The Unauthorized Version!

Our book today is Robin Lane Fox's mighty, encyclopedic 1991 volume The Unauthorized Version, one of the most essential works of Biblical exegesis ever written and a walloping amount of good old-fashioned literary fun.

Fox has an almost unbeatable track record. His Pagans and Christians is an enduring work of scholarship, and his biography of Alexander the Great became the 20^th century standard almost from the moment of its publication (Scarisbrick's Henry VIII volume did the same thing – a not entirely healthy procedure, but a toughly adhesive one just the same). The chief attraction in all Fox's prose can be summed up the way an old friend of mine used to do it: “He thinks on the page.”

As many of you will know, I have a sweet-tooth for biblical exegesis (I've even indulged in it here on Stevereads from time to time) – not biblical deconstruction, mind you, not in the sense of attacking the basis of anybody's faith – but biblical humanism, based on the assumption that whatever else the sacred texts of the Bible might be, they're also texts, able to be studied like any other written documents. Centuries ago, when humanism was in its perilous infancy, several of its most eloquent defenders pointed out the logical fallacies of objecting to such claims: if the Bible's various books are divinely inspired, they should be able to withstand a little textual scrutiny – and if despite their divine inspiration their human transmission has interpolated errors into their contents, well, then the divine inspiration isn't to blame, is it? Either way, humanists (at their best) argued, studying written texts cannot imperil true faith.

This is certainly the ethos behind The Unauthorized Version. Even though Fox wrote it as an atheist, he kept and open mind and heart (as he put it, he believes in the Bible, but not in God) – he's not out to attack anyone's faith, but even two minutes of studying biblical textual history is long enough to stumble into problems with the way most Jews and Christians today use and think about their sacred text. I see these people every day on the subway, complacently opening their Bibles with the exact thought in their mind that they're opening one book, written by one mind, moving toward one point.

It's an attractive thought, but as Fox amply demonstrates in The Unauthorized Version, it's a wildly inaccurate and inevitably self-deceitful way to deal with what Fox calls the “splendid incoherence” of the work as it's come down to us. That work can inspire many things, but complacent textual faith isn't – shouldn't be – one of them. As Fox puts it with doomed bluntness:

the prospects for one consistent and coherent construction out of this variety were precisely zero.

 

The main attraction of his book (which is so full of attractions it can literally be re-read every single year with new wonder, new discoveries … the acumen and sheer research necessary to have written it seem more impressive to me with every passing year) is the patient, open-minded, meticulous way Fox detonates that one coherent construction. In every text of the Bible, in every long-cherished received tradition of Judaism and Christianity, in every specific example, our author dives until he reaches the bottom, then presents us with a clear picture in sparkling, often very funny prose:

Historians are not so pedestrian that they cannot see how truth can be found even in an unintended fiction. A story may be wonderful evidence for what the narrator and his audience believed and assumed: it may help to hold their view of reality together. The beliefs may concern a god or an independent Satan (a late arrival on the biblical scene): they may be odd until we unravel them, like the curious story of Jacob in Genesis 30 who strips off the bark of fresh twigs, puts them in the water trough of his sheep and is somehow thought to have made them conceive speckled lambs as a result (it is not even that he had an speckled rams to father them: Laban had taken the speckled rams away). For centuries, scholars could still understand this story, as we have recently been reminded: it turned on the widespread belief that a mother's conception was influenced by whatever she looked at during sexual intercourse. In the water troughs, the stripped twigs looked dark and mottled; Jacob's ewes gazed on them and conceived mottled 'Jacob's flock', just as horse-breeders believed that a mare would conceive a fine foal if she saw her handsome stallion in a mirror while being mounted (in 1726 a woman amazed London society by claiming that she had given birth to rabbits after looking at a rabbit, but it emerged that she was wrong). Behind Genesis 30, which is story, not history, lies a widespread belief about conception and the facts of life. As late as 1950 there were commentators who claimed that it was true (which is another story and also part of history). It was left to Augustine to wonder why the ewes did not conceive twigs.

