How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  And here’s the thing: we see this same dynamic in the Bible.

  Some laws were already outdated for later biblical writers. The Old Testament covers centuries of time, and as times and circumstances changed for the ancient Israelites, older laws sometimes had to be adjusted to speak God’s word to new generations.

  And that’s one big reason why we see our third biblical characteristic, diversity, in the Old Testament laws—later biblical writers made adjustments to earlier laws, and both were kept in the Bible. For example . . .

  Not to Beat a Dead Lamb, but . . .

  Slavery is a horrible blight on the human drama, but in the ancient world—including the world of the Bible—it was as ordinary as today’s blue-collar class. And laws were put in place about how to treat slaves in ways that passed for humane at the time.

  Let me put it right out there that I think owning other human beings is wrong, even though the Bible assumes it’s normal. Human slavery is one topic of the Bible for which wisdom clearly pushes us beyond the words on the page to accept the sacred responsibility to ask ourselves, “But what do I believe God is like? How does God want us to view our fellow humans today?”

  It is clear from the book of Exodus that slaves were treated as property, not as full humans. The famous eye for eye, tooth for tooth law (Exod. 21:23–25) guarantees that justice will be fair in the event of physical injury, but not for slaves. If a slaveowner knocks out a slave’s eye, he needs only to let the slave go, not lose an eye himself—the repercussions are merely economic.

  A male Hebrew slave, however, has the option of going free after six years of service (along with his family, as long as he came in with one). No such choice is given to a female slave. Freedom can only be granted if she displeases her master (an ambiguous and unregulated idea) or if she is not properly provided for by her master, in which case she’d have to be bought back by her father. You can read all about this in Exodus 21:1–11.

  The book of Deuteronomy, however, has a different take. Now both male and female Hebrew slaves may choose freedom after six years of service. Further, they are not to leave empty-handed. The slaveholder is instructed: Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the LORD your God has blessed you (15:14).

  This law is much nicer—let’s call it more humane—and the motivation given for such treatment is Israel’s own experience of being mistreated as slaves in Egypt (15:15). Sure, six years is still a long time, but that might have been the only way for some to get out of debt and survive. It’s not a perfect system, and I’m happy to say that human civilization has come a long way. My point here, however, is that these two slave laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy don’t match up, even though they are both said to come from the same divine source: God revealing his will to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

  Let that sink in.

  The book of Leviticus adds a third voice (25:39–47): no Hebrew is a slave, but a hired hand. In the “year of Jubilee” they all go free, no questions asked, because all Israelites are technically slaves of God, who brought them out of Egypt to serve him. Foreign slaves don’t get this kind of treatment; they are still property.

  Another example of diverse laws concerns the Passover meal, which commemorates Israel’s exodus from Egyptian slavery. According to the book of Exodus, the meal is to be commemorated in the people’s houses (12:3–4, 7, 19, 22) and consist of, among other things, a lamb roasted over fire—and most definitely not eaten raw or boiled (12:8–9). And this command is a perpetual ordinance for when they enter the land of Canaan eventually (12:24).

  In Deuteronomy 16:1–9, however, we see no sign of this perpetual ordinance. Now the meal is to be held in the place that the LORD will choose as a dwelling for his name (verse 2), which is code in Deuteronomy for the Temple in Jerusalem. The family meal has become a national pilgrimage feast.

  Deuteronomy also includes a somewhat stunning detail. Exodus is clear that the lamb is to be roasted over fire and not to be boiled. Deuteronomy, according to English translations, only says that the lamb is to be cooked (verse 7). So what’s stunning about that? That word cook in Deuteronomy is the same Hebrew root word for boil in Exodus. In other words, the very thing not to be done in Exodus is commanded to be done in Deuteronomy without breaking stride.

  Not to get off track, but the choice to translate the same Hebrew root word as boil in Exodus and cook in Deuteronomy is aimed at avoiding this contradiction. This isn’t the only place this sort of thing tends to happen in modern translations of the Bible, though the better ones will provide helpful notes.

  I certainly understand why translators might want to avoid a contradiction like this, but that motivation is coming from a Bible-as-rulebook mentality. Obscuring the tension between these two laws, besides causing readers to feel lied to when they later discover it, only creates obstacles for seeing how the Bible actually works as a wisdom book—where thinking about God and God’s will changes over time.

  And if that’s not enough about food preparation, the book of 2 Chronicles has yet another take on the Passover law, and you have to hand it to this author for being ingenious. Apparently bothered by how God can give two different instructions for the same meal, this author fixes the problem by simply weaving the two together (35:13): the Passover lamb is to be roasted (as in Exodus) and the other holy offerings are to be boiled (as in Deuteronomy). And this writer is quick to point out that this Passover command follows the ancient ordinance. Indeed it does. Both of them.

