Just So Stories

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.