Readers Reply

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Neat Stuff

All I have to say is keep up the good work. I learn a lot of great stuff from this magazine. Thanks.

Worse than BAR

I debate daily whether to renew Biblical Archaeology Review as I sift for the 25 percent of the stories that do not belittle and blaspheme God’s book.

No such debate do I entertain with Bible Review. It is 100 percent Bible assassination. The Lord would call me to account for supporting this magazine’s race to the Abyss.

Genesis

The Genesis Paradox

Re: “Genesis as Rashomon,” BR 17:03, by Pamela T. Reis. Finally we have an article that dares to depart from the standard scholarly views. In the end, however, whether the two accounts in Genesis were written by the same person or not is beside the point. Both are needed for a true presentation of God. In chapter one of Genesis, we have God the Creator who is high and above us. In the second Creation account God appears personally and walks with Adam and Eve in the Garden. This paradox of divine revelation is what makes the biblical account supreme above all other divine revelations. Jahweh Elohim is at once the great Creator and also the God who reveals himself to us personally.

What Was God Thinking?

I have a question for Pamela Tamarkin Reis, whose article “Genesis as Rashomon,” BR 17:03, I enjoyed: Why is the creation of the sun and moon in Genesis accompanied by a statement that they are for “festivals”? (“God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times [or festivals; Hebrew, moadim]—the days and the years,’” [Genesis 1:14].) No human beings as yet were created, so why would there be festivals? Can this passage be interpreted from God’s perspective?

On a different note, in a photo caption in the same issue, the artist Bartholomaeus (misspelled) Spranger is wrongly identified. He was born in Antwerp in 1546 and died possibly in Prague in 1611. Danish he definitely was not.

Pamela Reis’s response appears after the following letter.—Ed.

Eve’s Heirs

Might Pamela Reis’s concept of one author with multiple perspectives help explain the varied references to human origins found in Genesis 3 and 4?

In Genesis 3:20 we are told that “Eve…was the mother of all living”—suggesting that all people descended from her. Genesis 4:1–2 says that “Eve…bore Cain…and Abel.” But Genesis 4:14 refers to some other people: “Everyone that findeth me shall slay me.” And Genesis 4:15 adds that: “The Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” Presumably the “any” refers to people other than Adam and Eve, who would likely not need a “mark” to recognize Cain. Finally it is clear from Genesis 4:17 that at least one other person did exist, for “in the land of Nod…Cain knew his wife.” In the same verse we are told that Cain “built a city,” which seems to imply the existence of more persons than Cain, his wife and their son Enoch.

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So was Eve the “mother of all living”? Or was that phrase simply used to suit one particular perspective?

Pamela Reis responds:

Both readers’ questions confirm the thesis of a single biblical author presenting two different points of view. The answer to Mr. den Boggende’s question is that the author portrays God as cognizant of his own intention to create humankind and as provident in supplying humanity with lights in the sky that may be used for setting set times and festivals. This mention of the use of lights occurs in the first chapter of Genesis, which describes the Creation from God’s omniscient perspective, according to my analysis.

D. Cartwright’s question has probably been asked by every Sunday School child as well as by theologians. Traditionalists offer that Cain married his sister and that those who would slay him were the animals who lost their fear of and respect for man when he murdered his brother. I believe the biblical author cleverly fashioned man’s narrative of Creation (2:4b–4:26) as not only a “mundane and somewhat discontinuous version of events,” as I point out in my article, but also as an uninformed and contradictory account. Man, after all, could only surmise how the world came about from the evidence he saw around him. His self-serving perspective provides many mysteries for the reader who regards it as an authoritative description of the beginning of the universe.

Let’s Keep Dancing

Marc Chagall’s interpretation of Adam and Eve in the June 2001 issue and the accompanying caption about “Bored Bourgeoisie” call to mind Peggy Lee’s recording “Is that all there is, my friend?” That’s a cool start for mankind.

Sad, Not Bored

The caption to the Chagall picture of Adam and Eve describes the couple as “bored” and the man as “indifferent.” My wife suggests a different interpretation.

Dr. Gachet (photo, above left) in Van Gogh’s famous portrait has almost exactly the same pose as Adam (photo, above right) in the Chagall painting. According to Cynthia Saltzman in her 1998 book on the Van Gogh painting, this pose is traditionally used to indicate melancholy. Chagall was no doubt familiar not only with this tradition but even with the Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

Prefers Genesis

I enjoyed Pamela Tamarkin Reis’s article “Genesis as Rashomon,” BR 17:03, and her interesting insights and views of this momentous book of the Bible.

