How to Read the Bible

Harvey Gallagher Cox

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780062343161
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062343178
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

For many people, the Bible lies at the heart of their faith, an ageless source of inspiration and guidance. On the other side of the spectrum, trained biblical scholars study the Bible using a variety of modern historical and literary approaches. But there is a wide gap be-tween these two groups of readers, a gap that brings negative consequences for both. Without an awareness of historical context, ordinary readers easily slip into a literal interpretation, while scholars sometimes overlook the deeply personal significance the Bible has for people in churches, synagogues, and Bible study groups.

In How to Read the Bible, renowned Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox shows how these different ways of approaching the Bible can be reconciled to the enrichment of all. By discussing a range of biblical books from Genesis to Revelation, he demonstrates how the historical analysis of the Bible, rather than undercutting its spiritual significance, can enhance and deepen it. Drawing on some of the commonly used modes of biblical scholarship, such as archaeology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Cox opens up a rich, diverse, and contemporary version of scripture, one that wrestles with issues of feminism, war, homosexuality, and race. The result is a Bible that is a timeless but contemporary resource for all.

1

Serpents, Floods, and the Mystery of Evil

The Book of Genesis

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

GENESIS 1:1–5, RSV

“In the beginning” are the first words of the first book of the Bible. Even though most scholars now agree that Genesis was written and compiled well after some of the other biblical books, there are still good reasons to begin with it. When the rabbis who initially arranged the order of the books of the Hebrew Bible placed it first, they knew just what they were doing. Genesis is a collection of stories by four or five different authors assembled by an editor, who may well have added some elements of his own. The book is also a compelling one, packed with action, drama, and a host of lusty characters. Perhaps the rabbis sensed that, if readers began with Genesis, they might find it hard to put the rest of the book down.

In Genesis we meet the wily serpent, which Milton thought so captivating that in Paradise Lost he made him a suave, smooth-talking Don Juan. Here also is Cain, who bludgeoned his brother, Abel, to death because his own sacrifice was not accepted by God, thus committing the first, but—alas—not the last slaying inspired by a religious dispute. Here is the chronicle of Noah and the great flood, the dove, the rainbow, and the embarrassing aftermath of the old man’s unzipped drunkenness. Here is the saga of Abraham, the “father of faith,” a founding figure for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Here is Jacob, cheating his brother, Esau, out of his rightful heritage, wrestling all night with an angel (or God), and then courting the lovely Rachel. But most gripping of all, here is the epic of Joseph and his jealous brothers, which Thomas Mann spun out into one of the great novels of the twentieth century, Joseph in Egypt. To be unfamiliar with these characters and plots exacts a cost. It makes one an outsider to some of the best literature ever written.

In addition to the engaging stories we find in it, there is another reason to begin with Genesis. We are trying in the present book to deepen our appreciation of the Bible by seeing it in the light of modern biblical studies. By stepping into Genesis we tread on scarred turf, over which many hard-fought scholarly battles have been waged, not just fights between literalists, historical critics, and symbolic interpreters, but internal fights within all these camps. And there are still unexploded mines here.

I also have a personal reason for starting with Genesis. It was in studying it that I was first introduced to contemporary biblical scholarship and had to cope, given my evangelical background, with how this analytic scalpel first seemed to threaten my own faith, but eventually helped strengthen it. Consequently, my approach here will be to select from the many nuggets Genesis offers some that will best illustrate my basic purpose.

Here is how it happened to me. Genesis is a collection of stories by different writers. But when I went to seminary I had no inkling of such a thing. At that time, however, the “multiple-source hypothesis,” though hardly new, was still regnant. Our Old Testament professor told us all to buy a box of colored pencils, so we could draw vertical lines in the margins of our Bibles to mark which parts came from the “Yahwist” source (blue), which from the “Priestly” source (red), which from the “Elohist” (yellow), and so forth. These different writers, he explained, can be identified not only by what they call God (“Yahweh” or “Elohim”), but also by their different vocabularies, their varying approaches, and even their disparate theologies. The consensus at the time held that the Yahwist source, which is now referred to as “J” (for the German Jahweh), dates from sometime between 950 and 800 BCE. The Elohist source, “E,” was said to come from about a hundred years later. A third source, called “P” for “Priestly,” was dated to a 150 years after “E.” (In recent studies all these dates have been sharply contested.)

I dutifully bought the pencils and drew the lines. I am sure our professor thought this was a useful exercise, and in retrospect I admit he was probably right. But at the time it was a little disquieting. I wondered what all this mincing and slicing would do to the voice of Genesis, to its overall narrative and to its spiritual power. But I also realized that the multiple-source theory did help explain why there are different accounts not just of creation, but also of the flood, God’s promise to Abraham, and the moving drama of Hagar and Ishmael. The interweaving of these disparate strands also explains why at times the surface of Genesis exhibits a certain jerky, discontinuous quality. The seams sometimes stick out. Little by little I decided that recognizing Genesis as the work of many hands did not diminish its spiritual significance. It deepened it.

