How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Religious traditions adapt too—for survival. That could mean suburban churches introducing clowns and coffee bars in the foyer to attract more people to cover the budget. Or it can mean another type of survival—a more serious one—that characterizes both Judaism and Christianity since . . . well . . . forever: the need to pass on the religious tradition from generation to generation.

  That has always involved some sort of adaptation—some adjustments or changes, something new that was not done or thought of before.

  And so we are back to our paradox: to maintain any tradition, you need to hold on to some aspects of the past while at the same time thinking creatively about how the past and the present can meet—reimagining the faith, as I’ve been putting it. The perennial wisdom question is, “What remains and what gets transformed?”

  At what point have we left the tradition by adjusting it to the present, and at what point have we killed the tradition by refusing to change at all? Addressing those questions describes the entire history of Judaism and Christianity, beginning already within the pages of the Bible itself and through to this very moment.

  To honor tradition means adapting that tradition in order to keep it vibrant. It may seem totally counterintuitive, but you can’t really honor a tradition unless you are willing to change it. Survival is at stake.

  Standing on a Table Covered in Syrup with My Hair on Fire

  Judaism has had a roughly three-thousand-year history, which is remarkable. I think God has something to do with this, but practically speaking Judaism survived because it has adapted its sacred tradition to its ever-changing environment while at the same time maintaining the tradition.

  Or maybe we can give that a little more punch: Judaism was faithful to its tradition by adapting that tradition so that it could survive. Not in a willy-nilly, let’s-throw-caution-to-the-wind sort of way, but Judaism adapted nonetheless—or risked letting the tradition die altogether.

  To think of either the faith of the Old Testament Israelites or the Judaism that emerged after the Babylonian exile as rigidly orthodox and unyielding to change simply isn’t true.

  We’ve already glimpsed some of these adaptations of the old ways: the slave and Passover laws were given different meaning over time; 2 Chronicles radically reinterpreted the reign of Manasseh in order to speak to Jews living in a new time and place; Jonah’s view of outsiders flipped what Nahum thought.

  This process of needing to adapt over time—as I will not tire of emphasizing—is part of the biblical fabric, baked into its pages, and a crucial yet overlooked aspect of the Bible’s character as a book of wisdom rather than a once-for-all book of rules and static information. The Bible in that respect is more like a living organism than a carved tablet.

  And thank goodness for that, because any other kind of Bible would have been dead on arrival within a few decades of when it was written. The viability of the Christian faith too—as we will see in more detail later—rests on the New Testament writers creatively adapting the story of Israel to account for Jesus. They did nothing less than reimagine God, a pattern that long preceded the Christian faith and that continued to be used by that faith in the millennia that followed.

  Adapting the past for the present is a wisdom move. Preserving faith in God is not about sticking to the past no matter what, but always asking anew how the past and the present can coexist.

  But, forgive me, we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves again. Back to Judaism.

  One early biblical hint of the type of reimagining we are looking at concerns the “one God among many” idea we looked at earlier. That biblical portrait of God, as you will recall, reflected the religious culture of the time, where gobs and gobs of gods filled the heavens. Well before the time we get to Jesus and Paul, however, Judaism became monotheistic. Gone were the days of Yahweh doing battle with the gods of Egypt or Moab. Though Paul’s heavens were active with supernatural entities (Eph. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:5), only one was worthy of the title “God.”

  How that transition happened is one of the puzzling features of ancient Judaism, and it won’t be solved here. We have the Old Testament uncomfortably assuming that other gods exist, and then when we turn to the time of the New Testament, it’s as if we’re looking in on another world entirely—which we are. We do see some movement, though, in a few Old Testament stories.

  For example, in one section of the book of Isaiah, written in the wake of the exile, we read: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god (44:6). For this prophet, idols are frauds, inanimate objects made by ironsmiths and carpenters, useless lumps of wood suited only for cooking food or keeping warm (44:12–20).* Jeremiah, another prophet of the exile, uses similar language about idols (10:1–18). In the entertaining story in 1 Kings 18:20–40, the prophet Elijah* teases and mocks the priests of the Canaanite god Baal when their god does not show up for a divine duel with Yahweh. At one point Elijah even suggests that perhaps Baal needed to use the restroom, which is to say he isn’t a god at all. I’m not kidding. He has wandered away in verse 27 is a euphemism for going potty.

  We are not yet in the world of full-blown monotheism, though we are moving in that direction, and the experience of exile seems to have played some role in this shift in thinking.

  If I stood on a table covered in syrup with my hair on fire, I still couldn’t draw enough attention to the importance of the Babylonian exile for the Israelites’ reimagining of God in the centuries that followed.

  Living on Babylonian soil was a new “here and now” that had to be addressed. Seeing their capital city and Temple razed and being deported to a foreign land were more than an inconvenience. With no land, no king, and no Temple and surrounded by the religious practices of their captors, Israelites surely thought God had finally abandoned them. This raised all sorts of questions in people’s minds, namely, “Was all this trust in Yahweh worth it?” “Does this God want anything to do with us or has he turned his back forever?” “Is this even the true God?”

