How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  When, where, and under what circumstances they lived all affected how the biblical writers perceived God, their world, and their place in it. The same holds for us. The moments of time, place, and location we occupy cannot help but play a major role in shaping how we understand God and the life of faith.

  And, as I’ve been saying, that reshaping is an act of wisdom. We have to work it through and figure it out.

  In that sense, one can speak of the Bible as “timeless”—not because its commands and teachings remain fixed and impervious to change, but because they are clearly not. Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

  The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, “Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, directed by God in what to write, and so not simply ordinary human writers.” I get the point. To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it works out in detail have proved to be quite tough nuts to crack.

  Answers abound (and conflict) and no one has cracked the code, including me. But any explanation of what it means for God to inspire human beings to write things down would need to account for the diverse (not to mention ancient and ambiguous) Bible we have before us. Any explanation that needs to minimize, cover up, or push these self-evident biblical characteristics aside isn’t really an explanation; it’s propaganda.

  Okay, I’m getting a little negative about this. Sorry. It’s just that there was a time when I was also very keen to work out some abstract theory about God’s role in producing the Bible, but that task no longer interests me. I’ve learned—by reading the Bible again and again—to accept and be grateful for this messy Bible we have, which drives us, as I’ve been saying, away from thinking of it as a stagnant pond of rules and regulations and toward thinking of it as a flowing stream that invites us to step in and be refreshed anew every day in following Jesus here and now.

  Biblical writers living in different times and places who wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances have modeled for us the centrality of wisdom for the life of faith. To rethink the past in light of the present moment, as the ancient writers did, is—again—not an act of faithlessness, but the very thing faith demands. To do what is necessary to bring the past to meet the present is the highest sign of respect. A wooden, inflexible view of the Bible doesn’t allow that.

  Some of us might understandably bristle in the quiet of our hearts at such an idea. And that’s okay. Take your time. My aim here is not to force anyone to stop bristling, but to point out that the biblical writers didn’t bristle. For them, a life of faith and of rethinking the content of that faith weren’t at odds with one another, but worked off of each other. The ancient Jews understood full well that an authoritative tradition cannot simply stay in the past and still have its say. It must be brought into the present to speak to the present.

  The ancient Jewish scribes living in the centuries after the return from exile (after 539 BCE) were responsible for collecting these ancient traditions into one book (the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament). They clearly valued this centuries-long process of bringing the past and present into conversation. They intentionally included all this diversity in their editing work rather than snuffing it out.

  They were wise. They already knew that honoring this “trajectory of change” was the only way to stay connected to the past as they lived in their present and hoped for their future.

  The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now. We respect the Bible best when we take that process seriously enough to own it for ourselves—but that is getting ahead of things a bit.

  First, let’s take a deeper look—though still only a glimpse—at how daringly some biblical writers adapted the past to let God speak in the present. And to do that, we need to loop back to Deuteronomy for a moment.

  This Part Is So Exciting!

  According to the biblical timeline, Deuteronomy and Exodus are separated by forty years of wilderness wandering, but the actual distance between them is much greater. And to see that we need to dip one or two toes into the exciting, star-studded, never boring, sexy, and lucrative world of biblical scholarship.

  For various reasons, biblical scholars for over two hundred years have argued—persuasively—that Deuteronomy was written much more than forty years after Moses’s time (generally understood to be about 1300 BCE). Actually, that isn’t just a modern theory, but goes back to the early centuries of Christianity, at least as far back (from what I can tell) as the church father Jerome, who lived around the year 400 CE. He mused that someone long after Moses, probably Ezra—who lived in the fifth century BCE—had possibly touched up Deuteronomy.

  Jerome’s observation is probably something of a passing comment, a side hunch, to explain some peculiarities of Deuteronomy. But fast-forward a few centuries, and we find modern scholars working through Deuteronomy systematically and proposing more detailed arguments for how and when Deuteronomy came to be. Some of those arguments can get fairly nuanced, and for our purposes here we can safely sidestep all of that.* We just need to see that the main reasons for dating Deuteronomy much later than Moses’s time come from Deuteronomy itself.

  For example, Deuteronomy begins, These are the words Moses spoke to all Israel beyond [on the other side of] the Jordan. Notice that the writer here is talking about Moses, and so the writer isn’t Moses himself. Also, Moses is not said to do any writing; he speaks, but he does not write. Although a historical Moses’s words may be the basis for the book (though that is far from certain), the writer of Deuteronomy clearly created the book itself.

  Also, Deuteronomy tells us that Moses died in the land of Moab (34:5) and never crossed the Jordan River to enter Canaan with the rest of the Israelites—it’s sort of a big deal that Moses of all people never entered the promised land. So, since the writer refers to the words Moses spoke “on the other side of the Jordan,” we know that means the writer is standing on the side of the Jordan that Moses never set foot on. The writer isn’t Moses.

