Important Lecture on The Hebrew Bible--Read this early in the first week

The Hebrew Text (and links to what you'll find below):

The book that we called The Bible is really a collection of writing that spans at least seven hundred years.  The texts of the Hebrew Old Testament were composed at moments between the eighth century B.C.E. ("Before the Common Era"; some maintain the period of time to be the ninth or even tenth century, and the debate is considerable as to the age of the first Hebrew writings) and the mid second century B.C.E.  Those books of the so-called New Testament--Christian writings--were composed probably between C.E. 60 and 100 ("C.E. means "Common Era"--these terms for dating are more neutral for historians and refer to the change in the Western world at the time immediately following the life and death of the prophet known as Jesus, and how his followers affected cultures, until even the Roman Empire represented the Christian faith).  For objective analysis, we must look for truth and meaning in each book as a canonical whole.  This view appeals to literary critics who read the "Bible as literature" and see attempts to split each book as an obstacle to understanding what they now mean.  The problem, we might also add, becomes compounded when we believe that all "Old" works make reference to "New."  For instance, in the medieval tendency to read all works allegorically, a type of fluid symbolism; that is, something that can have more than a single one-to-one meaning and continually change even as we read a work, gave way to what we refer to as the "four-fold allegory."

Works could be read by one or all four of the possible ways to read material:

1. Literal: the narrative reads as a literal representation of what it purports.

2. Moral: the narrative contains a moral meaning in conjunction with its literal one [also known as Tropological].

3. Allegorical: Perhaps a confusing term, since it defines itself; however, what it means is simply that a work may have political, historical, social, or any number of other meanings that we would not necessarily call "moral," but another reading is evident, other than the literal narrative one.  Some prefer to see the Literal Mode as being historical; but it's possible to be literal without being historical.

4. Anagogical: This is where religious significance to works makes itself known: all "Old Testament" readings always have "New Testament" parallels, fulfillments, or meaning.  For instance, the trial for Abraham with regard to his son Isaac compares to God's sacrificing His son, but with a different outcome.  Or, consider Jonah and the sea monster: here we have Jonah in the belly of the beast for three days, which corresponds to Christ's time in the tomb; or, the nomadic wanderings of the Jews under Moses' command, which corresponds to Christ's time in the wilderness, which he would successfully complete, 'finding his way to the promise of salvation, even as the Hebrews found their way to the Promised Land. [Note: Some prefer Typological as opposed to Anagogical, which is the same idea.]

Those who take the books separately, read them as individual narratives, each with its own symbolism, allegory, or stories to tell.  There's no "whole" picture of parts fitting together because they have been separated by centuries, differences in culture, influences, and changes in society.

 None of the books of our bible existed in its present form before the eighth century B.C.E.  By then at least five hundred years had elapsed since the date at which the Israelites are said to have left Egypt and entered the Promised Land.  Many of the great names of the bible, therefore, had managed without any scripture at all: Solomon, Elijah, David, or even Samuel.  When we argue over the date of the first writings of the Hebrew stories--done much as what occurred in the time of Jesus' followers; that is, the attempt to "authorize" the text because too many liberties were taken with the stories, embellished, sometimes forgotten, sometimes ascribed to the wrong persons--we must remember that other texts are older.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, is possibly a thousand years older, perhaps more, and it too underwent a time of "authorization," as did the final work of the King James Committee for the translation of the Bible, when, after the Reform movement caused questions about the validity of some books, in order to make a statement that these works, no others and no fewer, were God's inspired texts.

