The Bible for Grown-Ups E-Book

Simon Loveday

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Loveday's case is that the mantle of historical truth and divine authority has placed upon the Bible an intolerable weight, crushing it as a creative work of immense imaginative and inspirational power. His argument is both fascinating and persuasive.' Matthew Parris The Bible for Grown-Ups neither requires, nor rejects, belief. It sets out to help intelligent adults make sense of the Bible – a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out. Why do the creation stories in Genesis contradict each other? Did the Exodus really happen? Was King David a historical figure? Why is Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus so different from Luke's? Why was St Paul so rude about St Peter? Every Biblical author wrote for their own time, and their own audience. In short, nothing in the Bible is quite what it seems. Literary critic Simon Loveday's book – a labour of love that has taken over a decade to write – is a thrilling read, for Christians and anyone else, which will overturn everything you thought you knew about the Good Book.

Leseprobe

THE BIBLE FOR GROWN-UPS

THE BIBLE FOR GROWN-UPS

A new look at the Good Book

SIMON LOVEDAY

Published in the UK in 2016 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,

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ISBN: 978-178578-131-5

Text copyright © 2016 Simon Loveday

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset in Bembo by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

About the author

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One: The Old Testament

1.The structure of the Bible

2.The authority of the Bible

3.The historical context: the world in which the Old Testament took shape

4.The structure and purpose of the Old Testament: the mission statement for the Israelites

5.The Old Testament as history: what story does the Old Testament tell? And is it true?

6.The Old Testament as morality: what kind of god is God? What morality does the Old Testament teach? And is it ‘right’?

7.Who wrote the Old Testament? First attempts at a scientific reading

8.So – who did write the Old Testament?

9.Conclusion: if there is no single message in the Old Testament, what are its messages?

Part Two: The New Testament

1.The historical context: the world Jesus was born into (587 BC–1 AD)

2.The structure and purpose of the New Testament: the mission statement for Christians

3.The New Testament as history: is the story true?

4.The New Testament as morality: what morality (and what theology) does the New Testament teach?

5.The historical context (continued): the events of the 1st century AD, the world in which Jesus lived (4 BC to the early 30s AD) and the New Testament was written

6.So – who wrote the New Testament?

7.Who did Jesus think he was?

8.The New Testament: conclusion

Part Three: A Vision of Freedom

1.Is there a different way to read the Bible?

2.Three Bible passages: a literary appreciation

3.The sum of the parts: reading the Bible as a unity

Appendix 1: Books of the Old Testament

Appendix 2: Books of the New Testament

Bibliography

Notes

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Diagram 1. Writing, law, and power in the ancient world

Diagram 2. The rise and fall of Israel, I

Diagram 3. The rise and fall of Israel, II

Diagram 4. The rise and fall of Israel, III

Diagram 5. The rise and fall of Israel, IV

Diagram 6. Judea in the time of Jesus

Diagram 7. The so-called two-source theory

Diagram 8. Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem

Diagram 9. Fall and redemption

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Loveday trained as an anthropologist and a literary critic, teaching at UEA and Oxford. He also edited the psychological journal Typeface and wrote The Romances of John Fowles. He now lectures at Keele University and lives in Wells, Somerset. (He enjoys long train journeys.) He is a keen cyclist and former Chair of the Wells Festival of Literature.

For Sheena

PERMISSIONS

I should like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., for material from Awkward Reverence: Reading the New Testament Today, by Paul Q. Beeching

Faber & Faber, and New Directions Publishing, for material from ‘The Airy Christ’, by Stevie Smith

Penguin Random House LLC, for material from Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan

Victoria University in the University of Toronto, for material from The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, by H. Northrop Frye

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At various stages during the writing of this book I have been enormously helped by encouragement, advice, and detailed (but always constructive!) criticism, from a number of people, including Stuart Andrews, Roger Ashley, Michael Cansdale, James John, Gareth Jones, William Keyser, Bill White, and my editor at Icon, Duncan Heath. Tim Wood, of St Andrews Press, Kate Noble, and Chris Lee have kindly helped me with diagrams and design. All errors are of course my own responsibility.

