And yet it is the close equivalent of this that Thompson asks us to believe when he proposes that the biblical Book of Psalms is contemporary with the "Thanksgiving Psalms" of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or that the passage in Genesis narrating that
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And He said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of,
"shares a common intellectual world" with the passage from Jubilees that relates:
And it came to pass . . . and [the evil angel] Prince Mastema came and he said before God, Behold, Abraham loves Isaac his son. . . . Tell him to offer him as a burnt offering upon the altar. And you will see whether he will do this thing. . . . And the Lord was aware that Abraham was faithful in all of his afflictions because he tested him with his land and with famine. And he tested him with the wealth of kings. And he tested him with his wife and with circumcision. And he tested him with Ishmael and with Hagar his maidservant. And in everything in which he tested him, he was found faithful. And his soul was not impatient.
And he was not slow to act because he was faithful and a lover of the Lord. And the Lord said to him, Abraham, Abraham. . . . Take your beloved son, whom you love, Isaac, and go into the high land and offer him up on one of the mountains that I will make known to you.
This comparison does not tell us when Genesis was written. But it does tell us that the second of these passages is not only a commentary on the first but reflects a later historical period with a different theology, mentality, and prose style. None of the dozens of Jewish literary works definitely produced, like Jubilees, in the Hellenistic age has the outlook, tone, or manner found in most of the books of the Bible. And perhaps not unrelatedly, none has the grandeur, either.
But there is an even more important point to make--which is that, while the minimalists have been much influenced by recent critical analyses of the Bible showing it to be a work of highly sophisticated literary sensibility, they consistently play down the fact (which was a central concern of higher criticism) that this sensibility repeatedly behaves in strikingly unliterary ways.
Let us look at one example by returning to the story of David's pursuit by Saul. In chapter 24 of 1 Samuel, a book widely regarded as one of the Bible's literary gems, we are told how David has taken refuge in a cave that Saul enters to rest in without being aware that his quarry is inside. Stealing quietly up to the sleeping king from behind, David cuts off "the skirt of his robe," waits until Saul has left the cave and is at a safe distance, steps into the open, and calls out:
My lord, the king. . . . Behold, this day, thine eyes have seen that the Lord hath delivered thee today into mine hand in the cave; and some bade me kill thee; but mine eye spared thee . . . yea, see the skirt of thy robe in my hand. . . . And Saul said, Is this thy voice, my son David? And Saul lifted up his voice and wept. And he said, . . . the Lord reward thee good for what thou hast done unto me this day.
Now turn to chapter 26. This time, Saul is chasing David in the "wilderness of Ziph," where, pitching camp at night, he falls asleep in the midst of his sleeping troops. Stealing quietly up to him, David takes the king's spear and water bag, retreats to a nearby hill, and calls out to Saul's general, Abner:
Art thou not a valiant man? . . . Wherefore then hast thou not guarded the lord thy king? . . . And now see where the king's spear is, and the bag of water that was at his pillow. . . . And Saul knew David's voice and said, Is this thy voice, my son David? . . . I have sinned; return, my son David, for I will no more do thee harm.
It does not take the tools of higher criticism to make us realize that these are two different versions of the same incident. Why, then, did the author of Samuel give us both of them, thus clumsily repeating himself in a way that no competent writer of fiction would dream of doing, when the two stories could easily have been combined and reduced to a single, more effective one?
The answer would seem as obvious as the question. It is that, while he wished to use his great narrative talents to their best advantage, he did not believe that he was writing fiction. He believed that he was writing fact handed down to him--and whether he thought that both variants had happened, or that he simply lacked the mandate to choose between them, he felt obliged to pass them on as he had received them.
Indeed, over and over again in the Bible we find the literary skills of its authors or redactors frustrated by such concerns. At times this takes the form of senseless redundancy; at times of internal contradictions that could have been ironed out by simple editing; at times of curiously irrelevant details; at times of obvious errata allowed to remain in the text; at times of tedious genealogies or legal codes that interrupt the narrative flow. And most of all, it takes the form of puzzling silence; for, considered as fiction, the truly remarkable thing about the Bible, often referred to as its "stark" or "minimal" prose, is that it constantly spurns opportunities for dramatic description and development that any skilled writer of fiction would seize eagerly.