Sometimes it comes as a surprise to readers of the Bible that we're dealing with not one (as tradition has it, that Moses wrote the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures) but rather several.  Today, this is known as the Documentary Hypothesis or the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis, after the names of the 19th-century scholars who formulated the theory and the literature associated with certain writers.  For even those who hold to the literalist tradition of Moses' authorship, many problems exist, not the least of which is that Moses apparently writes of his own death, disobedience to God, and events that follow.  Of course, in terms of writing, a peoples' abilities to do so, etc., Moses as a historical figure would have preceded the written accounts that bear his authorship by more than 1500 years.  I have heard the claim used, as well, that the distinctions in style and writing between authors could be explained by one writer in different "moods"--a neat trick, that, given the differences would be even greater than our reading material in Shakespeare's day and finding no differences than reading today's newspaper.  And why should we not see the Genesis narratives as the work of several writers, much like the Gospels?  After all, it took an accepted four story tellers to view the life and death of Jesus.  How many may have written about the beginnings and travails of the one God?  Even in the time of Abraham, people believed in many gods--household gods, gods of the elements, gods of a territory--and Abraham's great surprise at leaving Ur was to learn that the same god as he had served there apparently went with him to the land of Canaan.  But even after this revelation, the Hebrews still believed in household gods and many other types.  It may be that there on Moses' tablets, brought down from Sinai, it merely says, in effect, that while many gods exist, Yahweh is primary--No Other Gods Before Me.

 And the Israelites' particular god was Yahweh, whom their older texts connect with a region south of the land of Canaan.  The Ten Commandments represents the first law, as we know it, of the people; but history shows that their origins were probably from the northern kingdom of Israel during the tenth century, and there were not ten -- nor were the commands particularly original.  The final form of this story may be as late as 550 B.C.E.  Another way to put this into perspective is to suggest that the story of Job was probably written between 500 and 300 B.C.E.--or, as the latter date suggests, written at the same time as Sophocles was writing Oedipus the King.

 For the early Jews, other gods clearly exist -- as Hosea acknowledges.  So, to repeat, the claim in the First Commandment is not that other gods do not exist but that Yahweh should come first.  Israel's first king, Saul, named one of his sons after the god Baal, and his other son, Jonathan, did the same.  The idea of monotheism is now dated about the sixth century B.C.E.  The early Jews were also realistic about death: when they died, they died forever.  The idea of life after death demonstrates an idea from the book of Daniel, and it dates from about 160 B.C.E.  This idea probably originated from one of many Jewish revolts from Roman occupation; the need for martyrs to sustain the struggle led to a belief in rewards for martyrdom.  Is that, especially today, difficult to comprehend?

The first of the two biblical writers was the Yahwist, "J" writer, who seems to have written form the southern kingdom, Judah, probably in the early eighth century.  The other writer is known as "E," or the Elohist, after E's preferred name for God.  He too wrote about the same time, but from the northern kingdom.  We cannot know which came first, but most scholars prefer to think that J is at times referring to E's earlier stories.  In about 722 B.C.E. the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom, and it is probable that someone brought to the south the stories of that people; those of the south feared that the same things would happen to them.  In the year 622/1 one of the Jewish priests, Hilkiah, reportedly found a scroll in the temple at Jerusalem, which he identified as the "Book of the Law of the Lord."  He had the core of our book of Deuteronomy, a text of commands and warnings.

 Hebrew writers:            E, for Elohist (eighth century B.C.E.)

                                               J, for Yahweist, probably basing his writing on E (eighth century B.C.E.)

                                                     D, for Deuteronomist (622/1 B.C.E.?)

                                                 P, for Priestly, (530 to 500 B.C.E., when the exile was ending?)

                                               C, for Chronicler (350 to 340 B.C.E.?)

 From Israel to Athens, the 620s B.C.E. represented one of the world's vital eras of written law.  In the city of Athens, Draco, author of draconian penalties, gives us the first written law code;  in Jerusalem, laws ascribed to Moses were found forgotten in the Temple and were enforced by the king as the law of God.  At some point between c. 540 and 400 B.C.E., an unknown editor had amalgamated written traditions and worked older and respected texts into our single body of narrative and law.  Out of four sources, he made what we now read as the first five books with our later titles, translated from the Greek language: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  We refer to this writer as the "D" author.  In the fourth century, a second block of narrative was formed which tells the stories of Ezra, Nehemiah and the narrative that we know as Chronicles.  It is still commonly accepted that this work was by a single author, known as the "Chronicler."