That emphasis on stories vs history is typical of Fox and a recurring note in The Unauthorized Version, which tries at every turn to strip away the accumulation of repetition and tradition that has filled up the holy books that comprise the Bible. In one delightful passage remarking on the fact that his contemporaries wondered if Jesus was King Solomon come back to life, Fox muses on how shocking Solomon would have found it, to come forward in time and see what the traditions of Judaism had done to his story:

Suppose that King Solomon had come back instead: he would never have credited it. Here were his descendants, venerating texts which he was supposed to have written and wondering whether or not they polluted people's hands: he had never composed a word of them. One of them said that he had 'uttered three thousand proverbs and his songs were a thousand and five': it was amazing to be thought so clever. There were even people who thought that he had written the Song of Songs: it would have looked to him like a collection of straightforward love poetry (his Egyptian wife had known plenty of bits like it). Why ever had people fallen for this book of the law in which Moses seemed to speak: why had they dreamed up a covenant with God or a future life? He and his friends had managed very well without any of them.

 

And yet, Fox allows, they weren't wrong to 'fall' for it, if it brought order and even comfort to their lives – the error happens when those same people, having been comforted, turn around and start to make untenable historical claims about the texts that gave the comfort. That's what historians like Fox can't tolerate – although The Unauthorized Version is in no way an intolerant book (you'll have to look to more modern pundits for the smallness of that). It's instead a fair and even loving one – but wry and unsparing too, and enormously worth your time regardless of your 'faith status.' Humanists everywhere should rejoice in it.

Bible Study: The Second Book of Samuel!

Our text today is from II Samuel, from the infamous lust-story of David and Bathsheba. One balmy spring evening, David is strolling on his palace roof when he spots a beautiful woman bathing. He asked around about who she was (we're not told how; either he described her address to the people he asked, or else he dragged them up to the roof and pointed) and learned that she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers in David's own army, under the command of Joab.

David sent flunkies to fetch her, and (presumably after saying hello, although David was a randy little bugger and the Bible is silent on the point) they slept together. Bathsheba later sent word to him that she was pregnant and that she was certain the child was his. So David promptly sent for Uriah; they sat and chatted about things in general, about the conduct of the ongoing war (those pesky Ammonites again). The Bible is silent on whether or not Uriah found it strange that he should be summoned out of the blue to gossip with the king, and what David did next is even stranger: he told Uriah to go home and relax for a bit, and he sent him away with a generous portion from the royal banquet tables.

David's motivation is obvious - if Uriah wasted no time in sleeping with Bathsheba, David could then claim the child was Uriah's and nobody would be the wiser. As starstruck as he is by Bathsheba's beauty, at this point in the story he's still trying to duck having anything more to do with her or the baby.

Unfortunately, Uriah didn't go home. He slept in camp in the palace yard, and when David summoned him and asked him (his exasperation can be imagined) why he didn't go home and take it easy for a bit, Uriah's dignity was ruffled: how could he live with himself if he want home and relaxed while his commander and all their men were still in the field, under arms, waging a war?

Nothing if not persistent, David tried again the next day ... more food, more wine, more chit-chatting, followed once again by urging Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. And again Uriah refused, once more sleeping in camp at the palace. Commentators over the centuries have wondered if perhaps there wasn't more going on here than simple martial virtue. After all, David had hardly made a secret of the fact that he fancied the man's wife - if Uriah had heard of this, is it any wonder he didn't feel like cozying up to Bathsheba, drunk or sober?

Finally David had had enough:

Next morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Station Uriah in the thick of the fight and then fall back behind him so that he may be struck down and die." Joab, then besieging the town, posted Uriah in a place where he knew there were fierce fighters. The men of the town sallied out and engaged Joab; the army suffered casualties, including some of David's bodyguard; and Uriah the Hittite was killed too.

When Joab got word of this, he sent a messenger to tell David what happened, and he prepared the messenger for a hostile reception (David by this point has something of an evil reputation for how he takes bad news), warning the man to make sure to tell David that Uriah the Hittite died in the day's fighting. And sure enough, when David hears news of the battle, the little hypocrite waxes wroth - until he's told about Uriah, at which point he almost comically calmed down and sent Joab a message saying, essentially, these things happen.