Paradoxically, then, the very features of the Bible that have been invoked to call its historical reliability into question--its lack of unity, inner discrepancies, fragmentary nature, and arbitrary selection of material--most demonstrate its authors' conviction that they had no right to expand or diminish the information they were entrusted with. They could shape it, craft it, even comment on it--up to a point. But that point was always before them.
Although the Bible may not be telling the truth, then, neither is it making much up. It is using literary techniques to transmit a tradition--or, rather, a large number of traditions.
This is hardly a revolutionary proposition. It is what nearly all biblical scholarship prior to the minimalists has maintained. Nor does even Thompson deny the presence of traditional material in the biblical text. Neither he nor his fellow minimalists, however, quite face up to the implications of this, or of the fact that an oral tradition, unlike a text, is inherently undatable.
Let us reflect on this for a moment. Suppose I discover a manuscript written in Middle English and describing William the Conqueror's use of artillery to defeat the Saxons at the battle of Hastings. Inasmuch as this battle took place in 1066 C.E., some three centuries before artillery was introduced into Europe, and Middle English ceased to be spoken in the last quarter of the 15th century, this text can be roughly dated to between 1350 and 1475.
But now suppose that I also come across a little old English lady who tells me that her grandfather, born in 1852, was told by his great-grandfather, born in 1764, that, besides using artillery at Hastings, William the Conqueror wore pink stockings on that day. What can I say about this? Well, one thing I cannot say is that the belief that William the Conqueror wore pink stockings dates to between the mid-14th and late-18th centuries. For, on the one hand, the old lady may be imagining or misremembering; while, on the other hand, the stockings could be a genuine detail passed down from generation to generation since 1066. The matter of the artillery is irrelevant to these stockings, since they could represent a tradition that is far older. Moreover, both artillery and stockings may be neither totally imaginary nor entirely true, but rather garblings of the truth. Perhaps the original story, born at Hastings but changed by centuries of retelling, was that William used archers and wore yellow gloves.
The same holds true of the Bible. Despite decades of scholarly efforts, there is no way that internal analysis--examining the Bible's language, for example, or its cultural situation and background--can tell us when a biblical story originated or what its primal content may have been. Much has been made of such facts as that Genesis 24, which speaks of Isaac's riding a camel to his uncle Laban's home in Haran, is inauthentic, because Isaac would have lived in the 18th century B.C.E. and camels were domesticated later. But this is trivial. If Isaac, having ridden a donkey to Haran, told the story of his journey to his son Jacob, who told it to his twelve sons, who told it to their sons who told it to their sons until it reached the author of the book of Genesis, who wrote it down in the language of his day, camels might obviously have replaced donkeys at some point. So?
The fact is that we know a great deal about the transmission of oral traditions among peoples all over the globe--and what we know tells us, above all, two things: that such traditions can have extremely long histories, and that they constantly mutate in the course of them. Apart from such obvious fairy tales as Jonah's being swallowed by a big fish, there is relatively little in the Bible that cannot conceivably be a distant echo of something that once happened. Unfortunately, distinguishing an echo from an echo of an echo is for all practical purposes impossible.
Does it matter? Does it make any difference whether Abraham and Isaac existed or not?
To traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims, obviously it does. But traditional believers are little influenced by historians. They have their convictions and do not let the disagreements between the Rohls and the Thompsons get in the way of them.
The same applies to present-day Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Certainly it is no accident that, whereas a biblical maximalist like Albright was strongly supportive of Israel, the biblical minimalists tend to be far from that. If the Jewish people's claim to a 4,000-year-old relationship with Palestine is largely imaginary, and the first real Jews were Hellenized Babylonian-Canaanite mischlings who projected a self-serving national legend onto the past, is not the better claim that of the "real" Canaanites--the Palestinians?(D) But ultimately, few people are going to choose sides in the Middle East because of this. National myths and passions run deeper than the excavations of archeologists.
And ordinary readers of the Bible, those who turn to it for their own pleasure or edification? For them, one might think, the current debate over its historicity matters least of all.
Thompson, indeed, thinks that the very attempt to construe the Bible as historical is naively to miss its whole point:
The most disorienting difficulty with such readings of the Bible is that they attempt to transpose a perspective of reality underlying biblical traditions into peculiarly modern terms. They permit reflection on our reality, but not reflection on what was real for the writers of the Bible. . . . "Reality" for the Bible lies quite far from both this world and its events. "History," like all of the events of human affairs, is, for the ancient traditionist, illusory. It is like the whole of this material, accidental, and refracted world in which we live. . . . True reality is unknowable, transcending experience.
