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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
The most comprehensive and accessible introduction to scriptural art yet written Literary Study of the Bible: An Introduction approaches each book of the Bible (including several of the apocrypha) with non-sectarian literary questions, exploring the meanings that the Bible reveals when we read it like a poem, narrative, or play. As a unique hybrid of introductory guide, essential handbook, historical survey, and absorbing commentary, this book fills a gap in literary Bible study with its fresh perspectives on the biblical writers' many arts. Readers will engage in wide range of textual approaches and interpretive traditions through this broadly informed, accessibly written text. Dr. Christopher Hodgkins has taught Literary Study of the Bible for 25 years, over which time he has field-tested the many lenses--of genre, image, language, characterization, plot, and craft--used throughout this book. Tracing the sources, composition, and influences of the Biblical text, this book places the Bible in a tradition of ancient near eastern, Hebrew, and Hellenistic literary art, giving new depth to the way we understand the familiar stories of scripture. Unlike other literary introductions to the Bible, this book uniquely combines these elements: * Approaches the Bible as a richly collaborative and coherent work of literary art, exploring how earlier books influence the creation and interpretation of later ones * Provides illuminating commentary supplemented by explanatory textboxes, maps, illustrations, and study questions to enhance interest and expand learning * Introduces poetic and narrative devices like doubling, juxtaposition, and irony within the context of scriptural art and editorial design * Gives extensive attention to each biblical book, resulting in the most comprehensive introduction to literary Bible study to date * Presents these materials through an accessible and lively text permeated with references to both high and popular culture Literary Study of the Bible will be a welcome addition to personal, school, college, and congregational libraries, as well as an excellent text for students of the Bible in both secular and faith-based settings.