  The harsh realities of changing times and nothing less than an unraveling social-religious fabric raised new questions that their ancestors never dreamed of—or if they did, those questions would now take on a practical urgency like never before. Modes of thinking from a more sheltered past were not adequate for dealing with this catastrophe.

  The Israelites had to adapt to a different world. One of those adaptations, a fundamental one, has been staring us in the face all along.

  We Need to Get This in Writing

  Before the Judahites returned from exile, there was no “Bible,” nor would there be such a book for some time to come. To be sure, back in the days of the monarchy the ancient Israelites began keeping records of various sorts—like kingly activities, laws, stories of the deep past, and other things. That is how the Bible began—or better, these were the early writings that would eventually make up parts of the Bible.

  We see hints of this process in the stories of Israel’s kings (1 and 2 Kings). For example, the story of the reign of Jeroboam, the first king of the north, ends (as they all do) with his death and this notice: Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, are written in the Book of the Annals* of the Kings of Israel (1 Kings 14:19). Likewise, the book of Numbers mentions a catalogue of battles called the Book of the Wars of the LORD and cites it in 21:14–15.

  This is as close as the Bible gets to footnotes. A written tradition was already under way, and it would eventually be adapted and woven into the stories we see in the Bible.

  But a Bible—the kind of sacred book we take for granted in our very literate and bookish world—did not exist. That was an innovation that grew out of the crisis of exile.

  One big clue that the Bible came along later is how little the stories of the kings and the prophets look back to the time of Moses or quote the Law of Moses, even when the topic calls for it. Though Moses and his story were likely known, in some form, there was no officially sanctioned book to appeal to. There
were laws, but there was no Pentateuch, no Torah (Hebrew, meaning “teaching”), that served as a recognized compendium of ancient commands by which kings were judged.

  For example, given that many of the kings of Israel were guilty of breaking the first two commandments (worshiping other gods or making idols), one might expect now and then something like, “As the LORD commanded Moses on Mt. Sinai,” or words to that effect. But no. They mention royal annals and books of war, but not Genesis or Leviticus.

  What the Bible (or proto-Bible) looked like at the time of David, or Josiah, or the exile, and so on are open questions. However we might try to answer those questions, which have occupied biblical scholars for centuries, we only need to see that the Bible as we know it today wasn’t always part of the life of ancient Israel. It was created and became part of their life, however, when the need arose—with the effective removal of God’s presence from the people in the exile and the centuries to follow.

  Creating a book that recounted and evaluated the past and gave a vision for the future addressed a pressing need brought on by a dramatic and devastating turn of circumstances. Creating a Bible—compiling and editing older stories and writing some new ones—was an effort to remain connected to the past amid uncertain times.

  Ironically, the thing that threatened ancient Israel’s existence, the exile, is what led to the creation of a sacred book that ensured Israel’s survival through the southern kingdom of Judah. Jews would become the “people of the book,” and that book has helped carry their tradition forward much farther than I’m sure any Jews would have imagined some twenty-five hundred years ago—and it hasn’t exactly hurt Christianity, either.

  On the other hand, “putting it in writing” would also create several metric tons of challenges, all of which can be summed up as follows: once you put the sacred tradition in writing, it is less a living tradition and more locked into a time gone by. As the decades and then centuries passed after the exile, the days of old faded farther and farther back in time. The Jews kept right on going, however, all the while dealing with one foreign landlord after another.

  Adapting this inscripturated past for life in the present was inevitable. Different Jewish groups may have had different ideas about how, but they all adapted their beliefs and behaviors somehow. They had to.

  The few biblical examples that we’ve seen of adapting the past to new situations aren’t random blips on the screen. They are, rather, early stirrings of a phenomenon that will come to occupy Judaism and Christianity throughout their entire histories, asking again and again the wisdom questions we’ve been looking at, “How can we stay connected today to the tradition of the past? How does there and then speak to us here and now?”

  The Bible already bears witness to the fact that people of faith dealt with these questions, and the challenges of merging past and present only continued as the decades and then centuries passed.

  And not only was the creation of the Bible an innovation, but the Bible itself experienced its own type of innovation early on in its history—namely, the need to be translated into other languages.

  Probably the earliest translation of the Hebrew Old Testament was into Aramaic—something of a close cousin of Hebrew on the ancient language family tree. This translation arose, as all translations do, out of a need.

  Hebrew was the language of the Israelites before the exile, but while in captivity they picked up the dominant language of the empire, the international language of politics and trade, Aramaic. It didn’t take long before Hebrew was reserved as the language of scribes and other guardians of the tradition, while ordinary people spoke Aramaic. So common was Aramaic that even portions of the Old Testament, namely, Daniel and Ezra (two postexilic books), were written partly in Aramaic. Aramaic was also, almost certainly, the main language Jesus spoke.