When it comes to preaching or teaching about Creation, it seems that all one ever hears from the pulpit and from theologians is the Adam and Eve allegory. This tunnel vision ignores the glorious perception in Genesis 1 of man and woman created spiritually as the “image and likeness” of God, Spirit, and the wondrously uplifting and transforming power this spiritual concept can confer upon humankind.

Mary

More About Mary

May I commend Ronald F. Hock on “The Favored One,” BR 17:03. It seems to me he could have added more about Mary, however, had he included tales from the Gospel of Mary. This apocryphal text recounts Mary’s training at the Temple of the Lord located in the mountains, where she lived in an apartment along with other Temple Virgins from when she was weaned at age 3 until she turned 14 and reached the “age of maturity,” after which she returned to her parents’ house in Galilee.

Like the Protevangelium of James (the subject of Hock’s article), the Gospel of Mary was written after the publication of the canonical Gospels.

A Simpler Solution

In “The Favored One,” BR 17:03, David Cartlidge states in the photo caption to Giotto’s painting of Anna greeting Joachim at the Golden Gate that the woman in black at the center of the picture is an “enigma” and that “some have suggested that she prefigures the sorrow of the Crucifixion.”

I would like to suggest she is Anna’s maid Juthine, who mocked Anna by insisting that God had made the elderly woman sterile (Protevangelium of James 2:6). To me, everything about this figure seems to be saying, “I was so very wrong.” The other women are smiling and happy, while she seems to just want to hide her face and leave the scene as fast as she can.

Columnists

Archaic or Archaized?

In his recent column (“Of Doubt, Gadflies and Minimalists,” BR 17:03), Ronald Hendel insists that the arguments of minimalist scholars who date the composition of the biblical texts to the Second Temple 045period (fifth century B.C.E. and later) are invalid on the grounds that the form of the Hebrew language in most of these texts most closely resembles the inscriptional Hebrew of the First Temple Period (ninth through sixth centuries B.C.E.) and not that of obvious later texts like Jubilees, Ben Sira and the Damascus Document. Those familiar with the work of the scholar Avi Hurvitz will be familiar with this argument.

Hendel’s case fails on three points:

First, he assumes that pre-Exilic inscriptional Hebrew was specific to this period and did not persist into the post-Exilic period. This is an unwarranted assumption because we have no examples of inscriptional Hebrew from the Persian and early Greek periods with which to compare that from the pre-Exilic period! Who is to say, therefore, that the form of Hebrew attested to in the pre-Exilic inscriptions did not continue into the post-Exilic period? If it did, there is no logical objection to dating the biblical texts to that period.

Second, there is no way to exclude the possibility that the form of Hebrew in which the biblical books were written was not deliberately perpetuated by Jewish scribes and scholars of the Second Temple period precisely because it was “classical” in nature and gave the works the veneer of antiquity and verisimilitude. Babylonian and Persian scholars, for example, rejected the influence of Aramaic and continued to use their own native language forms precisely because this gave them a sense of continuity with their cultural and national traditions. Why assume that the Jewish scribes, having been exposed to, influenced by and perhaps even educated in such circles, did not have similar conservative attitudes? We might also remember that Christian scholars throughout the Middle Ages continued to make use of Latin precisely because its antiquity and association with the past lent works written in it a sacred and reverential character.

Finally, as a consequence, one cannot blithely assume that typological form is equivalent to chronology, a point made by Philip Davies in his In Search of Ancient Israel (1992). A more nuanced view of the matter recognizes that different language forms may coexist for periods of time and that some communities of people may preserve and continue using older forms, while others make use of new forms.

Ronald Hendel responds:

Mr. Wildish makes some valid points about methodological issues. Even if the biblical texts written in what we call Classical Biblical Hebrew most closely resemble inscriptional Hebrew of the First Temple period, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they must have been written in this period. It is in theory possible that later writers could have written good Classical Hebrew. But his examples of late Babylonian and medieval Latin are instructive. A scholar who is well versed in Babylonian or Latin grammar can tell the difference quite easily between these “late” archaizing dialects and the classical language. The same applies in the case of Hebrew. The books that were clearly written in the Second Temple period belong to what we call Late Biblical Hebrew, which is in some respects an archaizing dialect, imitating Classical Hebrew. But it is hard to imitate a classical language, and grammatical and lexical differences abound in these texts, clearly indicating their later date of composition.