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Seitenzahl: 1447
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Preface
Literary Study of the Bible: And the Word Became Text
Acknowledgments
Part I: Beginning
1 “The Dream Was Doubled”: Reading Like a Hebrew
1.1 Seeing Deep and Whole: Stereoscopic Vision
1.2 Tabernacles for the Sun: Biblical Genres
Questions for Discussion
2 “In the Scroll of the Book”: Composition and Canonicity
2.1 The Documentary Hypothesis: Its Origins, Assumptions, and Evolution
2.2 New Testament Sources: “Q” and A
2.3 “In His Hand Was a Measuring Rod”: Community, Councils, and Canons
2.4 Literary Study of the Bible: A Way Forward
Questions for Discussion
Part II: The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/
Tanakh
3 Hebrew Poetry: Deep Calls to Deep
3.1 “In the Great Congregation”: The Many Voices of Psalms
3.2 Love Strong as Death: The Song of Solomon
Questions for Discussion
4 Wisdom Literature: Understanding Their Riddles
4.1 “Take Hold of Her”: Wisdom and Desire in Proverbs
4.2 “Enjoy Your Toil”: The Counter‐Wisdom of Ecclesiastes
Questions for Discussion
5 Origin Narrative I: Divine Images in Genesis
5.1 Biblical Narrative Style: The Elements
5.2 Day of Days: Creation in Stereoscope
5.3 Nakedness and Knowledge: Deception, Folly, Fall, and Curse
Questions for Discussion
6 Origin Narrative II: Patriarchy and Its Discontents in Genesis
6.1 “Arc” of the Covenant: The Story of God's Contracts
6.2 Warts and All: Abraham and Anti‐Patriarchal Patriarchy
6.3 “The Older Shall Serve the Younger”: Against Primogeniture
6.4 “What Will Become of His Dreams”: Joseph and His Brothers
Questions for Discussion
7 Biblical Epic I: Making the Nation in the Pentateuch
7.1 Mosaic Epic: The Priestly Kingdom
Questions for Discussion
8 Heroic Narrative: Remaking the Hero in Joshua, Judges, and Ruth
8.1 Joshua's Conquest: Taking the Promised Land
8.2 “When the Judge Was Dead … They Reverted”: Cycles of Decay in Judges
8.3 “Famous in Bethlehem”: Ruth and Boaz, Local Heroes
Questions for Discussion
9 Biblical Epic II: Making the Kingdom in 1 and 2 Samuel
9.1 Saul's Epic Tragedy: “A King … Like All the Nations” in 1 Samuel
9.2 David's Epic Tragicomedy: A Sure House, a Lasting Covenant in 2 Samuel
Questions for Discussion
10 National Narrative: Chosen Stories of Chosen People in Kings, Chronicles, Ezra‐Nehemiah, and Esther
10.1 Sad Stories of the Death of Kings: Kings and Chronicles
10.2 Return and Rebuild: Ezra and Nehemiah, Restorers of the City
10.3 “For Such a Time as This”: Esther in a Strange Land
Questions for Discussion
11 Drama: The Divine Tragicomedy of Job
11.1 Job as Primal Theater
Questions for Discussion
12 Prophecy: Who Speaks for God?
12.1
Nevi
'
im
: Prophets Former and Latter, Major and Minor
12.2 The Major Prophets: Isaiah Through Daniel
12.3 The Minor Prophets: “The Day of Small Things”
Questions for Discussion
Part III: The New Testament/New Covenant
13 Gospel Narrative: Kingdom Coming
13.1 Make It New: Another Covenant
13.2 “A House Divided”: Intertestamental Developments and Religious/Political Parties in Jesus' Day
13.3 Synoptic and Johannine: Stereoscopic Vision Revisited
13.4 “Tell No Man”: The Messianic Secret
13.5 Gospel vs. Biography: Chosen Stories of the Chosen One
Questions for Discussion
14 Epistle: Divine–Human Correspondence
14.1 Sent to the Nations: Pauline Epistles
14.2 General Epistles: Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude
14.3 Johannine Epistles: “God is Love”
Questions for Discussion
15 New Testament Apocalypse: Kingdom Come
15.1 Little Apocalypses: The Gospels and Epistles
15.2 “An Angel Standing in the Sun”: The Brilliant Difficulties of Revelation
15.3 Full Circle: A Tree in a Garden
Questions for Discussion
Appendix 1: Suggestions for Further Reading
Appendix 2: Boxes and Illustrations
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Literary Study of the Bible
An Introduction
Christopher Hodgkins
This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Hodgkins, Christopher, 1958– author.Title: Literary study of the Bible : an introduction / by Christopher Hodgkins.Description: 1 [edition]. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2018049406 (print) | LCCN 2019002179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118604502 (AdobePDF) | ISBN 9781118604496 (ePub) | ISBN 9781444334951 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Bible–Criticism, interpretation, etc.Classification: LCC BS511.3 (ebook) | LCC BS511.3 .H63 2020 (print) | DDC 220.6/6–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049406
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © The William Blake Archive/Wikimedia Commons—“Jacob’s Ladder”
To George
Tolle lege
Preface
Literary Study of the Bible: And the Word Became Text
What is “literary study of the Bible”? More to the point, what is “literary study”? First and foremost, it means attention to form and imagination; that is, a focus on the shapes that we give to our written songs and annals, our arguments and tales – and on the images that animate them. Thus “literary study” means observing the types and traditions of writing; noting the changes that writers and their word‐pictures ring on these traditions; listening to the figures and sounds of language; and scrutinizing the effects of these variations on hearers and readers. Add to these elements the storytelling devices of characterization and plot, the atmospheric considerations of tone and mood, and the perennial questions of subject matter and theme, and one has a reasonable sense of what literary study entails. It explores the mysterious space between imaginative adoption and adaptation, and thus it is not an exact science.
Speaking of science, the oldest recorded use of the word “literary” occurs in 1605, in Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the first programmatic description and defense of what he called “natural philosophy” and what we now call “the scientific method.” This means that the terminology of the specifically “literary” is twin‐born with the great empirical project that distinguishes between the imaginary and the factual, the humane and the technical, the fantastic and the real. Yet in 1605, Bacon sees the literary and empirical not as conflicting but as complementary, as two deeply important kinds of scientia, or “science” – that is, of knowledge. Indeed, for the father of empiricism, the “literary,” far from being an illusion destined to be dispelled by the long march of science, is instead the summation and goal of science itself, virtually synonymous with all “knowing”: for, he says, the “literary” is that “which doth most show the spirit, and life of the person.” As much as empirical experiment may expose and describe the splendid machinery of life, says Bacon, the point of this machinery is to support human personality. So if we are to know persons, to know spirits – to know souls – we must look to the literary. Without it, Bacon writes, natural and civil history are effectively blind, like “Polyphemus with his eye out” – and a Cyclops has no eye to spare.1 To leap from Homer to Jesus, “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23).
Having invoked the New Testament, what then do we say about “literary study of the Bible”? If we moderns (and now post‐moderns) often hear the comparison of the literary and the scientific as an opposition between fancy and fact, we also sometimes hear “the Bible as literature” as either a rejection or as a stratagem – that is, either as a pretext for dismissing or ignoring the Bible's pervasive truth claims and religious content, or as an excuse for proselytizing on their behalf. In other words, in the ears of many, “the Bible as literature” registers as “the Bible as mere literature,” with “literature” meaning fantasy or legend rather than reality; or, on the other hand, as “the Bible treated as great literature for stealth evangelism.”
What both of these rather jaded responses have in common is their despair of any way in which people with truly diverse beliefs and backgrounds can approach an open, respectful, responsible study of the Judeo‐Christian scriptures – either the secularists fear that the evangelists will try to hijack the discussion, or the religious folk worry that the Word of God will be disrespected and dissected as just another “text.” It's not difficult to understand either reaction, for the Bible is both uniquely beloved and highly alarming. No other ancient book is so continuously contemporary in the modern world as the Bible, a runaway best‐seller for centuries; no other old book is so intimately familiar, or so excessively strange, often to the same readers; and readers bring to this book, more than to any other set of literary writings, their strong preconceptions about what the text says and how to understand it. Furthermore, even in our supposedly secular age, presidents and jurors are not sworn in on Moby‐Dick, and people generally have not been willing to die (or to live) for Pride and Prejudice. Thus, for many the Bible is a culturally threatening and frightening book, too often used as a weapon; while for many the Bible contains the authoritative Word of God, the fountain of joy, the waters of Life itself for many others, perhaps most, the Bible is a little of both. Thus, few who open a Bible are indifferent to it.
So what, after all, does it mean when the Word becomes “text”? That is, what happens when the professed words of God Almighty come down and dwell among us where they can be put to the question, like words in a play or poem or story? The answer is that, with the right combination of contextual knowledge, ideological humility, and interpretive care, much richer understanding can emerge. While it is worthwhile to approach the Bible with many other devotional and academic methods, our approach in this textbook will be to ask consciously “literary” questions about form, language, characterization, poetic craft, and imaginative tradition – and to contextualize these questions with what can be solidly known (rather than speculatively guessed) about the texts' composition and history. Some devout Bible readers may be concerned that such a focus on human means may obscure the divine ends of these sacred writings; more secular readers may be unsettled that we will find a good deal more textual integrity and complementarity in and among the Bible's books than do many current theorists. Some believers will be disturbed that I don't endorse any one doctrinal system for interpretation, while some skeptics will worry that I decline to refute or criticize the obvious supernaturalism of nearly all the biblical writers.
