The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (51 page)

Over the centuries, the storytelling traditions were expanded and elaborated upon by priests and scribes whose goal was to formalize the stories and make them fit into the official faith of ancient Israel. The priests themselves promulgated law codes and prescribed elaborate rituals for high holy days and day-to-day life. At the same time, the archivists and chroniclers in service to the early monarchs began to write down official accounts of royal births and deaths, victories and defeats in wartime, international trade and treaties in peacetime. Then, in times of crisis, along came the seers and sermonizers whom we call the Prophets, and their visions and scoldings and exhortations were added to the sacred literature of ancient Israel.

Over the span of several centuries, starting around 1000
B.C.E
. and ending sometime after 200
B.C.E
., all of these many strands of storytelling, poetry and song, sacred law, priestly ritual, and court history were written down, gathered up, stitched together, and offered to the people of ancient Israel and their posterity in the form of the book that we know as the Bible. Today, the end product of a process that began in antiquity is
still
regarded by three religions as Holy Writ, and with no less fervor than at any earlier time in the Bible’s long history.

“Bible” is derived from the Greek word
biblion
which means “book” or “papyrus,” the plant from which paper was first made. In fact, the Greek
word derives from the name of a Phoenician city in the ancient Near East, Byblos, where a papermaking industry first appeared. Strictly speaking, “bible” is more accurately defined as “little books” because the Bible actually consists of a great many separate writings, some quite short and none very long, that have come to be regarded as a single sacred text by all three Bible-based religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In antiquity, however, the Hebrew Bible was not a book at all. Rather, the various writings were copied out on sheets of parchment by a scribe using a quill pen and handmade ink, and the sheets were sewn together and rolled up into scrolls. Only during the Christian era did the book (or “codex”) replace the scroll as the common way to preserve and pass along writings of all kinds, including sacred writings. Because a book was easier than a scroll to carry, store, and use, the advent of books represented a technological revolution in the ancient world—and the early Christians were among the first to make use of the new technology in making their sacred texts widely available.

By the Middle Ages, both Christians and Jews favored the book for day-to-day use of their sacred writings, and the very first book to be printed with movable type in the the late fifteenth century was the Gutenberg Bible. Even today, however, Jewish congregations in synagogues around the world still read the first five books of the Bible—the Torah—from a scroll that has been copied out by hand on parchment in precisely the same way that it was done by the scribes of ancient Israel two or three thousand years ago.

The Hebrew Bible is known in Jewish usage as the
Tanakh
, an acronym made up of the Hebrew names for its three major sections:
Torah
(also called the Five Books of Moses),
Nevi’im
(the Prophets), and
Kethuvim
(the Writings).

The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are known to most readers in the modern world by titles that are derived from the early Greek and Latin translations of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy. According to Jewish tradition, the same five books are titled with words that appear in the Hebrew text itself; thus, for example, Genesis is known in Jewish usage as
Bereshith
, the Hebrew word that means “In the beginning” and appears as the very first word in the Bible. These five books are collectively known as the Torah, a Hebrew word that means “teaching,” or the
Chumash
, a Hebrew word derived from the number five. In Christian and scholarly usage, the same five books are also called the Pentateuch, a Greek word that means “five scrolls,” or the Five Books of Moses, because of the tradition that attributes authorship to Moses by way of dictation from the Almighty on Mount Sinai.

According to Christian and secular usage, the Hebrew Bible is known as the Old Testament and the sacred writings of Christianity are called the New Testament, which is intended to distinguish between the original covenant between God and the Patriarchs of ancient Israel and the new covenant offered by Jesus of Nazareth. When Christian readers and scholars refer to “the Bible,” they generally mean
both
the Old Testament and the New Testament. However, the phrase “Old Testament” is not used in Jewish circles because of its theological implications, which is why I have used the phrase “Hebrew Bible” rather than “Old Testament” in this book.

The next twenty-one books of the Hebrew Bible are collected under the general heading of the Prophets, or
Nevi’im
. These include the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings), the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and the Twelve Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi).

The remaining thirteen books of the Hebrew Bible are collected under the heading of the Writings, or
Kethuvim:
Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and First and Second Chronicles.

Christian Bibles generally present the books of the Hebrew Bible in a different order than the one used in Jewish Bibles. For example, the Book of Ruth comes immediately after Judges in most Christian Bibles, while Ruth appears in the Hebrew Bible in the section called the Writings along with the Book of Esther, the Song of Songs, and other works.
The ordering of the Bible in Christian practice follows an early Greek translation of the Bible called the Septuagint, which differs from the Hebrew Bible in the selection and order of sacred books. (See below.)

The Bibles used by the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant churches also include several ancient writings that are
not
recognized in Jewish tradition as part of Holy Writ, including such books of the late biblical era as Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, and several others. These books are generally known as the Apocrypha in Protestant usage and the Deuterocanon in Catholic usage, but none of them are included in the Hebrew Bible.

“Canon” comes from the Greek word for a measuring stick, and the word is applied in Bible studies to describe the collection of biblical writings that have come to be regarded as sacred. At some point in ancient history, the Hebrew Bible was finalized (or “canonized”) in its current form—some books had been regarded as sacred for centuries, some were added to the canon at a relatively late date, and some were excluded altogether by the rabbis who acted as guardians of the Bible. Indeed, the rabbinical literature preserves some of the heated debates over specific books and their worthiness for inclusion in the Bible, and the Song of Songs, a collection of erotic love poetry that somehow found its way into the Bible, inspired a notably hot controversy among the ancient sages.