  In order for the tradition to survive, a change had to be made—and a big one at that. The language of Abraham, Moses, David, and God had to be translated. And no language translates perfectly into another. You always lose something in the translation, even though, as languages go, Aramaic and Hebrew were very similar Semitic languages.*

  But a bigger shift was on the way, thanks to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the major portion of the Mediterranean world in 332 BCE, which introduced to an already tired people a very different kind of language, Greek, which has no connection whatsoever to Hebrew or any other Semitic language, and boasted a very different kind of culture, one that brought with it some very pressing religious challenges to the Jews.

  We are about to see some serious adjustments to the ancient Jewish faith. Again, survival was at stake.

  Dealing with an Inconsistent (and Somewhat Ridiculous) God

  Greeks were pretty sophisticated, intellectually speaking. They invented philosophy, geometry, science, and democracy, and they did pretty well for themselves in the areas of art and architecture. These were the people who moved into the Jewish neighborhood.

  Of course, the Greeks weren’t from another planet. Like Jews and other peoples of the time, they had their own religious beliefs and rituals for connecting with the divine realm. But unlike Jews, this didn’t keep the Greeks from calculating the curvature of the earth, proposing the existence of atoms, explaining the physical world around them in terms of natural causes, building aqueducts, or discussing whether humans have free will or if everything is predetermined.

  We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element—maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science.

  “Some ‘chosen people’! What kind of God did you say you follow? Apparently one who lets bad things happen to you.”

  The sacred story of their people and the God they worshiped were becoming something of a problem. God had to be defended, and that meant God had to be reimagined.

  For one thing, Greek philosophers thought the idea somewhat ridiculous that the Greek gods were as humanlike as the old myths made them out to be—they lived on a high mountain and held meetings; they had bodies, petty emotions, vindictive behaviors, and uncontrolled sexual urges. You could hardly blame Jews for being somewhat self-conscious and defensive about how similarly humanlike their God appears in their sacred text—Yahweh has a body, gets angry and vindictive quickly, changes his mind, and moves about from place to place as any creature does, and so forth.

  I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That’s how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it’s enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

  Jews living in the Greek period had similar challenges. They addressed those challenges in a number of ways, one of which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, called the Septuagint.*

  Translations are great places for religious groups (ancient and modern) to introduce course correctives to some things that might cause embarrassment.

  For example, Genesis 2:2 in Hebrew says that God finished the work of creation on the seventh day—which if you think about it suggests that God actually did some work on the seventh day and then took the afternoon off. But that would imply that God broke on page one of the Bible his own commandment to do no work on the sabbath. The Greek translators saw the problem and made a minor adjustment: he finished on the sixth day his works. Now God doesn’t contradict himself. Problem solved.

  The Hebrew word for a sacrificial altar, mizbeach (miz-BAY-ach), is used pretty much across the board in the Old Testament no matter whose altar it is. The Greek translators, however, liked to use two different words, depending on whether the altar was Israelite or pagan. That change helped clarify that sacrificing to God is nothing like sacrificing to other gods. Not
a bad adjustment for Jews living in Greek polytheistic culture, trying to maintain their identity amid the temples and strange gods all around them.

  In Hebrew Exodus 24:10 says rather casually that Moses and a party of more than seventy Israelites saw the God of Israel, which is a problem because no one is actually supposed to be able to see God. The Greek translation shifts the focus (literally): they saw the place where the God of Israel stood. Likewise, after instructions for building the mercy seat atop the ark of the covenant, God says, There I will meet with you (Exod. 25:22). In the Septuagint God says, I will make myself known to you, which avoids the possibility of God’s physically appearing to Moses. And in Numbers 3:16, where the Hebrew refers to God’s very humanlike mouth, the Greek translation replaces mouth with God’s voice. Yes, humans have voices too, but at least now God doesn’t have a body.

  The Septuagint really wants to make God seem more, well, godlike.

  In Genesis 6:6, which still troubles some readers today, Yahweh says he was sorry he created humans; it grieved him to his heart (because they kept sinning, which led God to drown everyone). How can someone the Jews claim to be the true God seem so indecisive, not to mention prone to reactive humanlike emotions? So the Greek translation simply gets rid of that idea altogether. Instead of being sorry, the Lord thought deeply; instead of grieving, he pondered. Now God is in very Greeklike rational control of the whole process. God isn’t taken off guard and doesn’t change his mind.

  Just to make a point, apparently the ancient Israelites weren’t bothered by Genesis 6:6—but we are. We should let that sink in. Christians today perhaps have more in common with Jews living in a Greek world than we would with the Israelites of the time of David and Solomon. We expect certain things of God and are bothered when we don’t see them in the Bible.

  Likewise, according to Exodus 4:24, Yahweh is waiting for Moses by the side of the road to—somewhat shockingly—kill him, when he had just gotten done convincing Moses to go back to Egypt and deliver the Israelite slaves. The Greek translation, clearly concerned with such a painful ungodlike about-face, says that the angel of the LORD was waiting for Moses. Sure, that doesn’t solve the problem entirely, but at least God has a buffer.