The Sins of Scripture (25 page)

When the Northern Kingdom fell to the Assyrians in 721 BCE the citizens of this part of the Jewish nation were deported and resettled in other parts of the empire. Because they had no deep sense of cohesion, they literally disappeared into the gene pool of the Middle East, becoming the ten lost tribes of Israel. Some unknown person or persons, however, from the Northern Kingdom escaped the conquering Assyrians and, taking their northern epic story, the Elohist Document, with them, fled to Jerusalem. There the common history was recognized and the two stories, the Hebrew
Iliad
and the Hebrew
Odyssey,
were woven together, not in a seamless way, but woven together nonetheless. So it was that the epic of the Jews grew to contain the combined story made up of the dominant Yahwist Document and the recessive Elohist Document. From this point on the Jewish epic was known as the Yahwist/Elohist account of the history of the Jews. Clearly it was revered as their sacred tribal story. Just as clear, however, was the fact that this was a human-created national history, not God’s dictated or God’s inspired holy writing. This merger of the two epics occurred at about the time that the eighth century turned into the seventh century BCE. Though the epic was not yet finished, as we shall see, what we now call the Bible was coming into view.

Part 4: The Deuteronomic Writer (ca. 625 BCE)

In the latter years of the seventh century BCE, another massive revision of the Jewish epic was undertaken. It came about as a result of a frantic search for the means to win God’s favor and therefore God’s protection in a radically insecure Middle Eastern world. In that day if a tribe was defeated in battle it meant one of two things: either the god of the defeated tribe had been defeated by the superior god of the victorious people, or the defeated people had somehow offended the powerful deity they were supposed to serve and were therefore being punished. The first of these possibilities was not likely to be part of Judaism, since the Jewish people had begun to catch a glimpse of a dawning universalism: there was but one God who ruled the world. They still believed that this God had a special relationship to and a special vocation for the Jews, however, so overwhelmingly defeats and disasters for the Jews were interpreted to mean that the holy God was punishing the disobedient nation. This idea was particularly emphasized in the difficult years of the seventh century BCE, when the nation of Judah roiled in the insecurities of world history, caught as they were between the Egyptians to their south and west and the mighty nations bent on world domination that were emerging in the east. The Assyrians had conquered and laid waste to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, in the eighth century BCE. Now, however, these Assyrians were absorbed with fending off first the Babylonians and later the Persians. Judah was too weak militarily and politically to do much more than seek to win divine protection by holy living. They were pawns on the stage of history.

When the Assyrians had come down against the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the 720s, Judah had refused to come to Israel’s aid. Instead, Judah’s king had negotiated with the Assyrians to be given vassal status in exchange for not resisting. That maintained a modicum of independence but little more. The Jews paid tribute to their masters. Stripped of all wealth they remained free, but only in their poverty (2 Kings 19:14–28). It was better at least than deportation. In the minds of the prophets, who were their religious leaders at that time, all that could save them was faithfulness in worship and righteousness in living. The prophets despaired and wrote scathingly about what they regarded as the evil of their King Manasseh, who ascended the throne in Jerusalem at age twelve and reigned for fifty-five years as the seventh century rolled into history. According to the sacred story of the Jews (2 Kings 21:1ff.), King Manasseh “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” He built “altars for Baal” in the land and “made an Asherah,” a symbol of a fertility goddess. He “worshiped all the host of heaven, and served them,” and he even sacrificed his own son as an offering. He allowed wizards, soothsayers and mediums in the land. To these abominations the prophets promised the wrath of God: “Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle…. And I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish…turning it upside down” (1 Kings 21:12–13). The prophetic word continued: “I will cast off the remnant of my heritage, and give them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger” (2 Kings 21:14–15). It was a fearful word to hear. People wondered when the wrath of God would fall.

