The Bible is Unbiblical

Summary:

There really is no such thing as “The Bible.” The Bible doesn’t mention a Bible. The Book of Deuteronomy mentions a Torah (Pentateuch), but it’s not really clear that this actually refers to what are called the Five Books of Moses. Elsewhere in those five books, we hear of the Ten Utterances, the Book of the Covenant, the Tablets of the Covenant and other designations of sacred writings, but nowhere, for instance, in the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) do we hear of a Torah or any other collection of sacred writings with which we might be familiar. In fact, many things happen in these works that seem to contradict the model of covenant community expressed in the Torah. The gathering together of writings that emerged out of the civilization of ancient Israel took place as part of a secondary formation following the Babylonian exile and the return of the exiled Judeans to their homeland. Therefore, the notion of a “Bible” is unbiblical.

Full text:

In “Who Wrote the Torah?” I presented a religious humanist perspective on the nature of revelation as a human desire for connection to the divine, and in “Fundamental Blasphemy,” I wrote about the blasphemy inherent in a fundamentalist, literalist approach to the Bible. I would like to expand these ideas and demonstrate that the whole idea of a “Bible” is, from a certain perspective, fallacious. This assertion goes beyond the understanding that the Bible is a pluriform collection of different writings from different times reflecting multiple voices with multiple perspectives on the nature of divinity, the divine/ human connection and the character of the covenant community. The entire notion of a Bible as a collection of sacred writings is, itself, post-biblical. The gathering together of these pluriform writings takes place in a secondary post-biblical stage of development. It is in that secondary stage that a Bible emerges.

There is no Bible in the Bible. The multiple biblical writers were not setting down a series of sacred texts reflecting the word of a transcendent deity. The identification of these texts as such is a retrospective identification. Internally, there a few references to any collection of sacred writings that could be identified as the sacred writings we identify as biblical. Except for the Book of Deuteronomy, nowhere does the Torah call itself the Torah. As noted in “Who Wrote the Torah?” the Book of Exodus refers to The Ten Utterances, The Tablets of the Covenant, The Book of the Covenant, The Tablets of the Testimony, but never the Torah. As for the Torah mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy, there is no indication that it refers to any body of writing beyond Deuteronomy itself, which is almost universally identified by biblical scholars as the scroll discovered in the Temple during the reign of King Josiah at the end of the 7^th century BCE as described in II Kings 22. 

The so-called Deuteronomic History, also known as the Former Prophets—Joshua Judges, Samuel and Kings—rarely mentions the Torah. It appears a few times in Joshua and a few times in II Kings, the latter in reference to the scroll discovered in the Temple—as though it had not been known before being discovered. In Judges, I and II Samuel, I Kings, there is no reference to a Torah. Indeed, the Deuteronomic History includes few references to any of the instructions of the Torah. There are a couple of references to new-moon festivals, but Sabbath and other festivals seem absent. In reaction to the discovery of the scroll under Josiah, the king invites the entire nation to

“‘offer the Passover sacrifice to the Lord your God as prescribed in this scroll of the covenant.’ Now the Passover sacrifice had not been offered in that manner in the days of the chieftains [i.e., the judges] who ruled Israel, or during the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah”  (II Kings 23:21-22).

This event is said to have occurred some 500 years after the early settlement of the Israelite tribes in Canaan and some 300 years after the building of Solomon’s Temple. During this entire time, the Passover “had not been offered in that manner”? In which manner was it offered?

Contrary to the portrayal in the Torah and in the Book of Joshua of a unified nation under a unified political and religious leadership overwhelming the land, the Book of Judges reveals a loose collection of tribal groups with no centralized, institutionalized religious or political leadership—tribal groups that frequently war with one another. Samuel, from the tribe of Ephraim, assumes the duty of a priest, and upon bringing the Ark to Jerusalem, King David, from the tribe of Judah, appoints his sons as priests. Both of these events violate the Torah injunction that only descendents of Aaron, from the tribe of Levi, can serve as priests (Numbers 18).

Sometime in the middle of the 5^th century BCE, in the period following the Babylonian Exile—perhaps beginning during the exile—priests and scholars presiding over the rebuilding of the Temple and the reconstitution of the House of Israel as the Persian province of Judea , gathered together the manifold strands of literary material recounting the historical, religious, political and social development of the diverse tribal groupings that came to constitute the people of Israel. Overwhelmed by the tragedy of Temple destruction and exile, these beleaguered refugees returning to their homeland after fifty years of exile needed a unifying, consoling national story to give them hope and courage to reconstitute their nation. This gathering of what were primarily local tribal traditions came to form a rudimentary Bible—the national story promulgated by the post-exilic, Second Temple community. It is that retrospective, second-stage collection that becomes sacred scripture. The biblical material itself must be seen as reflecting the historical, religious, political and social evolution of a diverse group of tribes that eventually emerged as the nation of Israel.