How should we read the early chapters of Genesis? [Moberly]

Moberly, RWL, How should one read the Early Chapters of Genesis?, from Reading Genesis After Darwin, OUP 2009, ed. Barton and Wilkinson

Two sentence summary. Darwin would only make a difference to how we read Genesis if we read the text at face-value, like creationists do; but tensions in the story suggest that it was artificially constructed from originally disparate narratives. A face-value reading is therefore wrong-headed, and Darwin should not make a difference to how we read the early chapters of Genesis.

1. The difficulties of reading Genesis at face-value.

1.1 Introduction. Certain kinds of face-value readings of Genesis 1-11 meet with difficulties. These difficulties were recognised a long time before Darwin by exegetes like Origen, whose work reminds us that Genesis was not always read creationistically. In a similar manner to Origen, Moberly undermines face-value readings by pointing out elements of the text that stand in tension with their context. (While Moberly focuses on Gen 4-9, the same sorts of arguments could be made for Gen 1-3.) It is possible to resolve all of the issues below; but it is much harder to resolve them and also do justice to concerns and form of the narrative.

1.2 Cain and Abel. The context is the outset of human life on earth, but the story presupposes the earth is populated.

• There are advanced divisions of labour (tiller of the ground/keeper of sheep).
• Cain deliberately kills Abel in the open countryside, i.e. away from settlements where no one can see.
• Cain complains about becoming a restless wanderer who will be killed if found, which is only an issue in a widely populated world.
• At the end of the story there is a reference to the building of a city (‘ir).
• Whence Cain’s wife?

1.3 Noah and the Flood.

• The story seems to have priorities other than historical realism.
• We hear divine soliloquies, and we hear them on the same level with everything else in the story. We hear nothing from Noah.
• The narrator has no interest in practical feasibility: what animals were on the ark, how they got there etc. (Though the narrator is very interested in the entry and exit from the ark, and the increase and decrease of flood waters, matters that don’t interest most readers.)
• The ark is impractical. Those inside appear to be in total darkness, since it has but a door (which God closes from the outside) and a hatch (not a window, otherwise Noah could have just looked out of it, instead of releasing the dove through it).
• After a year under the sea the trees would be indistinguishable from seaweed. They would not show fresh life (the freshly-plucked olive leaf) or be in a state to house a dove.
• The wider narrative context is written as if the flood never happened.
• The Nephilim are said to be ‘on the earth in those days and also afterwards’ (Gen 6.4; they appear again in Num 13.33).
• Cain’s pre-flood descendants are the ancestors of those engaged in certain pursuits, e.g. Jabal, ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock; Jubal, ancestor of those who play the pipe and lyre. The narrator is presumably referring to people known in his own time.

1.4 Language and drama. The perspective and convention embodied in the use of Hebrew language is characteristic of dramatic narrative portrayals, rather than of strict history.

• All characters in the story speak Hebrew, God and humans alike. For instance, the first human speech involves a Hebrew pun on ish and ishshah, man and woman (Gen 2.23).
• It is common among dramatic narrative portrayals (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays) for foreigners (e.g. Julius Caesar or Othello) to speak the language of the reader (e.g. English). The point of the story isn’t that God speaks Hebrew.

2. Moberly’s alternative to face-value readings.

• The story is composed of originally disparate narratives which were once located in the context of ancient Israel. But they’ve now been brought together and placed in a new context, the beginning of human history. The whole narrative sequence has been artificially constructed. This is why they stand in tension with each other, and with this setting. This is a common phenomenon in literature, and we need to take seriously the Bible’s literary character.
• The writers are juxtaposing certain archetypal portrayals of life under God to provide an interpretative lens for reading God’s call of Abraham and his descendents.

3. Consequences.

• The role of normal human processes in Genesis’ composition—literary conventions and the historical process of its composition—does not mean it cannot simultaneously be divine self-communication.
• If we understand the text as a narrative construction, Darwin makes no real difference to how we read the text.
• Darwinian biology does raise important questions though: what does it mean for an evolved creature to be ‘created in God’s image’?
• Belief in creation needs to be divorced from the modern idea of ‘design’, and the narrative’s own concerns with creation brought to the fore: creaturely contingency, responsibility, the difficult that humans have in genuinely trusting God as a wise Creator and living accordingly etc.

