The Rise and Fall of the Bible

by Timothy Beal

  Not only do these kinds of moral bios often steer readers toward long-standing gender stereotypes and anxieties about women’s sexuality; they also steer readers away from the ambiguities and questions that arise when one reads the biblical texts themselves. In my experience, in fact, the Samson story (Judges 13–16) is an excellent example of the kind of biblical ambiguity that can quickly lead readers into uncharted territory. Imagine for a moment that you’re in a Bible-study group discussing the story of Samson and Delilah. You’re vaguely familiar with their names—especially Delilah’s, from a song by Chuck Berry, maybe, or the Grateful Dead, or the Plain White T’s. And wasn’t Samson that strong man who wore his hair long, like an ancient Israelite version of a modern-day professional wrestler? But you’ve never actually read the story until now. As you find your way into the details, it’s not the big-man-taken-down-by-a-beautiful-woman tale you expected to find. Things grow fascinatingly complicated, and surprising questions emerge. Wasn’t Samson quite the trickster himself? And although he’s humiliated and ultimately dies, doesn’t he in fact win in the final act when he pulls the pillars down on himself and everyone else? Doesn’t he play the final trick? And on the sex front, was he really any worse than King David, whose lust for Bathsheba led ultimately to his choreographing of her husband’s death in battle, not to mention the deaths of untold others as collateral damage? Approached from a slightly different angle, very unlike David, but a lot like David’s divinely doomed predecessor, Saul, might Samson even be something of a tragically ill-fated figure, caught up in a larger divine plan that is less than clear, especially to him?

  What about Delilah? Is she not also caught in a potentially lose-lose situation depending on what she does? And don’t I remember the Israelites celebrating Jael, a sexual trickster who played for their side? Is that the main difference? Very quickly, the idea that this is a moral lesson about how the wrong woman can ruin a guy’s shot at winning the game begins to look absurdly simplistic.

  In fact, these are all questions I have heard raised by college students and church Bible-study group members when reading this story without deferring to the special notes and comments of study Bibles and the like. And these are the kinds of biblical stories that led my grandpa, an irreverent union man who used to roll his eyes at us kids during dinnertime prayers, to begin reading the Bible for himself in the last few years of his life. “I had no idea this kind of thing was in there!” he joyfully exclaimed to me. Reading on his own, he had begun to see the Bible as something quite different from the book of dos and don’ts that he, like so many others, had expected to find.

  No doubt many an Every Man “reads” this Bible without ever reading very much biblical text. He focuses instead on the various callouts, sidebars, and other features, whose biblical values steer clear of the thickets of questions that are so often raised by biblical literature, and therefore more clearly and directly address his felt needs. He sticks to “the point” in a way that the Bible itself does not.

  Necessary Supplements

  The back cover of Tyndale’s best-selling Life Application Study Bible captures the felt need of many potential Bible buyers and repeat buyers: “How many times have you read your Bible and asked: ‘How can this possibly apply to my life, my job, my friendships, my marriage, my neighborhood, my family, my country? . . . Why can’t I understand what God is saying to me through His Word?’” The Bible is supposed to be God’s clear and unambiguous Word, offering practical guidance and solutions to every problem. Other Bibles have not come through. This Bible understands.

  In fact, about one-third of the text in the Life Application Study Bible is extrabiblical, “supplementary” content, including notes on verses, synopses, charts and diagrams, topical sidebars, and reflective essays. Its main competitor in the field of devotional study Bibles is Zondervan’s NIV Study Bible, which boasts more than twenty thousand notes. Nearly half of this Bible is “supplemental.” Some of the added material offers to help readers delve deeper into the biblical text itself, providing information about historical contexts, or alternative translations of the original Greek or Hebrew. More often, however, the intention is not to encourage readers to interpret for themselves but to interpret for them, to control meaning, dispelling doubts and questions and directing readers toward specific conclusions.

  Often these values-adding editorial controls focus on texts that could have something to do with present-day hot-button issues. Take, for example, the small handful of biblical passages usually cited in discussions about homosexuality. The popular cultural assumption is that the Bible very clearly says that homosexuality is an abominable sin. Biblical literature itself, however, is not so clear. In fact, it has very little explicitly to offer by way of moral teaching or legislation on matters of sexuality, let alone homosexuality, and what it does have to say does not speak directly to the issue as it appears in contemporary society. Two passages in the legal corpus of Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) prohibit a man from lying with another man “as he lies with a woman.” This commandment appears along with prohibitions against bestiality, adultery, sex with a menstruating woman, and marrying a divorced woman, a former prostitute, or a brother’s widow (a practice that is required elsewhere in Scripture). These two passages in Leviticus do not offer a blanket prohibition against all homosexuality per se. They do not address lesbianism, for example, or even sexual orientation, but only male-male intercourse. Leviticus, moreover, is not exactly a font of legal counsel for most Christians on other moral and ethical matters: it prohibits eating shellfish and pork, wearing mixed-fiber clothing, and planting different plants in the same garden; it requires ritual sacrifices; and it condones slavery.

