Date of Genesis - Gary Rendsburg

Gary Rendsburg reconstructs Israelite history without the Old Testament from inscriptions. An early Egyptian reference to Israel in the 2nd millennium BCE, to various kings and cities, to the phrase 'house of David' as presumed ancestor/king, to the Assyrian and Babylonian campaigns which led to displacement and exiles. He concludes therefore that OT historical narratives are rooted in real events. He divides scholars between those that assume the basic historical truth of the story (maximalists) and those who treat most elements as fiction (minimalists), identifying himself as a maximalist.

His 1986 book on Genesis dates the final version (redaction, or editing) to the period of David and Solomon. He accumulates details as being appropriate for this time - details of early Philistines, placenames and genealogies. There remains however (even if we accept this view) the issue of whether a traditional text was re-edited by post-exilic collectors (6th to 5th century) who were piecing together the old in order to recreate a new religious order. Our options are that the post-exilic scribes sumply collected, or put old traditions in a new redactionary framework, or made most of the material up as cultural fictions to validate their new order.

Rendsberg finds traces of old material. In particular, he posits an Israelite (northern) dialect with distinct vocabulary and grammar. If that can be confirmed, that is an interesting development. But I have argued elsewhere that a key term in this narrative-as-family-tree, the concubine has to be taken into account. The word for concubine, pilegesh, is a greek loan word. The feminine of pallax, 'young man' is pallakis, 'young woman' or 'concubine'.  Though it now is defined as a secondary wife, the word pallakis starts out as 'a man and his girl', as we would say. The problem is that a Greek loan word assumes a period of Greek influence. Whilst we know that this began in earnest in the 4th century BCE around the time of Alexander the Great, pushing it back into the 12th century BCE or earlier is nonsensical. There were, it is true, some small Greek enclaves further north on the Levant coast, and Greek ships undoubtedly landed in Philistine sea ports in Palestine, but this is not enough to influence family customs in the interior. The slave wife whom Rachel gave to Jacob (whose children were regarded as legitimate) is named as a concubine after her mistress Rachel's death. Reuben had sex with her, which seems to have been an attempted coup d'etat which went down badly. This is from the layer that called Jacob 'Israel', which I take to be a late validation of Israelite claims. Abraham also had concubines (Gen 25) who were paid off and sent away so that their children would not inherit. Although this may not seem significant, it illustrates that something is happening in the editorial shaping of this late redaction. Material such as that contained in Genesis was represented on various occasions: whilst there may  well be early material, we also have to take account of later manipulation.

The Bible, a Troubling Text

SUGIRTHARAJAH, R.S., Troublesome Texts: The Bible in Colonial and Contemporary Culture (Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008, pp.vii + 161. £35.00/$70.00/€47.50. ISBN 978-1-906055-38-7; ISSN 1747-9650.

The Bible IS a troublesome text. Its interpretation has been over the centuries the cause of major conflict. It has been used to promote slavery and patriarchalism. It has been the cutural symbol of empire, the basis of education systems in non-Christian developing regions. From it identity is claimed, and land disputes are fomented. Missionaries, by translating God as Ancestor, replaced tribal histories with an over-arching Biblicist ‘history’ in which Adam and Abraham are common ancestors, so biblical violence becomes an acceptable political model, and patriarchy-with-polygamy a legitimate social means of repressing women.