Either Bathsheba or David or both made a point of waiting out the bare minimum decent interval of mourning, and then they got married. Which might have been what they both wanted, but even so, the Bible tells us Yahweh wasn't happy about it.

It's hard to read into the story what might really have happened, although it's at least certain that at some point David changed his mind about what he wanted. At first, he made very pointed efforts to keep Uriah the Hittite alive and make him the baby's father. And when these attempts failed, David suddenly shifted his tactics and successfully got Uriah killed (and, in an especially cold little gesture worthy of King Claudius, had Uriah himself unknowingly carry the order for his own execution). What changed?

I think Bathsheba is the key. I think David was realizing two things during those days when he was trying to send Uriah home to his wife: first, that Uriah himself was a bit of a boob, and second, that David increasingly couldn't bear the thought of anybody being with Bathsheba but himself. I think the more he thought about her, the more he had to have her.

Still, he took an enormous risk. The people he asked about Bathsheba's identity, the flunkies he sent to fetch her, the palace servants he instructed to bear the royal banquet to this nobody's house, his army commander Joab, to whom he gave actual written instructions to connive at the murder of one of his own men ... right from the beginning, way too many people knew about this erotic fixation of David's, and that's surely our lesson for today: when pursuing another man's wife, discretion is everything. Without it, you run the risk of gossip, mutiny, and pissing off Yahweh.

Bible Study: The Book of Nehemiah!

Our text today is from the Book of Nehemiah:

When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. But I warned them and said, "Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will lay hands on you." From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Remember me for this also, O my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love.

Nehemiah tells his own story in the book (aside from a couple of lines that refer to him in the third person and may therefore have migrated into this text from elsewhere, unless the whole thing is by somebody else whose authorial control slipped in those lines), the story of being at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes in the years after the destruction of the Great Temple at Jerusalem and the exile of the surviving Jews.

Artaxerxes notices that Nehemiah is unhappy and asks him why. Nehemiah tells him: he'd like to go to Jerusalem and rebuild the city and the city walls, since great chunks of both lay now in burned ruins. Nehemiah assures us that it was God Who put this idea in his head, but it sure doesn't seem that way - this is a guy who seems very likely to get things done all by himself (and besides, in the Old Testament, God's idea of gently persuading Artaxerxes would have been to fill him to overflowing with live maggots, not get Nehemiah to propose some urban renewal). Nehemiah likewise credits God with Artaxerxes' answer, which is a resounding 'yes.' The king authorizes the rebuilding and shields Nehemiah not only with letters of instruction to the local satraps and governors but also with an armed detachment.

The aforementioned governors don't like any measures that help the Jews, and so they grumble and threaten violence. And in a typical motif of the Old Testament, even the Jews' alleged benefactor grows disillusioned with the Chosen People - the above quote is just one among many in which Nehemiah wonders if the squawking, covetous, mercantile behavior of the people he invites back into the rebuilt city makes them unworthy of all the bother he's gone to. And the quote demonstrates another thing about Nehemiah, as we've said: he was entirely capable of getting the results he wanted all by himself. His invocations of God come across as pro forma ass-covering.

And the message of it all? Well, the Book of Nehemiah comes at the very end of the Jewish history parts of the Old Testament, when the shot and incident of the earlier books has died away almost completely, leaving nothing much more than standard ancient history. So it's possible God simply stopped caring about any of this human stuff in which he once took such a drastic and bombastic interest. He doesn't talk to Nehemiah at all, not even a terse 'good job.' And a few centuries after Nehemiah, when the Roman Vespasian, his two sons Titus and Domitian, and their right-hand-general Trajanus all sacked Jerusalem and burned the Great Temple, God didn't lift a pinky to stop it.

Still, even though he's seconded by no smiting or plaguing, Nehemiah has at least royal backing to get his various projects done. And those projects do get done - a lot more quickly and unambiguously than most Old Testament projects in which God is heavily involved. If there is a falling off, maybe it's mutually beneficial.