My response to all such concerns is that the first responsibility of literary interpretation is to interrogate the text as we have it, and to give the original writers and audiences the basic human courtesy of consulting their points of view before imposing our own. No doubt there will be time to correct, to doubt, or to disagree, just as there will be time to endorse, to affirm, or to embrace. But first we need to know, fully and fairly, just what we are choosing to dismiss or to believe. As for the concern that we murder the text to dissect it: anatomy is not merely or necessarily the dismembering of the dead. Indeed, the best and most revealing kind of anatomical study “re‐members” the interrelations of vital organs in sustaining the growth and movement of an animate organism – very much alive on the hoof or on foot or on the wing. Similarly, to note that a psalm is made of words and rhythms and parallels and figures and stanzas isn't to leave it flayed like a disarticulated bird, but to re‐experience wonder every time the living poem takes flight anew in the reader's eye and ear.
How, then, can literary study of the Bible advance our learning? First, of course, as one of the world's foundational cultural texts, the Bible is an imaginative source book for countless references to come, from Fiat Lux and Noah's dove, through “let my people go” and Goliath's head, to the Moneychangers and the Prodigal Son and the City Foursquare. We will trace the Bible's literary influences on confessional writing and Dante's cosmology, Arthurian chronicle and King Lear, metaphysical poetry and Goethe's Faust. We will draw lines connecting Genesis and Jefferson, Moses and Martin Luther King, Gideon and Churchill, Samson and Shane, Job and George Bailey, David and Dylan. We'll attend to Founding Mothers, Warrior Women, Domestic Heroines, Seductresses, and Redeemed Courtesans from Eve, Sarah, Rahab, and Deborah, to Ruth, Jezebel, the Magdelene, and Mary – not forgetting the Whore of Babylon and the Bride of Christ.
Second, we'll consider the Bible's many books as embedded in a network of pan‐Mediterranean and Afro‐Eurasian cultures stretching back 7000 years, finding echoes of the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh in Genesis, drawing comparisons between Hammurabi and Exodus and Akhenaten, hearing anticipations of the Psalms and Canticles in Egyptian love lyrics, and foreshadowings of Homer in the Davidic epic of 1 and 2 Samuel; and we'll discover the roots of Gospel narrative in Hebrew chronicle, of New Testament theological letters in workaday Greco‐Latin epistles, and of Revelation's famed symbology in Old Testament apocalyptic prophecy.
But third, we'll advance our learning by not only attending to Bible legacies and sources, but also to the Bible's unparalleled range of characterization, setting, style, and theme. Far from being a monotonous monotheistic monologue, this great book of divinity is a humanistic education in itself, presenting a dizzying diversity of voices, outlooks, and circumstances far surpassing Shakespeare and Dickens. This range begins in the opening chapters of Genesis, with its doubled creation accounts, and appears in the line‐by‐line variety of Hebrew parallel poetry, and in the famed reticence of biblical narrative style, which portrays different motives and outcomes with shockingly little judgment – so that, as Mark Twain puts it, the story “seems to tell itself.” No ancient book, or anthology of books, invites us to consider such varied ethical and personal perspectives, and yet no book is better known for its ultimate moral and cosmic certainty. If by “literary” we mean, with Bacon, that “which doth most show the spirit, and life of the person,” then the Bible is “literature” par excellence.
Perhaps this is partly why that founding empiricist held an opinion of biblical authority probably shocking to our contemporary ears. Like the next generations of experimental researchers to come after him, from William Harvey through the Royal Society's founders and Isaac Newton, Bacon saw the Bible both as the foundation and the ultimate goal of this accumulation of “literary,” humane learning. Trusting in the design and ordained laws of the Creator, Bacon and his disciples sought to think God's thoughts after him, confident that discovery was also a kind of “recovery” of forgotten truth, a rolling back of sin's curse and an advancement of human flourishing that would, paradoxically, take humanity back to the future in a kind of Paradise regained.
It is now, of course, common to hear the Bible spoken of as superseded and even replaced by the research machinery that Bacon wrought. Humanity still seeks some kind of Paradise, but we are told that it will be regained, or gained, by cumulative human means; indeed, in this view, true Paradise can only come when humans fully rely on their own rigorously tested insight, end a childish dependence on the gods, and stand forth to “know good and evil” on their own, and thus merit the optimistic self‐imposed title “Homo sapiens,” “wise men.” Yet that very language should bring us up with a start, for the Bible writers anticipated it thousands of years ago, whether in Genesis (“you shall be as gods”) or in Ecclesiastes (“adding one thing to another to find out the reason”) or in Romans (“professing to be wise”). Somehow, even when we would escape biblical ideas, we find ourselves repeating them, even if many follow these themes to different conclusions.
Perhaps ironically, while many reject the relevance of biblical “divinity” on scientific grounds, others question the worth of the “humanities,” as well. Certain ardent advocates of the empirical project see their work not as complementary to the literary, but rather as essentially competitive with it, increasingly dismissing “the humanities” as at best a passing amusement, and at worst a wasteful distraction – useful not as ends in themselves, but only to be admitted on utilitarian terms, as promoters and handmaids of technological and material progress. Newspaper opinion pages and online response sites regularly teem with debates over the relative value to society of projects empirical and humanistic, some arguing that just as God (or the concept of God) “died” in the 1960s, so “humanity” (or the concept of humanity) is dying now, in order to make room for some new human–technological hybridity that will own the future. Ironically, a devaluation of “humanistic” learning, once primarily the theme of religious fundamentalists, has now become a goal of some atheist materialists.