Jews in Egypt's Alexandria translated the first five books, the Pentateuch, from Hebrew into Greek in the third century B.C.E.  The story is only legend, but seventy translators were said to worked on the project, hence the name Septuagint, or LXX.  By 100 B.C.E. Greek translations had been made of most of the Old Testament, although Ecclesiastes may have had to wait until the Christian era.

 In Greek, authors of a prose narrative or history usually named themselves at the start of the work; their history was subjective and affected their reputations.  In Hebrew, everything had to be inferred about the unknown author.  Anonymous narrative can easily lull us into accepting it, as if it is "the" story, not somebody's story.  Conversely, books of wisdom, laws, proverbs, dreams or prophecies cited an author or personal source.  This distinction is firm and long-lasting among Near Eastern writers.

 Our earliest full copy of the Hebrew scriptures nowadays is a manuscript known as the Leningrad Manuscript, which was written in C.E. 1009.  Jewish scholars who were working in the eighth and ninth centuries C.E. were known as the Masoretes (masorah is the Hebrew word for tradition), and it is to them we owe the traditional text of the Old Testament.  Greek translations went back to the third century B.C.E.  From the ruined site of Qumran, near the western shore of the Dead Sea, we have evidence of 175 manuscript copies of a book known in our Old Testament which range in date from c. 225 B.C.E. to C.E. 50, and these differ in many details from the Masoretes' Hebrew text.

From about 250 B.C.E. until the time of Christ, "close reading" was a new way of interpreting scripture.  The Essenes made many commentaries on the scriptures which were liberal in interpretation to the extreme.

 The myths of the Near East, like those of Greece and Rome, were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way [this is an idea that needs further explanation, which will come; however, it is important to remember that literalness is a very modern idea that would shock, if not repulse, other societies--the literal is never as effective as a metaphorical expression for grasping the true feeling of the inexperienced sensation or something beyond our comprehension).   By 4000 B.C.E. the Tigris-Euphrates valley was peopled by those we now know as Sumerians, who were later invaded by the Semitic Akkadians.  In about 2000 B.C.E. the Amorites invaded and made Babylon their capital.  The Assyrians followed, who captured Babylon in the eighth century B.C.E.  The composite Babylonian tradition affected the mythology and religion of Canaan, which would become the Promised Land of the ancient Israelites.

In Babylonian myth -- as later in the bible -- there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world.  The pagan vision was holistic.  The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate, ontological sphere; divinity was not essentially different from humanity.  Baal (storm and fertility) and Yam (god of rivers and seas) first lived with El, the Canaanite High God.  (These gods and others, in fact, had places within the Temple in Jerusalem.)  The following of El alone is attributed to Abraham, who left Ur and eventually settled in Canaan some time between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries B.C.E.

 There are three periods of settlement in Canaan: about 1850 B.C.E. by Abraham; a second wave by Abraham's grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel ("May God show his strength"); the third wave about 1200 B.C.E. when those who claimed to be descendants of Abraham arrived there from Egypt.

 The J writer is more interested in ordinary historical time; his perception shows a clear distinction between man and the divine: man (adam), as the pun indicates, belongs to the earth (adamah).  The P writer seems to suggest that the Israelites had never heard of Yahweh until he appeared to Moses in the burning bush.  Moses is told that Abraham had called him "El Shaddai" (El of the Mountain)  even though he was the same God.  God's answer to Moses's question as to what to call him, "I am who I am" (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) has a deliberate vagueness to it: the idiom means "never you mind" or "mind your own business."  In the Axial Age, the period 800-200 B.C.E., all the main regions of the civilized world created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative.  One of the hallmarks of the age was that of "compassion" in the gods; however, the age was also marked by masculinity and the reduction of women and goddesses to that of second-class roles.

