The Third Assumption

James L. Kugel, in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, asserts that Biblical interpretation was based on four assumptions. These four assumptions guided the interpretation of the Bible from at least the later writings in the Old Testament, until the development of the "higher criticism" in the 19th century. Fundamentalism, as a movement, has sought to restore these assumptions to their dominant position in Biblical interpretation. The first assumption, of which I wrote last month, was "that the Bible was a fundamentally cryptic text: that is, when it said A, often it might really mean B." The second assumption, as Kugel states it, is “that the Bible was a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day.”

The third assumption is “that the Bible contained no contradictions or mistakes. It is perfectly harmonious, despite its being an anthology; in fact, they also believed that everything that the Bible says ought to be in accord with the interpreters’ own religious beliefs and practices (since they believed these to have been ordained by God).”

This assumption can give a reader some problems. By the time of the postexilic reoccupation of Judea, it is apparent that religious practices have changed. Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus are full of sacrifices to God. There are sin offerings, burnt offerings, fellowship offerings, and so on, all involving the sacrifice of living animals, as well as grain, oil, and human hair. The descriptions of how these sacrifices are to be performed are very detailed (and very similar to descriptions in The Iliad).

“And so Agamemnon prayed
but the son of Cronus would not bring his prayer to pass,
not yet . . . the Father accepted the sacrifices, true,
but doubled the weight of thankless, ruthless war.
Once the men had prayed and flung the barley,
first they lifted back the heads of the victims,
slit their throats, skinned them and carved away
the meat from the thighbones and wrapped them in fat,
a double fold sliced clean and topped with strips of flesh.
And they burned these on a cleft stick, peeled and dry,
spitted the vitals, held them over Hephaestus’ flames
and once they’s charred the thighs and tasted the organs
they cut the rest into pieces, pierced them with spits,
roasted them to a turn and pulled them off the fire.” The Iliad, 2.

The first animal sacrifice I find in the Bible is in Genesis 8, a passage from the story of Noah to which I will return at the end of this essays. This is a very simple sacrifice. Things get much more elaborate later on. The design of the tabernacle (and, later, the Temple) and its furnishings and staff are all focused on the practice of sacrifices. In Exodus 29, for example:

“This is what you are to do to consecrate them, so they may serve me as priests: Take a young bull and two rams without defect. And from fine wheat flour, without yeast, make bread, and cakes mixed with oil, and wafers spread with oil. Put them in a basket and present them in it – along with the bull and the two rams. . . . Bring the bull to the front of the Tent of Meeting, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on its head. Slaughter it in the Lord’s presence at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. Take some of the bull’s blood and put it on the horns of altar with your fingers, and pour out the rest of it at the base of the altar. Then take all the fat around the inner parts, the covering of the liver, and both kidneys with the fat on them, and burn them on the altar. But burn the bull’s flesh and its hide and its offal outside the camp. It is a sin offering.”

Animal sacrifice was obviously a big part of the religious life of the Israelites in the legendary days of Moses and Aaron, but it disappears completely and without explanation. Moreover, this would seem to accompany a change in God. Accompanying these descriptions of sacrifices are frequent comments that the burning flesh makes a pleasing aroma to the Lord. Leviticus 23 says, for example, “They will be a burnt offering to the Lord, together with their grain offerings and drink offerings – an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord.” The Israelite practice resembles the Achaean in this: “All the fat is the Lord’s.” Leviticus 3:16.

The God of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the so-called books of Moses, is much more physical than the later, more immaterial God who resides in Heaven. God is present in the Most Holy Place, God is present as He leads the Israelites through the desert, God smells their sacrifices, God finds the aroma of burning fat pleasing, and God is an emotional sort. From time to time He is angry and sends a plague, or burns people with fire, and punishes them in other ways. Moses is kept busy trying to propitiate God. To put it simply, the God who exiles Cain, who causes the Flood, who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, who burns people who complain about the food in Sinai, is not the same God of the later Bible, and certainly not the God of New Testament. In general, God seems to mature, to become less petulant, less quick to anger, more a God of love and forgiveness, as we move through the Bible.

This is a problem for interpreters. God is perfect, and the perfect cannot change. Just as the Greeks believed that the perfection of the spheres made them immortal and unchangeable, the Biblical interpreters attribute these qualities to God. (I don’t believe that God himself claims these things; these beliefs arise as a matter of tradition.) But if God is perfect, if God is unchangeable, He can neither make a mistake, nor can He learn from it. Therefore, it cannot be the case that God is actually sorry that He caused the Flood, and is swearing that He won’t make that mistake again. But this is what the Bible says:

“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.”

This third assumption thus involves a significant trade-off. We gain a seamless, consistent narrative, without fault or contradiction, but we lose any sense of change, maturation, of spiritual growth, on God’s part or on the part the men who worship Him.