Private Ryan's added value

It’s never pretty when marketers unwittingly juxtapose the weighty with the unworthy. Sainsbury’s last Christmas advert was widely reviled because it evoked one of WWI’s most surprising, human moments, just to get people to buy bars of chocolate. Yesterday, when I was looking through my DVDs, I found something even worse.

On the back of the D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of Saving Private Ryan, the blurb begins promisingly. ‘In the last great invasion, of the last great war, the greatest danger for eight men… was saving one.’ Of course, this isn’t strictly true: their greatest danger was defending an important bridge, not saving Private Ryan. It is good English, though—very good, in fact. ‘In the last great invasion’ balances ‘of the last great war’; the syllables of ‘last’, ‘great’ and ‘invasion/war’ are all stressed, which makes them appropriately ponderous; ‘great war/invasion’ escalates to ‘greatest danger’; and ‘danger’ and ‘eight’ transition emotively to ‘saving’ and ‘one’. That sort of craftsmanship does justice to its subject matter. The next sentence continues in more-or-less the same vein. ‘The Saving Private Ryan D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition is a poignant and powerful homage to the soldiers of World War II.’ A phrase like ‘poignant and powerful’ is, well, poignant.

But this powerful paragraph is bludgeoned to bathos by the next sentence. ‘This epic film is now presented as a 2-disc DVD set, featuring all-new, never-before-seen added value.’ This is a triple thunderbolt, a concatenation of two synonymous hyphenated horrors and a degrading financial term. Craftsmanship is replaced with coarseness, and the commemoration of D-Day’s courageous soldiers is cheapened with the language of commerce.

It’s an issue of marketing. It’s fine to promote your wares with gimmicky language. There is a place for ‘never-before-seen,’ and even for ‘added value’—but that place is not on a Commemorative D-Day Edition; just as there is a place for a touching short about the Christmas truce, but that place is not in an advert for Sainsbury’s. Marketers should avoid these uncomfortable combinations: they sully the worthy elements, and make the trivial seem more trivial still.

Theological Consensus or Historicist Evasion? Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies [J. Levenson]

Chapter 4 from The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies, Jon D. Levenson, 1993

Two sentence summary. Biblical studies will not of itself lead to a useful dialogue between Jews and Christians, since its practitioners meet as historians, and not as Jews and Christians. Neither will it much benefit either Judaism or Christianity, as long as scholars restrict themselves to studying the bible’s history and ignore any relevance or contemporary application that the bible might have.

Introduction. Biblical studies aims to recover the original meaning of the bible by investigating the historical context of the biblical documents and their authors. A purely historical discipline, it requires its practitioners to bracket any religious beliefs they have. In principle, therefore, biblical studies favours no religion. This arrangement has benefits, but it also has both problems and limitations. In part 1, we examine the problem that Protestant scholars have failed to bracket their beliefs as the method demands, skewing biblical studies for the church, and against Judaism (1.1). We also look at why this is unjustified (1.2-3). In part 2, we look at a pair of limitations of bracketing one’s beliefs. First, Jews and Christians may meet as equals in biblical studies, but this meeting will not lead to any profound dialogue between them because they meet not as Jews and Christians, but as historians (2.1). Second, scholars restrict themselves to studying the bible’s history, ignoring any relevance the bible might have, and how it might be acted upon. They suggest by their disregard that neither the bible nor religious practice have meaning, and so harm both Judaism and Christianity (2.2). Levenson concludes (3) that Jewish and Christian scholars must maintain both intellectual integrity (from part one) and spiritual vitality (from part two).