PROLOGUE

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

(1 Corinthians 13:11)a

If you are a regular listener to BBC Radio 4, you cannot have avoided Desert Island Discs. A famous personality is shipwrecked on an imaginary island and asked to choose their eight favourite records. At the end they are offered one luxury and one book – in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare.

Desert Island Discs is not a religious programme, nor are its guests chosen for their religious beliefs. Yet the formula has not changed in over 50 years. Two books are felt to need no justification. One is by an author universally acknowledged to be among the greatest dramatists and poets who ever lived. But the other is … well, what is it exactly? Is it a work of faith? Then what use is it to atheists, or to believers in a different faith? Is it a work of philosophy, a guide to life? If so, what is the philosophy it puts forward? What are we to make of its frequent condemnation of non-believers? Is it Christian – or Jewish? Is it a set of beliefs? A framework of moral rules? Or just a collection of stories and poems?

Every Christmas, small children write their letters to Santa Claus to tell him what they specially want. As they grow up, children progressively lose their belief in Santa: we might be sorry to meet a four-year-old who did not believe in him, but we would be more troubled by a fourteen-year-old (or a 40-year-old) who did. There is a childish way of thinking about Santa – and there is Santa for grown-ups.

Every Christmas, the same small children in Western schools are carefully coached to act out the story of a child announced by an angel, fathered by a spirit, pointed out by a star, and born to a virgin. None of this – and very little of what surrounds it in the Bible – corresponds to our everyday reality any more than the story of Santa Claus: most of it, indeed, considerably less. Yet no one tells us how to make the transition from the innocent belief of the child, to a mature ability to get these stories into perspective.

There is a childish way of thinking about the Bible – but what is an adult way? What, in short, would be ‘the Bible for grown-ups’?

The intention of this book is not to break new ground, nor to be contentious. There is a huge amount of careful, thoughtful, and fascinating biblical research and scholarship from the past two centuries; but all too often it does not get over the academic frontier. This book seeks to make that research more widely known, in terms that the general reader can understand.

The book is theologically neutral. It neither requires, nor rejects, belief. What it tries to do is to help intelligent adults to make sense of the Bible – a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out. How do we approach the Bible, not with the naivete of the child, but with the maturity of the adult? How can we read the Bible with our brains in gear? The purpose of this book is to do just that.

Footnote

a. All quotations are from the Authorised Version, the King James Bible. Where newer Bible translations are more accurate, I have shown the amendments in square brackets.

PART ONE

THE OLD TESTAMENT

1. The structure of the Bible

The groundwork for this chapter was laid in 2011 – the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The radio was full of praise for the beautiful prose and the magical rhythm of that 1611 translation, which has become not only a flagship and standard-bearer for the English language, but also the best-selling book in history. The words of the King James Bible are woven into the lives, and the hearts, of many of us who went to Church schools, grew up with Anglican services, and sang its psalms. Weddings bring us its message of love, funerals its words of consolation and hope. But there is a remarkable omission from all this celebration. The King James Bible is not an original work – it is a translation. What is it a translation of? What was the original, and how did it come into existence?

The Bible as we now have it consists of three parts: the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. (‘Testament’ here means a kind of contract; the Old Testament defined one kind of contract between God and man, the New Testament redefined that contract.)

The Old Testament – known to modern Jews as the Hebrew Bible – consists of about 39 books. (Catholics and Protestants recognise 39; other Christian denominations, such as Ethiopian and Coptic, recognise up to four more.) These were written down in Hebrew or Aramaic between about 900 BC (or possibly later) and about 160 BC. They were then translated into Greek and became widely available – to Jews and Gentiles – around the Mediterranean. The core of the Bible is usually regarded as the first eleven books (from Genesis through Kings, omitting Ruth). These books tell a continuous story and take the Israelites from the creation of the world through to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. For the Old Testament part of this book, it is the first part of this core – the five books known as the Pentateuch – that I will focus on.