Bible Study: The Book of Joshua!

Our text today is from the Book of Joshua:

Yahweh drove them headlong before Israel, defeating them completely at Gibeon; furthermore, he pursued them toward the descent of Beth-horon and harassed them as far as Azekah, and as far as Makkedah. And as they fled from Israel down the descent of Beth-horon, Yahweh hurled huge hailstones from heaven on them all the way to Azekah, which killed them. More of them died under the hailstones than at the edge of Israel's sword. Then Joshua spoke to Yahweh, the same day that Yahweh delivered the Ammonites to the Israelites. Joshua declaimed:

"Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
and moon, you also, over the Vale of Aijalon."
And the sun stood still, and the moon halted,
till the people had vengeance on their enemies.

Is this not written in the Book of the Just? The sun stood still in the middle of the sky and delayed its setting for almost a whole day. There was never a day like that, before or since, when Yahweh obeyed the voice of a man, for Yahweh was fighting for Israel. Then Joshua, and all Israel with him, returned to the camp at Gilgal.

That's from the famous Chapter 10 of Joshua, famous for that bit about the sun refusing to set until the Israelites had had time to take vengeance on their enemies. The kings of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon have all marched with their armies against the city of Gibeon, which has just made a separate peace with Joshua, conqueror-king of the Israelites. Gibeon sends word to Joshua at Gilgal, begging him to come lift the siege.

Joshua is the most terrifying figure in the Jewish Bible. It's not just that he's grizzled with experience (he'd been a lieutenant of Moses, legendarily one of only two who were always steadfast in their bravery), although that's a part of it. And it's not just that he has the ear of Yahweh, clearly the most terrifying deity in Palestine (clear, that is, to everybody from random Canaanite prostitutes to most - though, obviously, not all - kings). It's that for one of the only times in the Old Testament, Yahweh has found a human who's a, God help us, kindred spirit.

Yahweh is as powerful as the gods of Olympus, but He has none of their counter-balancing sensuality. Nor does He have the grubby mundanity of the Norse deities. And the bizarre grace of those characters in the Mahabharata? Forget about it - that's the last thing Yahweh is. He's created this gigantic sandbox-world, and He's watched it populate with all kinds of people, and He's chosen one group of them to champion against all comers (sometimes - on alternate Tuesdays, those hailstones could easily have been pelting the Israelites). But he's a bit, shall we say, extreme.

In Joshua, he's found his Facebook soulmate. Because Joshua is a homicidal psychopath. When he catches the league of five kings by surprise (an odd thing for him to need to do, since Yahweh already told him he'd win - but then, Yahweh helps those who help themselves. Sometimes.) and puts them to flight (that bit about Yahweh throwing the gigantic hailstones is one of the only times anywhere in the Bible where any kind of specific physical action is attributed to Him)(He's more a remote-control kind of catastrophizer), he doesn't want to subdue them or teach them a lesson or even ransom them.

So they hole up in a cave, the five of them, and when Joshua's done slaughtering their armies (mention is made of only a few straggling survivors), he has them dragged out from their cave, he kills them (there's the strong implication that he does it personally), he hangs their bodies on trees for the afternoon, and then he tosses their remains back into the cave and seals it up with big rocks (we're told those rocks are still there to this day - the Book of Joshua often goes out of its way to assure us that its events can be independently verified - notice that allusion above to The Book of the Just, now lost).

And that's the end of that - or so you'd think! But no! You see, Joshua has one problem with the rest of Palestine: it still has people in it. Not just conspiring kings, and not just their armies, and not just able-bodied (and presumably grumbling) men - it still has anybody living in it. That irritates Joshua, as it would irritate any homicidal psychopath.

Unlike most homicidal psychopaths, however (cases like Joshua and Brigham Young are rare), Joshua had the full and fervent backing of a bloodthirsty god. That's the sort of thing that gets you results.