  Already in the first verse, the anonymous writer isn’t exactly trying to hide the fact that someone after Moses wrote the book. But how long after Moses?

  Assigning dates to books of the Bible is tricky, and the best arguments are also quite nerdy and long (don’t tempt me). Still, Deuteronomy itself gives us some signs that a lot of time had passed from the time of Moses to the author’s day.

  First, after notice of Moses’s death in the last chapter of Deuteronomy, we are told that no one knows his burial place to this day (34:6). Unless the Israelites had immediate mass memory loss, “to this day” surely suggests (as it did to Jerome*) that a lot of time had passed—so much time, in fact, that the grave site of the most important person in the Old Testament is unknown.

  Second, just below in verse 10, we read, Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses. This comment—no one has ever come close to Moses—is actually stripped of its power unless a long time had passed.

  One more example (of many) comes from Deuteronomy 4:37–38. Moses—who never entered the promised land—speaks of the possession of the promised land as a present reality: He [God] brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession, as it is still today.

  As it is
still today indicates that whoever wrote this was living in the land of Canaan long after Moses, after God had driven the Canaanites out of the land and given the land to the Israelites. Most scholars have concluded that this was written after the establishment of the monarchy—no earlier than 1000 BCE, and likely, for other reasons, centuries later.

  We could go on, but I’m not writing a book on Deuteronomy. I only want to point out that Deuteronomy was written from a much later point of view than Exodus. When exactly was Deuteronomy written? The broad consensus is in the latter half of the seventh century BCE based on an earlier (perhaps eighth-century) prototype and then subject to revisions up to and including the time of the Babylonian exile and perhaps later.

  More specifically, scholars generally agree that Deuteronomy reflects a particular moment in Israel’s history—the Assyrian threat to the southern kingdom, Judah, in the seventh century BCE, after the deportation of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. In fact, Deuteronomy as a whole is structured like the treaties the Assyrians made with their conquered foes.

  That’s why the book as a whole is structured like Assyrian treaties, which begin with an overview of the sovereign’s great deeds (Deut. 1–4), followed by the stipulations of the treaty (the laws, Deut. 5–26), and the promise of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience with both parties bearing witness (Deut. 27–28). As we glimpsed earlier, the laws of Deuteronomy in particular differ in places from those in Exodus (and Leviticus), because they are set at a different time and under different circumstances. The command to celebrate the Passover meal in the Temple (not in the people’s houses) reflects the central importance of the Temple as the national political and religious symbol of God’s presence.

  The overall message of Deuteronomy is that the people of Judah are to make an alliance only with their true King, Yahweh, and not with the Assyrians, despite the great threat. In other words, be faithful to Yahweh; trust him alone. And Deuteronomy is the treaty.

  I swear on my heart that this is so interesting, which is why I got into this line of work and needed to take out a home-equity loan to marry off my daughter and reshingle my roof. But I’m not dragging you through all this to justify my sorry existence. The bottom line is that Deuteronomy is a late revision of ancient law. And what is so striking and so vital in all of this is that whoever was responsible for Deuteronomy apparently had no hesitation whatsoever in updating older laws for new situations and still calling it the words that God spoke back then to Moses on Mt. Sinai (or Horeb, as it is called in Deuteronomy), even though they don’t match what God said in Exodus.

  This writer wasn’t an idiot. He knew exactly that his words differed. But by saying that his words were the ones spoken by God to Moses a generation earlier, he was making a huge spiritual claim that we simply cannot miss and should take to heart: The writer of Deuteronomy sees his updating of the older laws as God’s words for his time and place.

  And so God isn’t just a voice out of the past. God still speaks.

  You Were There

  One truly remarkable passage, Deuteronomy 5:1–5, illustrates this point, and I can’t tell you how many times I read this before I finally saw it. Moses relays the Ten Commandments to this new generation of Israelites living forty years after these commandments were first given on Mt. Horeb (Sinai), and he says:

  Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. The LORD spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the fire. (At that time I was standing between the LORD and you to declare to you the words of the LORD; for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain.)

  “With us . . . with us . . . with you . . . to you.” How can that be? The whole point of the forty-year time-out between Sinai and Moab was for the disobedient original generation to die in the wilderness, so God could start over again with a new batch of Israelites. So why is this writer treating this new generation as if they were present forty years ago when by definition they weren’t? This makes no sense.

  Or does it?

  Think of Deuteronomy as a motivational sermon. The second generation was to see itself as the “exodus generation,” to whom God is present and accessible, not a long-gone deity from days of old.