The Apocrypha (from the Greek for ‘that which is hidden away’) consists of about sixteen books – again, different branches of Christianity vary in their precise selection – mostly composed in late pre-Christian times. The Roman Catholic Church accepts it as a part of the Old Testament and so of the Bible, but the Anglican Church does not. It does not have the same ‘canonical’ status as the other parts of the Bible, and consequently, though it is very stimulating (it contains, for example, the world’s first detective stories), I will not be discussing it in this book.

The New Testament consists of 27 books – the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters (or Epistles) of St Paul and others, and the Revelation of St John. It tells the story of Jesus and his followers from the birth of Jesus (somewhere between 6 and 4 BC), through his death around 30–35 AD, till shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was written in Greek between about 43 AD and about 120 AD, but did not take final form until the 4th century AD.

An obvious point that is often missed is that both the Old and the New Testament were written by Jews (with the possible exception of Mark and Luke), about Jews, and largely for Jews; virtually every major character in both books, from Abel to Zebedee, from the patriarchs to the prophets, and from Adam to Jesus, is Jewish. Given the long history of Christian anti-Semitism round the world, that is quite a sobering thought!

2. The authority of the Bible1

‘Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it … what thing soever I command you, observe to do it’

(Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32)

Christianity is a world religion: at the last count there were almost a thousand million Christians scattered round the globe. There is a huge diversity under the Christian umbrella, but we can confidently expect every Christian to share at least two beliefs: one, that there was a special person called Jesus who lived and died in Palestine 2,000 years ago and who sets an example that Christians must follow; and two, that there was and is a special book, the Bible, that has a particular authority and claim to truth for all Christians and indeed for all humanity.

The authority of the Bible is not just a matter for abstruse theological debate. The question whether justification should be by faith or by works – argued with reference not only to the New Testament, but also to God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:1–6 – was a major factor underlying Martin Luther’s departure from the Catholic Church in 1521; religious wars raged throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries over the question of whether or not Christ was present in the bread and water of the host (Matthew 26:26–28); millions of individual fates to this day have been determined by the restrictions on divorce, and on the remarriage of divorcees, drawn from Jesus’ remarks in Matthew 19:3–9; and the restrictions on ‘usury’ (lending money at interest) drawn from Leviticus 25:36–37 governed the financial life of Europe throughout the late Middle Ages.

These are not just historical influences. Nor are they confined to Christians – for Muslims, Jews and Christians all draw on a common body of Old Testament stories and characters, recognise Jesus as a historical figure, and describe themselves as ‘people of the book’. Homosexual behaviour, notably between men, is banned in many parts of the world by reference to Leviticus 20:13; drawing on Old Testament principles, the Qur’an forbids the payment of interest and has consequently given rise to ‘Islamic banking’ throughout the Arab world; and the boundaries of the Promised Land set out in Joshua are used by the modern state of Israel to determine settlement policy in Jordan and the West Bank. Even more striking in its focus on a single Biblical text is the continuing decision of the Catholic Church to reject contraception on the grounds that Onan displeased God because he ‘spilled [his seed] on the ground’ (Genesis 38:9).

Reference to Catholicism may make Protestants feel a little smug. This would be unwise. Catholics believe that the authority of Scripture is interpreted by the ‘magisterium’ of the Church: as a result there is a continuing process of re-interpretation of doctrine going on within the Catholic Church, expressed in a series of Papal encyclicals. Recent examples are the increasing attention and status given to women in the Catholic Church (for example, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus) and the way in which Catholics have reformed their attitude to and teaching on Jews. In these matters the Catholics are ahead of the Bible, which says nothing about Mary’s perpetual virginity (especially given that Jesus has a number of brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3)) and robustly blames Jews for the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:25, Mark 15:12–14, Luke 23:13–24, John 19:14–16).

By contrast, Protestantism arose as a rebellion against the way the Church stood between man and God; it has rested from the start on a conviction that men and women need no priests to interpret the word of God, and that all answers are to be found in the Bible. William Tyndale, who in the 1520s wrote the first translation of the Bible into English, remarked angrily to a fellow clergyman that ‘if God spares my life, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!’ Protestants depend on the authority of Scripture because there isn’t any higher authority to appeal to.