History was more trivial than poetry and myth: the one describes what has happened, the other what might.  Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.  Aristotle's idea of God had an immense influence on later monotheists, particularly on Christians in the Western world.  In the Physics, he had examined the nature of reality and the structure and substance of the universe.  He developed what amounted to a philosophical version of the old emanation accounts of creation: there was a hierarchy of existences, each one of which imparts form and change to the one below it.  Man is in a privileged position: his human soul has the divine gift of intellect, which makes him kin to god and a partaker in the divine nature.  It is his duty to become immortal and divine by purifying his intellect.  Wisdom (sophia) was the highest of all the human virtues; it was expressed in contemplation (theoria) of philosophical truth.  Very few people are capable of this wisdom, however, and most can achieve only phronesis, the exercise of foresight and intelligence in daily life.

 But an irreconcilable difference between the god of Aristotle, which is scarcely aware of the world it has created, and the God of the bible, who is passionately involved in human affairs, represents the tension between Greek thought and Jewish religion.  The Greek God could be discovered by human reason, whereas the God of the bible only made himself known by means of revelation.

 The God of Israel had originally distinguished himself from the pagan deities by revealing himself in concrete current events, not simply in mythology and liturgy.  Now, the new prophets insisted, political catastrophe as well as victory revealed their God.  Thus the prophets saw their God differently: Isaiah, a member of the royal family, had seen Yahweh as a king; Amos, poor and illiterate, had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to God; while Hosea saw Yahweh as a jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife.  But all religion must begin with some anthropomorphism; a deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest.

 The reformers rewrote Israelite history.  The historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were revised according to the new ideology and, later, the editors of the Pentateuch added passages that gave a Deuteronomist interpretation of the Exodus myth to the older narratives of J and E.  Yahweh was now the author of a holy war of extermination in Canaan.  The dangers of such theologies of election, which are not qualified by the transcendent perspective of an Isaiah, are clearly shown in the holy wars that have scarred the history of monotheism.  It was in exile that the second Isaiah, so-called because his work was added to the oracles of Isaiah, that Yahweh became the only God.  People were now interested in their creation: Ps work from the Priestly tradition was written in exile and inserted into the Pentateuch; this gave its own interpretation of the events described by J and E.  P drew upon the Enuma elish (the Babylonian epic of creation that was retold at the feast of the New Year) for the account of creation.  The notion of "separation" is crucial to P's theology.

Genesis: The P Writer:

 For the P writer God is described as Elohim, a generic term for Creator, and El Shaddai, usually translated as God Almighty, that means "God of the mountain," or force (another ancient term: "Shekinah" -- "the God within our tents").  The writer is concerned with beginnings, and hence also of family lines, genealogy, family trees.  For him, there must be no break in the chain of transmission through which God's dispensation has been handed down; hence he follows the genealogical line all the way back to Creation.

 For P, his world is heaven-centered; man's role in the Creation is thus passive.  Personalities recede into the background, while the formal relations between God and society become the central theme.  P was probably not an individual, or even a group of like-minded contemporaries, but rather a school with an unbroken history reaching back to early Israelite time, and continuing until the Exile and beyond.

 The J Writer:

 The J writer, also known as the Yahwist writer, is not given to stereotypes.  What is truly distinctive about this writer is his incisive style, his economy and boldness of presentation, his insight into human nature, and the recognition that a higher order and purpose may lie behind seemingly incomprehensible human events.

 His style is clear and direct, a single sentence can evoke a whole picture.  His figures are realized in depth; it is their inner life that invariably attracts the author's attention; yet he manages to show it in action, not through description.  And the reader is thus made a participant in the unfolding drama.