While the full range of these philosophical and theological arguments is beyond the scope of this literary textbook, I would say two things in drawing this preface to a close: first, that, whatever we believe about the Bible's claims for itself, biblical images and categories of thought are more relevant than ever, as we all seem to be drawn irresistibly to language of “knowing the end from the beginning,” of seeking a new “Genesis” of “redemption” and even “salvation” by remaking the world “in our image” in order to prevent the “Apocalypse” and somehow return to the “Garden.” But second, we will remember Bacon's warning: if the “empirical” is one eye and the “literary” the other, we should beware lest in putting out the “unnecessary” eye we make ourselves as blind as Polyphemus. For really, there are no unnecessary eyes, if we are to see deep and whole.
Such a multiplicity of perspective informs this textbook's very structure. First, the reader will find a kind of “peripheral vision” represented by a series of boxes that periodically illuminate particular linguistic, historical, geographical, or cultural details in order to enrich the main flow of discussion without disrupting it. Second, each chapter ends with “hindsight,” raising a series of questions for further exploration and discussion, reflecting back on the main terms and points made in that chapter, and pressing the reader to consider larger implications and consequences.
And third, our literary approach means that our chapter sequence will follow central concepts and a variety of genres more than strict biblical book order. Thus, while Chapter 1 begins with Genesis, it quickly moves into a more general discussion of ancient reading practices, then itemizes inherited literary types as they appear throughout the Bible. This wide‐ranging overview segues into Chapter 2 on other preliminary questions of composition and canonicity, touching on varied hypotheses about the Bible's documentary origins. Full‐on discussion of specific Old Testament books doesn't begin until Chapter 3, on the most quintessential of Hebrew genres, the lyric poetry of the Psalms and Canticles, followed by Chapter 4 on the wisdom writing of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Having started in the middle of the Bible, it is only in Chapter 5 that we return to the beginning, taking up Genesis in depth by dealing with the elements of biblical narrative style, and with its highly condensed and multi‐faceted creation accounts, followed in Chapter 6 by discussion of patriarchy and its discontents in the rest of Genesis, and by the book's unfolding succession of divine–human contracts or “covenants.”
Chapter 7 takes up epic heroism as developed and modified in the life of Moses throughout the remainder of the Pentateuch, with Chapter 8 considering how the heroic ideal is further remade in the shorter hero stories of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. Chapter 9 returns to the epic genre with the sweeping sagas of Kings Saul and David in 1 and 2 Samuel, then Chapter 10 turns to the more episodic (and often tragic) national narratives found in the books of Kings, Chronicles, Ezra‐Nehemiah, and Esther. Chapter 11 pauses from prose narrative to consider the poetic and tragicomic drama in the ancient Book of Job, while Chapter 12 asks “who speaks for God?” and surveys the wide range of prophetic callings, modes, and literary forms evident in the “Former Prophets” Elijah and Elisha, and in all of the “Latter Prophets,” including the “Major Prophets” Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the “Minor Prophets” from Hosea to Malachi.
Moving from the Old Testament to the briefer books and letters of the New, Chapter 13 examines the political, cultural, and religious developments of the “Intertestamental” period, applying these contexts to the conventions of remade heroic prose narrative in the four canonical Gospels and the Book of Acts; Chapter 14 contextualizes the New Testament epistles, sampling and analyzing a representative variety of divine–human correspondence from the letters of Paul, James, Peter, John, and Jude; and Chapter 15 casts an eye on the dazzling difficulties of Revelation, measuring the fearful symmetry that structures its mighty vision; we scan the bewildering assortment of interpretive schools, but finally circle back, like the Apocalypse itself, to a tree by a river in a garden, where Genesis began.
With this end that is also a beginning, the Bible seems built to remind us that, in a world of partial sight and fragmentary experience, once is not enough. When the Word becomes text, truth takes “more shapes than one,” as Milton wrote, and it takes diverse vision – a kind of literary and textual empiricism – to “re‐member” these shapes and to see truth plain. So as our first chapter will show, “Reading Like a Hebrew” means learning to look from multiple angles. As old Solomon said, “two are better than one.”
Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations are from the New King James Version.
Note
1
Oxford English Dictionary
, “Literary,” def. 1. Bacon,
Advancement of Learning
, 2Bb3v.
Acknowledgments
Since this book is the fruit of a quarter‐century of teaching, many of my most prominent debts are to colleagues and students. James E. Evans, my first Head in the English Department of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, invited me in 1994 to develop a course in Literary Study of the Bible, and after my initial trepidation passed, I discovered that English 371 stirred the liveliest and widest‐ranging discussions of all my classes – which is saying a great deal, since my other courses engage the most splendid works of the Renaissance, from Thomas More and Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare through the metaphysical poets and John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Indeed, while I have benefited from a number of other texts and textbooks treating “The Bible as Literature” (see Suggestions for Further Reading), my roots in the English Renaissance inspired my book's unique design, for I begin all of my courses with a unit on lyric poetry – whether Shakespeare's Sonnets, John Donne's Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems, George Herbert's Temple, or Milton's Poems. So I elect to begin this book in the middle of the Bible, and of biblical literary history, with the Psalms. Each psalm is a “little world made cunningly,” and all of them nevertheless model many of the chief devices, characteristics, and themes of Hebrew literature. I have found that starting in medias res like the epic poets of old, by unpacking a few representative short lyric poems, is the quickest and most exciting way into the heart of the biblical imagination, and hope that the reader will too.