3. The historical context: the world in which the Old Testament took shape

The chorus of praise for the King James Bible often seems to suggest that the book was written in 1611 (and in English). But it was not.a The Hebrew Bible that we know as the Old Testament was not the product of one mind, nor was it the product of one time or even of one country (much of the Old Testament was written in Babylon, and the bulk of the New Testament was certainly written outside Palestine). There are four points of critical importance for an understanding of this element of the Bible:

the Old Testament is the work of a variety of authors over several hundred years;every word of the Old Testament has been copied and re-copied, written and re-written, edited and re-edited, many times on the way to its present form (for English-speaking readers, we must add translated and re-translated);Old Testament authors wrote within a social and political context, and with their own social and political purposes – which frequently included the fervent wish to take issue with another Old Testament author. The work cannot be understood without some knowledge of this background;paradoxically, we know more about those who wrote the Old Testament than we do about those who wrote the New Testament.

To start to understand the Old Testament, let’s begin by considering the world in which it unfolds. We have seen that its books were first written down between about 900 BC and about 160 BC. Some of the happenings described in the text (e.g. the events that take place in Egypt and are described in Genesis and Exodus) are presented as having happened some hundreds of years earlier; a few (the creation of the world described in Genesis, the Flood, the covenant with Abraham) are placed even earlier. But the majority of the events of the Bible are presented as having taken place in the first millennium BC.

To put that in context, Diagram 1 shows what was happening around the Mediterranean during that period.

By 3000 BC, Egypt was a functioning kingdom, the first Pyramids were being built, and writing was being used to record both sacred and secular information. There was a highly developed knowledge of mathematics for surveying, irrigation, and astronomy, a meticulous bureaucratic system of records, and a professional class of scribes to control the religious activities of the people of Egypt. There were long-standing trading relationships with countries throughout Africa and as far north as Britain (where the first circular ditch was just being dug at Stonehenge). Further to the west, in Sumeria, the Law Code of King Urukagina embodied rules of social justice, and the Epic of Gilgamesh set out a creation myth and a flood myth with strong parallels in the much later book of Genesis.

Diagram 1. Writing, law, and power in the ancient world.

By 2000 BC, writing was widespread round the Mediterranean. Sumeria had fallen, but the kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria were rising to power and competing with each other. A number of legal systems had been set out in written form, including the famous phrase, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ (from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi).

By 1000 BC, the moment at which the Bible stories start to intersect with events that can be authenticated from other written material, the Egyptian Empire was in decline, but other powers were on the rise (Assyria, Babylon, and Persia). The Greeks were beginning to expand across the Mediterranean (the Philistines, mentioned frequently in the Bible, are thought to be a Greek offshoot). The Minoan civilisation of Knossos had risen and fallen, probably because of the explosion of the volcanic island of Santorini around 1450 BC. Ugaritic (Canaanite) epics such as The Palace of Ba’al had appeared in writing and are thought to have influenced much later Biblical writings (Deuteronomy 32:7–9). And by 900 BC the Israelitesb themselves were living in two kingdoms – Israel in the north, with its capital first at Samaria and then at Shechem, and Judah or Judea, with its capital Jerusalem, in the south – which pretty closely overlap the modern country of Israel.

The Bible relates that those kingdoms were united around that time by the most famous Israelite king, King David, whose reign the Bible dates to about 1000–962 BC. The Old Testament books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles tell us that between 1000 and 800 BC, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah – united under David and his son Solomon, then divided by civil war under Solomon’s sons Rehoboam and Jeroboam, but always aware of a common language and a common religion – flourished both militarily and economically. The Bible recounts that the First Temple was built by Solomon with great magnificence; that alliances were established, many through marriage (Solomon was reputed to have 700 wives, creating in the process 700 political connections with other tribes and states); that trade expanded widely; that a professional army was built up, replacing the old tribal levies; that a network of cities developed; and that power was centralised in Jerusalem, capital of the southern kingdom of Judah.

However, this was also the period of growth of two mighty empires further east, in Mesopotamia: Babylon and Assyria. Israel and Judah were more powerful than their immediate neighbours and had overcome and swallowed up the small kingdoms of Moab and Edom to the east. But they were far out of their depth against the superpowers.