1. The problem of scholars failing to bracket their traditions.

1.1 The results of modern biblical studies are skewed to favour Protestantism over Judaism. Examples include:

• Sympathies with the Northern secession. Scholars often sympathise with Jeroboam’ rejection of entrenched power and centralised worship because it lines up with their Reformation ideals, even though Deuteronomistic history considers Jeroboam’s secession a sin of the highest order.
• Indifference to the cult and postexilic books. Scholars aren’t very interested in the cult or in postexilic books because of their Protestant preference for word over sacrament, prophet over priest, and the spirit over institutional structures, especially those structures that suggest the Israelite religion’s ‘devolution’ into Judaism, the Judaism that Jesus overthrew.
• Languages. NT students are taught biblical rather than mishnaic Hebrew, even though the latter is more relevant to their studies. Not only so, but the same scholars who ignore rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic will still energetically learn 7th c. Arabic. And though much relevant academic literature is written in modern Hebrew, almost no scholars know the language.
• Christian supersessionism. Scholars implicitly support the idea of Christian supercession when they end histories of Israel after the defeat of the Jewish rebellion in 135 C.E.
• The boundaries of biblical studies. Scholars have assumed that there is a definitive break between the last book of the Hebrew Bible/OT and the following period of Qumran and Diaspora, even though there are other historically legitimate ways of cutting the pie (e.g. putting the break at the exile, and grouping Ezra and the rabbis together). They refuse to put biblical and rabbinic Judaism on a continuum because as Christians they believe that the history of Judaism underwent major revolution about the time of Jesus.

1.2 It is not the case that the results favour Protestantism because the method employed by biblical studies is essentially Protestant. Renaissance thinkers and Jewish exegetes got there before them, and Catholics and later Jews got there after them, all without assuming Protestant attitudes.

• The medievals and the Renaissance
• The medievals didn’t see the value in historical criticism because they didn’t think that the past was qualitatively different to the present. Renaissance thinkers, however, strongly felt the pastness of the past. By the 17th c., this feeling had evolved into skepticism about the eternity of the Bible, fueling the modern passion for understanding the Bible in its historical context. For example, Petrarch explored Roman ruins, collected coins and used them as historical evidence, and thought that laws had a historical context and not—as the medievals did—that law was something outside of time.
• The medievals thought that since the Bible is from God, and God is eternal, the Bible is not so much a historical document as oracular one, speaking to the present and the future. The Bible’s history didn’t matter to them. Renaissance thinkers, however, liked to evaluate historical evidence. The 18th c. successors of the Renaissance adopted this approach when studying the Bible, exposing supposed pseudonomy and discerning sources. For example, one the one hand, medieval Jewish exegetes doubted that Moses wrote entire Pentateuch, but didn’t care to consider when and by whom the non-Mosaic passages were written. On the other hand, Renaissance thinkers exposed a series of forgeries, most notably the Donation of Constantine. Nicholas of Cusa wrote a history of the Koran’s ideas, and discerned distinct three components or sources (one of which was Nestorian Christianity; another a Jewish adviser to Mohammed).
• From the 11th c. on, Jews increasingly preferred the basic sense (peshat), and were increasingly aware that the midrashic interpretations weren’t a source of valid exegesis.
• More recently, Jews and Catholics have joined the modern biblical studies and employed its methods, without adopting classical Reformation attitudes.

1.3 The method of biblical studies is at odds with the assumptions of Protestantism. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at the Renaissance humanist, Spinoza, and showing that Biblical criticism has followed Spinoza’s programme.

• The bible is like any other book. First, humans wrote it like they write any other book. The writings of the prophets and apostles aren’t unique, rather, revelation is universally available to all humans, as all human minds contain and partake of God’s nature. Second, humans can interpret the Bible like any other book. Just as they did not need Spirit to write the Bible, they need only Reason to understand it. Modern biblical criticism has followed his conclusions, even if it might get to those conclusions differently. For instance, Jowett, writing in 1860, argued that we should read the Bible like any other book.
• Spinoza denies the sufficiency and necessity of scripture, undermines its inspiration, and denies that one needs the Spirit to understand it: all core Protestant doctrines.
• The meaning of Scripture is therefore not God’s, but the author’s. To find the author’s meaning we must uncover the life of the author, his setting, the occasion of his writing and his adressees: biblical studies is now the study of history. If we discover that the real history of the Bible is different from the one that it claims, and we should give normativity to our reconstruction. His reconstructed history takes precedence over the Bible’s literary unity. Again, Jowett argued in 1860 that the meaning of the Bible is solely the meaning in the mind of its original writers and hearers.
• Spinoza undermines classical Protestant doctrines once again, not least inerrancy.

2. The limitations of scholars bracketing their traditions.

2.1 Jews and Christians meet as equals in biblical studies because they meet as historical critics. But in doing so, they don’t meet as Jews and Christians.

