Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  We eventually found the apartment building and rang the front bell. The garden brimmed with gardenias, honeysuckle, and cherry-red geraniums. “Are you looking for Professor Malamat?” the woman said. “He’s around back.”“Are you looking for Monsieur Malamat?” a man in back instructed. “He’s just up the side.” Eventually we found the door. “Ah, now I remember,” Avner said. “I haven’t been here in twenty years.” He pressed the buzzer.

  Soon we would be leaving for the more pioneering part of our journey—traveling down the Nile in search of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers; then retracing the Exodus through the Sinai. But first we had to examine the stories of Jacob. Since most of the places Jacob went were places his father and grandfather had already been (and thus we had already visited), we decided to step off the road for a few days and explore some of the questions we had been delaying: namely, What is the Bible? Who wrote it? And how do we know whether it’s true? To help, Avner suggested I meet a few of his colleagues. The first was Avraham Malamat, a historian, the patriarch of biblical scholars, and Avner’s teacher.

  His wife greeted us warmly and led us into the den, a sunny room lined with cushioned benches where students had been gathering for decades in a lively salon. On the coffee table were three bowls filled with chocolate-covered almonds, chocolate cookies, and chocolate bon-bons. Professor Malamat had a smudge of chocolate on his lips, which his wife wiped off when we arrived. He had been unwell in recent months, and his pale hair was drawn over his pink forehead in wisps, his face plump like a mango. He had a cane, which only served to accentuate his authority when he pounded it on the ground after each of his proclamations. I had yet to meet a timid Bible scholar.

  “Welcome to my home,” he said, gesturing grandly and noting that he had 10,500 books in his personal library. “How many about the Bible?” I asked. He seemed surprised by the question. “Ten thousand five hundred.” It was the largest private collection in Israel, he said. Avraham Malamat had come to Jerusalem in the 1930s and spoke Hebrew, German, French, Arabic, English, and assorted Mesopotamian dialects. He had studied at Oxford, lived in America, and traveled around the world. “I’m from Vienna,” he said. “Do you know where that is?” Feeling a bit disparaged, I was eager to prove I knew a bit about the world, too. “So, did you know Freud?” I said, cockily.

  “Dr. Freud!” he said, pounding his cane. “He was my neighbor! He lived at 19 Berggasse. We lived at Number 12. I used to see him every day. When he came back from the country on weekends, his little white poodle would run down the stairs and leap into his arms.”

  I was flabbergasted, but at this point committed. “So,” I said. “Did he ever ask you about your mother?”

  “Just the opposite,” Professor Malamat said. “Whenever my mother would walk me by his house she’d say, ‘If you don’t behave, Dr. Freud will put you on his couch.’ ” He paused. “I don’t even think she knew what a couch was.” He tossed a bonbon onto his tongue.

  Sufficiently in his grasp now, I moved on to the topic at hand. One thing that fascinated me about the Bible was how it came into being. There are thirty-nine books in the Hebrew Bible. The books are divided into three categories: the Law (torah), the Prophets (nevi’im), and the Writings (ketuvim). The Hebrew term for the Bible, tanakh, is an acronym for these groups. For Jews, the first group, containing the Five Books of Moses, is the most sacred. According to the Bible, these books were written by God and revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. They contain about half narrative, half religious instruction. In Hebrew, the first words of each book serve as its name, thus Genesis is bereshit, or “At the beginning,” and Exodus is we’eleh shmoth, “Now these are the names,” and so on. In English the names come from early translations into Greek.

  Genesis, from the Greek word geneseosis, or origins, tells the stories of Creation, Noah, and the patriarchs. Exodus, from the Greek word exodos, or departure, relates the escape of the Israelites from slavery. Leviticus, from the Greek word meaning priestly, and Numbers, a reference to the numerous censuses in the book, intersperse stories of the Israelites’ sojourn in the desert with more than six hundred mitzvot, or laws. Deuteronomy, from the Greek term for repeated law, focuses on Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites on the brink of the Promised Land. These books were later coupled with the other thirty-four to make the Hebrew Scriptures. Early followers of Jesus added five narratives, twenty-one letters, and a book of visions. Originally these were viewed as addenda to the Hebrew Scriptures, but as they gained in importance, Christians began calling the earlier books the “Old Testament” and the supplement the “New Testament.”