In 722 BC, after a series of attacks, we know from historical and archaeological evidence that the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, plundered its cities, enslaved many of its citizens, and resettled the land with a variety of peoples from different parts of their empire, in the process deliberately wiping out the pure worship of the God of Israel. (The new country became known as Samaria, and its people as Samaritans – the very same as we meet in the New Testament parable.) The refugees fled south to Judah. In the process they brought with them their version of the religion of their people, their versions of the sacred stories, and a heightened focus on what separated both the northern and the southern peoples from the different religious and national groups in the region.

Diagram 2. The rise and fall of Israel, I. The kingdom united under Solomon (c. 950 BC).

Diagram 3. The rise and fall of Israel, II. The kingdom divided: the northern and southern kingdoms, 900–722 BC. J and E authors begin Genesis, Exodus, Numbers. Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah create prophetic books.

Diagram 4. The rise and fall of Israel, III. The fall of the northern kingdom, 722–587 BC. The Priestly elements of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers. Jeremiah writes ‘Deuteronomist history’.

Diagram 5. The rise and fall of Israel, IV. The Babylonian conquest and exile, 587–536 BC. (Massive writing, collating, editing takes place in Babylonian exile.)

The religious systems around the Mediterranean overlapped to a high degree: from Babylon across to Greece, and from before 1000 BC right through to the Christian era, Ashtaroth (or Ishtar, or Aphrodite, or Venus) was the high goddess, Marduk (or El, or Zeus, or Jupiter) was the chief of the council of the gods, and there were constellations of lesser gods performing specific functions within the greater whole. More importantly still, the gods were relaxed about pluralism as long as the order of precedence was respected: when a country conquered another or forced it into a vassal role, images of the conqueror’s gods would be installed in the temples of the subject people to represent their control over their subjects.

By contrast, even at this early stage the Israelites were known by their neighbours as distinctively monotheistic. This was not completely true yet: the Elephantine Temple, set up by an Israelite community in Egypt in the 8th century BC, contained statues to a number of gods, and it may be more accurate to call the Israelites at that stage henotheistic (that is, believing that many gods exist, but their own god is superior). There are many traces of this belief in the Old Testament, and the constant tirades by the prophets against the worship of idols make it clear that the ordinary people of Israel displayed a regrettable tendency to spread their bets among a number of gods. However, within the territory of Israel and Judah, there was no room, officially at least, for any god but God.

The fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC was followed by the decline of Judah, the southern kingdom, as it became squeezed between Egypt on one side and the rising power of Babylon on the other. In 609 BC King Josiah was killed fighting against the Egyptians; in the next twenty years Judah was successively the vassal of Egypt and Babylon; and in 587 BC the unthinkable happened. After an unsuccessful rebellion, King Zedekiah was defeated by the forces of Babylon and forced to watch the execution of both his sons, after which he was blinded. Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple was destroyed, thousands of Jews were deported to Babylon, and many of the survivors fled – taking refuge, by a cruel irony, in the land of their old oppressor, Egypt. God’s chosen people no longer had a home.

Footnotes

a. ‘That the Bible was not written originally in English is a fact not always appreciated, and there are even now those who are unaware of it’ – New Oxford Annotated Bible, OUP, 1991.

b. It is not easy to find the right terminology to refer to the people who are now thought of as the forebears of the modern Jews. For simplicity I shall refer to them as Israelites or the people of Israel in the Old Testament and Jews in the New, with apologies for the considerable over-simplification this involves.

4. The structure and purpose of the Old Testament: the mission statement for the Israelites

‘Now the Lord had said unto Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee; And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”.’

(Genesis 12:1–3)

‘Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command thee this day: And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.’

(Deuteronomy 11:26–28)

The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible – ‘Bible’ being a translation of the Greek ‘ta biblia’, ‘the little books’ or ‘the scrolls’ – was written down well before the birth of Christ, and makes up well over half the Bible: and the Old Testament is not Christian. It was not only written by Israelites. It was also written for Israelites. In fact it is the mission statement for the Israelites: the assertion that they are the people chosen by God not only to be the moral compass to the world, but also to rule over it.