Yet Manasseh died in peace at the age of seventy-seven and was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old son Amon (2 Kings 21:18). In the eyes of the prophets Amon continued in his father’s evil. Perhaps because of that Amon was subsequently murdered by his servants, and the heir, an eight-year-old son named Josiah, came to the throne (2 Kings 21:23–24). Josiah appears to have had a godly mother and to have been tutored by the prophets, who invested great hope in him. His faithfulness to the traditions espoused by the prophets, it was hoped, might temper the prophetic words of doom.

When King Josiah was twenty-six years old, his religious zeal led him to undertake renovations on the temple. During those renovations a book of the law, purporting to have been written by Moses himself, was discovered in the walls of the temple by Hilkiah, the high priest, who brought it to the attention of the king. When the king heard the words of this book, he “rent his clothes” and inquired of the Lord about what he should do, “because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book” (2 Kings 22:3–13).

On the basis of that discovery, which is believed by scholars to be substantially the book of Deuteronomy (which literally means “the second law”), Josiah initiated the greatest transformation in the way people worshiped in Judah in all of that nation’s history (2 Kings 23:15–27).

Was the book a plant? I suspect so. I also suspect that it reflected the work of, or at the very least the involvement of, the prophet Jeremiah. However, under the purging zeal of the Deuteronomists, as this reforming group came to be called, the epic story of the Jews was modified in two dramatic ways. First, the book of Deuteronomy was added to the Yahwist/Elohist Document, turning it into the Yahwist/Elohist/Deuteronomic Document. Second, this entire text was now edited in the light of the Deuteronomists’ values, and thus a mighty reformation of Jewish worship practices was carried out. That book became the next building block in the development of Jewish scriptures. Once again it was events of very human origin that added a new layer to the epic of the Jews. As this development shows, the Bible is not the “Word of God.” It was never intended to be the “Word of God.” It has its roots in the tribal sacred story of the Jewish people. It was simply the chronicle of their walk with who they believed God was through their own national history. It rooted them in time and it gave them a past to remember.

Josiah reinstituted the Passover as a liturgical means whereby the Jewish past might be captured and even entered. The Passover had not been observed by the Jews since the time of the judges, the scriptures stated (2 Kings 23:21–23). In addition to connecting with the past these reformers gave the Jewish people a future to anticipate. The reinstated Passover related them to a transcendent sense of God, who stood always beyond their grasp, calling them into those patterns of worship that forced them to think beyond the limits of their human capacities.

The great reform movement under Josiah, as dramatic as it was, did not, however, bring about divine favor. Shortly thereafter Pharaoh Neco of Egypt went up to battle the Assyrians. King Josiah intercepted him on the plains of Megiddo and was killed. It was such a traumatic moment in Jewish history that Megiddo gave rise to the mythological battle of Armageddon, which would take place at the end of time. Now the nation of Judah began to cascade toward what would be the most traumatic moment in its national life until the Holocaust in the twentieth century. In that tragedy, however, the final editing of the Hebrew epic would be accomplished.

Part 5: The Priestly Writers (ca. 580–520 BCE)

It was within twenty-five years of the time of Deuteronomic reforms and the traumatizing death of King Josiah that the little nation of Judah faced an ultimate challenge. To their north and east the Babylonians had conquered the Assyrians and were now the dominant military power in that part of the world. Under the command of their general, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonians swept down on the nation of the Jews in 598 BCE, and after a bitter two-year siege they conquered Jerusalem in 596 (2 Kings 24–25). A puppet ruler, but still part of the royal House of David, named Zedekiah, was set on the Jewish throne and a state of vassalage began. Ten years later an unwise rebellion led to a Babylonian reconquest of Jerusalem. This last Davidic king of the Jews was forced to watch the execution of all of his sons. Then his eyes were put out. He died a blind man in captivity. Almost all the Jewish people were carried into a Babylonian captivity that was destined to last for two or three generations. The prophet Jeremiah, closely allied with the Deuteronomic reforms, escaped to Egypt and died there. What history has called the Babylonian Exile of the Jewish people had begun. Among the people carried into exile was a priest-prophet named Ezekiel, who along with his priestly cohorts would radically rewrite the sacred epic of the Jewish people in the light of the needs of their particular time.