According to one popular tradition, the Hebrew Bible was canonized at a rabbinical assembly held in the coastal town of Jabneh in Palestine in 90 C.E., but modern scholarship suggests that the process of canonization actually took many centuries. The Five Books of Moses were probably recognized as Holy Writ no later than 400
B.C.E
., and the Prophets were generally accepted around 200
B.C.E
. By the time of the Jabneh assembly, the problem faced by the rabbis was to pick and choose among a vast assortment of more recent writings on sacred themes, including a proliferation of commentaries on the earlier holy books, a number of so-called apocalyptic writings that predicted the end of the world, and the new Christian teachings. Thus, the final act of
rabbinical authority at Jabneh was to close the
Jewish
biblical canon once and for all. The Christian canon, of course, remained open to receive the sacred writings that we know as the New Testament.

Soon after the Hebrew Bible was canonized, some attentive readers began to notice certain oddities and curiosities in the biblical text. The very first can be found “in the beginning” of the Bible, where as we saw in chapter sixteen, we are given two quite different versions of the creation of the first man and woman in the Book of Genesis (Gen. 1:27, 2:7, 22). Only a few verses later in Genesis, we find two different versions of the familiar story of Noah and the Ark. In one version, Noah is commanded by the Almighty to bring
two
of every living thing aboard the ark, male and female of each species (Gen. 6:19). Then Noah abruptly receives a second set of divine instructions: God orders him to bring
seven
pairs of every “clean” animal but only one pair of the “unclean” animals (Gen. 7:2). We are told first that the flood lasts 40 days (Gen. 7:17) and later that it lasts 150 days (Gen. 7:24). On two different occasions, Noah sends out a bird to search for dry land, first a raven and then a dove (Gen. 8:7, 8).

Such repetitions of the same story in two different (and sometimes inconsistent) versions, which scholars call a “doublet,” are found throughout the Bible. Indeed, we have already encountered one of the rare “triplets” in the Bible: the story of a patriarch who tries to pass off his wife as his sister is told three times, twice about Abraham and Sarah and once about Isaac and Rachel. (See chapter three.) But these unexplained repetitions were not the only puzzles in the Biblical text. We notice, for example, that God is sometimes called Yahweh and sometimes Elohim. We are told that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible—but the last of these books, Deuteronomy, actually describes the death of its own author! Such flaws and contradictions turned out to be the crucial first clues in the search for an answer to the question of who really wrote the Bible.

Efforts were made to explain away these awkwardnesses by pious scholars of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, both Jewish and Christian. But as the centuries passed and Bible readers grew more
demanding, the tortured explanations of the early apologists no longer sufficed, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza, among many others, insisted on pointing out the obvious if slightly heretical conclusions to be drawn from such evidence. “It is … clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses,” Spinoza declared, “but by someone who lived long after Moses.”
¹

The pioneering Bible scholars of the nineteenth century, including such commanding figures as Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen, proposed a way to explain the apparent inconsistencies that have come to be accepted as a first principle of Bible scholarship. The Bible, they suggested, was drawn from many sources, written down by many hands, and revised over the centuries by many redactors, each with a different theological agenda, a specific historical frame of reference and political subtext, and a distinctive literary style. What we regard as the Holy Scripture is a patchwork quilt fashioned by human hands, and we can learn to recognize the styles and motifs used by the various contributors to the finished work.

Of course, we cannot know with certainty the identities of the biblical authors—their names, places of residence, dates of birth and death. We cannot really know whether the men and women who authored and edited the Bible were individuals working alone or members of a “school” or “tradition.” Indeed, biblical scholarship has detected layer upon layer of additions and deletions, revisions and redactions, and so it is likely that the biblical text was worked and reworked by countless hands over the centuries. Still, the various threads of authorship are usually identified in scholarly writing as if they
were
the work of specific individuals.

The oldest strand of biblical narrative is attributed to an author who calls God by his personal name, Yahweh, which appears in the Hebrew Bible as the four Hebrew letters corresponding to YHWH. Since the scholars who pioneered the study of biblical authorship in the nineteenth century were German, the German rendering of God’s personal name (Jahveh) is used to identify the biblical author who calls God by that name—the author is called J, or the Yahwist. Scholars believe that he (or she) worked in the southern kingdom of Judah sometime after the
reign of King David, perhaps in the tenth or ninth century
B.C.E
. Some of the richest and most intriguing material in the Bible is attributed to J, including many of the stories collected and retold in this book.

A parallel strand of biblical narrative is attributed to a different author who is known as E, or the Elohist, because he tends to refer to God by the Hebrew term
Elohim
. E, who displays a marked reverence for Moses and the line of priests descended from Moses, may have been a Levite priest from the northern kingdom of Israel who was working at a slightly later period in history than J, perhaps 900 or 800
B.C.E
. It is the Elohist, for example, who shows us Aaron—the brother of Moses but also his rival—as he fashions a golden calf and disputes the primacy of Moses as God’s chosen prophet, all with disastrous results for himself and the Israelites who follow his example.