I also wish I could thank my late colleague Russ McDonald, “Shakespeare god” and unparalleled academic yenta, for first suggesting my course's potential as a textbook, and for putting me in touch with Wiley‐Blackwell Acquisitions Editor Emma Bennett, who over the course of the book's long gestation was joined or succeeded by Isobel Bainton, Ben Thatcher, Annie Rose, Sarah Wightman, Deirdre Ilkson, Manish Luthra, Jake Opie, Viniprammia Premkumar, and Camille Bramall. As to that gestation, many other projects have delayed the progress of this book – two monographs, four essay collections, one journal special issue, two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants leading to two born‐digital editions, and about a dozen conferences and symposia organized and presented – making my task feel at times, as Marvell said, “vaster than empires, and more slow.” I console myself that Moses took fifteen more years than I to arrive in the Promised Land.
But this gradual ripening has meant that virtually every concept, lesson, or example in the finished book has been tested and refined dozens of times in collaboration with the thousands of students who have explored the Bible with me over the decades. These students have come from virtually every religious persuasion, including “none”; from every continent except Antarctica; from scores of academic disciplines across the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities; and they have ranged from Sunday School and Hebrew School stars to biblical neophytes, and from the most enthusiastic literati to inveterate poetophobes. This very long “road test” means that while there are some great questions that this textbook does not presume to answer – usually questions of a metaphysical variety – there are very few questions and challenges that this author has not heard or addressed. Thus, my debt of gratitude to my students is practically infinite – hardly a page of this book would exist without them.
Special thanks are also due to some special mentors, colleagues, students, correspondents, and friends who have influenced or discussed or read this work in progress and thus have helped me to improve it (in alphabetical order): Brian Augustine, Beatrice Batson, Anthony Brogan, Neal Buck, Jason Crawford, Anthony Cuda, Sam Fornecker, Kathleen Fowler, John Gabel, Sidney Gottlieb, Malcolm Guite, Hannibal Hamlin, Andrew Harvey, Russell Hillier, Alice Irby, Bill Kellogg, Nathan Kline, Gail McDonald, Charles McKnight, Jeff Miller, Matt Mullins, Kenneth Oliver, Harrison Phipps, Stephen Prickett, Leland Ryken, Joseph Sterrett, Richard Strier, Louis Surprenant, Matt Wallace, Robert Whalen, Joan Whitcomb, and Helen Wilcox.
Many in my family have lived with and responded to this undertaking: my children, Mary, Alice, and George, for much of their lives; my father Royce and late mother Eleanor, in their repeated visits to my classrooms; my brothers Craig and Charles; and my wife Hope – my best friend and best editor. Consummatum est!
Part IBeginning
1“The Dream Was Doubled”: Reading Like a Hebrew
There probably is no more famous beginning than “In the beginning.” The Bible starts with a great and apparently cosmic claim: that there actually was a beginning; that the world and time don't just go around in circles or go on forever in all directions. But to open the Bible at its first book and to read with even moderate attention is to confront an inevitable question: at which beginning do we begin? Even the most rudimentary examination of Genesis quickly discovers not one but two beginnings; or is that two versions of the same beginning?
In Genesis 1 verse 1 we read: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” an opening assertion followed by the famous six days of creation, culminating in the apparently simultaneous creation of male and female humanity, and followed by the Shabbat, God's Sabbath day of rest. Then, turn the page, and in Genesis 2 verse 4 we read: “In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” This “second start” is followed by the apparently sequential fashioning first of the Man from the earth and then of the Woman from the Man, in all of their naked, unashamed glory – and all in a “day.”
So naturally, a few questions arise, especially for the modern, uninitiated reader. First, why do we find the story of creation told twice? Isn't once enough? And second, why do these double accounts of the beginning appear to differ in apparently significant ways? If it's a question of multiple viewpoints, then how do we understand their relation to each other? Is this a case of seeing wall‐eyed through conflicting lenses, like a pair of poorly made glasses? Or is it a case of seeing stereoscopically through complementary lenses, with depth of field, for roundness, solidity, and perspective? In other words, in Genesis 1 and 2, are we seeing double, or are we seeing whole?
1.1 Seeing Deep and Whole: Stereoscopic Vision
In the Preface we noted the unique value of approaching the Bible through the conscious study of literary forms – with questions that focus on genre, characterization, figurative language, poetic and narrative structure, and the varied imaginative traditions that provided the contexts for composing its many books. In Chapters 2 and 5 we will discuss this perennial question of narrative doubling in Genesis more fully, but here such doubling can serve to illustrate the practical value of a specifically literary approach to reading the Bible. For what literary study attempts to do, first of all, is to discover a text on something like its own terms, and in the case of the Hebrew Bible, that means learning something about the imaginative equipment of an ancient Hebrew. “Reading like a Hebrew” means asking how the Bible's writers and editors chose structural and figurative devices to address their audiences' expectations and cultural habits of mind.
So, for instance, a literary approach to the twice‐told opening of Genesis seeks useful context by turning to instances of doubling elsewhere, and nowhere is such doubling more frequent than in the lyric poetry of the Psalms. The Psalms, for all of their apparently absolute proclamations, also display a high degree of deliberate repetition, contrast, and embellishment. No doubt the Psalms begin with a passage expressing a single, unequivocal viewpoint, without complication or qualification:
“Blessed is the man,” writes the anonymous composer of Psalm 1,
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
(1–2)
Here is one hallmark of the ancient Hebrew imagination emphatically on display – that is, the inclination to draw bright lines between right and wrong, good and evil, and especially between the righteous and the ungodly, and then to sanction these judgments in the name of one almighty God.