 J's world is in diametric contrast to P's: J's is emphatically earth-centered.  And his earth is peopled with actors so natural and candid that even their relation with Yahweh are reduced to human scale, so that God himself becomes anthropomorphic.  In the Eden prelude, Adam is portrayed as a lost and confused child, and is so treated by Yahweh.  Humans will later acquire complexity.  Sarah's childlessness results in an acute domestic crisis, leaving Abraham caught between two headstrong women.  J also appears to sympathize with victims, as he does with Esau as opposed to Jacob.

 Man is not, in J's scheme of things, as mere marionette, as he is in P's account.  The individual is allowed considerable freedom of action, and it is this margin of independence that brings out both his strengths and his weaknesses.  But no mortal is ever in complete control of his destiny.  No one may grasp the complete design, which remains reasonable and just no matter who the chosen agent may be at any given point.  This may be the purpose of Jacob's unintentional blessing by Isaac (27), or the eerie encounter at Penuel (32:23-33).

In the Noah episode, the two writers are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate their narratives: the reason for the flood is cited by J in 6:5-8, and by P in 6:13; J records that the ark accommodated seven pairs of each kind of bird and clean animal, but only one pair of the unclean species (7:2-3), whereas P knows only of a single pair in each case (6:19-20; 7:15).  And, according to J (7:4, 12; 8:6, 10, 12) the rains came down forty days and nights, and the waters disappeared after three times seven days, the whole deluge lasting thus sixty-one days.  But in P, whose calendar is typically exact, the waters held their crest for one hundred and fifty days (7:24), and they remained on the earth one year and eleven days (7:11; 8:14).

 Why weren't discrepancies corrected by the redactor or compiler to whom we owe the composite version?  Such authority was exercised, if at all, only with utmost hesitancy and with the briefest minimum of substantive change--just as one would be loathe to correct one of the Gospel accounts: we are dealing with different perspectives.

 The E Writer:

J and E are at times impossible to distinguish from one another.  In general, E lacks the directness of J where man's relations with God are concerned.  This is precisely why E is led to interpose angels or dreams, or both, the Deity being regarded, it would seem, as too remote for direct personal intervention.  The center of E's world has not shifted all the way to heaven, as it has with P; neither is it earth-bound, on the other hand, as in the case of J.

 One major distinction is that E is interested in events while J is interested in people.  The first substantial contribution by E is not in evidence until chapter 20.

 The E source does not reach back beyond Abraham, unless one ascribes this late start to accidents of preservation rather than deliberate design.  Neither J nor P was interested in national history as such.  Rather, both were concerned with the story of a society and, more particularly, a society as the embodiment of an ideal, that is, a way of life.

 Note: Speiser puts J's version in the tenth century B.C.E., E a century later in the ninth; P he places at "early Israelite history, through the Exile and beyond."  Others, Lane Fox in particular, would move them forward in time by two centuries.

 Both J and P follow similar outlines of Primeval History; and all three sources, J, P and E, reflect the same basic date in regard to the patriarchs: family tree, migration from Mesopotamia, settlement in Canaan, beginning of the sojourn in Egypt.

 The data were not to be tampered with because tradition had stamped them as inviolable; and they had acquired an aura of sanctity because the subject matter was not secular but spiritual history, history a writer might recount, but could not color to his own liking.

 Their story is selective, not comprehensive.  The writers remind us again and again that theirs is a special theme.  Other aspects of the story, they say, can be found in The Book of the Wars of Yahweh (Num 21:14); the Chronicle of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41); the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (1 Kings 14:19; 15:7; 22:46).  The ways that they chose to interpret events also shows selectivity: J could not know that Jacob's preferment did not have to depend on falsehoods.  Yet the author's personal feelings on the subject gave him no leave to alter the received data that tradition had shaped and sanctioned long before.

