Understanding the Bible: Recognizing Antiquity

In an earlier blog post we spoke of the necessity of recognizing literary genre as one of the essential keys to understanding the Bible.  A second key to understanding the Bible is recognizing its antiquity—that is, acknowledging that the Bible is a very old book—and therefore very different than our modern books.

This would seem to be too obvious to need stating, but apparently not.  That is, we moderns are often determined to read into those ancient Biblical texts our modern presuppositions about how to read literature.  We assume that the Biblical authors wrote with the same presuppositions as we moderns write, so that our understanding of reality (which we today call “science”) and our way of writing history are the same as theirs.  When one thinks about it, one quickly sees how unlikely this is, but we seem to do it all the same anyway.  What seems obvious to us we assume would have seemed obvious to them also.  Yet when we look more closely at that ancient literature, we immediately see that this is not so.

For example, we see this in our differing understandings of the physical world—i.e. of science.  The ancients thought that the world was flat, that the sun moved across the sky, that the sky was solid, and that this solid sky held aloft a heavenly sea of waters that existed above us and from which the rain came down through windows in the sky.  We now know that none of this is true, but that is hardly the point.  Though the Biblical authors accepted this view of the cosmos in common with everyone else in the ancient world, the purpose of the Biblical texts was not to confirm this view of the physical universe.  The Biblical authors wanted to make other points.

The fact that the sky was not solid, that there was not a sea of waters above the sky, and that the sun did not move across the sky like a strong man leaving his bridal chamber (Psalm 19:4-5) was all irrelevant.  The Bible’s point was not that the sky was solid, but that it was the God of the Hebrews that made the sky.  The Old Testament Bible is an ancient book coming to us from antiquity, and therefore reflecting the views of the physical universe common to everyone in antiquity.  That does not make the Bible wrong.  It only shows that the Bible is very old.

As well as expecting the Old Testament Bible to reflect an ancient cosmology about how the universe was constituted (with a solid sky and a moving sun), we should also expect its history to reflect ancient ways of writing history.  The ancient way of writing history differs in a number of ways from our modern way of writing history.  We mention two of them.

One difference was in the use of numbers.  We moderns use numbers solely to determine size.  If therefore there was a protest consisting of a hundred marchers, we think it is wrong to record that there were a thousand marchers there, and anyone caught inflating the figure would be chastised and forced to admit to an error.  The ancients used numbers not only to describe size, but also symbolically, to give the listener an opportunity to feel what it was like to be there.

Thus for example 1 Chronicles 21:5 reports an army of over a million Israelites in the time of David.  Given the fact that later on an international coalition of armies from many nations at the famous Battle of Qarqar consisted of just over 50,000 soldiers (with King Ahab of the northern Israelite kingdom contributing 10,000 to the force), the figure of over a million soldiers from Israel alone in the time of David is clearly inflated.  That does not mean the Chronicler was lying; only that historians sometimes used numbers symbolically to make a point.

We see differences too in the matter of reportage.  In our modern historiography, if one reports that someone made a speech and cites quotes from it, the quotation must be accurate—or at least an accurate approximation of what the person actually said.  Making up a speech out of whole cloth and putting it in someone’s mouth as a report of what they said is not acceptable, and might even result in charges of libel.  But that was how the ancients wrote their history.  If an historian knew that a king gave the customary speech before a battle but didn’t hear the speech or know what was in it, he might invent a speech and say that the king gave this speech, even if he had no idea what the king actually said.  This was not lying, only an attempt to give the listener a feel for what it was like to be there.

We know this is how the ancients did their history because an ancient historian tells us that was how they did it.  Thucydides, a well-respected historian who died about 400 B.C., wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”

This actually was an advance in concern for accuracy from the previous historical methods used, which is why Thucydides is hailed as the father of modern history.  But we can see even from him how our modern way of writing history differs from that of the ancients.

None of this means that the numbers, stories, and reportage in the Bible are wrong.  It only means that the Bible is a collection of very old books—with some material over 3000 years old.  They therefore reflect a different cosmology and a different way of writing history.  It is an act of hubris and cultural imperialism to insist that how we use numbers and write history is the only correct way and that the ancients who did it differently were thereby wrong.  If we come to the Bible in humility and with the proper respect for what the authors wrote and what the text actually says, we will have to do some cultural translation to fully appreciate all its meaning and nuance.  We have to make sure that we are hearing correctly the points the Biblical authors wanted to make, and not insist on them answering questions no one was then asking.

It is no good whinging and whining that this all makes the Bible too hard to understand.  Mastering all the meaning and nuance of an entire library was never going to be easy.  But for all the Bible’s nuance, complexity, and difficulty, its main message is simple enough for a child to understand.  According to Christ, the main message of the Law and the Prophets—i.e. the Hebrew Scriptures—is this:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  The flip side and the corollary of this is:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The entirety of the Law and the Prophets depend on those two principles (Matthew 22:37-40).  That message is easy enough for anyone to understand—though it is not quite so easy to put into practice.

Our Lord’s words here remind one of the brief comment by the Rabbi Hillel.  Hillel was asked once by a Gentile to teach him the whole Torah while he, the Gentile, stood on one foot, and the Gentile promised that he would become a Jew if Hillel could do that.  Hillel replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.  That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

Hillel was right.  Even though the Bible is a very old book written in different languages across many centuries and from many places, its basic message is easy to understand.  But, we hasten to add, that “commentary” is very important, and contains lessons we desperately need to know.  It is, as Chrysostom once observed, a well that has no bottom.  Drinking from this well and learning all its lessons demands from us a humble spirit.  We approach the sacred text on our knees, putting aside the noise of our modern presuppositions and listening to what the Scripture actually says.  Being a very old book, we must listen very carefully to hear it properly.  But the effort put into the understanding the commentary is worth the hard listening.