by Timothy Beal
Centuries before “the books” became “the Book,” Jerome, patron saint of translators and father of the Vulgate Bible, had used a different Latin word for the Christian Scriptures: bibliotheca, that is, “library.” What would it mean to think of the Bible not as a book but a library? A library is a collection of writings. A library may include a variety of genres of literature from a range of periods in history. It does not presume that all in its collection is of one authorial voice. A library’s collection is a matter of intentional selection and exclusion. It chooses to include certain texts and certain editions of texts and not others. Its collection has an organization and order to it. And yet, although its collections are placed in a certain order, perhaps catalogued from A to Z, a guest in a library is not required or even advised to read everything in that order. So, too, the Bible. It’s not a single book with a single voice running from Genesis to Revelation. It’s a library of writings, representing many different voices and times and perspectives. Like a library, the Bible invites readers to enter and read around within it. You don’t need to start or end in any particular place.
And like a library, the Bible can be a place of serendipity and surprise, in which accidents and tangents often turn out to be more important than your best-laid plans. You’re wandering through its collection in search of one thing but you stumble on something else, something you didn’t know was even there. And that something turns out to be more interesting or more revealing than what you thought you were looking for. It raises a question you’d never asked, or opens a new direction for reflection, or inspires a new insight. The biblical library is a space that hosts accidental revelation.
I suggest that we make Jerome the patron saint of this chapter, as we reimagine the Bible after the Bible—not as a book, but as a library.
The late philosopher Jacques Derrida had a wonderful phrase: “impoverishment by univocality.” Meaning that when we try to make a text univocal, “one-voiced,” of one voice with itself, we deprive it of its richness. To interpret with the goal of “getting to the point” about what a text really means is an act of impoverishment.
When it comes to the Bible, many feel that there is a single right meaning—the one its divine author intended. “Well, what does the Bible say?” “The Bible is very clear about that.” This is part of the iconicity of the Bible in contemporary society, the idea of it as the one and only divinely authored and guaranteed book of answers, with one answer per question. No more, no less.
For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can’t find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don’t know how to read it correctly, or you’re missing something. You’re not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God’s perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God’s Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you “what it really says.” I think that’s tragic. You’re letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.
The Bible is anything but univocal about anything. It is a cacophony of voices and perspectives, often in conflict with one another. Let’s explore a few examples of biblical polyvocality in a little more detail, starting in the beginning.
Sometimes diversity can be discovered not only within particular biblical passages but within a single word, even a single letter. So it is with the very first letter of the very first word of Genesis. In Hebrew, that word is bere’shit (pronounced be-ray-sheet, with the accent on the last syllable), which is also what the book itself is called in Jewish tradition.
Bere’shit can be translated two very different but equally correct ways, and each way leads to a very different meaning for the beginning of the creation story. It all depends on how we take the first letter, called bet, in relation to the word it modifies, re’shit. Christian tradition, following the lead of early Greek translators, has generally taken re’shit as a noun, from ro’osh, “beginning” (from whence we get Rosh Hashanah, “beginning” or “head” of hashanah, “the year”). Taken that way, the bet is translated as a preposition, “in.” Thus, “In the beginning, God created . . .”
But the word re’shit may also be translated as a verb form, meaning “began.” This is how Jewish tradition has tended to take it in this verse. Taken that way, the bet is translated as “when” rather than “in.” So, if we take re’shit as a verb rather than as a noun, we get “when began” rather than “in the beginning,” and the opening sentence of the Bible reads, “When God began to create . . .”
Now, compare the two resulting translations, both of which I’ve made from the same Hebrew text:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God brooded upon the face of the waters. And God said, “There is light.” And there was light. (Genesis 1:1–3; my translation)
When God began to create the heavens and the earth—the earth being formless and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God upon the face of the waters—God said, “There is light.” And there was light. (Genesis 1:1–3; my translation)
What’s the difference? In the first, we have creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. God creates the heavens and the earth, and the earth that God creates is initially a formless, chaotic void. Then God proceeds to create light and darkness, land and water, and so on. In the second, by contrast, we have creation in media res, in the midst of things. At the moment we pick up the story, when God began to create, the formless void of the earth is already there. Creation is not out of nothing but out of chaos. That’s a big difference. And it cannot be resolved. Both readings are perfectly correct and mutually irreconcilable. Undecidability inheres to the first letter, the first word, and the first act of creation.