 With regard to Mesopotamian polytheism, because the cosmos was viewed s a state in which ultimate authority was vested in the collective assembly of the gods, mortals were, paradoxically enough, both gainers and losers.  Human society followed the lead of the gods in adopting an anti-authoritarian form of government.  But since heaven itself was subject to instability, mankind too lacked the assurance of absolute and universal principles.  Monotheism, on the other hand, is predicated on the concept of a God who has no rivals, and is therefore omnipotent.  As the unchallenged master of all creation, he has an equal interest in all of his creatures.

 The biblical concept of a nation stresses three features above all others: 1) a body of religious beliefs; 2) an integral system of law; and 3) a specific territorial base.

 Biblical history proper, as distinct from primeval history, begins in Genesis with chapter 12.  In terms of subject matter, the Book of Genesis breaks up into two distinct and unequal parts.  the first contains chapters 1-11; it is restricted -- if allowances are made for the Table of Nations -- to what has come to be known as Primeval History.  The second part, chapters 12-50, takes up the Story of the Patriarchs.

 The patriarchal narratives in Genesis comprise three major subdivisions: 1) The story of Abraham (12:1-25:18); 2) The story of Jacob (25:19-37:2); and 3) Joseph and His Brothers (37:2-50:26).

 The Old Testament was compiled sometime before the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.  But the extant manuscripts of Genesis as a whole are many centuries later, so that much could have happened, and some things are actually known to have occurred, after the definitive compilation.  Later Hebrew usage is by no means identical with early biblical usage.  Yet successive interpreters would tend to make the secondary usage retroactive.  And because the bible had become sacred Scripture, such anachronistic interpretations acquired a normative bearing of their own.

 Creation:

We have two separate accounts of this theme, the first Creation, which stems from P, and the other following which goes back to J.  Yet neither source could have borrowed directly from the other, since each dwells on different details.  Accordingly, both must derive from a body of antecedent traditions.  The order of events is the same, which is enough to preclude any likelihood of coincidence.

 Comparison of the Babylonian creation with that of Genesis:

 

            Enuma elish                           Genesis

Divine spirit and cosmic        Divine spirit creates cosmic

matter are coexistent and     matter and exists independently of it

coeternal                                                        

Primeval chaos; Ti'amat       The earth a desolate waste,

enveloped in darkness           with darkness covering the deep

Day 1: Light emanating from gods  Light created

Day 2:  Creation of firmament        Creation of firmament

Day 3:  Creation of dry land            Creation of dry land

Day 4:  Creation of luminaries         (seasons)Creation of luminaries (seasons)

Day 5:  Living creatures, land and water         Living creatures, land and water

Day 6:  Animal kingdom & Creation of man   Animal kingdom&Creation of man

Day 7:  Gods rest and celebrate       God rests and sanctifies the seventh day                                                                

 It would appear that P's opening account goes back to Babylonian prototypes, and it is immaterial whether the transmission was accomplished directly or through some intermediate channel; in any case, J cannot have served as a link in this particular instance.  The patriarchs constituted a direct link between early Hebrews and Mesopotamia, and the cultural effects of that start persisted long thereafter.

 The Babylonian creation story features a succession of various rival deities.  The biblical version, on the other hand, is dominated by the monotheistic concept in the absolute sense of the term.  Thus the two are both genetically related and yet poles apart.

 P's first sentence (his opening: 1:1-2:4a) states that "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," what ensued was chaos (vs. 2) which needed immediate attention.  In other words, the Creator would be charged with an inadequate initial performance, unless one takes the whole of vs. 1 as a general title, contrary to established biblical practice.  In fact, the present interpretation precludes the view that the creation accounts in Genesis say nothing about coexistent matter.

Note as well that verse 1 in Genesis (the Anchor Bible), "a formless waste," represents a rhetorical device called an hendiadys, that is, two terms joined by "and" and forming a unit in which one member is used to qualify the other: Speiser notes that in this passage, "unformed-and-void" is used to describe "a formless waste."  Another example is verse 14, sets lights in the sky to mark a distinction between day and night, as well as marking time by "days and the years."  Speiser's excellent scholarship demonstrates the rhetorical tropes (metaphors and rhetorical strategies) used by these writers to make the most of the intended expression.  It is, in many ways, much more sophisticated than a "literal" reading of past events.