Yet even if we construe the Bible as "mere" literature, is this an accurate literary judgment? It may be the way the Bible was read by Platonically-influenced Hellenistic intellectuals, or by medieval mystics, and it is obviously one way of reading it in a late-20th-century culture heavily affected by Buddhism and Eastern religion. But is this the biblical text as a discriminating literary taste experiences it? Its characters "illusory" actors in an "accidental and refracted" world? Saul and David? Abraham and Isaac? Would the mind still go numb each time it read of Abraham's terrifying pilgrimage to Mount Moriah if we--if Abraham--had the comfort of knowing (as the prolix author of the Book of Jubilees thought he knew) that it was all an illusion? Is it because we are given to understand that Saul's great love and great hatred for David are the insubstantial froth of an untrue reality that we weep with him?
I should think the opposite. The Bible, if read as literature, is unique in its ability to evoke in us the illusion that it is not an illusion. This is part of what accounts for its enormous hold upon men's minds.
Who does not remember how he read when he was young? Greedily, gullibly, with that eager "suspension of disbelief," as Keats called it, that, plunging into the midst of a story, forgot that it was in the midst of what was only a story? All fiction was history then. One may smile at childish innocence, but whoever has read great works of literature in this way, or even lesser works, knows that no book will ever again possess him in the same manner.
We mature. Our sophistication and discrimination develop--and with them the realization that all literature is artifice, and that the more gripping a story is, the more cunningly it is contrived. Eventually, if we become "good" enough readers, we actively look for the artifice, ferret it out, take pleasure in dragging it from its hiding place. But even if this does not happen, like the mother who whispers to her frightened child in the movies, we tell ourselves as Anna throws herself in front of the oncoming train or Jim leaps from the deck of the Patna: "Don't worry. It isn't real."
Now--speaking from my own experience--long after we learn to react this way to Tolstoy or Conrad, we go on reading the Bible like children. It does not matter how many times I climb Mount Moriah with Abraham or look down at the sleeping Saul. Each time, I am convinced it really happened.
Conceivably this has to do with the religious education I received as a child. No one drilled it into me at the age of eight or nine that Anna Karenina and Lord Jim were true stories. But equally, it has to do with the biblical text. For its artifice is hidden with a cunning that surpasses cunning, with such a violation of all rules of artifice as to give every appearance of being artifice's absence.
Surely this is the reason that contemporary literary criticism came to the Bible so late--in the same 1950's and 60's in which the seeds of biblical minimalism were first sown: not because literary criticism feared to tread on holy ground, but because it falsely thought that a ground so full of weeds was lightly cultivated. And surely this is one reason why millions of readers throughout the ages, although perfectly capable of recognizing a work of fiction when they saw one, have believed the Bible to be true.
This is not to say that the Bible, or any part of the Bible, is true. It is merely to say that it is precisely one's sense of literature that tells one that it is not precisely literature.
But does it matter? Especially, does it matter if one considers--as Thomas Thompson does--imaginative literature to be a high spiritual calling? Anna Karenina and Lord Jim are true, too, even if they happened only in the imagination. Why not be content with the same claim for the Bible?
The question is reasonable. I can think of two answers.
The first is that no one likes to be fooled. If the Bible belongs to the same truth-category as Anna Karenina, then I am fooled by it each time I read it. It is like watching a card trick repeatedly performed before one's eyes without understanding how it is done. This is exasperating.
The second answer . . . but no: this would only be repeating the first in fancier language. One does not wish to be fooled. The Bible is not a book for children.
(A) Basic Books, 412 pp., $30.00.
(B) Century (London).
(C) Actually, even if Rohl is entirely wrong, the evidence on this point is not as clear-cut as it has been made to seem. Some Canaanite settlements were destroyed in the 13th and 12th centuries; their not having been immediately reinhabited might be due to their sackers' being desert nomads who did not immediately choose to settle down; and not all military conquest leaves archeological remains anyway. What archeological proof do we have that William the Conqueror conquered England?
(D) Thompson, it must be said, although his ambivalent attitude toward biblical Judaism carries a strong whiff of secularized Christian supersessionism, never pushes such reasoning to its limit. Anyone curious to see it at its politicized worst is invited to read a book like Keith W. Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge, 1997).
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