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.

The Second 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." In this essay, I wish to move on to the second assumption.

As Kugel states it: "Interpreters also assumed that the Bible was a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day. It may seem to talk about the past, but it is not fundamentally history. It is instruction, telling us what to do: be obedient to God just as Abraham was and you will be rewarded, just as he was."

The Iliad and the Odyssey, along with Hesiod's Theogony, were sacred texts to the ancient Greeks. They, like the myths and legends of many other peoples, are no longer considered sacred. Much of the reason for this is that we no longer make this particular assumption about them; we no longer take the Iliad to contain instruction relevant to us in our day. Therefore, we don't read it for instruction, which means that we can only read it for entertainment. Remove the assumption that a book provides instruction, and it becomes a mere tale of adventure. Take away the assumption that the Norse myths contain valuable instruction, and Thor becomes a comic-book character.

When the interpreters assume that the Bible is a book of instructions for living, this is not merely to say that they accept Biblical law as enunciated in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy as applicable in their own time. Taking the injunction not to murder as applicable for all time is easy. More interesting is the manner in which later interpreters accept various prophecies and stories as applying to their own time. Matthew, for example, is at great pains to relate the story of Jesus' birth to earlier prophecies. He ties the story of Herod's slaughter of the innocents to a verse in Jeremiah written six hundred years earlier.

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious,
and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were
two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the
Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

A voice is heard in Ramah,

weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children

and refusing to be comforted,

because they are no more.

The text from Jeremiah 31 is part of a long passage predicting that the exile in Babylon will eventually end, and that the people will one day be restored to the land of Israel and Judah. There is no indication in the text that this prophecy extends beyond the immediate future, or relates to anything other than the Babylonian exile. Yet Matthew readily assumed that Jeremiah's words were applicable to the events of his own time.

In the passage I quoted earlier, Kugel stated that the Bible "is not fundamentally history." This is an interesting point, and one of the key points of dispute between traditional interpretations of the Bible, and the newer critical approaches - literary criticism, or "higher" criticism - based on German scholarship. One of the few rules I remember from my only formal religion class (a college class on the Synoptic Gospels), is this: When there is a reason for saying something, other than its truth, one must question its truth. In other words, a statement made merely because the speaker witnessed an interesting event, or is reporting what happened in his time, gives us no immediate reason to doubt its veracity. But a statement which proves a point, which supports an argument, or which has any other motivation other than mere truth, gives rise to questions.

One of my favorite examples of the manner in which Biblical stories which appear, from the text, to carry one meaning, have been interpreted in order to give instruction to us in our days, is the story of Onan. See Genesis 38:6-10.

Thus, the assumption that the Bible is a book of instruction also leads us to the realization that the interpreters, the editors, the collators of the Bible, from whoever compiled the Torah, or Books of Moses, to the Christian councils that promulgated an authoritative Biblical Canon, read the Bible selectively. They selected the stories that fitted into an instructional scheme, and they interpreted stories in accordance with their didactic purposes. That is, if a story conflicted with the message that an editor wanted publicized, perhaps that story didn't make the final cut, or was modified in some way in order to suit the purpose.