As we continue through the opening chapters of Genesis, the polyvocality builds. For what follows are two different accounts of divine creation, one after the other. In the first, God creates the world in six days, beginning on the grandest cosmic scale by separating light from dark and finishing on the sixth day with the creation of humankind, male and female, made in God’s image. Then God rests on the seventh day, the first Shabbat. Note that here, humans are created in the plural, as the culmination of creation, God’s pièce de résistance. Everything else, including all animal and vegetable life, was created before them and is already teeming by the time they arrive on the scene and are told to “be fruitful and multiply.”
The second story begins halfway through the fourth verse of the second chapter (2:4b). Here, the order of creation is entirely different. God’s first act of creation, before there are any plants or animals, is to form a single human, not yet male or female, by shaping it from the dust of the earth and then bringing it to life by breathing into its nostrils. Thus ha’adam, the human, is formed from ha’adamah, the earth, and becomes a living soul by divine ruah, which means “breath” but also “wind” and “spirit.” A beautiful image of the ecological spirituality of humanity: a God-breathed and breathing lump of clay, ha’adam from ha’adamah, human from humus. The human is an incarnation of divine transcendence and earthy immanence, as intimate with the ground as with the divine.
But this second creation story is literally incompatible with the first. Here a single human is created before any other living thing. God creates animals later, by the same means, as potential companions for the human. When that doesn’t work out, God puts the human to sleep, takes a side from it, and forms that side into a woman. So one could argue that woman was created first, and the man was the leftover. In any case, this order of creation ca
nnot be made to match the order in the story that immediately precedes it, in which God creates humans in the plural, male and female, after God creates all plants and animals.
When we look more closely at these two stories in Hebrew, it’s clear that they were drawn from two different literary sources. They employ different names for God. They use different narrative styles and vocabularies. They have different theological interests: the first is more cosmological, concerned with the divine order of creation as a whole, while the second is more anthropological, focusing on human relationships with God and one another. Based on these and other details, most scholars conclude that the first story comes from the sixth century, during the Babylonian exile or shortly thereafter, and that the second probably dates a few centuries earlier. Yet, in the final form of Genesis, these two very different creation stories have been stitched together into a single narrative. As we continue reading, we find many more seams, spots where different pieces of narrative from different sources have become part of a larger literary work.
Nor are these two stories at the beginning of Genesis the only two biblical accounts of creation. There are several others in other biblical writings. In the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job (chapter 38), for example, the first act of creation is described as a struggle between God and the primordial forces of chaos, called Yam (“sea”), a monstrous personification of the formless, watery deep there before the world began. Here God takes control of Yam, sets boundaries for it, and sinks deep foundations for the earth like some huge primeval offshore drilling station.
In Psalm 74, we find yet another version of creation. This one, too, envisions creation from chaos, a conflict in which God takes control and then creates cosmic order out of it. But here the conflict is much more violent, depicting a scene of creation in which God must utterly destroy the monstrous forces of chaos before establishing cosmic order:
You yourself drove back Yam with your strength.
You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters
You yourself crushed the heads of Leviathan.
You gave it as food for the seafaring people.
You yourself cut openings for springs and torrents.
You made great rivers run dry.
Yours is the day, and yours is the night.
You yourself established light and the sun.
You yourself fixed all the boundaries of the earth.
Summer and winter you yourself made. (my translation)
As in Job, we see God driving back Yam, the sea personified. Here, however, the sea itself is home to teeming hosts of anticosmic forces, the sea monsters and Leviathan. These primordialchaos monsters are not part of the order of creation. God fights and destroys them in order to create a safe, secure, inhabitable ecology for God’s people.
It’s interesting that the larger context of this psalm is a crisis. The psalmist is crying out to God for rescue from what appears to be the resurgence of chaos monsters, this time taking the form of the Babylonians who have destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. Here, cosmic chaos and social chaos are integrally related. The psalmist recalls God’s original act of creation against chaos in hopes that God will once again put down the monsters and re-establish order. Just as you did not allow monsters to destroy your creation in the beginning, the psalmist is saying, so you must not allow this newly awakened monster, Babylon, to destroy your people, your city, and your Temple, which together represent the social, political, and religious center of that creation.