Another factor is the representation of foreign words. Such words (mostly in personal names or place names) in the classical language can sometimes be charted against sound changes in the foreign source language. This also helps to date the linguistic stratum of the texts, and confirms the general era of Classical Biblical Hebrew in the First Temple period. These are obscure details that would have been far beyond the knowledge of later archaizing scribes.

When one compares Samuel-Kings with Chronicles, for example, it is manifestly clear that they represent different strata of Hebrew linguistic history, one from the First Temple period and the other from the Second. A gem of a book by Arno Kropat (written in German in 1909) details the manifold differences. No doubt different dialects existed side by side (see the “shibboleth” story in Judges 12), but the difference between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew is clearly chronological. For those interested in this subject, I strongly recommend Angel Saenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

The linguistic issue is the Achilles’ heel of the minimalists. They have not and, I submit, cannot respond to it in detail, because it shows that their theory simply doesn’t hold water.

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Back to the Basics

One can analyze bullae, potsherds and indecipherable cuneiform, read a multitude of ancient languages, as well as trace the etymology of a word back to God Himself, yet be completely dumbfounded by the most basic principles of Scripture. The whole argument for and against homosexuality can be easily answered by the basic principles given to us within Scripture. (See Susan Ackerman’s column, “When the Bible Enters the Fray,” BR 16:05, and the subsequent letters in the February and June 2001 issues, see Readers Reply, BR 17:01 and Readers Reply, BR 17:03.) It is not a matter of finding a “loophole” by extraneous searches for particulars and omissions. It is understanding the principle of the matter and then applying this to our lives.

In the listings of prohibitions found within Scripture, we are not told every instance or aspect of prohibition, because we are expected to be able to reason for ourselves. There is simply not enough ink and paper in the world to list all of the potential wickednesses of man’s imagination. Furthermore, these wicked deeds are unpredictable, even to God—“They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin” (Jeremiah 32:35).

The basic biblical principle regarding sexual orientation is that homosexual relations do not fulfill God’s plan for mankind, which involves heterosexual intimacy. God’s character is revealed through this intimate relationship. In man he is revealed to woman; in woman he is revealed to man. In homosexual relationships, we have a distorted understanding of the God of the Bible.

The same God who labeled homosexual activity a violation of his plan for mankind, also labeled pride, envy, lust and greed equally repulsive. It’s not an issue of “legalism vs. love” as one earlier letter writer termed it. We all struggle with different inclinations toward sin that we are comfortable with. This does not mean because we are inclined toward bitterness, hatred or deception that we change our scriptural interpretation to comfort ourselves in our own deception. The Bible was written in order that we might be “made in the image of God,” not that we would make Him into our own, fallen image.

Jots & Tittles

Vindicated Syndicate

I must speak up in defense of Johnny Hart’s “B.C.” comic strip on Jesus’ last words, reprinted in the June 2001 BR (Jots & Tittles, BR 17:03). Fortunately, I read the strip before I read the accompanying article. I am Jewish, I have written a lot about Jesus the Jew and I have been very critical of scholars who ignore Jesus’ Jewishness and who promote a Jesus who supersedes Judaism.

My impression is that Hart was making a point about how Jewish Jesus was. His cryptic use of “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) to end the strip could mean that Jesus was saying, “Do not forget how Jewish I was.” When you began the article by saying Hart’s work had created controversy, I assumed Christians were complaining about this reminder. Hart’s intention perhaps was to prod Christians with a little historical lesson.

I was quite surprised to learn that the criticism was coming from Jewish leaders. I think their interpretation is way off. Technically, I can see why they read it the way they do, as Christianity superseding Judaism, since the strip begins with a menorah and ends with the cross. But even now I see it very differently. Perhaps it is because the Jewish menorah appears on seven, very bright panels. The overwhelming emotional impression of the strip is one of Jewishness. Only the last panel, or last two, shows the cross, and it’s dark. If the strip says anything, it is that Jesus was a Jew and then, mysteriously, a new religion was born. There is no sense of Christian triumph here. The cross actually appears smaller than the menorah. Remember: It’s a comic strip, not a theological or historical treatise.

No Mistake

In his “Bible in the News” column (Jots & Tittles, BR 17:03), Leonard Greenspoon claims that an estate planner quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune “deliberately misquoted Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7): ‘Give and it will be given to you.’” It is possible he deliberately misquoted Jesus, but it seems feasible that the estate planner was accurately quoting the first part of Luke 6:38, where those words appear.

Neat Stuff
All I have to say is keep up the good work. I learn a lot of great stuff from this magazine. Thanks.