In fact, after the psalmist continues for a few more verses elaborating the rewards of the righteous and the miseries of the wicked, he sums up their likely futures in starkly absolute terms: “For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, / But the way of the ungodly shall perish” (6). Very clearly here, the way of blessing is the way of the Law, of walking according to the revealed will of a covenant God. To depart from that way – to “stand in the path of sinners,” or to “sit in the seat of the scornful” – is the way to destruction. So the one righteous way would appear to be single rather than double: keep the Sabbath holy, avoid forbidden foods like pork and shellfish, commit no murder, and touch not your neighbor's wife – nor shall you look at her. Keep the Law, in all points great and small, or bid your blessing goodbye.
So far, you may well ask what light this passage sheds on the contrasting perspectives of Genesis 1 and 2. The light is this: while Psalm 1, like Genesis 1, would seem to settle matters, it doesn't. In fact, we soon discover that there's plenty of room in the Psalms for other angles and for second opinions. If it's quintessentially Hebrew to lay down the Law once and for all, it's also quintessentially Hebrew to say, with Tevye the Jewish dairyman from the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, “On the other hand …” And the other hand for Psalm 1 is found, for instance, in Psalm 32, which is attributed to a formerly righteous man, King David, who now has killed his neighbor in order to take his neighbor's wife, and is starting to groan for it: “Blessed is the man,” David also begins – but how differently Blessed than the straight arrow of Psalm 1:
Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven,
Whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity,
And in whose spirit there is no deceit.
(1–2)
Like Johnny Cash's inmate in Folsom Prison, who “shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die,” David the psalmist had known better, had known the Law, but broke it anyway.
Yet in Psalm 32 David imagines the possibility that the Lawgiver God still has a soft spot for lawbreakers, and that the “ex‐righteous” can somehow become righteous again. So he ends this psalm by celebrating his recovered righteousness, as if it were a kind of recovered virginity.
Here then we see a second hallmark of the ancient Hebrew imagination clearly on display: if the Hebrews were inclined to draw bright lines separating the sheep from the goats, they also often crossed those lines and identified with the goats. If the Hebrew scriptures proclaim the absolute laws of an unchanging God, they also portray a God of second thoughts and second opinions, a Deity capable not only of monologue but of dialogue, and of compassion. In Chapter 3, we will consider the Psalms in greater depth, but even a quick look at the Psalms shows that the Hebrew desire for a second opinion, for alternate viewpoints and other hands, appears not only among and between poems, but is woven into the very fabric of Hebrew poetry itself, in the pervasive device of parallelism.
It's here that the Psalms' usefulness as context for the doubling in Genesis becomes clearer. Modern readers naturally ask, “Why can't the psalmists say anything just once? Why do they always have to repeat themselves?” And, true enough, the most distinguishing mark of biblical poetry, the genius of its structure, is its insistent line‐by‐line repetition, its parallelism. Parallelism is a kind of doubling, and is defined by Webster's Dictionary as “recurrent syntactical similarities introduced for dramatic or rhetorical effect.” Put more simply, Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme words, as English or French or Italian poets often do; Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas. Sometimes this “idea rhyming” is simply for emphasis, sometimes for contrast, and sometimes for development and embellishment. To put it another way, the biblical poets knew that there's only so much you can see with one eye, so they prefer two; and, perhaps paradoxically, when we look at the world through two eyes, we can see life in three dimensions.
One need only poke a random finger into the Psalms to find a dozen examples of such “three‐dimensional” poetry on every page. For instance, there's Psalm 19 (here in the New Revised Standard translation), which echoes the cosmic creation language of Genesis 1, and appropriately glitters with varied parallelisms:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard;
Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
(1–4)
To analyze these verses is to see how the parallelisms work to deepen, enrich, challenge, and complement each other: “The heavens are telling the glory of God” – this is the opening statement, which personifies the heavens as praising the Creator –
“And the firmament proclaims his handiwork” – this is the synonymous parallel statement, repeated for emphasis. “Day to day pours forth speech” – again, opening statement – “And night to night declares knowledge” – this is an antithetical statement, made for contrast. “There is no speech, nor are there words; / Their voice is not heard” – this opening statement, a triple parallelism, creates added emphasis, and dramatically contradicts all that has gone before, pointing out that one can't literally hear the stars. “Yet their voice goes out through all the earth, / And their words to the end of the world” – this too is an antithetical statement, deliberately contradicting the previous antithetical statement, in order to heighten the poetic paradox of God's voice heard clearly in the silence of the stars.
So far, then, we've noted that the two opening chapters of Genesis both duplicate and contrast with each other. We've also noted that the poems in the Book of Psalms employ the literary device of doubling, both among poems (as with the contrasting kinds of blessedness and righteousness portrayed in Psalms 1 and 32) and within poems, through the distinctive and pervasive use of parallelism (as in Psalm 19). Scholars generally agree that within individual Psalms doubling devices like parallelism work as deliberate literary art, so that the contrasts and apparent contradictions within a poem like Psalm 19 exist not just accidentally but intentionally, to produce particular poetic effects. In the case of Psalm 19, the parallelisms seem designed to induce wonder at God's mysterious silent language of the stars. The Book of Psalms contains the work of many different poets, writing over as much as a thousand years, and finally compiled by editors sometime after the Jewish return from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. At that time the Psalms were gathered and grouped together thematically into five books, imitating the five books of the Hebrew Law or Torah – a conscious and significant artistic arrangement. Scholars may disagree over whether Moses or David or Solomon wrote particular psalms, but they agree that Psalms is a composite book, a purposeful unit carefully crafted from quite varied sources.