    This thought-provoking collection of conference papers asks uncomfortable questions about Biblical hermeneutics. In ‘Gautama and the Galilean’, Sugirtharajah uses his Sri Lankan background to explore how and why Victorian theologians constructed lives of Buddha and Jesus, revealing rampant racism. There is however another side to this: enough ‘Orientalists’ took the task seriously enough to contribute to the preservation of texts which has turned Buddhism from a local cult to a respected global world religion.
Buddhism was encountered as an indigenous religion separately in Nepal and in Sri Lanka, and gradually the similarities and differences between the two observed and the conclusion reached that these were two traditions of a single religion, which came to be named Hinayana (lesser vehicle) and Mahayana (greater vehicle). Hinayana (also referred to as Theravada) was regarded as purer than Mahayana, which was considered syncretistic with local pagan deities and spirits. Today, Mahayana belief and ritual would be treated philosophically and symbolically. The Dalai Lama (leader of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism) is globally known and respected for his spiritual wisdom. Sugirtharajah notes that the reason for the study of Buddhism was to discredit it, and finds many quotations to support this. There is another side to the story and academic study of Pali texts began, albeit slowly. Lives of Jesus have abounded over the past two centuries, are mostly devotional in intent (some thrive on being controversial), and tell us more about the writer than about the historical Jesus. My view is that even the canonical gospels are fictional hagiography which owe more to the need to demonstrate fulfilment of scripture than to historical recollections. Unfortunately, fewer sayings of Jesus have survived than words of the Buddha.
Chapter 2 is on ‘Subjecting the Johannine Letters to Postcolonial Criticism’, concluding that the letters have a dogmatic, imperialistic tone demanding compliance, but that the new message being promulgated owes some informal debt to Buddhism. To ‘walk in the truth’ and ‘walk in love’ is likened to the Buddhism requirement to ‘walk by dhamma’, a praxis-centred practical religion by which ‘everyone who does justice is born again’ and ‘everyone who loves is born of God’ (3 Jn 4, 2 Jn 4-6, I Jn 2.29, 1 Jn 4.7). For the writer, actions not words indicate a person’s faith, salvation by works contrasting with Paul’s salvation by faith and God’s grace. Unfortunately, this worthy ideal is presented as a demand to be obeyed and not an aspiration to be taken to heart. Chapter 3 focuses on the Sermon on the Mount read in India as a basis for ethical spirituality, for example by Gandhi and Roy. He notes that after independence it was replaced by Leviticus 19-26, a ‘roadmap’ for state building, John’s Gospel (mystical), liberation theology and identity hermeneutics. Chapter 4 looks toward next steps: these are for interpreters to explore power-knowledge relevantly. It challenges the dominant hermeneutic by demanding emphases are shifted and silences are vocalised. Chapter 5 explores ideas of God after the tsunami of boxing day 2004, where images of all-powerful and compassionate deity is exploded. Chapter 6 focuses on the link between Bible interpretation and conflict, even violent conflict. Those who study and interpret the Bible from outside the powered elite risk scorn and gagging, even lynching. For Sri Lanka, this is a call for open and honest multi-faith dialogue. Chapter 7 looks at the Bible industry as a form of cultural imperialism, for repression towards a dominant view instead of being a sea of challenging and exploratory stories. Chapter 8, ‘Future Imperfect” calls for attitudes of exclusivity towards the Bible as word of God is replaced by a recognition that the Bible itself was (and is) a site of ideological battle, and has to sit beside the scriptures of other faiths as together charting the spiritual questings of humankind. Chapter 9 ends the compilation autobiographically of the writer’s journey and motivation, calling for creative and imaginative scholarship.

Sugirtharajah - Letters of John.

Chapter 2 of Troublesome Texts is on ‘Subjecting the Johannine Letters to Postcolonial Criticism’, concluding that the letters have a dogmatic, imperialistic tone demanding compliance, but that the new message being promulgated owes some informal debt to Buddhism. To ‘walk in the truth’ and ‘walk in love’ is likened to the Buddhism requirement to ‘walk by dhamma’, a praxis-centred practical religion by which ‘everyone who does justice is born again’ and ‘everyone who loves is born of God’ (3 Jn 4, 2 Jn 4-6, I Jn 2.29, 1 Jn 4.7). For the writer, actions not words indicate a person’s faith, salvation by works contrasting with Paul’s salvation by faith and God’s grace. Unfortunately, this worthy ideal is presented as a demand to be obeyed and not an aspiration to be taken to heart.
[Chapter 3, coming soon, is on the Sermon on the Mount and the struggle for independence in India].

Troublesome Colonial Texts

A brief review of the following will appear in The Society for Old Testament Booklist for 2011 and I offer here an extended version:
Sugirtharajah, R.S.,Troublesome Texts: The Bible in Colonial and Contemporary Culture (Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008. £35.00/$70.00.
This thought-provoking collection of essays asks uncomfortable questions about Biblical hermeneutics. In ‘Gautama and the Galilean’ (chapter 1), Sugirtharajah uses his Sri Lankan background to explore how and why Victorian theologians constructed lives of Buddha and Jesus, revealing rampant racism. There is however another side to this: enough ‘Orientalists’ took the task seriously enough to contribute to the preservation of texts which has turned Buddhism from a local cult to a respected global world religion.

Buddhism was encountered as an indigenous religion separately in Nepal and in Sri Lanka, and gradually the similarities and differences between the two observed and the conclusion reached that these were two traditions of a single religion, which came to be named Hinayana (lesser vehicle) and Mahayana (greater vehicle). Hinayana (also referred to as Theravada) was regarded as purer than Mahayana, which was considered syncretistic with local pagan deities and spirits. Today, Mahayana belief and ritual would be treated philosophically and symbolically. The Dalai Lama (leader of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism) is globally known and respected for his spiritual wisdom. Sugirtharajah notes that the reason for the study of Buddhism was to discredit it, and finds many quotations to support this. There is another side to the story and academic study of Pali texts began, albeit slowly. Lives of Jesus have abounded over the past two centuries, are mostly devotional in intent (some thrive on being controversial), and tell us more about the writer than about the historical Jesus. My view is that even the canonical gospels are fictional hagiography which owe more to the need to demonstrate fulfilment of scripture than to historical recollections. Unfortunately, fewer sayings of Jesus have survived than words of the Buddha. Using colonial/postcolonial analysis, Sugirtharajah points to cultural and religious imperialism by Christians, designed to promote Christianity as the ideology of the empire, the acceptance of which removes indigenous peoples from being regarded as heathern savages.
I have written further about missionary activity in http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/787. 
[critique of chapter 2 on the letters of 'John' to follow]

The Torah (Pentateuch) a political fiction?