  In the New Testament, Jesus has nothing to say about homosexuality and very, very little to say about sexuality in general. Paul’s letters do disparage some specific male-male sexual practices common in the larger Greco-Roman society (e.g., pederasty, or sexual “mentoring” of young men by older men, and soliciting young male prostitutes). But Paul never condemns consensual same-sex relations between adults. That’s not to say that if Paul were time-machined to the present he would be an advocate of gay marriage. It is to say that one can—and many do—interpret the Bible in ways that are supportive of homosexual unions and gay rights. The simple fact is that the Christian Scriptures are not clear on this issue. It is a matter of biblical interpretation and ethical reflection in which faithful Christians can and do disagree.

  Yet the supplemental features in many Bibles, especially those marketed to teens, make much ado about the “biblical view” of homosexuality—that is, “what God says” about it in the Bible. The NIV Teen Study Bible from Zondervan, which has sold over 2.5 million copies and is the best-selling Bible among twelve - to fifteen-year-olds, is typical. On the same page as Leviticus 18, there is a “The Bible Says” feature called “Only One Right Choice,” which decries the idea that homosexuality could be an “alternative lifestyle.” According to the commentary, Leviticus 18 clearly states, “It’s wrong to have homosexual sex,” and “this isn’t the only Bible passage that says homosexual sex is a sin. Read also Romans 1:26–27. If someone tells you homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle—meaning that it’s OK—don’t let those words fool you. It’s an alternative all right. A sinful one.” Then, four pages later, near Leviticus 20, there is a full-page image of a piece of lined stationery with a “Dear Sam” note from “Chris in Crystal Springs.” It’s meant to look like a note that’s been slipped into Chris’s Bible at this particular spot. Chris writes that he doesn’t understand how he can follow Jesus’s teaching to love everyone, including homosexuals, without accepting their “alternative life-style.” A response from Sam on what looks like a sticky note gives the answer: love the sinner but hate the sin; understand that the Bible is very clear that homosexuality is a sin. “You can’t approve of something evil that God has forbidden.” In both of these “helps,” the plain intention is to remove the ambiguity that exists in Scriptu
re itself, thereby leaving no room for interpretation.

  I have yet to find anyone, adult or teen, who has seen a Biblezine in her or his Bible-study meeting (many Bible-study participants, when shown a Biblezine, respond in shock and horror, “What’s that?!”). But several report having seen people bring study Bibles such as the NIV Teen Study Bible or Life Application Study Bible. These tend to be group members who have had less experience reading the Bible, on their own or in such a group. As one woman, a veteran of many different Bible-study groups, sympathized, it can be intimidating for newcomers to participate in Bible study without a study Bible, because they’re often afraid that they might say something wrong, or ask a question whose answer is obvious to others.

  Values-added content purports to be supplemental, intended simply to make clear or amplify what the Bible is already saying. It speaks for the Bible, indeed for God. But why does it need to do that? The biblical text itself is right there, on the same page, albeit in a plainer, smaller, less visually attractive font. Why not simply let it speak for itself? Perhaps because it doesn’t speak that way. It’s not that kind of literature. The Bible is not an instruction manual. It doesn’t give “real answers, real fast.”

  Still, Bible publishers know that simple, black-and-white answers are what the majority of biblical consumers expect from their Bibles. Remember, most Americans believe that the Bible has the answers to all of life’s important questions and is infallible in its teachings.

  In most Bibles, as we’ve seen, pages are designed so that the supplemental helps stand out visually from the main body of biblical text. They appear in larger print, using contemporary fonts and graphics (often in color), with catchy titles. They jump off the page and grab the reader’s attention. They purport to supplement the biblical text, but the reverse is true. They are the center of attention and the biblical text is background. Practically speaking, they become part of the Bible, if not its central and unifying voice. It would be perfectly understandable for a thirteen-year-old with an NIV Teen Study Bible to say that the Bible clearly prohibits homosexuality and that it’s not an alternative lifestyle. The Bible says so. Or was it Dear Sam? Whatever.

  If That’s What It Means, Why Doesn’t It Say So?

  In still other cases, translators make the biblical text itself agree with the likes of Dear Sam, adding values that are not clearly present in the text they’re translating. The New Living Translation, for example, which is the text used in the Life Application Study Bible and many other Bibles from Tyndale, puts its interpretation right into its translation of Leviticus 18:22: “Do not practice homosexuality; it is a detestable sin.” Although this version claims to be an actual translation from the Hebrew, the wording of this passage is virtually identical to that of its predecessor, The Living Bible, which was an interpretive paraphrase from another English version (“Homosexuality is absolutely forbidden, for it is an enormous sin”). As we’ve seen, the Hebrew text refers specifically to a man lying with another man as though with a woman, not to homosexuality or homosexual behavior in general. The Hebrew word translated “abomination” (to’evah), moreover, does not carry the Christian meaning of “sin” as moral wrongdoing. It is not about moral guilt so much as impurity. The American Standard Version, from which The Living Bible was paraphrased, maintains this sense: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” The New Living Translation and The Living Bible, however, seem to know better. They implicitly claim that the thought, the intended meaning, behind that ancient Levitical prohibition was to forbid homosexuality (taken most broadly to refer to male-male sexual acts, female-female sexual acts, homosexual identity, and homosexual unions) as sinful. They agree with Sam, and they take his point one big step further, adding it directly into the biblical text.

