. Until she was 50, she knew no Hebrew and no Bible at all. She studied in a couple of home study groups, audited classes at Yale and listened to the Torah reading on Shabbat morning in synagogue. And yet she has produced a dozen essays deemed good enough for publication in the field’s major scholarly journals. Now she has put these essays together in book form, together with fascinating introductions explaining how she arrived at her unique interpretations.

We are not used to a scholar who writes: “Bingo! I finally figured it out” and then goes on to make her case. We are not used to a scholar who says she listened to academics discuss the story of Sarah and Hagar at a professional conference and found they were so hard on Sarah that, as she puts it, “I was eating my breakfast; they were eating my liver.” We are not used to a scholar with a sense of humor who can write chapters with titles like “Take My Wife, Please,” or “Dead Men Tell No Tales.”

I confess I am not sure what to make of Reis and these essays. All of them are innovative and original. Some are really insightful. Some, I suspect, are completely off base. But even when she is wrong, her boldness deserves respect. Her ability to see things in the stories that apparently no one else has seen is impressive.

For instance, she claims that Hagar was never a wife to Abraham, only a servant whose purpose was to provide Sarah with a child and ease the pressure on her so that she might have another child of her own. Therefore, according to Reis, Sarah’s anger at Abraham is justified when she finds him with Hagar again after Hagar has fulfilled her duty. And Abraham shamefacedly has to admit that Sarah’s anger is right, so he agrees to send his servant and her child away. According to Reis, the proof that Abraham really does not have any emotional attachment to Hagar, but only to the son they have produced together, is that he sends them away with food and water but no donkey to ride! Abraham is not a poor man. He has plenty of sheep and cows and donkeys. (He brings a donkey with him to Mt. Moriah in the next chapter, for example.) So why does he not send Hagar and Ishmael away with one?

I am not sure Reis is right in her explanation, but it is surely a good question, is it not? And it is a question that most, if not all, of the biblical scholars who have studied this page seem to have missed.

Another example: Sent by his father Jacob to find out how his brothers are doing in Shechem, Joseph goes there only to meet a mysterious stranger informing him the brothers had gone on to Dothan. When Joseph follows them to Dothan, they lynch him and throw him into a pit. Ms. Reis raises the question: Why do we need to be 042told that they went from Shechem to Dothan and that some stranger told Joseph how to find them? Would it not be enough to say that Joseph found his brothers in Dothan? Why does the Bible bother to include this seemingly trivial detail? Does the brothers’ exact whereabouts really matter?

It does not matter to the reader nowadays. But who knows what the name represented to readers or listeners many centuries ago? We know from the story that Canaanite and Midianite merchants passed through Dothan on their way to Egypt to sell their goods. And we know that truck stops and places where traveling salesmen gather today are not exactly centers of culture or of piety. Perhaps it was the same back then. Perhaps Dothan was a place for gambling or prostitution or other such illegal or immoral activities, and perhaps this was the reason why the brothers left Shechem and went there. And if so, then perhaps the reason they got so upset when Joseph arrived was not because they saw him but because they realized that he saw them. They were caught in the act and they knew it. So they beat him up and threw him into a pit and left him to die there because, as an old radio show put it, “dead men tell no tales.”

I am not convinced that Reis is right in her explanation of the scene at the inn in which Zipporah saves the life of Moses on their way down to Egypt—but then no one else seems to have a good explanation for this strange passage either.

Nor am I certain that Reis is right about the story of Jephthah and his daughter in the Book of Judges. According to Reis, Jephthah never swore to offer his daughter up as a sacrifice and he never did. He only offered to keep her at his side, unmarried, for the rest of her life—precisely what she wanted and what she maneuvered to achieve. Reis’s argument is based on the laws written in Leviticus 27, which say that if you pledge the value of a person you must pay the worth of a person. But I don’t know whether the Israelites observed these laws in the time of Jephthah and that, if they did, those laws pertained to someone who pledged the equivalent of a daughter. No one else I know of explains the story of Jephthah and his daughter this way, but it certainly makes for a more edifying tale, if Reis is right. She just might be.

What impresses me most about this book is not the individual insights Reis offers but the boldness of her enterprise. Here is a woman who starts out at the age of 50, with no previous training in Bible, and turns out a corpus of work that is bold, insightful and at least sometimes on target! And what 043that says to the rest of us is that the Bible is not the private property of scholars, that each and every one of us, no matter what our age, and no matter how much formal training we have had, has the right to confront the text and see what it means to us here and now.

I am sure that Ms. Reis would be embarrassed by the comparison, but Rabbi Akiva learned the alphabet at the age of 40 and went on to become the greatest sage of his time. She started at the age of 50 and look how much she has achieved. I hope that we get to see more of her work, for her verve is most commendable.

Reading the Lines: A Fresh Look at the Hebrew Bible