There are still other biblical versions of creation. Some imagine that God was not alone in carrying it out. In Proverbs 8, for example, Wisdom (hokmah), personified as a female companion to God, declares that she was with God “from the beginning, from the origin of the earth, there was still no deep when I was brought forth, no springs rich with water, before the mountains were sunk.” When God “assigned the sea its limits” and “fixed the foundations of the earth,” she declares, “I was at his side as confidant. I was a source of delight every day, playing before him all the time” (my translation). We may find echoes of this poetics of creation in the opening lines of the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. (John 1:1–4)
The Greek word traditionally translated here as “Word” is logos, which can also mean not only “reason” or “logic” but “wisdom.” Reread this passage with “Wisdom” in place of “Word,” and it’s easy to see the resonances between the image of creative Wisdom in Proverbs and this logos who was with God and was God in the beginning, and who has now become flesh and dwelt among us.
I’ve heard Christians of creationist and “young earth” persuasions declare that their faith rests squarely on the historical and scientific accuracy of “the biblical account of creation”: if the biblical account is wrong, if modern evolutionary theory and cosmology are right, then the Bible is a lie and Christianity is a fraud. They are setting themselves up for a fall. The Bible’s own creationism is rich in different, mutually incompatible ways of imagining cosmic and human beginnings. There is no single biblical account of creation. There are many, and they don’t agree.
Mark Twain’s Drugstore
Our second example of biblical polyvocality is harder to stomach for many, especially those with a more “liberal” theological orientation, who tend to believe that the true message of the Bible is love and peace.
In an essay fragment called “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice,” Mark Twain suggested that the Bible is like a drugstore. In it you can find both poison and cure. The Bible was used as the basis for the Salem witch trials, and it was used to condemn them. It was used to justify slavery, and it was used to abolish it. Twain was well aware that churches during his time were splitting over the issue of slavery, each side basing its positions in the Bible. He understood, moreover, that the problem wasn’t simply that slavers were bad biblical readers, distorting the text. The problem was that the poisonous texts are there. Institutions of slavery are presumed and supported in some biblical texts. Even the Ten Commandments take slave ownership for granted. Why else would they prohibit coveting a neighbor’s slaves? Indeed, just a few verses after the Ten Commandments are given in the book of Exodus, we find detailed regulations for trading slaves, not to mention other possessions, including daughters. It also sets liberal limits on how much physical abuse a slave owner may deliver. “When a slave-owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately,” for example, “the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.” The passage is disconcerting enough in and of itself, but especially so given that it appears only a few pages after the story of the release of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
Some might hasten to say that these slave texts are all in the Old Testament and therefore are part of life “under the law” from which Jesus Christ liberates humankind. They might well note that in the New Testament letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul declares that “there is no longer slave or free . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Yet in another letter, he by no means condemns his Christian friend Philemon for owning slaves; he simply requests that one particular former slave, Onesimus, who probably had run away from his master, be accepted back with a new status as fellow Christian.
One of the most poisonous biblical interpretations in recent decades is found in the Christian white-supremacist idea of the Phineas Priesthood. Its biblical basis is a story in Numbers 25 about divinely sanctioned violence in the name of ethnic purity. In that story, the Israelites are suffering from a deadly plague, which Moses explains as God’s punishment against them for marrying non-Israelites. While listening to Moses denounce intermarriage, a priest named Phi
neas notices an Israelite man with a Midianite woman. He leaves the congregation, follows the couple into their tent, and impales them both on the same spear. In response to this zealous double murder, God lifts the plague against the Israelites and blesses Phineas, promising him an “everlasting priesthood.” Inspired by this story, white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins wrote Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood, which presents a postbiblical lineage of “Phineas Priests” who have been willing to carry out similar acts of violent racial and moral purification, and which calls forth a new generation of white Christian zealots to similar action. In the years since its publication, Hoskins’s book has gained wide circulation among white supremacist die-hards and potential recruits, in and out of prison. Today, many notoriously militant racist groups lay claim to this dubious biblical heritage, declaring themselves Phineas Priests. Indeed, within these groups, the idea of the Phineas Priesthood has become a powerful means of ordaining acts of racist terror as part of a larger, divinely sanctioned racial holy war.