  Tyndale’s New Living Translation is what’s known as a functional equivalence, or “meaning driven” translation. Central to this approach is the idea that translating biblical texts from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages in which they were originally written is, and should be, an act of interpretation, determining what they mean as clearly as possible. Contrary to the traditional formal equivalence approach to translation, whose goal is to translate words, phrases, and other forms of speech into their closest English counterparts, the goal of functional-equivalence translations is to give what the translator considers to be the full meaning of larger units of speech. There are more than thirty-five translations of the Bible on the market today. Although the King James Version remains the bestseller, the market for functional-equivalence translations is big and getting bigger.

  Nearly all translations depend to some degree on functional equivalencies in order to put ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek figures of speech into sensible English. A good example is the common Hebrew phrase for divine wrath, imagined as God’s red-hot nose. When God learns of Aaron’s golden-calf project, most translations have God tell Moses something like, “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them” (Exodus 32:10). But “wrath” is a euphemism, of sorts. The Hebrew word is ’aph, “nose.” Here, as in many other places in the Bible, God’s nose burns hot. One might take that as strictly figurative if it weren’t for the next story, in which God tucks Moses into a cleft in a rock and then walks past, allowing Moses to behold the divine backside.

  Given such English refigurings of God’s hot Hebrew nose, it’s not surprising to learn that another, more bawdy Hebraism is also usually lost in translation. In Samuel and Kings, a male is sometimes referred to as, to quote the King James Version, “one that pisseth against a wall,” that is, who pees standing up. That’s a very literal translation of the Hebrew phrase (mashtin beqir). Consider the story of the future king David, on the run in the wilderness from King Saul, seeking food for his army from a rich man named Nabal (“fool”) in exchange for their protection of his estate. When Nabal refuses, most modern translations, tuned to our delicate post-Victorian ears, have David vow to leave not one single “male” alive by morning. But in the more graphic Hebrew, David declares that not one person will be pissing against the wall by morning. The threat is not only bawdy but poetic: “against the wall,” beqir, sounds very like “morning,” boqer (read it aloud to hear for yourself: ad ha-boqer mashtin beqir). David’s expression gets further literary play after Nabal’s wife, Abigail (soon to be one of David’s wives), convinces David to relent. When she returns to Nabal, she finds that he’s hosting a party and already very drunk. So she waits till morning, “when the wine had gone out of him”—which could mean after he was sober or after he had literally pissed it out—to tell him what almost happened. At that news, he sinks into a depression and dies ten days later. Clearly, the functional equivalent “male” loses a lot in translation.

  In most cases, functional-equivalence translations go much, much further than losing nuance and wordplay, to the point that they are really writing something new that is more or less inspired by the text in its original language. Often, the translator will read several sentences in a row before putting into English what he or she determines the overall meaning to be. To get a clearer sense of the difference between a formal-equivalence and functional-equivalence translation, compare these three translations of the opening verse of Psalm 1. First, here is my rather wooden, strictly form-driven translation from Hebrew:

  Happy the man

  who does not walk in the counsel of wicked ones

  In the way of sinners he does not stand

  In the seat of scorners he does not sit

  Now here is the same verse in the King James Version, the old standard of formal-equivalence translation:

  Blessed is the man

  that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,

  nor standeth in the way of sinners,

  nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

  Seventeenth-century -eths aside, this is fairly close to mine, albeit aesthetically more resonant. “Ungodly” is a stretch for a word (resha’im) that in
variably refers to those who act wrongfully or wickedly. But the metaphorical actions of walking, standing, and sitting are maintained. This translation also captures the Hebrew repetition, in the last line, of yashav, used in verb form for “sitteth” and in noun form for “seat.” Note too the verse’s finely crafted parallelism, which is a key element in the craft of Hebrew biblical poetry:

  that walketh not

  in the counsel

  of the ungodly

  nor standeth

  in the way

  of sinners

  nor sitteth

  in the seat

  of the scornful

  The effect of this kind of synonymous parallelism is more than simple repetition. It’s not just about reiterating an important point—“avoid bad guys.” This is poetry, not pool rules. Each new metaphor and term adds intensity, tension, and depth. It slows us down and creates space for imagination, contemplation, and self-reflection.

  Now compare the Contemporary English Version, a functional-equivalence translation produced in 1995 by the American Bible Society under the supervision of Barclay Newman, whose background was in the mission field, where he translated the Bible into languages and cultures (which are the contexts of meaning) often radically different from Western ones. that walketh not nor standeth nor sitteth