So what is in the Old Testament? The 39 books can be grouped into four categories, and we can sum them up as follows.

First are the five books known to Greeks as the Pentateuch, and to Jews as the Torah (often translated as ‘laws’, but better rendered as ‘instruction’). These books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – tell the story of the people of Israel from the creation of the world, the Flood, the covenant with Abraham, the exile in Egypt, the escape from Pharaoh, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the 40 years in the wilderness. They end when Moses, having led his people through the wilderness of Sinai, dies on the very border of the Promised Land of Israel.

Included seamlessly in this narrative sweep is a mass of law-giving of which the most famous element – repeated, with variations, on three different occasions – is the Ten Commandments.

This first part of the Old Testament tells the story of ‘how we gained the kingdom’: how the Israelites returned to the land that they believed God had given them, and the moral and ritual principles that were to govern their lives in that land.

The second group of books – Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles – are known as the Histories. These books – which are written in the style and form of history rather than of myth – feature such celebrated figures as Saul, David, and Solomon, and tell the story of the life of the Israelites in their newly conquered kingdom, from rule by judges to rule by kings, from unity to division, and finally to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the exile in Babylon. Put simply, it is ‘how we lost the kingdom’.

The third group is the Prophets. If the first two are ‘what happened’, this group of writers ask ‘why it happened’ – why things went wrong, and what the Israelites should do about it. Most of the prophecies were written at roughly the same time as the Histories, but are kept distinct from them (unlike the unashamed mixing of genres in the Torah) because they are of a different genre – much as modern newspapers seek, not always successfully, to separate news from comment. These are emphatically comment (and seldom news). The prophets – Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Jonah, and many others – consider the former greatness and present humiliation of Israel, explaining it as God’s punishment for the way the Israelites disobeyed the divine instructions. There is no falling away from the sense of a mission conferred on the Israelites by God: defeat simply strengthens the urgency of the need to understand the divine plan, and put things right.

Finally there are about a dozen books that do not fall into any of the three categories above. Some continue the historical account (Ezra, Nehemiah) in the world of exile and return; some are philosophical meditations on life (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes); there are religious and secular poems (Psalms, the Song of Solomon), and romantic tales (Esther, Ruth). Some of these are highly charged with religion; some (Ecclesiastes) explicitly deny that religion can explain anything. In the Hebrew Bible these books are simply grouped as ‘Writings’, which is as good a way of describing them as any other.

The date at which the Old Testament books were written bears no relation to their place in the sequence. Much of Genesis, which opens the Bible, was written after 700 BC, but prophets such as Hosea and Amos (respectively numbers 28 and 30 of the 39 books) wrote almost a century earlier, while the Oxford Bible Commentary dates the earliest element of the entire Old Testament, the triumph song of Deborah and Barak (Judges Chapter 5 – the seventh book of the Bible), to the 12th century BC, over 300 years before Genesis was begun. The sequence of 39 books that we have now (see Appendix 1) is the result of very careful editorial (re)arrangement.a

Finally, we should note that the Old Testament contains a full spread of genres and styles: sacred and secular, laws and philosophy, geography and genealogy, songs of praise and songs of love. As the Oxford Bible Commentary puts it, ‘we cannot assume that the writers saw any distinction between “sacred” and “secular” history’.

Footnote

a. The Old Testament as we have it now, Part One of the sacred book of the Christians, is as we have seen almost identical to the Hebrew Bible, the sacred book of the Jewish people. The order of the books in the Hebrew Bible is somewhat different, and there are some differences as to which books are included, but for the most part the early Christian Church simply took over the Jewish scriptures. In fact there are more differences between Christian faiths as to what should go into the Old Testament, than between Christianity and Judaism (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and Ethiopian Christians all have a different set of books in their Old Testament canon).

5. The Old Testament as history: what story does the Old Testament tell? And is it true?

The Bible begins with three great stories: the creation of Adam and Eve, the expulsion from Eden, and the great flood (Genesis 1–9). These stories, which refer to the whole of humanity rather than only to the people of Israel, are often (though not universally) regarded as mythical rather than historical truths, and I will not elaborate on them here. But they quickly give way to stories that do lay claim to historical truth; stories, not of the birth of man, but of the birth of the Israelites.