David Sperling writes (1998) about the nature and purpose of "the original Torah", focusing on "the political intent of the Bible's writers". He takes further the main point I made in Creating the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible in 1989 and also the work of Niels Peter Lemche, Ancient Israel: A New History of Isralelite Society in 1988. We all emphasise that Old Testament readers should stick to the evidence. The main evidence is simply that someone wrote the books, and this was clearly later than the last things they describe. Whether these books were fact or fiction we have to decide on the basis of other evidence, for example from archaeology.

Since there is no convincing archeological or documentary evidence for the existence of characters such as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the eponymous ancesters of Israel, we all insist that they did not exist as historical characters.This is now the trend in non-conservative Old Testament studies, where analysis and theology do not get mixed up.

So, the Torah had a writer, whose date has to be determined. The reasons across Old Testament scholarship for this date being given as exilic or post-exilic are many and various: datable loan words, the relationship of Deuteronomy to King Josiah, and the editorial hand of the Priestly Writer (P) are all part of this evidence. Especially the archaeological record does not support the details given in the stories. So Sperling starts his discussion with a sixth or fifth century BCE writer, whose purposes have to be ascertained from the text.

He uses the concept of allegory. The Torah stories are seen as reflecting some later event of significance to the writer. Slavery in Egypt is an allegory for the people in Canaan/Palestine being in servitude to Egypt, their overlord, as the archaeological record shows. The covenant is a treaty of alliance, common in the ancient near east: for supporters of Yahweh, it was a means of political control. The Abraham cycle was composed to legitimate King David, the Jacob cycle to legitimate Joroboam and the northern kingdom, 'Israel'. The Aaron traditions legitimated northern temples and festivals (and later Judaean editors damned him for this). Moses, like Saul, was responsible for Yahweh becoming Israel's official God, so the Moses cycle needs to be read also as a legitimation myth. These comments of summary cannot do justice to the detail of the argument, which I take as persuasive. Indeed it has parallels in some current work I am completing and will be discussed in this blog later. That Bible texts are the result of political spin should not surprise us, given the nature of our own political mythologies.















(UK readers looking for these books had best use www.amazon.co.uk).

Bible narrative, Mark's Gospel - Frank Kermode

Just finished reading Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures for 1977-8, published by Harvard University Press. Kermode is writing as an expert in literature and an outsider in theology. His task is to read the Gospels, and Mark in particular, as literature, freeing our minds from the baggage that the word 'scripture' implies.It is most exciting, although it could be upsetting for an incurious believer.

Mark is important to study because it is commonly agreed to be the first Gospel to be written, and used as a source by Matthew and Luke. (The author names are traditional but we need to be cautious about their accuracy). Kermode is as interested in what Matthew and Luke do with Mark's text, as in the intention of Mark itself. He distances himself from naive assumptions that the authors reproduced what actually happened (no historian does that). By 65CE, Mark's message tells us that no one remained as an authentic eye witness of events - indeed, at the point of the crucifixion three decades earlier, there were no witnesses. People denied knowledge of Jesus, kept his mysteries secret, and bluntly kept their heads down. Whatever is said to have happened later is a fiction. Before readers get agitated, most of this comes from Mark himself. Jesus is presented as Son of God (verse 1). He talks in parables/riddles/mysteries to hide the nature of what he is saying (hence the secrecy in the title). He gets annoyed when his disciples do not understand. When Peter identifies him with the messiah, he commands silence (he does not say whether he agrees or not, but he does argue on exegetical grounds that the Messiah could not be the son of David). He offers a bleak future (Mark 13) and in the trial sequence reports that Peter denies him, a young man runs away, and generally everyone goes to ground. A Roman centurion honours him: Surely this man is a son of God but his own followers do not. He is laid in a tomb by a stranger, Joseph of Arimathea (in dexplicit contrast to John the Baptist who was buried by his disciples) and the women who come to anoint the body (already day 3) are met by a young man (the same one who ran away?) but contrary to their instuctions, tell no one "for they were afraid". So the book ends, Mark 16:8. So Jesus's death was met with denial, fear and silence, although demons recognised him for what he was. Full stop. End of story. Mark here finishes. Forget lost endings, and ignore the babblings of the current additional ending. They were afraid and silent. The story ends. This story is uncomfortable. Matthew, nor Luke, liked it and changed it. At least one alternative version of Mark existed which softened it. A church could not be founded from where Mark leaves the story.