The rest of Chapter 10 is a record of those results. Joshua led his army into Makkedah and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Libnah and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Lachish and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Gezer and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Eglon and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Hebron and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Debir and killed every single person living there. We get a wide-angle view:

Thus Joshua subdued the whole land: the highlands, the Negeb, the lowlands, the hillsides, and all the kings in them. He left not a man alive and delivered every single soul over to the ban, as Yahweh the God of Israel had commanded. Joshua conquered them from Kedesh-barnea to Gaza, and the whole region from Goshen as far as Gibeon. All these kings and their kingdoms Joshua mastered in one campaign, because Yahweh the God of Israel fought for Israel. And then Joshua, and all Israel with him, returned to the camp at Gilgal.

And plenty tired they were, no doubt. Systematic genocide, as any Nazi could tell you, is thirsty work.

Bible Study: The Book of Judith!

Our text today is from the Book of Judith:

I will sing a new song to my God.
Lord, you are great, you are glorious,
wonderfully strong, unconquerable.
May your whole creation serve you!
For you spoke and things came into being,
you sent your breath and they were put together,
and no one can resist your voice.

Should mountains topple
and mingle with the waves,
should rocks melt
like wax before your face,
to those who fear you,
you would still be merciful.

This is part the song Judith sings in celebration at the climax of her story, and she has every reason to celebrate, having single-handedly saved her city of Bethulia from the ravaging hordes of the invader.

The invader in this case is the mighty King Nebuchanezzar, lord of the Assyrian empire and self-styled king of all the world, who has sent his vast army under the command of General Holofernes into Israel and swept all opposition before him. The King did this despite the warning of Achior the Ammonite that it would be best not to disturb the Israelites, because you might thereby incur the wrath of their particularly nasty deity. Nebuchadnezzar doesn't take kindly to dissenting voices and banishes Achior to Israel, to suffer their fate right along with everybody else.

At first, the King seems to be right. The Israelites lament that their God isn't protecting them from the invading armies, and soon Bethulia is besieged. That brings Judith into the story: she's a beautiful young widow whose (henpecked, one suspects) husband died of heatstroke during a barley harvest, leaving her with property, servants, a nice house, and a spotless reputation. When Holofernes invades, she puts off her widow's weeds, dresses herself to perfection, and goes to his camp, telling him she's betraying her own people because they're wicked and obstreperous.
He'd have believed anything she said, of course, because he's jaw-droppingly besotted with her beauty from the first moment he sees her. This completely human trait is one of many Holofernes has; for a story's villain, he's surprisingly affable, as when he responds to Judith's comments about her own people:

"Courage, woman," Holofernes said, "do not be afraid. I have never hurt anyone who chose to serve Nebuchadnezzar, king of the whole world. Even now, if your nation of mountain dwellers had not insulted me, I would not have raised a spear against them. This was their fault, not mine. ... Courage! You will live through this night, and many after. No one shall hurt you."

Poor sap - too bad the same can't be said for him. Because of course Judith never intended to betray her own people, quite the opposite. After a brief enough stay in Holofernes' camp to cause everyone to let their guard down (including the eunuch Bagoas, whose job it is to watch over Judith while she's there) - the general even lets her eat her own specially-brought food, which she carries in - spoiler alert! - a big canvas sack - Judith lies in wait one night when Holofernes has had more wine than usual (he's working up his nerve to rape her, though she doesn't know that). With an imperiousness that comes through even the story's sparse narrative, she gets Bagoas to dismiss all the general's servants and take the night off himself, and she enters the tent of the passed-out Holofernes.

She takes his scimitar from his bedstead and with two mighty whacks cuts his head off. She then puts the head in her trusty canvas sack, stuffs the bed canopy in there too (no use leaving it, soaked with arterial spray to a height of nine feet, broadcasting to even the most casual onlooker what happened), and calmly makes her exit from the Assyrian camp.

