The Sins of Scripture (24 page)

But this was the first step through which the Bible came into being. To grasp this origin is to take the first step in the process of reclaiming the Bible as a worthy guide to our life today. This is neither to denigrate the Bible nor to demote it. It is, however, to be honest about the Bible and to sweep away the excessive claims that have been laid upon it. Perhaps as the story unfolds we will grow more comfortable with this first conclusion.

Part 3: The Hebrew
Odyssey—
the Elohist Document (ca. 850 BCE)

The Yahwist Document, the Hebrew
Iliad,
hardly looked like the “Word of God” in its earliest form. Neither did the “Elohist Document,” which I think of as the Hebrew
Odyssey
. It too rose out of a very human situation that marked the Jewish nation about a century after the Yahwist document was written. It grew not only out of a time but also out of a situation that rendered the Yahwist document no longer able to be the defining story for part of the Jewish people. That is why a new epic was required, or perhaps at the very least a new chapter in the ongoing epic of the Jewish people. We look now briefly at step two in the very human development of what we would later call the Bible.

The Jewish nation, as we noted earlier, was never really a unified people. Perhaps that was because they were the union of two different tribes with two different histories. In a real sense it was a merger that never quite merged, leaving a cleavage as big as a fault line deep in the middle of Jewish history. That division was always acknowledged in their sacred literature.

Scholars, historians and anthropologists go back to the moment of the Exodus to locate the original separateness that would always plague the Hebrew people. To understand this division requires that we challenge one of the basic assumptions we have all made about biblical history.

The overwhelming probability is that not all of the Jews were numbered among the escaping slaves from Egypt. Enslaved people in Egypt appear to have been only a segment, albeit a significant segment, of the people who would someday create the story of the national history of the Jews. The other constituent part of the Jewish nation appears to have been nomadic Semites who roamed the wilderness and never were the slaves of Egypt. The escaping slave people recognized an ethnic kinship with these fellow Semites and so formed an alliance with them during their wilderness years. This merger may have occurred in a place called Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, for there are numerous references in the Hebrew scriptures to the fact that the children of Israel resided there for some period of time.

The name Kadesh appears first in Genesis 14:17. It was identified with Ishmael in Genesis 16:14. Abraham dwells there in Genesis 20:1. The children of Israel abide there in the book of Numbers, and Moses even brings water out of the rock at Meribah in Kadesh, which was said to have been a great sin since it put God to the test. The story says that Moses was punished for this action by not being allowed to go into the Promised Land (Num. 10:11–13:26, 20:1–122, 27:14, 33:36–37). Deuteronomy reports that the Israelites remained in Kadesh many days (1:46). The book of Judges attests that Kadesh was a place of sojourning (11:16–17). Kadesh receives further references in 2 Samuel 24:6 and in Psalm 29:8.

The theory has been advanced that at Kadesh the escaping slave people and the nomadic wilderness Semites came together, formed an alliance and began to share their oral histories, so that their separated lives began to blend into a single story. The difference, however, was never lost. Perhaps this was the time when the patriarchs that we know as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were added to the epic. Originally they may have been only the names of Canaanite holy men associated with sacred shrines in that land located at Hebron, Beersheba and Bethel, historical figures who were later woven together by suggesting that Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac was the father of Jacob and Jacob was the father of the twelve sons who would make up the nation of the Jews. In their common ancestry of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to whom they said God had promised the land they were prepared to conquer, these two groups of people found a sense of oneness and a moral blessing on their violence. In the different wives of Jacob, however, they found the sources of their divisions.

Jacob had two wives, the story said, Leah and Rachel, who were sisters and so their sons were both half brothers and first cousins. There were other sons of Jacob—not children of these two sisters, but of their servants. They were thus the children of concubines, racially mixed, and their descendants were destined to live on the fringes of the Jewish nation. The ultimate division and rivalry would, however, be between the two legitimate lines, a rivalry that would always threaten the unity of the Jewish nation. It is interesting to watch how the Elohist writer portrays the separation and makes the claim for the superiority of those who were the people for whom the Elohist wrote.