  One lesson I quickly learned was that one’s view of the Bible often depends on which Bible one reads. Christian Bibles, for instance, arrange later books in the Hebrew Scriptures in a different order than Jewish Bibles. Catholic Bibles, in both their translations and their content, differ from Protestant Bibles, which differ from Anglican Bibles, which differ from Greek Orthodox Bibles. This discord began in antiquity. The term bible is derived from the Greek biblia, meaning “books,” which in turn comes from the word byblos, or papyrus, a plant from the Nile that produced early paper. The oldest complete version of the Hebrew Bible is the Septuagint, a series of Greek translations from the third century B.C.E. that differed slightly from the original Hebrew, mostly by including the books known as the Apocrypha. The term septuagint, which means seventy, comes from a legend that seventy-two elders did the translating. The Septuagint is the best source of information on the pre-Christian Bible and is the Bible quoted in the New Testament. The definitive Hebrew version of the text dates much later—to around the first century C.E.—and is known as the Masoretic, or Traditional, Text.

  While seemingly insignificant, these translations have had enormous impact on how we view the Bible. For example, the original Hebrew text had no vowels, since Semitic languages originally had none. Also, the text had no chapters, which were added in thirteenth-century England, and no verses, which were added in sixteenth-century Geneva. It wasn’t even on paper, but on papyrus, parchment, even leather. When I asked Professor Malamat how he viewed the text, for example, he said, “The picture in my head is scrolls.”

  What I most wanted to know from him was how to view the content of these scrolls. As William Dever, the American archaeologist, has written, “We must constantly keep in mind the fact that the Bible is a garment of a very ancient literature in a dead language, until the discoveries of modern archaeology, the sole relic of a long-lost culture, and the product of an ancient world totally foreign to most of us.”

  For my purposes, this raised a question: How reliable is the Bible as history? I began by asking Professor Malamat how much we now know about the period the Pentateuch describes.

  “We know very much about certain pockets,” he said. “For example, about the eighteenth century B.C.E. we know very much. More than the Middle Ages. At Mari, we found thirty thousand documents that describe what people bought, what they sold, what they ate. I was having dinner in Oxford once and I sat next to a woman who studied medieval Europe. She envied me. I said we had ten thousand Assyrian menus. She said, ‘The entire continent of Europe doesn’t have ten thousand menus from that time.’ ”

  “But only pockets,” I said.

  “Right. We know a lot about Mesopotamia. We know a lot about Egypt. But we have less material for here. The one question I cannot answer is, ‘Why didn’t Palestine yield as much material?’ ”

  “So why didn’t Palestine yield as much material?”

  He smiled. “I think because it was written on papyri, and papyri deteriorate. Or maybe it’s because you have so much oral tradition. Maybe there’s a law that if you don’t have much written tradition you have an oral tradition.”

  I asked him how long oral traditions could survive without being written down.

  “Very long,” he said. “We fool ourselves. They could survive for two thousand years, easily. You must have heard of the Nieb
elungs, the German story of Siegfried. The oldest kernel is from 800 C.E., but it has survived another twelve hundred years and was only written down for part of that. Also, everyone, including Hitler, tried to put in his own stuff.”

  I suggested we look at one story, Jacob, and see how accurate it is. From a narrative point of view, the story of Jacob marks a significant increase in psychological complexity. Unlike Abraham, Isaac appears infrequently in Genesis and is mostly seen as a transitional figure, with little distinctive personality of his own. His twins, however, seem to make up for his lack of charisma; both are born with specific personalities. “The first one emerged red,” the text says, “like a hairy mantle all over, so they called his name Esau,” which means Rough One. “Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they called him Jacob,” which means Heel Holder. These initial characterizations are clue enough to their characters, but the text goes even further. “When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors,” while Jacob was a plain man who stayed in camp. “Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah favored Jacob.”