• The good.
• Given how poorly Jews and Christians have often related to each other, they should value this opportunity, and take the chance to correct their misconceptions of the other.
• The limitations and difficulties.
• As constructive as this is, Jews and Christians are still meeting only as historical relativists, not as Jews or Christians, and so biblical studies will not, on its own, lead to profound dialogue between the two religions.
• Some have suggested that Jews and Christians have found common ground in historical criticism; but they have really found neutral ground, ground on which neither the Jewish nor Christian religion is at home.
• Biblical studies requires that scholars with diverse religious beliefs become homogenous historians, a requirement that implies the distinctive elements of those beliefs (e.g. the cross) matter so little that they can be ignored.

2.2 Biblical scholars uncover the historical context of the Bible and its composition. These discoveries can be of enormous benefit to Judaism and Christianity. Yet they do so in a manner that suggests the Bible has no meaning, making their religious practice, the practice of others, or the lack of both, of no relevance.

• The good.
• Historical study can and does add vast depth and vitality to religious study of it.
• The limitations and difficulties.
• Scholars with religious convictions restrict themselves to descriptive history and ignore contemporary application. By talking about the Bible only in the past tense, they suggest that the Bible is irrelevant in the present; that it once meant a lot, but now means little. Many institutions try to resolve this problem by claiming that contemporary application is the theologian's domain: historians only recover what the text ‘meant’, and theologians interpret that ‘meant’ into what the text ‘means’. But this distinction doesn’t help, since it suggests that the Bible’s meaning is discovered best by people who investigate its history the least.
• Scholars parasitically rely on the very religious commitments that they ignore. Without the church or synagogue, theology would not be studied at universities; but very few biblical scholars study with those religious institutions in mind.
• Historical critics drive a wedge between the bible’s history, and its traditional or contemporary uses. Jews and Christians think that the past is related to their religions, and they may be right; but that relationship is only problematised by scholars who restrict themselves to showing how alien the past is. Scholars risk burying Judaism and Christianity, as each vanishes into the past in which neither had yet emerged.
• By merely dismembering the bible, scholars destroy its literary unity, and eliminate some of its ability to speak. Making the historical context sovereign, they assign its parts to different periods and schools, to different religions and theologies. What does Isaiah have to do with Qohelet, or the NT with the OT? If the bible were just a collection of fragments, this would not be an issue. But religious traditions hold that the bible is one book, with one coherent story developing through typology. The bible’s fragments speak as parts of a whole. This way of thinking about the bible is ignored by scholars. Nevertheless, it is not a useful solution to wholly drop historical criticism, and do literary criticism instead. While literary criticism looks at the Bible in its unity, Jewish and Christian literary critics will work from different Bibles (Tanakh/OT+NT), and will consequently lose the neutral ground and consensus of historical criticism. Christians cannot read the OT the same way after they have read the NT, just as the first ten books of the Aeneid will never be the same after the last two have been read and Turnus has been slain. Jews and Christians can identify with other’s context, but imagined contexts are only that, and at some stage the consensus of historical criticism is impossible.

3. Conclusion  and prospect: Jews and Christians must maintain both intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality.

• Conclusion. We saw in part one that it is valuable for biblical scholars to bracket their traditions—and that they have often failed to do so. Yet in part two we repeatedly saw that bracketing one’s tradition has limitations: scholars did historical criticism without also thinking about contemporary practice, or dismembered the bible without also considering how it might speak as a whole, or estranged tradition from history by focusing on history without also considering how it relates to religion. The problem is not historical criticism with its bracketing of religious beliefs: the problem is that these ‘without also’s undermine religious beliefs.

• Prospect. We determine, therefore, that practicing Jews and Christians must maintain both intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality. For instance, Christians must not only affirm that different books/chapters belong to different periods, but also affirm the meaningfulness and interpretative relevance of larger contexts (e.g. the rest of the canon), contexts that homogenise the literatures of different periods.