The Elohist narrative does not just include, but lingers over, an account of their ancestor Jacob wrestling with an angel and having his name changed to Israel (Gen. 32). As the Jacob story is developed, we are told that Jacob agreed to work for seven years for a man named Laban in order to secure as his wife Laban’s beautiful younger daughter, Rachel (Gen. 29:1–20). However, Jacob was tricked by Laban, for the veiled daughter to whom Jacob was eventually married turned out to be not his beloved Rachel at all, but her older sister, Leah, who was described in less than flattering terms. Her eyes were weak, said the text (Gen. 29:17), or perhaps cowlike, seeming to pop out of her face. When Jacob in the cool light of dawn discovered this deception, he was irate. Laban justified this chicanery by saying it was inappropriate for the younger daughter to be married before the older daughter. In a world where multiple wives were not a problem, the situation was rectified by giving Rachel to Jacob to be wife number two and Jacob agreed to work for Laban seven additional years. As this story developed the unattractive and unloved wife Leah became the mother of Judah, who was to be the dominant patriarch of the Southern Kingdom. King David was a descendant of Judah. The holy city of Jerusalem with its temple was in the land of Judah. But Rachel became the mother of Joseph, who was destined to be the dominant patriarch of the Northern Kingdom. Since Rachel, according to this story, was the favorite wife of Jacob/Israel, it followed that Joseph would be portrayed as his favorite son, the one upon whom Jacob/Israel lavished his affection (Gen. 37–50).

It was for this favored son that the coat of many colors was made. Because Joseph basked in this status, it was said that he excited jealousy among his brothers (who were the sons of Leah and of the concubines) by dreaming of the day when all his brothers would bow down before him and serve him. Finally this family tension reached the place where the brothers decided to kill Joseph. They captured him, threw him into a pit and planned to leave him there to die. Their plan was to kill an animal and sprinkle the blood of that animal on Joseph’s ostentatious coat of many colors, so that their father would think that his son had been destroyed by a wild beast. At that moment, however, according to this story, some traders in a caravan headed for Egypt came by and Leah’s son, Judah, suggested that they not kill Joseph but instead sell him into slavery, which they did, gaining for him the price of twenty pieces of silver. That evil deed was to set in motion the drama that represented this nation’s first understanding of what it meant to be the saved people.

Through a series of exciting adventures that served to extol the virtues of Joseph, this young man went on to rise to great prominence in Egypt, until he was second in command to the pharaoh. In that power position Joseph was actually able to save his brothers from death in a great famine. He did not leave them to starve in the land of Canaan, though they had intended starvation to be
his
fate when they threw him in the pit, but rather he moved them with their entire extended families into Egypt, where they settled in the land of Goshen. Over a period of some four hundred years, the story says, these Hebrews who began their life in Egypt as the privileged family of the pharaoh’s closest advisor gradually declined into being an underclass, then sank into being a slave people—which is what finally set the stage for the Exodus.

Joseph, the son of Rachel, was clearly the hero of this story. When the slave people came out of Egypt under Moses, they carried with them the bones of Joseph (Exod. 13:19). When under Joshua they set up their new nation in the land of Canaan, the northern part of the territory was assigned to Joseph’s heirs (Josh. 17:7–18). His importance was such that the descendants of his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, were given the status of full tribes and were assigned land in the Northern Kingdom. This kept the number of tribes at twelve, since the tribe of Levi was reserved for priestly duty (Josh. 13:14). So the division between the two groups of the Jews was written into Jewish history. The descendants of Joseph, the son of Rachel, were to dominate the north; the descendants of Judah, the son of Leah, were to dominate the south. I suspect that the Joseph tribes were the escaping slaves from Egypt and the Judah tribes came from the nomadic Semites of the wilderness.