When she shows the severed head to her people back in Bethulia, they fall on their knees with joy (well, except for wimpy Achior, who faints) (when he revives, he agrees to convert to the Israelite religion and is promptly circumcised, probably wishing he'd stayed fainted) - she predicts, correctly, that the Assyrians will fall to pieces when they find out what's happened to their mighty general, and when that happens, the Israelites drive the invaders from their land. We're told they knew peace for a long time afterwards.

And Judith? She was honored by her people and grew old in peace and prosperity. She lived to 105 and died in her bed (just like Holofernes, but you know what I mean).

And the lesson? To me it seems obvious: agnosticism is best. Despite Judith's elaborate praise to God in her "new song" (the first parts of which also slip in a lot of praise to herself), one of the most prominent features of her story is that God isn't in it; Judith doesn't get commanded by Him to kill Holofernes, and although she prays to Him for strength, the fact that she needs two whacks to decapitate her victim implies she had to rely on her own two arms, as the reader suspects all along. And really - given the rest of the Old Testament, can you imagine how much different the story would have unfolded, if God had been involved? In its present form, the Book of Judith is a tidy little story about one woman's plucky nationalism; Books where God takes an active hand are never neat. Had He been involved, Judith probably wouldn't have survived her own story - and if she had, she'd have been punished something awful for her success.

Nope, she did it all on her own: she reasoned, correctly, that the invading army would dissolve into chaos if it's head, so to speak, were cut off, and she resolved to do just that. And everything worked out fine, for her and the Israelites. All well and good to praise God after the fact, but the Book of Judith shows clearly that you really don't want Him involved while you're trying to get things done.

Bible Study: The Book of Hosea!

Our text today is from the Book of Hosea:

When Yahweh spoke first through Hosea, Yahweh said this to him, "Go marry a whore, and get children with the whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore for abandoning Yahweh."

So he went; and took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, who conceived and bore him a son ...

Hosea is one of the so-called minor prophets of the Old Testament (not really so minor, since God doesn't talk to just anybody, but nevertheless not in the big leagues where God actually gets chatty), and to him God gives just about the lousiest instructions He gives to anybody in the book: to make yourself a walking billboard, a living demonstration of how Israel isn't worthy of My love, act as My stand-in and go marry a faithless whore.

Of course Hosea has no choice but to obey (God is God, after all, He of the smiting and the afflicting-with-boils), but even so, he certainly musters some enthusiasm for the part. He instructs Gomer to name their first son Jezreel, a name which is meant to invoke God's intent to ruin Israel and end its reign (it would be like a father today naming his son "Chinese Debt"). And he instructs Gomer to name their second child "Unloved." And the third kid gets named "You're Not My People." So it's not just God who's ruining lives to make a point here.

The point is that Israel keeps straying from the steadfast compact with God (Hosea is the first to introduce the husband/wife metaphor for God/Israel - a metaphor that will get co-opted later on by the Catholic Church), and God's not happy about it, as the little book's verses make clear:

That is why, when the time comes, I will withdraw my corn
And my wine, when the season for it comes.
I will retrieve my wool, my flax,
That were intended to cover her nakedness;
So I will display her shame for her lover's eyes
And no one shall rescue her from my power.
I will lay her vines and fig trees waste,
Those of which she used to say:
"These are the pay my lovers gave me."
I am going to make them into thickets
for the wild beasts to ravage.
I will put an end to all her rejoicing,
Her feasts, her New Moons, her sabbaths,
And all her solemn festivals.
I mean to make her pay for all the days
When she burned offerings to the Baals
And decked herself with rings and necklaces
To court her lovers,
forgetting me.
It is Yahweh who is speaking.

No offense, but that final line surely isn't necessary: nobody in the Bible, Hell, nobody in all literature, has a worse (or more elaborately detailed) temper than Yahweh.

And the point? That despite Hosea's extreme bitterness at having a wife who strays from him (although she faithfully bears him children, she habitually falls back into her whorish ways, at one point even needing Hosea to buy her back into his household), he keeps taking her back (in defiance of Jewish law, even); that despite how faithless Israel habitually is to her God, despite how bitter He is about it, reconciliation is still possible.

That and, of course, that it really, really doesn't pay to be one of God's prophets.