Redacting Rowan's redundancy

Rowan Williams’ Theological Integrity is almost impenetrable. So Delphic is its discourse that a professor at my university once warned a class of Masters students that they might have to read it five or six times to understand it. Rowan won this battle for incomprehensibility through a ream of means: he introduced concepts that he never defined, he made impossibly subtle allusions, and he gave us neither introduction nor conclusion. But his master stroke was to cram his essay with redundancy. Take this sickly sentence:

The self as liberated from the need to be in control of the transactions in which it is involved does not require the subterfuges of escape from direct conversational speech which constitutes the erosion of integrity already described. (38 words)

This sentence it is so full of needless noise that readers will struggle to tell which words are important. They must work out which one of the words ‘direct conversational speech’ matters, instead of just reading the word ‘conversation’ (a feat few find taxing). And when it taxes readers to work out which words matter, they will understand sentences and paragraphs fuzzily at best. By cutting the clutter, we end up with a much clearer sentence:

The self as liberated from the need to be in control of the transactions in which it is involved does not require the subterfuges of escape from direct conversational speech which constitutes the erodes of integrity already described.

The self as liberated from the need to be in control does not require the escape from conversation which erodes integrity. (21 words)

That might still be ugly, but it’s certainly not the linguistic bog it was before. All we had to do was delete superfluous words.

Let’s do this with a bigger body of writing, his opening paragraph.

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks "integrity"? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say — as a Marxist might — that eighteenth-century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economic relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they could not mean what an eighteenth-century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not — the objective direction, the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the "innocence" of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment. (235 words)

We’ll start with the gratuitous precision. When I read the third sentence (and it took some time), the feeling almost occurred within me upon reaching no less far than the half-way mark that I may not or otherwise will not ever reach the end, but end up getting lost and confused in a whirlpool of clarifications that don’t clarify anything at all. These nuances are so precise that readers will stumble over them without remembering or comprehending them. So let’s cut them.

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks "integrity"? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that a speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say — as A Marxist might say — that eighteenth-century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined its judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economics relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of on his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an this aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they know could not mean what an eighteenth-century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not — the objective direction, about the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the "innocence" of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment. (162 words)

That’s good, but we can do better. The first two sentences are really one sentence split in half.  When we combine them, we get rid of a lot of material. The final two sentences feel bloated too. We can deflate them by giving them a concrete character: us.

What makes us say of any A discourse that it has "integrity"? We can answer this in terms of whether a discourse if it is about what it says it is about. This is not to make a pronouncement on the integrity of A speaker is not necessarily dishonest, who may not if they don't know that the their discourse doesn't serves a the purpose other than what it it professes. A Marxists might say that eighteenth-century aesthetics was part of bourgeois cultural dominance, and that what economics determined its judgments was economics, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam on his compositions. Somebody perpetuating this aesthetic But today, when we know (according to the Marxist would say, we know) its determinants, would be dishonest because they know about the interest in fact served by the discourse serves. the aesthetic serves an interest, so we cannot perpetuate it honestly. The When we know a discourse is without integrity because it conceals its agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our we cannot say it innocencently, the "innocence" of the original speaker. (109 words)

We can cut redundancy further. We don’t need to know about ‘bourgeois cultural dominance’ to understand the example, and if we really wanted to pare things down, we could get rid of Johnson and Hawksmoor too. In getting rid of them, we can also slightly rejig Bach. And let’s change ‘eighteenth-century’ to ‘18th century’: it’s quicker to read, even if it adds a word.

A discourse has integrity if it is about what it says it is about. A speaker is not necessarily dishonest if they don't know that their discourse doesn't serve the purpose it professes. Marxists might say that economics determined eighteenth-century 18th century aesthetics was part of bourgeois cultural dominance, and that economics determined its judgments, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was lying, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam Bach lied about composing on his compositions ‘ad maiorem Dei gloriam’. But today, the Marxist would say, we know the aesthetic serves an interest, so we cannot perpetuate it honestly. When we know a discourse conceals its agenda, we cannot say it innocently. (85 words)

Finally, information about integrity is scattered throughout the paragraph, so let’s cluster things more carefully:

A discourse has integrity if it is about what it says it is about; it is dishonest if conceals its agenda, professing to be about one thing, but serving another purpose.  

People can honestly employ a dishonest discourse, as long as they don’t know it’s dishonest. Marxists say that 18th century aesthetics was dishonest because it was really about economics; but they allow that if Bach didn't know about that dishonesty, he could have honestly composed ad maiorem Dei gloriam. (80 words)

And there, in 80 clear words, is everything that Rowan said in 235 unhelpful ones.

We could improve things further. We might make the vocabulary more consistent; and we might have people, not discourses, doing things in the first sentence. But the point is clear: reduce redundancy, and you reduce obscurity.