What are etiological histories? Better, what are etiological stories? These questions have to do with the function of history in societies, and, in particular, with the way the Bible has been read.
An etiological story explains the reason for some state of affairs. Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, contains many examples of etiological stories, explaining that this or that creature acts or appears a certain way because of some mythyical event far in the past. One of the most famous collections of etiological stories is the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. (I have a copy from Weathervane Books, New York, reprinting the first edition, with 35 illustrations by the author.) I'm going to assume that all of us have read the Just So Stories, and you should read them if you have not yet done so.
There are twelve stories in the Just So Stories, and all but one of them ("The Butterflythat Stamped") are etiological stories. The titles are enough to tell you what is going on:
"How the Camel Got His Hump", "How the Leopard Got His Spots," "How the First Letter was Written," "How the Alphabet was Made," and "The Beginning of the Armadilloes," are stories which purport to explain the origins of things in the far-off past. There are a lot of stories of this sort in the legends, mythologies, and - I'm afraid - histories of various people.
I received for Christmas a rather nice book called How to Read the Bible. (James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York, The Free Press, 2007), xiv + 819 pages.) The givers knew that I had begun a project to read the entire Bible, which is continuing, so this book seemed an appropriate gift. I've only read about six chapters, so far, and I'm enjoying it very much. There will be more on this later, as Kugel contrasts the traditional interpretation of the Bible, which goes back to the fifth century BCE, or before, and was current until the middle of the 19th century, and modern biblical scholarship, which came to the fore in the 1850s.
The point I wished to adumbrate here is that, according to Kugel, there is general agreement among scholars that the Bible consists largely of etiological stories. Whereas the traditional interpretation brings in a number of meanings and makes a number of assumptions about how the Bible should be read, the original authors had it as their intention to explain things. How did the Earth and all that is in it come to exist? Why is childbirth so painful? Why do we have to work so hard? Why is this well called Beer Sheba? In particular, why are there so many different Semitic languages in the Middle East?
I'm not prepared to make a judgement on this point, or even to elaborate it much, but I think it is well to keep in mind while reading the Bible, that the stories were not necessarily written because they were true, as much as because they filled a human need to satisfy our curiosity.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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3 comments:
In our modern, "scientific" age, we make a distinction that didn't matter so much in the ancient world - the difference between the "true" and the "useful" or "beautiful". I noticed, Glenn, that you find it helpful to appreciate the Bible by thinking of it in terms of "useful" as opposed to "true".
This is because the commonly accepted epistemology defines "true" only in the empirical sense. I don't think ancient authors saw things in this manner.
This has caused no end of conflict as modern readers have attempted to impose a Western, dualistic epistemology on an Eastern, holistic document, the Hebrew Bible. As it turns out, the first chapter of Genesis is a poem of great rythm, expressiveness and beauty. I can imagine a group of Semitic shepherds sitting around a fire at night and looking up at the stars. The patriarch of the group starts to sing a wonderful hymn about Yahveh making the stars and the world and everything else. God is in the heavens and the world is beautiful. Everyone goes to sleep that night with dreams of wonder and gratitude.
Then some 20th century right wing evangelical has to come along and treat the damn thing as if it were a physics or biology textbook and misses the entire point.
Thanks for your comment, Sean.
Exactly my thought.
Now that I have finished reading James L. Kugel's book How to Read the Bible, I note that one of the problems Kugel finds in how to read the Bible, taking into account the findings of modern biblical scholarship, is based on one's need to have one's faith supported by historically true stories.
Kugel has his own solution to the matter, but I think one way of dealing with it is to reject the historicity of the Bible "stories" as a criterion for accepting them as providing examples from which we might learn.
From something else I read, I got the impression that this was a particular problem for Christians, for whom the truth of the story of Jesus is important in establishing the authority of the Christian messages. From Kugel, I get the impression that a lot of Jews bring the same attitude to their moral rules.
I'm not sure I get that. If Moses didn't bring the ten commandments down from Mt. Sinai on two stone tablets, after a personal interview with God, does that make murder okay? If Jesus wasn't born of a virgin (something he never claimed to be true, as far as I've read), does that invalidate his message of brotherly love?
For Christians, it does matter, because coercion is at the very heart of their message. If Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, then God has no power to punish or reward and therefore no ability to command obedience. If God didn't create the world, then he has no right to command obedience.
Christians generally don't want people to critically evaluate Christianity's message as if it were philosophy, they want people to accept it on the basis of an escape from guilt, fear, shame or uncertainty or to avoid eternal punishment.
So, yes, if Moses didn't really get the commandment from God about murder, then there is no basis to condemn it from their point of view. Christians don't condemn murder because it is wrong by some external standard, they condemn it because it is a sin. It is wrong because God said so.
This is one reason why evangelicals are so afraid of evolution. If God didn't create the world, then there is no one with authority to command moral behavior. If you listen to them carefully, they see atheism as destructive of moral behavior because they only understand morality by edict, authority and punishment rather than by reason and common values that we all share.
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