I still have on my shelf that edition of the Bible, with its multihued marginal markings, its covers now missing. But I had not been out of school long before another way of studying the Hebrew scriptures assumed front stage. It was called the “narrative approach.” Some of its supporters questioned or even rejected the multiple-source theory. Others claimed that focusing on it too much, with or without colored pencils, could make one forget that at some point someone put all these pieces together, and that the overall trajectory of the whole edited work was what really mattered. Still others claimed that Genesis had grown by a kind of accumulation process, not by calculated editing and pasting. These newer modes of study were especially favored by people, including some evangelicals, who had always been suspicious of “chopping the Bible up,” but many others found them sensible too. In my view, it is immensely helpful to be familiar with the sometimes inconsistent sources of Genesis, but also that we enjoy its matchless narratives.

Subsequently the narrative method has been complemented by at least two other approaches. One is derived in part from literary studies, and its proponents call it “rhetorical criticism.” This means reading a book or passage and asking questions such as: To whom is the writer or editor aiming this text? Who is he or she trying to convince or refute, and why? What is being left out and why? This is also an especially helpful approach, because it enables us to see not only that the different writers of the Bible differed with each other, but also that they argued against each other. Think of Genesis as a kind of panel discussion in which the panelists (drawn in this case from different centuries) present their divergent views on some of the persistent questions of human life, such as guilt, responsibility, death, suffering, jealousy, family tensions, and our relationship to God. In the end you see that, although they differ, their views also overlap, and all of them agree that what they are talking about is of pressing concern.

Another recent mode of study is called “effect history.” It focuses on the question: How has this text been used, applied, or deployed in the centuries since it was written? This method makes sense to many people, because it takes seriously the question the average person might well ask about any part of the Bible: What difference has it made? We will see later how this method is especially helpful in studying the last book of the Bible, Revelation.

Not everyone needs to master the ins and outs of these tempests among the scriptural literati. The net result is that we can not only appreciate the Bible as a long conversation, even as a series of ongoing quarrels; we can also view our own reading and study as a continuation of this conversation. The Bible not only presents multiple points of view; it invites multiple interpretations, and generations of its readers have joined this uninterrupted colloquy.

For me, the discovery of the profusion of biblical voices and subsequent interpreters was a welcome one. It still is. In an age of both religious conflict and interfaith dialogue, to find that the Bible itself, beginning with the book of Genesis, fosters a kind of pluralism is refreshing and timely. Indeed, when one looks carefully at the deity described in Genesis, it seems that God smiles on miscellany rather than uniformity in the world.

This becomes even clearer when we learn that the Hebrew word most translators have rendered with the word “create” actually carries a somewhat different significance. The Hebrew term is bara, and it is used in the Bible exclusively for the activity of God. It does not mean “to make” in the sense of “to build” or “to construct.” There is another word for that. Rather, bara has the sense of “to order” or “to assign a place or role.” It seems that God’s work in “creation” is to compose a symphony of diverse sounds and tonalities that is intended to be a harmonious whole, complete with counterpoint and minor chords. But unlike the old deist conception of the clockmaker God, who constructs an intricate mechanism and then leaves it to run on its own, the biblical image of God is more like that of a composer-director-performer who constantly rearranges the balance if the trumpets or the bass violins start to drown out the flutes and the violas. Further, he must do so delicately while the orchestra continues to play. To extend the metaphor, in this creation God enlists the musicians in continuing to compose what still remains an “unfinished symphony.” Now with this biblical research in hand, let us begin with “in the beginning.”

THE CREATION STORIES

As we peruse the familiar accounts of the creation stories (1:1–2:4a; 2:4b–31) with the help of what biblical studies have contributed, we immediately recognize important discrepancies among the different strands. And if we consult commentaries, we will also become aware of a large dose of disagreement among competent scholars, not just on what a particular verse means, but even on what it actually says. This variation of opinion starts with the first verse. Although standard English translations render it, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” most experts on the original Hebrew agree that the words mean, “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth . . .”¹

The dispute may at first appear it to be merely grammatical, but it is more than that. Was God doing something else before he started his “creating of the world”? The second verse (“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”) raises equally puzzling dilemmas. Did God generate the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), or did he shape it out of some preexisting chaos of “formless matter”? These questions may seem esoteric, but they allow us to foresee a theme that will recur time and again throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Job to the book of Revelation: the mystery of evil.

The answers scholars give to the ex nihilo or non–ex nihilo question are complicated, but the consensus is that “P,” the writer of the account that appears in chapter 1, may have wanted to depict a God-shaping-chaos scenario, while the second, “J,” preferred the creation out of nothing (2:4b–5). If “P” is right, with his God-shaping-chaos description, where did the chaos come from? Did God also create that as well? This becomes a critical question for generations of philosophers, because this chaos (not God) is often interpreted as the source of evil and disorder in the world. But if the second version (“J”), the ex nihilo account, is right, then we are left with the question of where this disorder and evil came from.

Theologians have faced a strenuous test trying to explore this ambiguity. Those who opt for an ex nihilo version do so in part because they are concerned that if there was “something there” along with God before the creating began, then what was it (a “formless void”?) and, most important, who created it? Or was it “always there”? Both the supporters of “J” and those of “P” want to steer clear of a dualistic theology. They want to avoid any hint of two creators, a good cop and a bad cop.