  Deuteronomy reimagines God for a new time and place. Deuteronomy is, in other words, an act of wisdom. For the past to have any spiritual vitality in the present, it had to be reshaped for the present.

  Reimagining God. We’ll be coming back to that idea a lot from here on out.

  This practice of making the exodus present has continued throughout Jewish history in the Passover seder—all Jews everywhere are to see themselves as the exodus generation, saved by God.

  I won’t lie. Deuteronomy is a hard book to wrap our heads around and drives scholars batty. But it is also a beautiful book for showing us how the Bible itself models that God keeps speaking, that God is not just a God of the past, but a God of the present—and we are truly responsible people of faith when we keep our eyes and ears open for how, reading the times as well as the text.

  If such a view of the Bible alarms or concerns us, it may be because we are harboring a false expectation of the Bible as a source of unchanging information, an expectation the Bible seems designed to dismiss.

  Deuteronomy doesn’t line up with Exodus not because the writer was distracted and dropped the ball, but because Deuteronomy is an act of wisdom. The author accepted the sacred responsibility to rethink the past because the changing circumstances demanded it: “What does God require today? How do we embody God here and now, in our time?”

  When we miss how the book of Deuteronomy works, we miss a great opportunity to see how the Bible can and must also work for us—as a sacred text to be taken seriously that also impresses upon us the responsibility of going beyond it. Deuteronomy gives us permission to strike out in bold faith to discern what it means to live God’s way for our time—not by scripting that for us but by modeling for us a process that we now have to own for ourselves. And thus the Bible, rather than closing down the future, sets us on a journey of relying on God’s presence to discover it.

  It is much maligned in some Christian circles to suggest that different times require different responses, since “The Bible is God’s word. People may change, but God never changes.” I understand the logic, but the author of Deuteronomy doesn’t agree.

  Neither does the prophet Ezekiel.

  Peel Me a Sour Grape of Wrath

  Like the author of Deuteronomy, the prophet Ezekiel lived around the time of the Babylonian exile. A prophet’s job in the Bible was to interpret for the people the events of the day from God’s point of view—in Ezekiel’s case, to proclaim that the sack of Jerusalem and the (for all intents and purposes) end of the nation of Judah was no accident of history, but God’s punishment for generations of corruption, namely, worshiping false gods.

  This, of course, was bad news, but that’s what prophets did. They never showed up just to say, “Hey, everyone. I just wanted to stop by and say you’re doing great! Keep it up.” Prophets delivered bad news—also now and then with a ray of hope—but generally speaking they weren’t the perky life-of-the-party kinds of folk you want to hang out with. Definitely not the type of people you ask to come speak at the church fund-raiser.

  Having said that, in Ezekiel 18 we find a turn for the better. It seems that God has heard a complaint and has sent his prophet to clear things up.

  Apparently, a saying was making the rounds at the time: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (18:2). As the following verses make clear, this saying is a complaint: children are exiled in Babylon for what their parents did (worshiping foreign gods). If the parents were the ones who ate the sour grapes, why should the children’s teeth b
e on edge? Think of how your jaw locks when you bite into a lemon. Pretty effective metaphor, if you ask me.

  Anyway, that doesn’t seem fair, does it? No, it doesn’t. Not one bit.

  One can easily imagine that some of the deported Judahites were too young to have actually done anything all that wrong. And, if you think about it for a second, plenty of deportees were probably not themselves serious offenders but just got caught up in the mayhem. Still others were born in captivity and weren’t even alive when the wrongs were done.

  So why are all these people being punished by this prolonged time-out when they themselves didn’t do anything to deserve it? Why are their teeth on edge? And if this is how God operates, maybe God isn’t just at all!

  Ezekiel’s answer—better, God’s answer spoken through Ezekiel—is: As I live, says the LORD God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine; it is only the person who sins that shall die (18:3–4).

  It’s as if God is saying, “Yes, I see your point.”

  Ezekiel goes on for a few paragraphs laying out various scenarios to make it absolutely clear what God means. God will bless a righteous and lawful man, but if his son is wicked, that son will be treated as he deserves; he can’t appeal to his father’s reputation. Likewise, if the son is righteous and does not follow in his father’s wicked footsteps, he will not bear his father’s punishment.

  There’s more to it, but we get the gist: everyone is treated by God as they deserve. The son doesn’t get a free pass because dad was the model of obedience, nor is the father’s punishment for wickedness downloaded onto the son.

  Okay, why bring this up at all? Because the exiled Judahites were struggling with God’s fairness —wasting away in a foreign land, punished by God for something some of them had no part in, wondering whether all this God business was really worth the effort. If God’s justice looks like this, we might be better off giving up on being Israelite and instead joining a softball league or community theater.