When we come later to the time when a monarchy was set up in Israel, Saul, who was from the tribe of Benjamin, became the first king (1 Sam. 9). It was an interesting choice since Benjamin was said to be Rachel’s second son after Joseph, but the tribe of Benjamin was located in the south as a satellite of the tribe of Judah. Thus in some sense he minimized the split among the Jews—indeed, the tensions between the two groups may have been factors in the choice of their king. Saul, however, could not establish his monarchy and so was not able to hand the throne on to his son. The kingship then passed to David, who was Saul’s popular general and a member of the tribe of Judah (2 Sam. 1ff.). After a forty-year reign in which David expanded his kingdom and pacified the immediate area with military conquests, he abdicated his throne while on his deathbed, so that his son Solomon might be placed on the throne and the nation spared conflict over succession (1 Kings 1). It worked and Solomon reigned for another forty years. During this reign, however, the tensions between the north and the south reached a fever pitch. Upon Solomon’s death his son and heir apparent, Rehoboam, assumed the throne but was immediately challenged by a northern general named Jeroboam, who demanded a redress of northern grievances. Rehoboam refused and civil war broke out. The south was unable to quell the uprising and so the kingdom of the Jews was split into two provinces: one was called the Southern Kingdom or Judah and the other was called the Northern Kingdom or Israel (1 Kings 12ff.). The Jewish nation was never to be reunited. The date of this split was about 920 BCE.

The north always had the harder task of nation building. They had no holy city like Jerusalem that could serve as a symbol of unity, and so in time they set about building their capital at Samaria (1 Kings 16:21ff.). This new capital would never rival Jerusalem in grandeur. Samaria possessed no temple in which God was supposed to dwell. To minimize this sense of loss, the Jews of the north built shrines in their land, but these shrines never compared favorably with the temple. There was no royal family in the north, just a series of military dictators who were regularly overthrown. Last but not least, the northerners had no separate and justifying epic history that was their own. So the Northern Kingdom was never as stable as the Southern Kingdom. Northern Jews tended to be looked down upon by the Jews of the south, who acted as if nothing good could come out of Galilee (which was the first-century CE name for what was left of the Northern Kingdom).

What the people of the north did, however, somewhere around the midpoint of the ninth century, was to write their own epic, to give themselves a vision of who they were. The Yahwist version of Jewish history would not do. That older epic extolled the institutions of the south. It suggested that rebellion against either the king or the high priest was rebellion against God. Since the citizens of the north had rebelled against both, they needed an epic justification. So it was that representatives of the Northern Kingdom began to put into writing their own version of what had heretofore been an oral history. That was how the Hebrew
Odyssey
came into being.

This work is called the “Elohist Document” because it used the name Elohim, rather than Yahweh, for God. It suggested that God made the covenant not with Moses but with the people, who then chose Moses as their leader. God’s covenant was not with the king, but with the people, who allowed the king to rule by their consent. The implication was clear that if the king misruled, the people had the right to overthrow him. Kings served in the Northern Kingdom not by divine right but by the will of the people. In many ways the Elohist Document shared much of the same history as the Yahwist Document, but it reflected the values of the revolutionary north. The northerners glorified their own origins by suggesting that they were the heirs of Jacob’s favorite son and, thus, the descendants of Jacob’s favorite wife. They wrote their negativity against their neighbors in the south into their history by suggesting that the citizens of Judah were descended from the rejected and weak-eyed Leah, who was so unattractive her father had to scheme to marry her off. They further suggested that it was their noble ancestor Joseph who had actually saved the ancestors of the tribe of Judah from starvation by taking them down into Egypt to live. He did this despite their earlier attempts to kill him by starvation in the pit. They also shamed their southern neighbors by suggesting it was Judah, the chief patriarch of the south, who had suggested that their ancestor Joseph be sold into slavery for money that he pocketed. They challenged the sacredness of Jerusalem and its temple, and they defined God much more democratically. The Jewish epic of the Northern Kingdom nonetheless did what all epics are designed to do. It rooted the people in history. It provided a common past. It anticipated a common future and it located God in their midst. It was, as all epics are ultimately, an intensely biased tribal story. It was hardly the “Word of God.”