A dualistic theology was present in the world in which the biblical creation narratives were written. It assumed classical form in Zoroastrianism, which appeared in Persia in about 1000 BCE. In it, two equally strong deities, the good, illuminating deity Ahura Mazda and the bad, destructive god Angra Mainyu, were locked in endless combat. The editors who pasted Genesis together were aware of the Zoroastrian religion, and they wanted to spell out a quite different view of God: as one who is not the source of evil. But did they succeed? God no sooner creates men and women and places them in a luxuriant garden than the serpent appears. And where did he come from? We will return to this snake below.

The mystery of the source of evil has troubled thoughtful human beings from the beginning. At first it was thrashed out in the language of myth, as in Genesis. The discussion continued. Think about the book of Job, in which God strikes a deal with Satan to torment a righteous man to test his faith. Think about the demonic forces Jesus contended with or the “principalities and powers” Paul mentions. Think of the terrible horses with lions’ teeth and scorpions’ tails conjured up in Revelation 9. In all these instances, the writers grapple with the riddle of evil using the language of symbol and myth.

When scholars of religion use the word “myth,” they do not mean something that, unlike a “fact,” is simply untrue. Rather, “myth” is a narrative that, although not necessarily factually accurate, is nonetheless true in a deeper and more significant sense. A myth is essentially true because it is a symbol, and a symbol is something that points beyond itself to a truth that might be difficult or impossible to express in ordinary language. In this sense a myth is a narrated symbol just as a ritual is an enacted symbol. For example, when we say the Adam and Eve story is a myth, we suggest it is a story that is not empirically factual, but one that nonetheless illuminates a profound truth about the human condition. Much of the difficulty we have in reading the Bible today results from literalism—when we mistakenly look for facts instead of recognizing and appreciating the profound truth of myth.

After the Bible the argument about evil waxed more philosophical, but has continued to attract novelists, playwrights, and poets. It is a question that has aggravated theologians for centuries. It still does. The twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theologian Nicholas Berdyaev preferred a view of creation that does not see God making something out of nothing. He favored a God who struggles with me-on, Berdyaev’s Greek term for an unformed void that was and still is the source of anxiety, anguish, and sin in the world. Brilliant and original, Berdyaev was, however, regarded with profound suspicion by many of his fellow theologians. Still, when I was a theological student, Richard Niebuhr, a professor who had a special interest in the problem of evil, recommended him to me. I remember sitting up half the night engrossed in his book The Destiny of Man.²

Today I still think Berdyaev may have had something. As I will mention later, I am not satisfied with the ex nihilo interpretation of the creation account, which implies a God who is utterly omnipotent and therefore does not have to struggle against evil as we humans do. Nor am I comfortable with a cosmic dualism. Consequently, I am glad the Bible allows for, indeed encourages, a range of views on this subject. I find it appropriate that the Bible says some quite contrasting things, even about some weighty matters, from its very opening, because this tips us off that for some sixty-five books to come there will be more of this divergence. In reading the Bible, get ready not for unanimity, not for a single cadence, but for what the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews calls a “great cloud of witnesses.”

In any case, let us be clear that neither of the writers of the two creation stories was trying to formulate some proto-scientific theory of how the universe came into being or how the various species of animals appeared. These accounts are not relevant, one way or another, to the stale creation-versus-evolution argument that still ruffles school boards and textbook writers in some parts of America. The writers of Genesis had a different purpose in mind. They were also not concerned about what one philosopher has recently suggested is the fundamental question of all philosophy: Why is there something and not nothing? (Or why does the world exist anyway?) Genesis does not assign a single verse to this intriguing riddle. Some of the earlier Near Eastern myths the biblical writers drew on had this puzzle in mind, but the writers of Genesis were interested in something else. They had three objectives.

First, they wanted to sharply differentiate God both from pantheism (the idea that the world itself is divine) and polytheism (the idea that there are a number of equally powerful deities). Thus they insisted that the sun, moon, and stars, which some neighboring religions considered gods,...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Serpents, Floods, and the Mystery of Evil: The Book of Genesis
• Chapter 2: Following the Footsteps of Moses: The Book of Exodus
• Chapter 3: Battles and Burlesques in the Conquest of Canaan: The Book of Joshua
• Chapter 4: Talking Back to God from the Garbage Heap: The Book of Job
• Chapter 5: Listening to the Voices of the Voiceless: Amos and the Prophets
• Chapter 6: Getting to the Final Four: Gospels, Kept and Discarded
• Chapter 7: Looking Over the Shoulders of the Writers: Matthew, Mark, and Luke
• Chapter 8: On the Road with Paul of Tarsus: The Epistles
• Chapter 9: Surviving a Turbulent Trip: The Book of Revelation
• Chapter 10: How Do We Read the Bible Today?
• Conclusion
• New Testament Time Line
• Appendix: What Language Did Jesus Speak?
• For Further Reading
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Credit
• Back Ad
• Copyright
• About the Publisher