  The writer of 2 Chronicles, who lived long after the time of either Exodus or Deuteronomy, about two centuries after the return from exile, saw the contradiction and felt compelled to create a hybrid in order to resolve it. Creative thinking about past laws is already happening during the biblical period.

  I don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it. Who knows, perhaps a future episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have Midge’s mom stressed out about how exactly to prepare the Passover lamb. For us, however, we really only need to note that the laws on slavery and the Passover differ, even though they are said to come from God on Mt. Sinai.

  As startled as we might be at that notion, we are gaining here a pivotal insight. We are seeing wisdom at work—rethinking older laws for new situations, bringing together the ancient and revered tradition with the ever-changing, real-life circumstances of God’s people over time.

  In fact—and here’s the interesting part—in order for these laws to remain God’s word, they could not simply be left in the past, as an artifact of a bygone era. These laws had to be revisited and adjusted if future generations will also hear God’s voice.

  And I think I’ve just described the reality of what it means to “live biblically”—the wisdom act of bridging old and new.

  Ambiguity in the Bible isn’t a problem to be solved. It is a self-evident reality. It is also a gift, for this characteristic is precisely what allows the Law to be flexible enough to fit multiple situations over time. And, as I’ve been saying, it’s not just we today who have to get creative; the ancient Jews already set the trajectory. They knowingly produced and embraced this wonderfully diverse and ambiguous collection of texts we call the Bible or Old Testament.

  The Bible’s very design gives us full permission to work out how to bridge the horizons of then and now for ourselves precisely because we too want to hear God’s voice. But how those horizons are bridged is not the kind of information the Bible provides. That is where wisdom comes in.

  Transposing the Past

  The ancient, ambiguous, and diverse nature of the biblical laws are there for all to see, and Judaism and Christianity have had long and lively histories of debate about what to do with them.

  And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing ta
ke-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

  We can’t miss what this is telling us today. Circumstances change, and wisdom is needed to keep the divine–human conversation going. Wisdom always shows up at the door anytime we read the Bible. That is how it has always been—and was meant to be.

  Within the Bible itself we see writers both respecting the past and transposing it to the present—or better, they respect the past by transposing it, thus allowing the past to continue speaking. Transposing the past is an act of wisdom. It is not scripted. It can’t be predicted. It just has to happen as it happens, in real time, by those seeking God’s presence for their time.

  Why would we think now, two to three thousand years later, that we somehow magically escape this biblically grounded process of transposing the past—that we, living in our postindustrialized, microchip-technologized, overstimulated world, would now be able to leave behind the process that even the ancient biblical authors could not: the need to rework the past, employing imagination and ingenuity, guided by the needs of the present?

  Already for biblical writers, keeping the laws meant reengaging them when needed. And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

  The Law cries out for wisdom. As we saw with Proverbs, what it means to keep a law here and now is as much a matter of “reading the moment” as it is reading the words on the page.

  * * *

  You might be asking yourself where I’m going with all this, and I wouldn’t blame you. Yes, I tend to go on and on when I get excited about something, and I am excited about all this. We are seeing here vital clues about how the Bible works, what it is actually designed to do for us, which will open up to us the Bible as a book of wisdom that leads us toward wisdom.

  And as for where all this is going, let’s take a step back from the Law to glimpse other places where the Bible changes over time. And when we do that, we will be able to see even more clearly not simply that this sort of thing happens in the Bible, but why.

  I’ve been circling around that question for a while now, and the answer is so straightforward you might wonder how you ever missed it.

  Chapter 4

  Wisdom = Time + Diversity

  Changing the Script

  My wife, Sue, and I raised three amazing* children, who have somehow managed to become semifunctioning adults with less than oppressive college debt and no significant brushes with the law. In other words, on the Enns family intergenerational scale of emotional health, they are psychological triumphs.

  I wasn’t perfect as a father, as I’m sure you’ve already concluded. I made mistakes, but I also learned a lot as time went by—like the fact that, though there are general guidelines for how to parent well (lock up the cleaning products, don’t give your two-year-old a knife, Smarties are not a food group), no parenting script can take you from birth to adulthood. It usually can’t get you past lunch.

  Or, perhaps better, we write the script as we go, in tune with the moment, and subjecting that script to constant revision simply as a matter of survival and sanity. Parents have to stay flexible and be ready to adjust on the fly, because situations change and children get older.