Mark's was however a foundational story. Whatever we think of the later Gospels, and how they changed the story, we cannot forget Mark. They added birth narratives, genealogies, teaching such as the sermon on the mount, and a resurrection sequence, even an ascension.Above all they made Jesus fulfil scripture - the first clue, says Kermode, to spotting a made up story. Was Mark telling the truth? Of course not, he was writing a meaningful story emphasising things he felt strongly about. He emphasises cleanness and uncleanness, the demoniac living among the dead, the woman with the menstrual hemorrhage, Jairus's dead daughter, the death pollution gone from the tomb. Jesus represented cleanness, and pulled the world towards it.

So far we have simply read and understood the text of Mark as plainly written. Why Mark wrote the book is harder to interpret. This was a misunderstood and bad tempered Jesus. "Get thee behind me, Satan", he said to Peter. He could undertake acts of power, but faced with unbelief, "he could do no miracles (acts of power, dunameis) there. "Could not". Too much for Matthew and Luke. Acts of power, miracles, were dependent on belief. Demons recognized him, so perhaps he was a demon too? The synagogue rejected him because of his reformist tendencies - if resurrecting (second) Isaiah can be said to be reformist. He closed the book, before getting to the reference to the day of judgement. That is future. The now is about the blind, lame and captive. Real life, equity, justice and openness.

How did Mark construct his text? Kermode speaks of the powerful use of testimonium, Old Testament texts interpreted as Messianic. It seems to me that the over-riding text for Mark was Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, generally described as the Suffering Servant passage. This contrasts the servant as an eventual exalted figure, who has reached that point by suffering. In (Second) Isaiah it may be a personification of the Jewish nation. In Mark, the story opens with a Servant quotation referring to John the Baptist, a messenger preparing the way. The Servant is despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and grief whom people hid their faces from. In the end, Jesus' followers leave him, run away, deny him, and let a stranger bury his body. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, unarguing. He took upon himself the sins of the world to heal others. He died with the wicked, hence the cross as a criminal's death; but also with the rich (in Isaiah this is the parallelism of equivalents), so Jesus had a rich man's tomb. He will have no descendants, yet world powers will take him seriously. In Mark, Jesus predicted his death immediately Peter identified him as the Messiah. He taught that the Messiah could not be the son of David, the popular warrior figure (Mark 12:35-37). People will see without being told, understand without hearing: in Mark, being told in parables prevented understanding; being told was not the answer. So the whole structure of the book revolves around the Suffering Servant. There are other proof texts too, the humble Son of Man from Ezekiel (and maybe Daniel), the cry from the cross quoting Psalm 22, "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" - for "It was Yahweh's will to crush him" (Isaiah 53.10). My view, in line with Kermode's general thesis that the Gospels were fictions, is that these Old Testament texts form the skeleton around which Mark's story was generated. Real information about the Jesus of history was sketchy, episodic because it was preserved in worship, and of uncertain historical authenticity. Some of the sketches about healings and teachings slotted into Mark's wider framework, their origins now uncertain. But the overall meaning given to Jesus' life and death is Mark's own creation. In it, Jesus keeps his own estimate of his mission secret, requiring silence and secrecy from his followers. This at a stroke undermines church claims attributed to Jesus himself. He is what he does - whoever has eyes to see let him see; "For what they are not told they shall see; and what they have not heard they will understand" (Isaiah 52:15). In Mark's Gospel, the disciples unfortunately never did understand.

Slave and captive wives

There is legislation about slave wives in Exodus 21:7-11. It is confused, because one word could either be l'o, 'not' (Masoretic Text [MT] and NEB) or lo, 'to him' (Qere reading and NIV). A man has sold his daughter as an amah, slave woman. If he (the owner) has not 'selected her', he has treated her unfairly and she can be redeemed. This suggests that the purpose of the arrangement was marriage. A husband would normally pay a bride-price (mohar) to the father, so one wonders how this amah arrangement differed from regular marriage, since money still changed hands. On the alternative reading, he had selected her for himself (i.e. taken her sexually), and then she displeased him. If she is married [the word used is 'designated'] to a son, she is treated as a daughter (i.e. as an equal). She cannot be sold to a foreigner. If he marries another woman, he must continue to provide her with food, shelter and (probably) oil. Although this has been taken as an example of sexual freedom and polygyny, this is not inevitable. The rights of this woman as wife are protected. According to the MT, he has not consummated the union sexually and has been unfair.

Marriage to a captured woman is dealt with humanely in Deuteronomy 21:10-14. She is allowed time to mourn. The marriage is given dignity, and rights are given in case of dismissal (sending away). She cannot be sold as a slave because of the sexual relationship which existed.