A Messy Bible and the Art of Comments
Dinah is raped and Jacob's sons exterminate the people of Shechem. Kanaanites are being slaughtered because God commanded it. Families of Israel's enemies are being killed for the sins of their fathers. daniels accusers were thrown into the pit with the lions, as well as their wives and children for their crime against Daniel. The God of the (hebrew) Bible is vindictive and cruel.
That is a powerful attack on the integrity on the Bible. So much so, that there is hardly a reason left to read and study it. Something that most people don't do anyway. Not anymore. The bible thumpers read their New Testament or interpret the Old testament allegorically or as preparation of the New Testament of love and forgiveness. In all these cases - whether you turn to atheism, remain a Jew and turn to the Talmud or just live according to ancient tradition, become a Baptist or evangelical, the Old Testament is lost. isolated as a holy relic or critically judged as a Bronze Age expression of cruelty. Apart from some stories in Genesis, the message of the Hebrew Bible is lost.
There maybe a Jewish way out. According to David Plotz one needs to understand that the Bible is a book to be argued with. It wants to evoke commentary and argument. This jewish dialogue over the centuries is far more important than the Book itself. Bible commentary and Talmud are products of a living dialogue, Whereas the Bible is in most of its parts a weird book that we need to go beyond. Plotz in writing the book simply called The Good Book, wanted to take a look at the Bible as someone who had no commentary, no teachers, just as someone who wanted to read a book without any expectations. This fresh look at the Bible was then blogged and ultimately produced this book.
One of the comments at the Fora.TV channel neatly summarized the point:
I would say that the old testament writings were compiled and perpetuated by an extreme authoritarian patriarchal elite of hebrew society. This served to consolidate power and frighten a weak and lazy population into some sort of social cohesion. The success of their society we see today, for those of us who are the result of it. An illiterate inbred tribe who rose to greatness and influenced the world, it is a pretty unusual story in the history of anthropology.
"The Bible" continues to be a glimpse into the relationship of a weak childish majority led by a strong mature minority. Rebelling against that authority has been a Jewish pastime for millenia, resulting in a constant supply of genetic and philosophical apostasy. We, the Jews, are the "Sons of Seth", and The Bible has been the ox-goad that inspires us to be the contrarians we are.
You are getting the drift.
Now I fully agree that the Bible is a book to be argued with. Argument and conversation is an intrinsic part of the way the Bible has functioned over the centuries. Not just in Jewish culture. But there is a problem here.
When confronted with a religious tradition in a society, there are basically two ways to deal with its authority. Against the simple acceptance and enforcement of that tradition one can choose the 'reflected life.' In stead of using the argument of authority, we make an appeal to reason and that means ultimately, consent. That is the path of Socratic philosophy, epitomized - though it would have surprised Socrates himself I'm sure - in the Politeia by Plato. That huge dialog is basically a conversation about Justice, a philosophical analysis of the tradition of social ethics and why a more rational approach is superior. Tradition is set aside, we move beyond it, and find a new source of authority. So we do what someone remarked during the David Plotz lecture: move beyond it, give it up.
Plato tried to enforce this rational solution in Syracuse, but it wouldn't work. The people resisted it, the King was not as persistent as he should have been, and there was a quarrel about the way to implement Plato's wonderful political solutions. The point of this being, that Plato represented the power and the majority that were supposed to deliver the groundwork of his political edifice. Still it didn't work.
Next to that is a different kind of solution that Plato never had to envision. What if you're a minority in a large society that has a totally different mindset and culture than your own? Plato's solution of the 'reflected life' wouldn't work here to maintain identity and guarantee survival. Israel would have been totally assimilated within Babylonian culture if it had tried to do so - it it ever had been a real possibility of course.
But what if you maintain the old traditions by writing them down, fixing in a way the religious culture that you have, but immediately set up a culture of debate, a 'legal' culture, which is directed towards the practical demands of every day life?
The Biblical texts are there, because there was a context in which they were edited and re-written, that was from the start contradictory to the original context of the stories. Setting them in the new context of the canon, making them part of a literature that is set up like a three story house: Torah - ground-floor, prophets - first floor, and then the Writings, second floor. All of that means that the moment and occasion of their publication lies in the communal conversation that existed between laymen, Priests and Levites, who ached for a return to the home land they had lost qwhen jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. They never functioned within the life of the people apart from the process of commentary. Maybe there were parts of Leviticus active for the priests when there was a Temple in Jerusalem. Maybe there were the stories of Genesis as retold by the Scribes. Only late in history we find reference to the book of Deuteronomy. Compared to the centuries in which the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings were part of a commentating, criticizing and arguing culture, the life span of the 'original' bible was very short indeed.
So what is my point?
That the story if Dinah is about justice that is raped. That the conduct of the sons of Jacob is depicted as despicable, because Israel - the later name of Jacob - is supposed to act differently from other nations. Because only from the whole context of the Bible and the motives and context of its insertion into the national culture, can it be read properly. If you decide to forget all of that, you wind up indeed with a messy text - the text of a book that never functioned in the ay we are reading it. Fragments of a culture that may have given rise to the text, but did not give rise to the book. Messy text indeed, but that is not valid for the book and its original community of readers. In fact, it is an invitation for a social self-reflecting community, that cannot simply set its traditions aside, but is empowered through commentary to make the changes in the law that really count for daily life.