 J's narrative (2:4b) begins with the making of "earth and heaven."  The difference is by no means accidental.  In the other instance the center of the stage was heaven, and man was but an item in a cosmic sequence of majestic acts.  Here the earth is paramount and man the center of interest.

 It isn't strange that so much dependence exists on Mesopotamian concepts in a writer of J's originality and caliber.  In the early chapters, J reflects, in common with P, distant traditions that had gained currency through the ages.

 The Fall of Man (2:25-3:24 -- J):

 There is action here and suspense, psychological insight and subtle irony, light, and shadow.  The characterization is swift and sure.  Everything is transposed into human terms.  Yahweh speaks to him as a father would to his child.

 Yet the purpose of the author is much more than just to tell a story.  J built his work around a central theme, which is the record of a great spiritual experience of a whole nation.  But a nation is made up of individuals, who in turn have their ancestors all the way back in time.  When such a composite experience is superbly retraced and recorded, the result is also great literature.

 Such motifs as sexual awareness, wisdom, and nature's paradise are of course familiar from various ancient sources.  It is noteworthy, however, that all of them are found jointly in a single passage of the Gilgamesh Epic.  There Enkidu was effectively tempted by the courtesan, only to be repudiated by the world of nature; "but he now had wisdom, broader understanding."  Indeed, the temptress goes on to tell him, "You are wise Enkidu, you are like a god"; and she marks his new status by improvising some clothing for him.  It would be rash to dismiss so much detailed correspondence as mere coincidence.

The Genesis Narrative and Literature:

Whenever we read anything our minds are moving in two directions at once.  One direction is centripetal, where we establish a context our to the words read; the other is centrifugal, where we try to remember what the words mean in the world outside.  Sometimes the external meanings take on a structure parallel to the verbal structure, and when this happens we call the verbal structure descriptive or nonliterary.  Here the question of truth arises; the structure is true if it is a satisfactory counterpart to the external structure it is parallel to.  If there is no external counterpart, the structure is said to be literary or imaginative, existing for its own sake. 

Legend and saga develop into history; stories, sacred or secular, develop into literature; a mixture of practical knowledge and magic develops into science.

 A descriptive writer who aims at conveying some truth beyond his verbal structure avoids figures of speech, because all figuration emphasizes the centripetal aspect of words, and belongs either to the poetic or to the rhetorical categories. 

In short, the Bible is explicitly anti-referential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself.  How do we know that the Gospel is true?  Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament.  But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true?  Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel.  As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase "word of God," as applied both the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. 

If there is one thing that biblical scholarship has established beyond reasonable doubt, it is that authorship, inspired or not, counts for very little in the Bible.  If the Bible is inspired in any sense, all the glossing and editing and splicing and conflating activities must be inspired too.  

Poetic language is closely associated with rhetorical language, as both make extensive use of figures of speech.  The bible uses a language that is as poetic as it can be without actually becoming a poem.  But it is not a poem; it is written in a mode of rhetoric, though it is rhetoric of a special kind, called kerygma or "proclamation."  To a critic, however, myth means primarily mythos or narrative, more particularly the kind of self-contained narrative which is meant by the English word story in contrast to history.  Such myth is the only possible vehicle of kerygma, and as every syllable of the Gospels is written in the language of myth, efforts to demythologize the Gospels would soon end by obliterating them.  

The literal meaning of the Bible, then, must be a mythical and metaphorical meaning.  It is only when we are reading as we read poetry that we can take the word literal seriously, accepting everything given us without question.  There may be meanings beyond the literal, but that is where we start. 

