Category Archives: Biblical Studies

One of the supposed indicators in the Hebrew Bible for a Deuteronomistic passage is that of a threat of exile as punishment for disobeying the will of God, seeing this as specifically relating to the Babylonian exile of Judahites after 586 B.C.E. But such a consideration of exile as punishment is not something that need necessarily only have appeared in so late a period among the Judahites as King Josiah’s time or later. In fact, for more than a thousand of years before, exile, as part and the process of a city’s falling to an enemy, had been viewed among Israel’s neighbors as a result of punishment for having displeased the divine, as we’ll see in some examples below. Yet, even within the Hebrew Bible itself, cutting across the boundaries of centuries and/or hypothetical source-critical strands, are earlier descriptions of exile as a result of displeasing God (Adam and Eve, Cain, the people of Babel), often, one way or another, attributed to Deuteronomistic influence. However, the wider motif of threat/promise of the divine in response to dis/obedience on the part of the worshipper(s) is, in fact, an integral part of prophecy itself, even outside of Israel, as we’ll also see below, and can even be said to be at the heart of any religious system utilizing divination of any kind (either inductive, like haruspicy and astrology, or non-inductive, like dreams and ecstatic utterance) to determine the divine will. In this regard, the similarity of the Israelite prophetic approach to that of other foreign prophets, some much earlier, is important to the Prophetic Perspective I mentioned in an earlier post, proposing particularly the Israelite prophetic guild and its supporters as the origin for the Old Testament writings as a whole. This essentially eliminates the need for attributing such passages reflecting threats of disasters (inter alia, exile) for disobedience or promises of blessings for obedience to either Deuteronomistic influence or directly to the Deuteronomist.

Continue reading “Disobedience and Exile”

For some time now, I’ve been approaching the Hebrew Bible in a particular way as a kind of experimental framework. I thought it might be interesting to share a short description of this framework, and elicit comments. This is by no means a complete description, but more of a series of notes.

Essentially, I see the entirety of the Old Testament as an expression and work of the ancient Israelite prophets and their supporters, a group that can reasonably be understood as the true Yahwists, in contrast to the more syncretistic wider population and official institutions, particularly the monarchies and priesthoods. Their evaluation of historical figures and events are presented in the texts of the Old Testament as we have them, not those of the priests or the monarchy. It is when those latter were in conflict with the prophets that the evaluations for these instutions are negative, particularly in the historical books.

In such a situation, I would prefer to speak of a Prophetic History, rather than what most describe as the Deuteronomistic History. In this is a return of the emphasis back to the wider, more general category of the prophets. After all, it is entirely and only their evaluations and their first-person voices that we are priveleged to read in the Old Testament, which I don’t think anyone disagrees with, except perhaps among the Psalms, and then Proverbs, which are a different kettle of fish altogether. What we have in the Hebrew Bible, then, is a group of writings of an ancient pre-exilic religious minority, which, in the post-exilic period, are at long last taken as foundational by the priestly and secular leadership of Yehud.

A few items of support: How is creation accomplished in Genesis 1? Through speech, the medium of the prophet, not through ritual, the medium of the priest. Of Aaron and Moses, who gets the better press? Moses the faithful prophet rather than Aaron the syncretistic priest. What institution is consistently exclusively Yahwistic throughout the periods for which there is reliable evidence? Only the prophets. What is the framework given for all the legal texts? Prophetic delivery to Moses, and Moses to the people. Who decided which kings were good and which bad, and according to what criteria? The criteria were those of the prophets moreso than those of the priests.

Keeping this prophetc perspective in mind while reading the Hebrew Bible texts is often more enlightening than various other approaches. Give it a try, O reader, and let me know what you think.

I’ve just finished a first draft of an updating of the Preface to the original publication of the Douay-Rheims Old Testament of 1609. It’s much shorter than the Preface for the New Testament which I posted yesterday, but it’s still interesting.

I think this Preface is quite a bit more moving in some parts than the other. The faith of the authors is much clearer, and is much more to the forefront than in the New Testament Preface which focused so much more on academic matters of textual criticism and so on. Lest we forget, at the time this Preface was being written, people were dying for their faith. More specifically, they were being killed for their faith. Christians were warring with Christians, specifically as Christians, and Europe was a wreck. Many people are familiar with the perspective of the Reformers. This Preface and the New Testament Preface show us the other side of the coin.

In response to the flurry of English translations and New Testament textual criticism in a recently Protestantized late sixteenth century Europe, a certain group of very well-educated English-speaking Roman Catholics, sadly in exile from their home country for the sake of their religion, produced a translation into English of the Latin Vulgate, relatively recently proclaimed at the Council of Trent as the authoritative Latin Bible, essentially the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament at Douai in 1610, “By Lavrence Kellam, at the signe of the holie Lambe.”

Most people are familiar with this Bible in the form it took under the capable hand of Bishop Challoner in the late eighteenth century, or even the last revision of it as the Confraternity Bible of the mid-twentieth century. Typically, however, reprints of these versions do not include the original prefaces of the translators, just as they don’t include the extensive and numerous notes. The sixteenth century English orthography, wild spelling, peculiar punctuation, and rambling syntax all combine to make the original almost entirely unreadable these days, removing this extremely important piece of English Catholic history from accessibility.