  I really can’t think of a better analogy for how the Bible works as a wisdom book. And I do mean the Bible as a whole.

  We’ve already seen how Proverbs, with its baked-in antiquity, ambiguity, and diversity, is designed to funnel us toward wisdom, so we can tap into the life force of the cosmos and learn to live wisely amid the unexpected twists and turns of life. We saw that even the Law, which we might think would be God’s heavenly helicopter-parenting book, is nothing of the sort, but likewise pushes us toward wisdom. Otherwise the laws would stay locked in the past.

  A Bible that does things like this is not a disappointing problem that has to be explained away or made excuses for, but something to be embraced with thanksgiving as a divine gift of love, as we, in return, accept our sacred and biblical responsibility to walk daily the path of wisdom rather than looking to hitch an easy ride.

  But now I want to narrow our focus to something we’ve only glimpsed thus far. The Bible’s diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible’s true purpose for us.

  Different voices coexist in the Bible, because the Bible records how writers in their day and in their own way dealt with the antiquity and ambiguity of their sacred tradition.

  It’s not enough for us simply to observe that diversity exists. We need to understand more clearly why. And because this is going to be such a big deal from here on out, let me repeat: The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today.

  We don’t see this type of diversity over time in Proverbs. Yes, Proverbs says different things about wealth, as we’ve seen, but those sayings aren’t different because they were written at different points on Israel’s historical timeline. Some sayings might have had earlier oral precursors, but given their general nature, there is no way to date these sayings; they could just as easily all have been written by one sage on one day.

  The Law, however, is tied to a storyline, and so, as we’ve seen, laws in Deuteronomy and Exodus differ, because they are separated on Israel’s timeline by wandering and soul-searching in the desert for forty years (at least as the story is told—hold that thought). Deuteronomy adapted and adjusted earlier laws for later times and circumstances, like amendments to the Constitution or a Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment allows the banning assault rifles, because the world has changed since the eighteenth century.

  What is true of the Law is also true of the Bible generally. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritten by people of faith, not because they disrespected the past, but because they respected it so much they had to tie it to their present.

  I’ll go even farther. Without such changes over time, Christianity wouldn’t exist. The Christian tradition depends on these changes over time—and some rather big ones at that. But we’ll leave that for later. For now it’s enough to say,

  The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time.

  When I began to see that for myself, a lot of things fell into place about the Bible’s purpose and what it means to read it with the eyes of faith. When we accept the Bible as the moving, changing, adaptive organism it is, we will more readily accept our own sacred responsibility to engage the ancient biblical story with wisdom, to converse with the past rather than mimic it—which is to follow the very pattern laid out in the Bible itself.

  A rulebook view of the Bible misses that dynamic process entirely; indeed, it seems determined to obscure it.

  The Most Important Part of the Book Thus Far

  Thinking of the Bible as shifting and moving may feel spiritually risky, bordering on heretical, but it isn’t. Sermons, Bible study materials, prayer books, and the like adapt the ancient words for modern benefit all the time. Biblical psalms that praise the Lord and then ask God to squash the enemy are often edited for church consumption. Generally speaking, Christians think asking God to kill their enemies is wrong (Jesus said so), so adjustments are made to those parts of the Bible that say exactly that. Laws that assume the legitimacy of slavery or virgins as their fathers’ property are omitted or given a more spiritual spin. The list goes on.

  None of these modern adaptations is “in the Bible,” and yet even the most committed “rulebook Bible” readers out there wind up adapting what the Bibl
e says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today.

  And what is true of us is already true of the biblical writers. Between the earliest writings of the Old Testament (around 1200 BCE) and the latest writings of the New (around 100 CE), about thirteen hundred years passed.* The last biblical writers were as far removed from the first as we today are removed from the invention of gunpowder and the rule of Charlemagne. The idea that every writer over that great span of time was on the same page at every moment in spite of the myriad of complex and changing social and political factors is hard to accept in theory and impossible to accept when we read the Bible and see the diversity for ourselves.

  Adaptation over time is baked thoroughly into the pages of the Bible as a whole and as such demonstrates that the Bible is a book of wisdom, demanding to be adapted again and again by people of faith living in vastly distant cultures and eras—including our own, removed by as much as two millennia from the time of its completion.

  And so, to repeat an earlier point, if the ancient biblical writers themselves needed to make adjustments about how they were hearing God speaking to them, whatever would make us think that we can escape that same process? Indeed, if we, like the biblical writers, want to stay connected to that past, why would we even want to try to escape?