  One day Jacob is cooking lentil stew when Esau returns from hunting. Esau says to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished.” The text says this exchange is why Esau later gives birth to the land of Edom, across the Jordan river, implying a connection between Edom and adom, the Hebrew word for red. But Jacob insists that Esau first sell his birthright as the elder son, which entitles Esau to succeed Isaac as the head of the family. Esau responds, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?” But Jacob insists, “Swear to me first,” and Esau does. “Thus did Esau spurn the birthright,” the text says, implying that he was not entirely tricked. My first question for Professor Malamat was did such birthrights exist?

  “Absolutely,” he said. “They go back to Mesopotamia. First sons were considered sacred, the key to the family line. They received double inheritance and were given a seat of honor over their brothers. Also, in this case, they received the special covenant with God.”

  “So could these rights be transferred?”

  “Yes. We have a Nuzi document in which a son actually buys the right from his brother.”

  In a second story of manipulation, Rebekah helps Jacob finagle a greater birthright from his father. One day when Isaac is old and “too dim to see,” he summons Esau and says, “I do not know how soon I may die. Take your gear, your quiver and bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some game. Then prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die.” Rebekah overhears her husband and instructs Jacob, her favored son, to fetch two choice kids so she can prepare Isaac’s favorite dish and he can receive his father’s blessing. “But my brother Esau is a hairy man,” Jacob protests, “and I am smooth-skinned. If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster and bring upon myself a curse, not a blessing.”“Just do as I say,” Rebekah insists, and he does.

  Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes, covers his hands and neck with the skins of the kids, and gives him the dish. Jacob goes to visit Isaac, who asks, “Which of my sons are you?” “I am Esau,” Jacob says, “your first-born; I have done as you told me.” Skeptical, Isaac asks, “How did you succeed so quickly?” Jacob responds, “Because the Lord your God granted me good fortune.” Isaac bids Jacob to come closer so he may feel the boy’s arms. “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau.” He smells the boy and announces, “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of the fields that the Lord has blessed.” Finally Isaac relents and gives his innermost blessing to his second son.

  May God give you/Of the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth,

  Abundance of new grain and wine./Let peoples serve you,/And nations bow to you;

  Be master over your brothers,/And let your mother’s sons bow to you.

  Cursed be they who curse you,/Blessed be they who bless you.

  No sooner does Jacob leave than Esau returns and does as he has been instructed. When he and Isaac uncover the ruse, Isaac is seized with “very violent trembling” and Esau bursts into “wild and bitter sobbing.”“First he took away my birthright,” Esau wails, “and now he has taken away my blessing.” Finally he threatens, “I will kill my brother Jacob.” When Rebekah hears this, she instructs Jacob to flee at once for Harran, to visit her brother Laban. Before Jacob leaves, Rebekah tells Isaac that if Jacob takes a bride “from among the native women,” she will be distraught, so Isaac instructs Jacob, “You shall not take a wife from among the Canaanite women.” Jacob promptly sets off for Mesopotamia. Would someone in the ancient Near East undertake such a grueling trip just to meet a wife?

  “Of course,” Professor Malamat said. “Jacob goes back to his clan. He doesn’t go to a foreign people. The Bible says that God hurt people if they married foreigners. There is a bias against Canaanites. We try to make it nicer these days, but it’s not nice. The biblical storytellers hated the Canaanites, because the Canaanites didn’t believe in God.”