I’ve just edited the preface to make it more easily readable. It’s now roughly at the level of late eighteenth century English, which people are familiar enough with through standard editions of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (the editions of both of which with which most are familiar were established in that time period). So, basically, there are some thees and thous and, yea, some odd sentence that passeth, but it’s now a good site better than the original, let me tell you.

Lo, a link to said Preface, if you’re interested. I intend to reformat the page later, but the text is done. Reading it, I think you’ll be surprised, as I was, at the depth of knowledge on the side of these Catholics regarding textual criticism and the value of the Vulgate for such. Their interaction with the Protestants (“The Adversaries”) is fascinating. It’s really a remarkable document, and should be more widely known. So here it is, and hopefully it will be. Enjoy!

One should begin by warning the reader that it is impossible to make general statements regarding any phase of Biblical criticism today without running the risk of oversimplification. The whole field is in a state of flux. It is moving, certainly, but it is not always easy to say in what direction. Sometimes it gives the impression that it is moving in several mutually canceling directions at once. Even upon major points there is often little unanimity to be observed. As a result, scarcely a single statement can be made about the state of the field that would not be subject to qualification. Indeed, perhaps the only safe generalization possible is that the critical orthodoxy of a generation ago, with its apparent certainties and assured results, has gone, but that no new consensus has taken its place. Nevertheless, in spite of confusion and disagreement, certain significant trends can perhaps be charted.

John Bright, pp 13-14 in his chapter “Modern Studies of Old Testament Literature” in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (Doubleday, 1961).

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

I just yesterday found a used hardback copy of this book in nearly perfect condition for only ten bucks! The only slight defect is that the upper edges of the pages are well-foxed, which I find quite fitting for this particular title.

(1.1) The oracle of THE LORD to Israel by the hand of Malachi.

(1.2) I have loved you, said THE LORD, and you say, In what way have you loved us? Is not Esau a brother to Jacob?—the prophecy of THE LORD—but I have loved Jacob,

(1.3) and Esau I have hated. I have made his mountains a desolation, and his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness.

(1.4) For Edom will say, We were trampled, but we will return, and we will build the ruins. Thus has said THE LORD of Hosts, They will build, and I myself will destroy, and they will call them Territory of Wickedness and The People With Whom the Lord is Angry Forever.

(1.5) And your eyes will see, and you will say, The Lord will be great over the border of Israel.

Continue reading “Great is My Name among the nations”

I’m receiving some interesting feedback on an essay of mine on Number Multiplication in the Historical Books of the Old Testament over on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

The series starts with Jim Snapp’s essay The Quest for the Historical Census, and continues with P. J. Williams’ post The case against the reduction of large numbers, followed by Jim Snapp’s Defending a Case for the Reduction of Large Numbers, then P. J. Williams’ Keep ’em large, and ending thus far, with Jim Snapp’s A Second Reply in Defense of Reduced Census-Numbers, several of which messages I’ve peppered with comments of my own, particularly the last.

I obviously agree with Jim Snapp that the numbers need to be reduced if they are to be held to represent the reality of the times they ostensibly describe. I differ with him in his method of reconstituting the orginal numbers. He uses a variation of the Mendenhall method (“thousands” and “chiefs”/”bands” having the same spelling in Hebrew, אלפים,the meanings were confused at some point). I rather see within the text itself evidence (1 Kings 4.26 compared to 1 Chronicles 9.25 started it all off) that a multiplication by 10 or 100, depending upon circumstances, has occurred in order to keep the population numbers near a certain preconceived number, and to inflate most other numbers as well. The Assyrians, we know, used precisely the same tactic (see especially Marco de Odorico, The Use of Numbers and Quantifications in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. State Archives of Assyria Studies 3. Helskinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1995). This deliberate, centralized alteration of texts at a point before they were widely known is apparently something that some people have an issue with. I see it as a mistaken instance of scribal “correction” to be corrected. Others, like P. J. Williams, see the population numbers as representative of a trope of sorts, representing the fulfillment of the “be fruitful and multiply” command in Genesis 1.28. One wonders what chariot stalls have to do with fruitful human reproduction, or heads of cattle, amounts of silver, wheat, etc. Indeed, since the trope is never explicitly commented upon, I find it dubious. Also, I find the Mendenhall approach dubious because it is never clear at what point in this theory the confusion was supposed to occur. Pre-exilic numbers in lists were written using a form of Egyptian numeric annotation, not fully written out. Even if they were written out fully, and words were confused with numbers, in what context was this to have happened? It would need to be several steps removed from the text we have, as the numbers are totalled and treated solely as numbers in the text as it stands. Even more importantly, the Penatateuchal military census numbers are not the only ones in the Hebrew Bible exhibiting inflation, but it is a phenomenon that persists throughout almost the entirety of the historical books.

One of the interesting and kind of fun things that happens in reducing the numbers according to my scheme is that in the Exodus, the number of people of Israel and others participating in the original will have been less than the number of people involved in Cecil B. DeMille’s movie version!

Anyhow, it’s a subject I find fascinating, and I’m glad others are interested in it, too.