Genesis recounts that the people of Israel did not originate in Israel. It says that they came originally from the land of the Sumerians (modern-day Iraq – Genesis 10:10), and travelled to Canaan (modern Palestine) and thence to Egypt (Exodus Chapter 1), where they were enslaved. From there, by the direct intervention of God and under the leadership of the prophet Moses, they were released and after 40 years in the wilderness, returned to the Promised Land, the modern Israel (Exodus through Deuteronomy). This they invaded, putting its occupants to the sword and dividing the land among themselves (Joshua).

The liberation of the Israelites from servitude and captivity in Egypt has an importance in the Jewish, Israeli, and indeed the world imagination that it would be hard to over-estimate. The very word ‘exodus’ is instantly meaningful to people for whom the Bible is literally a closed book; the image of a suffering people released from slavery and guided to safety by a protective God resonates with us all. And it is usually taught, both in Christian religious groups and in modern Israeli schools, as a historical truth.

To fit it in with the chronology of Saul, David, and Solomon (around 1020–920 BC), the events of the Pentateuch are usually posited to have happened over the preceding thousand years: Abraham’s journey from Ur to Canaan about 2000 or 1900 BC, the descent into Egypt shortly after that, and the Exodus – after 400 years in Egypt – in the 13th century BC. But powerful, even universal, though this story is, we have to say that outside the Bible itself there is not a single shred of historical evidence to support it. Indeed recent historical scholarship actually undermines it even further.

To take a specific point: the Genesis stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – which the sequence of events in the Old Testament places around the 19th or 20th century BC – make frequent references to Philistines and Aramaeans. These peoples are well authenticated in the archaeological and the historical record – but not until the 12th century BC at the very earliest, and in the case of the Aramaeans, not reaching the height of their powers till the 9th century BC, a thousand years after their appearance in the Bible story. (To give a modern parallel, it is as if we spoke of the role of the Vikings in the fight against Hitler.)

The same difficulty recurs with camels. These are frequently cited in Genesis (for example, 12:16, 24 passim, 30:43) and Exodus (9:3). Unfortunately the historical and archaeological evidence admits of no doubt: camels were not domesticated until 1000 BC at the earliest, a thousand years too late.

But there are more powerful objections. The Egyptian state meticulously documented the events of the reign of each Pharaoh. Though there are records of nomadic peoples in Egypt, there is no record of the 400-year presence of a Hebrew people there; there is no record of a persecution of such a people; there is no record of a rebellion, or an exodus. Moreover the Biblical date for such an exodus – around the 13th century BC – throws up a further problem: at that time Palestine was an Egyptian province. The escape would have been out of Egypt, into … Egypt. The Bible story of 600,000 warriors, together with wives and children – a group of at least two million – travelling through a barren desert, is not merely improbable: it is supposed to have happened in a period well documented in Egyptian records, and it left in those records no trace whatsoever. The Biblical Mount Sinai from which Moses descended with the Ten Commandments has never been found, and settlements mentioned in the narrative – Pithom, Etzion-Gever, Arad – did not exist until centuries later. The rise of Biblical archaeology in the second half of the 20th century was expected to produce the evidence that is lacking from the historical record, but it has become painfully clear – painfully to many of those who sought such evidence – that it is simply not there.2 The first reference to ‘Israelites’ occurs on an Egyptian stone tablet dated around 1200 BC, but it places them already in Palestine. We have seen that Egyptian records make no mention of them in the Egypt of the time.

The next key event in the history of the Israelites is the capture of the Promised Land by Joshua: ‘Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I give to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast’ (Joshua 1:2–4). The bloody battles for that promised land – the defeat of Jericho and the massacre of all its inhabitants including women, children, and animals (Joshua 6:21), the conquest of Ai and the death of the 12,000 male and female inhabitants (Joshua 8:25–26), the massacre of every living thing in the conquered settlements (Joshua 11:11–14), and the overthrow of the 31 kings of that country (Joshua 12:7–24) – are followed by a careful division and allocation of the land between the twelve tribes of Israel and a rigorous instruction not to intermarry with the survivors of the ethnic cleansing (Joshua 23:12–13). Israel has come into its own: the Promised Land has been won.

