It Ain’t Necessarily So

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One of my favorite Gershwin songs is a little ditty from Porgy and Bess called “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” (It’s particularly good when Ella Fitzgerald sings it.) The song begins with a rather scandalous lyric:

The things that you’re liable
To read in the Bible—
It ain’t necessarily so.

Lately this sentiment has received a lot of play in the national press, though not with Gershwin’s—or Ella’s—flair. Harper’s Magazine had an article on this subject titled “False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History.”¹ Around the same time The New York Times had a similar piece titled “As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting.”² People seem sad or angry—or sometimes gleeful—that many of the stories in the Bible ain’t necessarily so.

The recent spate of coverage concerns primarily the stories of the patriarchs, the Exodus, the Conquest, and David and Solomon. No one seems particularly exercised these days about the lack of historicity in the biblical stories of Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Flood. Most people assigned these stories to the category of myth or folklore long ago. The arguments about geology, the age of the earth and the Flood in the 19th century are old controversies, barely remembered today. But Abraham, Moses and David seem like real people in real times—not the mythic era before the scattering of people from the Tower of Babel. These stories could be true, so most people have assumed that they are.

But in the meantime, biblical scholars and archaeologists have discovered lots of reasons to think that many of these stories too belong to the category of ancient Israelite folklore—think of David and the giant Goliath (1 Samuel 17), or stars fighting alongside the Israelite armies (Judges 5:20), the sun and moon standing still at Gibeon (Joshua 10:12–13), or Jacob wrestling with a divine being (Genesis 32:23–33). Why should we think that any of these stories are historically accurate? Most people skim off the miracles and assume that the rest really happened. But the interplay of folklore and history is very tight in these stories, and it’s not clear how exactly to separate the one from the other.

There probably is, it must be said, lots of history embedded in these stories. David and Solomon were almost certainly historical figures, though some of the stories about them may be fictional. It would be silly to dismiss David as a historical figure because of the Goliath story, or because of exaggerated claims of empire-building, as it would be to dismiss George Washington as a historical figure because of the cherry tree story (which historians tell us never happened). There is a lot of overstatement in the recent media coverage of these issues. (It’s difficult for the media to get subtle stories right in any circumstance.)

The Exodus is a bit more complicated. We know that there were Canaanite slaves in Egypt—interestingly, the Egyptian word for “Canaanite” also meant “slave” in the period immediately prior to Israel’s emergence. We also know that some Canaanite slaves escaped from Egypt.³ The leap from our historical knowledge to the formation of the story of the Exodus is not a large one. In other words, it is historically very plausible that a group of escaped slaves from Egypt were the original “Exodus” group, and that their story grew into something like the biblical story in the formative period of early Israel. Does this picture of literary growth make the story “true” or “false”? This, I suggest, is a false dichotomy. The story is true in what it says about oppression and freedom, and is probably historically true in some details. As it stands in the Bible, the story is a complex cultural memory, a web of narrative, folklore, history and religion.⁴

It’s false to call the Hebrew Bible a “False Testament.” There are truths and fictions in every culturally important book about the past. We seem to be witnessing a failure of nerve in the national press’s inability to confront complexity. The sky isn’t really falling, and the Bible isn’t some sort of ancient conspiracy intended to trick us. What is true is that the Bible is a complex and multifaceted book, which still holds center stage in our cultural drama.

One of my favorite Gershwin songs is a little ditty from Porgy and Bess called “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” (It’s particularly good when Ella Fitzgerald sings it.) The song begins with a rather scandalous lyric: The things that you’re liableTo read in the Bible—It ain’t necessarily so. Lately this sentiment has received a lot of play in the national press, though not with Gershwin’s—or Ella’s—flair. Harper’s Magazine had an article on this subject titled “False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History.”1 Around the same time The New York Times had a similar piece titled “As Rabbis Face […]