It would be hard to overestimate the trauma of this period of Jewish life. The chosen people lost every symbol of their Jewish identity. They could no longer even observe their defining calendar of feasts and fasts. Most of them thought of God as one bound to their land in Judah, so they believed they had lost their God also. They wondered how they could ever “sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land” (Ps. 137:3, 4). The Davidic monarchy was gone forever as an institution in history, but it was destined to reemerge in their fantasies about an ideal king, one that they called Messiah, who would someday come to restore the fortunes of the Jews. Messiah gave the Jews a future hope that probably nothing else could have given them.

The one thing the Jews had and to which they clung with a tenacious ferocity was their sacred story, their defining epic, now represented by the merger of the Yahwist Document and the Elohist Document together with the new inclusion and editing of the Deuteronomic writers. Their new circumstances were of such painful significance that it was felt with an overwhelming intensity that their defining epic had to be revised anew. So it was that Ezekiel and a group of fellow priests undertook that responsibility. When they finished this work the Jews finally had what we today call the Torah. In the process the Yahwist/Elohist/Deuteronomic Document was massively edited and expanded by the priestly addition, almost doubling the size of their sacred story. The survival of the Jews’ identity as a people was the first priority of these priestly writers. In order to survive as a separate people, these Jewish leaders believed, the Jewish people had to be distinct and different. Three traditions were therefore either inaugurated or revived to create this distinctiveness. All three are still today major identifying aspects of what it means to be Jewish.

The first was the observance of the Sabbath. The Jewish people were to be set apart from the other peoples of the world by their refusal to work on the Sabbath day. To give that tradition the force of divine command, the story of the seven-day creation was written. Its intention was not to tell people how or in what timespan the world was created. To use this story as Christians did in the nineteenth century to counter Charles Darwin’s writings about evolution is the height of biblical ignorance. Its whole purpose was to enjoin on the Jewish people in exile the mark of the Sabbath. God had blessed and hallowed the seventh day by resting on it. The worshipers of this God were bound to do likewise.

The second tradition inaugurated in the Exile was the collection of the ritualistic laws that bound the Jews into proper worship. These laws are spelled out in detail by the priestly writers in the latter part of the book of Exodus and in the entirety of the book of Leviticus, which were both the products of the Exile. The holiness code of the book of Leviticus, which includes the prohibitions we have already discussed about sexuality, were designed to make the Jews morally different from their pagan captors. Here are located the prohibitions against touching menstruating women and engaging in same-sex unions, as well as hundreds of other prohibitions. Needless to say, the Jews knew little about either menstruation or homosexuality, but they treated both as somehow unclean. It was their way of maintaining a separate kind of ethical puritanism. The kosher dietary laws are part of these religious regulations in the book of Leviticus. Their purpose was to prohibit the Jews from eating with anyone who was not Jewish. Not only did the Jews have to refrain from both the meat of swine and shellfish, among many other prohibitions, but the kitchens in which Jewish food was prepared had to be kosher. If one does not eat with another outside his or her clan, one can hardly develop a relationship that might grow into a friendship or a marriage. That was, of course, the point. The Jews were to remain isolated from all other people. Otherwise there could be no survival.

The third tradition that was revived and made mandatory for Jewish males was the rite of circumcision. This habit, which appears to have had much earlier Middle Eastern roots, had fallen into general disuse, but now it served the primary need of Jewish survival. The scriptures were thus revised so that circumcision was said to have been the requirement of God at the time of the covenant with Abraham (Gen. 17:10), a sign of being part of the chosen people from the time of Moses (Exod. 12:48), and a mark of what it meant to be Jewish from the time of birth (Lev. 12:3). Every Jewish male had to wear on his body the mark of his Judaism so that marrying or conceiving outside their tribe would be difficult. Jewish identity was not to be hidden.