by Peter Enns
HOW THE BIBLE ACTUALLY WORKS. Copyright © 2019 by Peter Enns. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design: © David Fassett
Cover art: CSA Images | Getty Images
Illustrations by Shay Bocks. Used with permission.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Enns, Peter, 1961– author.
Title: How the Bible actually works : in which I explain how an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book leads us to wisdom rather than answers—and why that’s great news / Peter Enns.
Description: FIRST EDITION. | San Francisco : HarperOne, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035460| ISBN 9780062686749 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062686756 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780062894816 (audio)
Subjects: LCSH: Wisdom–Biblical teaching. | Bible–Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Classification: LCC BS680.W6 E56 2019 | DDC 220.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035460
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Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-268677-0
Version 01092019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268674-9
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* According to the Enneagram Institute (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-6/), we sixes crave structure to alleviate fear. We also tend to be sarcastic. Some famous sixes include Richard Nixon, Mike Tyson, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Frodo Baggins. So I have that going for me.
* Sarcasm.
* Sarcasm.
* Okay, nerdy footnote coming your way, because I need to drop it in somewhere. You may have noticed my switching back and forth between proverbs and Proverbs. Uppercase refers to the book of Proverbs. Lowercase refers to one or more of the individual sayings in the book. See, this is why you read the footnotes. To impress your friends. Some of us went to graduate school to learn this.
* Another nerd alert. “Fortress” in 10:15 and “strong city” in 18:11 are the same in Hebrew, qirith ’uzzo, literally “strong city (or town).” I’m honestly not sure why this phrase was translated differently in these two verses.
* Deuteronomy, though technically not wisdom literature, nevertheless bears the mark of wisdom “influences,” as scholars like to put it, such as Moses’s admonishment to the people to give heed to the teachings he is giving them (Deut. 4:1), which echoes such passages as Proverbs 1:8 and 10:17 about “hearing” or “heeding” wise instruction. Anyway, that’s why I feel I have permission to include a passage from Deuteronomy in a chapter that focuses on Proverbs. That, and I just feel like it. Plus it signals that what we are seeing here with regard to Proverbs holds elsewhere.
*As in Exodus 15, a song celebrating Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, which begins, The LORD is a warrior. . . . Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea (read “drowned”; 15:3–4).
* I often use the common Christian term “Old Testament” when referring to the Bible of Judaism. Since the Christian Bible is different than the Jewish Bible (the Christian Bible has all that Jesus stuff in there), using “Old Testament” will help avoid unnecessary confusion about what part of the Christian Bible I am talking about. I mean no disrespect to Judaism or to its scripture, which I trust is already clear.
* In Hebrew, the word for “wisdom” (hokmah) is grammatically feminine and therefore personified as a woman, hence “her.” More on this in a minute.
* In the Bible, God is typically (though not absolutely always) depicted as male. For the record, I don’t think God is gendered, and I try my best to avoid using male pronouns, but when I am citing biblical passages that refer to God as Yahweh (a male deity), or if avoiding the male pronoun would result in some painfully awkward sentence structures, I will say he, him, or his. I think that’s the best solution until English comes up with agreed-upon pronouns that transcend gender. But I have a writing deadline.
* In verse 22, many English translations have created instead of “acquired,” though they also supply a footnote explaining that “acquired” is the better translation.
* The Wisdom of Solomon is a moving book written to encourage Jews to remain faithful amid persecution. It wasn’t written by Solomon—it was actually written in Greek either slightly before or during the first century CE—and for that reason is not included in Jewish or Protestant Bibles, but consigned to a collection of sixteen books referred to by the tantalizing title Apocrypha, a Greek word meaning “hidden” (though apparently not particularly well). The book is included, however, in the Bibles of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches along with other Apocryphal books, a number of which will come up later.
* Nerd note: Law is capitalized out of respect when referring to the body of laws in the Torah (or Pentateuch), the first five books of the Bible. Otherwise the lower case is used.
* The Christian sabbath (aka the Lord’s Day) moved from the original Saturday of Judaism to Sunday as a celebration of Jesus’s resurrection—unless you’re a Seventh-Day Adventist and hold to Saturday. It’s complicated. Which is more or less the point of this discussion.