Turning back to Genesis 1 and 2, we can apply some of the insights from our preliminary look at the Psalms to the more general question of “reading like a Hebrew.” First, an ancient Israelite would see and hear frequent duplication, contrast, and even divergent details as consistent with a high degree of intentional design; in fact such duplication indicated deeper certainty. Outside the realm of lyric poetry, later in Genesis, the prophetic patriarch Joseph speaks to Pharaoh about his repeated contrasting dreams of cattle and corn: “Pharaoh's dreams are one and the same … the doubling of Pharaoh's dream means that the thing is fixed by God” (Gen. 41:25, 32, New Revised Standard Version). Despite the obvious differences in detail between the cows and grain, Joseph announces that Pharaoh's dream was doubled to stress its unified truth. As with parallelistic poetry or musical harmony and melody, difference here is complementary.
The second insight from the Psalms that will help to shape our “Hebraic” reading has to do with the diversity of source material. Despite disagreements about the dating of Genesis, nearly all scholars agree that, like the Psalms, the first book of the Bible was composed using a number of earlier documents. A detailed discussion of this documentary hypothesis will have to wait for Chapter 2, but, to summarize briefly, the dominant academic theory holds that the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch – in other words Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – were constructed largely out of four older documents and put in their present form, like the Psalms, sometime soon after return from the Babylonian Exile. Many other scholars hold that there were as many as ten original source documents or histories (the Hebrew word is Toledoth), and that these were edited and combined about 900 years before the Exile – that is, soon after the Exodus – although the text was updated and stylistically tweaked over the succeeding centuries.
However, from an artistic and literary standpoint, the question isn't only one of when Genesis was composed, and by whom, but even more importantly why, and to what effects? To use some non‐biblical examples, it's possible to be moved by King Priam's begging of Hector's body from Achilles in The Iliad, or gripped by Odysseus' dramatic vengeance on Penelope's suitors in The Odyssey, although we know little about the poet Homer. Similarly, it's possible for two people to laugh out loud at the antics in A Midsummer Night's Dream or weep with King Lear while disagreeing over who wrote these two plays (though the evidence is very strong for Will Shakespeare of Stratford). In fact, it's precisely because these epics and plays are so intrinsically and enduringly powerful that we care about who wrote them.
In the same way with Genesis, questions of authorship and original documents aside, the book's double opening has proven to be an intrinsically and enduringly powerful combination – so powerful that for millennia it has inspired in its hearers and readers not only strong emotion and sharp controversy but unfathomable devotion. The unique majesty of this opening derives significantly from its stereoscopic form – its two‐eyed, three‐dimensional vision. To put it simply, then, what are Genesis 1 and 2 together designed to make us think and feel, and how does the passage work?
To answer these questions, let's consider the main differences and the important similarities between creation as imagined in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2. (For the sake of convenience, we will refer to Genesis 1:1–2:4a as “Genesis 1” and Genesis 2:4b–25 as “Genesis 2.”) First, the main differences:
Quite famously, Genesis 1 and 2 use significantly different divine names – that is, ways of referring to the Creator God.
Each chapter has a distinctive spatial perspective and center of focus.
The two accounts differ obviously in how much and what kinds of detail they report.
Genesis 1 and 2 have strikingly diverse chronological scales, and in some cases, apparently different sequences of creation.
Genesis 1 and 2 portray God creating with different methods and means.
If we elaborate on these differences we can begin to ask what they may mean. The original hearers and readers would immediately recognize the difference in divine names as important. Genesis 1 uses the generic Hebrew name for God, Elohim. In contrast, Genesis 2 refers throughout to Yahweh Elohim, often rendered “LORD God” or “Jehovah God” in English Bibles, to designate God's covenant name with the Hebrew people. In other words, the generic divine name Elohim instantly cues to the Hebrew reader Genesis 1's emphasis on the Creator's universal power over all peoples and nations, while Yahweh Elohim cues Genesis 2's stress on the Creator's particular relations with chosen persons and chosen nations.
In a similar way, the opening phrase of each creation account signals to the attentive reader a unique spatial perspective and center of focus for each chapter. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (1); this italicized phrase puts us in the heavens first, and suggests a panoramic vista, a transcendent and lofty point of view – as if we were hovering high with the Spirit of God looking down over the swelling scene. In contrast, when the second creation account begins with Genesis 2:4b “In the day when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,” the earth‐first ordering in italics puts our feet on the ground, and hints at a smaller‐scale world of close‐up personalities, intimate exchanges and conversations, an immanent point of view looking from a sheltered garden upward into the lofty skies.
It follows, then, from these contrasting divine names and spatial relations that the two accounts would differ in how much and what kinds of detail that they report, though not in ways that would necessarily indicate contradiction to a Hebrew reader. Genesis 1, with its transcendent outlook, provides a symmetrical schema of harmonious design, as the six creative days unfold like a pageant. First we encounter the form and setting, and then the creatures to fill the form: light, sky, and landscape on the first three days; heavenly bodies, sky and sea creatures, and land animals on the next three days. All of these creations are “very good” (31), we are told, and all crowned with a seventh day of rest. On the other hand, Genesis 2, in keeping with its close‐up and personal perspective, provides not a panoramic schema but instead the intimate details of warm human life. So we observe the names of local rivers, the yearnings of a lonely young man, a fascinating tree with a warning, and the outcry of love at first sight: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” (23).