Alas, this story, like the exodus that preceded it, finds no support whatever from the archaeological record. There is no evidence of a change of culture in the Palestine of the time; no record of mighty battles or of slaughter beyond the general run of small wars that were universal in the late Bronze Age; no sign of a decisive shift of peoples or movement of armies. Many historians (though with no support from the archaeological record) take a political rather than a religious view of the conquest of Israel, seeing it as a revolt by the Israelite peasants against their rulers; but whatever the theories, there is no support in history for the story in the Bible. Perhaps the Israelites were just one of the many tribal groups – Ammonites, Canaanites, Midianites, Hivites, Jebusites, Moabites, Perizzites – who lived in Palestine at that time. We simply don’t know. ‘The book of Joshua tells a powerful tale of conquest, supported by a God who showed no respect for most of the Holy Land’s existing inhabitants. Even now, the tale has not lost its power, but it is not history and it never was.’3

At this point the reader may be thinking that it is no great achievement to punch holes in the ‘mythical’ early part of the Bible: after all, most Christians no longer accept the literal truth of the Creation story, so why should they expect literal truth from the Exodus narrative? Most Bible readers probably feel – as I did – that when we get on to the ‘Histories’ in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles (the part of the Old Testament that recounts the rise of Jerusalem and the political unification of the kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon), we are onto solid historical ground. The style of the writing changes, the reference to historical places becomes more secure, the names begin to be familiar.

So it may come as something of a shock to realise that no more evidence has been found for the lives and the achievements of David and Solomon, than for the tales of exodus and conquest that precede them.

This is not for want of trying. Both Christian and Jewish archaeologists have sought assiduously in Jerusalem for evidence to corroborate the accounts in 1 Kings of Solomon’s enormous wealth, mighty throne of ivory overlaid with gold, and superb temple – constructed by builders hired from Lebanon, and covered within and without in gold. So great was his magnificence that when the Queen of Sheba visited him in Jerusalem she remarked: ‘I heard in mine own land of thy acts and thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard’ (1 Kings 10:6–7). Alas, ‘no trace has been found of that legendary king, whose wealth is described in the Bible as almost matching that of the mighty imperial rulers of Babylonia or Persia’.4 There are impressive traces from earlier periods in the history of Jerusalem: but in the time of David and his son Solomon, ‘Jerusalem … was more like a village’.5

As I shall seek to show in Part Three, the account by the Court Historian of the lives of Saul, David, and Solomon is a magnificent piece of writing. But history it is not.

Thus when we come to the big story – the core narrative – of the Old Testament, we find that its historical basis is pretty thin. What are the building blocks of this big story?

The story of Adam and Eve – no historical or archaeological evidence.The story of the Flood – no historical or archaeological evidence.The descent of the Israelites into Egypt, the Exodus from Egypt, and the wanderings in Sinai – no historical or archaeological evidence.The conquest of the Holy Land – no historical or archaeological evidenceThe events of the life of David (the fight with Goliath, the struggles with Saul, the seduction of Bathsheba) and of Solomon – the glories of the First Temple, the visit of the Queen of Sheba, the 700 wives, the massive international reputation – no historical, architectural, or archaeological evidence.

We should emphasise here that this ‘demythologising’ is as difficult for modern-day Israelis as for Christian believers in Biblical truth: the stories above provide for the state of Israel not only an intellectual justification, but a potent organising principle for the teaching of history, for the political life of the state, and for its military boundaries and policies.

6. The Old Testament as morality: what kind of god is God? What morality does the Old Testament teach? And is it ‘right’?

A close look at the Old Testament shows that morally it is a very mixed bag. Stick in your thumb and you may get a plum – or you may lose a limb! Consider the ten statements below. Nine are from the Old Testament; one is not.

‘Therefore thus saith the Lord God … because of all thine abominations … the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers’;