* Yahweh is God’s personal name in the Old Testament, though, truth be told, we’re not sure that’s correct. In Hebrew, all we have are four consonants, Y-H-W-H. The vowels are guesswork, though “Yahweh” is a respectable guess, thanks to a long history of linguists, who just had to know. But they don’t really.
* To avoid the problem altogether, ancient Jewish scribes replaced the divine name Yahweh with adonay (“lord”). This practice is still reflected in modern English Bible translations, in which LORD (using small capitals instead of lowercase letters) replaces the divine name throughout.
* Not to get sidetracked, but there is even archaeological evidence that some Israelites thought Asherah was Yahweh’s wife. Another free piece of trivia for you.
* Unfortunately, yes. Read Exodus 22:14–15 about making restitution for animals, then ignore that little subtitle most of your Bibles have, and go right to verses 16–17, which talk about virgins the same way. Exactly.
* (Are you still reading this, guys?! Again, PLEASE don’t put me in a home.)
* Because I know someone is going to ask, here is another nerd note. Although it may be best to keep an open mind, most biblical scholars conclude that the earli
est portions of the Old Testament are snippets that stem from about the thirteenth century BCE and include old poems such as Exodus 15 and Judges 5. The latest written was Daniel in the second century BCE. The earliest New Testament writings may be as early as the late 40s CE (1 Thessalonians) and the latest around the 90s CE (Revelation, the Gospel of John, the Pastoral Letters), if not later. Acts and 2 Peter may have been later still.
* For those of you who hate sidestepping, the Wikipedia article on the “Book of Deuteronomy” does a great job explaining all this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Deuteronomy#cite_note-3.
* To quote Jerome, “We must certainly understand ‘this day’ as meaning the time of composition of the history, whether one prefers the view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch or that Ezra reedited it. In either case I make no objection” (The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 7). Jerome’s casual tone suggests that the problem of Deuteronomy 34:6 was already well known in his day.
* No need to expect literal information from that number, but it matches roughly the length of the Babylonian exile.
* Process theologians and openness theologians say that God does change. Frankly, that topic is above my paygrade.
* The date is either 586 or 587. It was a long time ago and a year either way is close enough.
* Or 539. I hope you’re not losing sleep over these dates. They should make you feel smarter, actually. If you’re in a Bible study and some know-it-all shows off by throwing out “538,” you can say, “Or 539. Scholars give both dates.” But only if you sense this is the time to “answer a fool.”
* I’m not kidding. Google “Lachish reliefs” and check out how the Assyrians depicted their sack of Lachish (just southwest of Jerusalem) in 701 BCE.
* While we’re on the subject, the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were not originally written in two parts. They were just really long, so when the original Hebrew was translated into Greek (more on this later), someone figured, “Hey, these are long. Let’s make each of them two books.” And apparently someone else said, “Okay. That’s a great bit of marketing, turning three boring books into six. I don’t see the downside.” And there you have it.
* This story continued to resonate with Jews of later generations. Centuries after Chronicles was written, an unknown Jew imagined what Manasseh’s prayer of repentance might have looked like, giving us a short book known as the Prayer of Manasseh, which can be found in the Apocrypha.
* Blaise Pascal, “Of the Necessity of the Wager,” sec. 3, nos. 205–6, in Pascal’s Pensées (New York: Dutton, 1958), 48.
* Monolatry comes from the Greek mono, “one,” and latreia, “worship.”
* Archaeologists actually found a Moabite account of Mesha’s rebellion carved into a three-foot-tall standing stone monument referred to by archaeologists (always known for their flare for the creative) as the Moabite Stone. It differs in focus and details from the biblical version, as one would expect, but ends in generally the same way: thanks to his god, Chemosh, Mesha won.
* As mentioned earlier, English translations replace the divine name “Yahweh” with “LORD” out of respect for Jewish tradition. The reason I prefer to use the divine name here and there is only to remind us of the point of this chapter, that the Israelites had a God with a proper name just as all the other nations had gods with their own names: Baal of the Canaanites, Chemosh of the Moabites, Milcom of the Ammonites, and so forth.
* Have you noticed the prices have been going up while the portions have been getting smaller? Me too.
* If this idea jazzes you, the Psalms are great places to see it, like Psalm 95:3 (Yahweh is a great God, and a great King above all gods). Similarly, Psalm 82 (among others) and Job 1–2 portray God as something like a CEO of a “heavenly court” of divine beings—sons of God as they are called. Some form of the “one God among many gods” idea even peeks out at us from the New Testament, when Paul writes, In fact there are many gods and many lords—yet for us there is one God (1 Cor. 8:5–6). Welcome to the ancient world of the Bible.