This mention of the human creatures points out yet another divergence, evident to readers both in English and in Hebrew: the apparent chronological and sequential differences between the two accounts. Most obviously, Genesis 1 speaks of multiple “days,” while Genesis 2 speaks of one “day in which the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” (4b – the same Hebrew word, yowm, being used throughout). But even more importantly, the multiple days in Genesis 1 provide a crescendo that prepares the reader for the crowning climax of the creation: humanity. The human pair, male and female, are created together on “the sixth day” in God's image, placed in the midst of the creation, and given dominion over everything in heaven, earth, and sea. In contrast, on the single creative “day” mentioned in Genesis 2, the order of creation doesn't seem as important. That is, it's hard to tell whether the man is made before the plants and animals, or after them. Also, the human “dominion” of Genesis 1 is expressed here in humbler terms: the Man (adam/iysh) and Woman (ishshah) of Genesis 2 are seen as caretakers, placed “in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (15) more like happy sharecroppers than imperial viceroys.
However, despite the general indifference to sequence and status in Genesis 2, even a moderately attentive reader will see that one sequential detail is stressed: in contrast to Genesis 1, the LORD God clearly makes the Woman after he makes the Man, and He makes the Woman out of the Man – out of his side, it says, or more famously, out of Adam's “rib.” What does this coming last mean? Does it give Adam's rib – the Woman – dominion over Adam, as the climactic creation of humanity gives them dominion over all creation in Genesis 1? Does it imply inferiority to Adam? Or does it suggest that Woman is the completion of all things, neither from his head to rule him nor from his foot to be ruled, as the old saying goes, but from his side, as his partner? Thereby hangs a tale, to be taken up in Chapter 5.
This picture of the LORD God pulling a rib out of Adam's side and molding the bloody mass into a marriage partner stands in rather bold contrast to the more serene means of creation used by God in Genesis 1: that is, mere speech. In fact, the last of the main distinctions between Genesis 1 and 2 is in how they imagine divine creative power. Put simply, Yahweh Elohim, the covenant God of Genesis 2, is a God who gets his hands dirty in the red clay that becomes Adam (adam being Hebrew for red clay), while the exalted Elohim of Genesis 1 doesn't need to dirty his hands because he simply speaks, and it is. To put it another way, the Maker of Genesis 2 is a manual artisan, while the Creator of Genesis 1 is an artist of the Word, a poet or storyteller.
Which of these two creators is better? Which do you prefer? Theological questions aside, which kind of art is superior: a beautiful poem, or a beautiful vase?
And which is more important (to quote W. B. Yeats): “the dancer or the dance”?
And if you had to choose one eye to be put out, which eye would you choose? If these last questions sound increasingly silly to you, then you need to remember that well‐educated people have in fact been debating these biblical differences for centuries, especially during the past three centuries, as Greco‐Roman ideals of Reason, and Anglo‐Scottish ideals of Common Sense, and scientific ideals of Non‐Contradiction have been applied to the composite text of Genesis and have found it wanting.
Many analysts of the Bible will point to the different divine names, or the differences in spatial perspective, or the divergences in the details and sequence of creation, or the contrast between verbal and manual creation. They will speak as if they have discovered something truly shocking that the ancient Hebrew writers, editors, and redactors of the Torah somehow did not know. There must be some kind of accident here, it is said, because there's more than one creation story, and these stories are different!
So, before I turn to the similarities between Genesis 1 and 2, and then to my conclusions, I'm going to stick my neck out a bit and say this: No, the ancient Hebrews could not drive cars, or type. No, they could not do triple bypass surgery, or download a music file, or microwave their meals. And no, they could not fly to Manchester or Glasgow or Cleveland or Pittsburgh. Yet I will venture that they probably could tell when two creation stories were different, which means that whoever composed and combined Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 probably did so for a reason. And that reason, which should not be too surprising by now, is probably that these ancient Hebrews believed that the two creation stories together gave a deeper, richer, and truer picture of their God than either story could alone.
They believed in a God who kept his promises to everyone on the earth, and who kept covenant with special chosen people; a God of transcendent might and power, a supreme architect and designer, a commander of heavenly armies, who also liked to drop in for informal visits with his creatures and shoot the breeze in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. They believed that their God orchestrated creation to honor humanity as his representatives and to give them dominion, and that he expected them to exercise their dominion with the humility of hired hands. And they believed in a God who could make or unmake everything with his Word, yet who also loved to lay his hands on the earth and on Adam, to fashion him and fill him with longings for love and friendship – and then to fulfill his longings by giving him a lover and friend. In short, the composers of Genesis believed that when looking into deep and complex things, it's better to use both eyes and to see all sides.
I've been giving what amounts to a defense, not of a particular religious creed or of a specific biblical interpretation, but of a distinct state of mind, that of stereoscopic, three‐dimensional reading. Such a literary approach values the truth, but it knows, as John Milton wrote in Areopagitica, that truth comes “in more shapes than one.” If textual difference and complexity are not necessarily embarrassments but are often enrichments, it might seem almost unnecessary to note the many ways in which Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 resemble each other:
Although the
Yahweh Elohim
of Genesis 2 is God's covenant name in dealing with the Hebrews, the more universal
Elohim
of Genesis 1 is a maker and keeper of covenants as well, including the very Hebrew‐sounding covenant of seventh day “Sabbath” rest with all creation.
Although Genesis 1 and 2 vary in their heavenly or earthly focus, both chapters imagine God's creation as comprehensive, encompassing both the heavens and the earth, both the earth and the heavens.
Both creation accounts portray the Creator as concerned with the “goodness” – the wholeness and fullness – of his creation; in the case of Genesis 1, he expresses this concern positively through the repeated refrain, “and he saw that it was good” (12, 18, 25, 31), and in the case of Genesis 2, he expresses this concern negatively when he says of Adam's single state, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (18).
Although the Genesis 1 language of “having dominion” differs from the Genesis 2 language of “tilling and keeping,” both creation stories agree that the Creator intends humans to manage the earth under divine authority, and both agree that work was part of the originally good order of things.