  Jacob arrives in Harran and promptly meets Rachel, the daughter of his uncle Laban. Jacob tries to impress her by rolling the stone covering off the mouth of the well, and, in an episode repeated nowhere else in the Bible, he kisses Rachel and breaks into tears. Jacob then explains that he is Rachel’s kinsman and they go to meet her father, who offers Jacob a job. Jacob responds, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” Besides being the younger of Laban’s two daughters (and thus parallel to Jacob), Rachel is described as being “shapely and beautiful,” while Leah is described only as having “weak eyes.” Laban agrees, and the seven years pass, though they seem like just days to Jacob, “because of his love” for Rachel.

  At the end of his service, Jacob demands his reward and is given a bride, with whom he has marital relations. The following morning he discovers that Laban, in what appears to be an unwitting but poetic retribution for Jacob’s deception of Isaac, has substituted Leah for Rachel. “Why did you deceive me?” Jacob asks, to which Laban responds, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older.” Laban offers to let Jacob marry Rachel if he works another seven years, which Jacob agrees to do. Another seven years pass, and Jacob marries Rachel. But God, seeing how Jacob prefers Rachel, makes her barren. Leah, by contrast, gives Jacob four sons. Rachel’s servant gives him another two sons. Leah’s servant adds two more. Leah then contributes two more sons and a daughter, Dinah. Finally God remembers Rachel, and she bears him a son, Joseph.

  My question to Professor Malamat was, would such switching of brides truly have happened?

  “It was common to marry the firstborn daughter first,” he said. “If Jacob wants the more beautiful daughter, he has to work another seven years. You have to understand, the most important thing in a marriage was not love. It was not romance. It was children.”

  “So all in all,” I said, “how would you evaluate the story in terms of its historical accuracy?”

  “I believe in the historical background of the story,” he said. “There might have been a man like Jacob. It’s quite possible. Of course, there are many anachronisms in the story. Edom did not exist at the time of the patriarchs; that detail was probably added later. But I say, ‘Good show!’ I like anachronisms. I always quote Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. There’s a part where someone says, ‘And the clock strikes three.’ That’s a good line, but in Rome there were no churches during that period—Christianity wasn’t even invented—and no clocks. So that’s an anachronism.”

  “So who introduced the anachronisms?”

  “The writers. Those who, at the end, edited the Bible we have now.” Which is where the real controversy begins.

  In 1800 the Bible was regarded by much of the world to be true, the unchallenged word of God. The Pentateuch, in particular, was written by Moses; the stories were historically accurate, the con
tents divine. In the course of the nineteenth century, this view came under relentless scrutiny. In one of the momentous intellectual revolutions of the last two centuries, a series of European and American scholars, working in the novice fields of literary criticism and archaeology, removed the Bible from its untouchable heights and planted it firmly in history.

  The first area for exploration was authorship. Studious readers had long observed contradictions in the text. Events are reported in one order, then repeated in a different order. The Moabites are said to have done something; then the Midianites are said to have done the same thing. Moses gets the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, then at Mount Horeb. Also, events are described that Moses couldn’t possibly have known, like his own death. Over time, the rabbis had tried to explain these seeming contradictions, but some commentators refused to go along. Their views were hurriedly squelched. One eleventh-century critic was dubbed “Isaac the Blunderer.” A sixteenth-century scholar had his book banned; a seventeenth-century scholar was imprisoned. By the nineteenth century, an enlightened consensus emerged that certain tensions in the text could no longer be avoided: foremost among them, that God has different names. Genesis, for example, tells two different versions of Creation; in one the protagonist is Elohim, in the other it’s Yahweh.

  By century’s end, German scholar Julius Wellhausen compiled a number of these budding ideas into a unified theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, easily the most destabilizing doctrine in the history of the Bible. Using linguistic analysis, word frequency, even syllable count, Wellhausen concluded that the Bible has four separate sources. The oldest he termed “J,” for the German word for Yahweh, which was responsible for many of the narrative sections. The second source was “E,” for sections mentioning Elohim. The largest source comprised the legal sectionsandwastermed “P,” forthepriests. Alatersource, foundonlyin Deuteronomy, was called “D.”