* As a special bonus, here is number 11. After the Israelites complained about the bland diet of manna (bread from heaven) in the wilderness, God sent them quail—three feet deep. But just when they started to eat them, the LORD struck the people with a very great plague (Num. 11:31–35).
* In Genesis 1 God simply speaks and things are. That being said, we do see echoes of a “creation conflict” in several places, like Psalm 89:10, where Yahweh crushed Rahab like a carcass, and Psalm 74:13–14, where God broke the heads of the dragons and crushed the heads of Leviathan, all of which depict God’s defeat of the sea at creation in a manner reminiscent of Mesopotamian and Canaanite stories where the sea is depicted as a serpent or dragon.
* Daniel 12 is the lone exception, which biblical scholars typically consider to have been written in the second century BCE. But in the Old Testament in general, bodily resurrection wasn’t part of the script. The New Testament idea owes more to postexilic Judaism than it does to the Old Testament, which is a big topic we’ll come back to in chapter 12.
* Mixed metaphor. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.
* Suburban problems.
* The prophet Isaiah lived in the late eighth century BCE. Isaiah 44:6–20, however, is part of a section of Isaiah beginning in chapter 40 that biblical scholars date to the sixth century (or later), because the Babylonian exile is already assumed to have happened. This so-called Second Isaiah—which may have been an individual or more likely a “school” of followers—carried forward anonymously the tradition of the great eighth-century prophet.
* The stories of the kings of Israel in 1 and 2 Kings were also written and edited around the time of the Babylonian exile. The events that biblical books describe don’t tell us when the book was written—which if you think about it is not a very daring idea. Historical novelists do this all the time. Nathanial Hawthorne didn’t live in the seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay Colony and yet he wrote The Scarlet Letter.
* Do not make the mistake some of my college students do and spell this word with one n. Annals are official year-to-year court records. With only one n we have a very different word, indeed.
* I’m throwing this in for free. “Semitic” comes from the name Shem, one of Noah’s three sons who survived the flood (Gen. 9:18; 11:10–26). His line of descent led to Abraham, the father of Israel. In Hebrew, the consonants sh and s are almost identically written and were sometimes interchangeable. Hence, “Semitic,” meaning of the family of Abraham, or Jewish.
* Septuagint means “seventy.” The name is based on a Jewish legend that six members of each of the twelve tribes (so, seventy-two) were sequestered on an island and miraculously cranked out the translation in short order. The historical truth is more complicated. Greek translations were probably grassroots efforts at multiple locations as the need arose after the Greek conquest. The Hebrew version became more the focus of scribes and learned Jews, whereas the Septuagint became the common, and for some Jews even the authoritative, translation. The New Testament writers almost always relied on the Septuagint, so this is no minor point.
* Philo (20 BCE–50 CE) was from Alexandria (Egypt), which had been a Greek cultural center and a choice of residence for Jews for centuries. Philo was quite an influential figure in integrating Judaism and Greek culture, and his allegorical method influenced two early Christian theologians, Clement and Origen. This stuff all hangs together, folks.
* Messiah is Hebrew for “anointed one,” which had become code for “Davidic king.” “Christ” is the Greek word for it.
* These persecutions sparked a rebellion that resulted in a brief period of Jewish semi-independence, which is where Hanukkah comes from.
* We also meet them in the New Testament. Gabriel announces to Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus (Luke 1:26). Michael is mentioned in Jude 9 as having a dispute with another new figure, the devil (more below).
* It’s hard to get past t
he story of Adam and Eve and the flood without noticing the misfit of these Greek ideas. For example: God fashions Eve for Adam only after God realizes the animals are not “suitable” for Adam; God takes a stroll in the Garden of Eden; God needs to question Adam after the misdeed; God is caught by surprise by humanity’s sinfulness and reacts by sending the great flood.
* The “kingdom of God” and the “kingdom of heaven” are the same thing. Just be clear that this kingdom isn’t in heaven, which we may (or may not) enter in the distant future, but here and now—as Jesus prayed, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). The parables aren’t instructions for getting into heaven one day, but for living the kingdom life now.