It may be asked, "Why can't we have it both ways?  Why not a body of narrative and imagery that is also a definitive replica of truths beyond itself?"  The answer is that description is a subordinate function of words.  Even one word is a sign and not a thing: two or three words begin to form grammatical fictions like those of subject and predicate.  Because the Bible is deeply rooted in the nature of words, at a certain point of intensity a choice must be made between figurative and descriptive language, and the Bible chooses figurative.

 In ordinary experience we think of ourselves as subjective, and of everything else as objective.  We also tend to think of the objective as the center of reality and the subjective as the center of illusion.  The act of recalling is a far more vivid and intense experience than memory itself.  When Elizabethan critics used Horace's phrase about poetry as a "speaking picture," they implied that poetry gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination. 

Wherever there is love there is sexual symbolism, and the rhetoric of the Bible, which seeks out its reader, is traditionally a male rhetoric, all its readers, whether men or women, being symbolically female.  In secular literature, where the category is purely poetic, the sexual symbolism is reversed.

 A myth is primarily a mythos, a story, narrative, or plot, with a specific social function.  There arises a distinction between stories which explain to their hearers something that those hearers need to know about the religion, history, law, or social system of their society, and less serious stories told primarily for amusement.  We may call the myth a verbal temenos, a circle drawn around a sacred or numinous area.  The less serious group become folktales.

 Pre-literary myth arises in a state of society in which there is not as yet a firm and consistent distinction between subject and object.  A statement that a subjective A is an objective B is a metaphor, and at the center of pre-literary myths are the gods, who, being partly personalities and partly associated with some department of nature, are ready-made metaphors.

In Christianity a divine nature taking on a human form is a portentous miracle that can happen only once in history, but such a view is very remote from Homer.

In the popular mind there is only one way in which words can express truth, and that is the truth of correspondence, where a body of words describes a set of external facts or events or propositions, and is said to be true if we find the correspondence of the words and what they describe satisfactory.

 The Bible is mythical rather than historical, because for its purposes myth is the only vehicle for what has traditionally been called revelation.  It is generally accepted that the opening words of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word," were intended to form a Christian commentary on at least the first of the two creation myths of the Bible.

 If the Word is the beginning, it is the end took the Omega as well as the Alpha, and what this principle indicates is that to receive the revelation of the Bible we must examine the total verbal structure of the Bible.  This implies a deliberate and conscious renouncing of what is called "literal" belief, which always means subordinating the Word to what the Word is alleged to describe. 

A creation myth is in a sense the only myth we need, all other myths being implied in it.  Of the two creation writers, the Jahwist one is considerably earlier than the Priestly account, which is almost certainly postexilic.  The Jahwist account may also be divided into seven stages, just as the Priestly account is.  First, a "mist" or irrigating fountain is set up in the middle of a dry, parched earth.  Second, the first human being is created, whom we may call "the being" or "the adam" with a lower-case A.  Third comes the creation of the garden; fourth the creation of the four rivers, fifth the creation of living creatures other than humans, sixth, the creation of the first woman out of the body of the "adam," and finally the statement, a human Sabbath corresponding to that of the other account, that the two human beings were in a state of innocence, naked and not ashamed.

 In the Priestly narrative there is a strong emphasis on division and contrast.  The Priestly account is a vision of creation largely in terms of what was later to be called natura naturata, a cosmic structure or system reaching from chaos up through the human to the divine.  The Jahwist account sees rather a natura naturans, a growing fertile nature with humanity at its center.

 What is actually coming into being is the human consciousness, and what is being presented to that consciousness is the sense of order and design in the universe that has prompted every creative effort in human arts and sciences.  Similarly, the day of rest at the end is not merely an explanation of the origin of the Sabbath: it means among other things that the creation has become objective to its Creator, which implies that it must become objective to human consciousness as well.

The fact that human consciousness is the mirror of creation is symbolized by the bringing of land and air animals to the adam to be named, the bestowing of names being clearly regarded as a necessary completion of the creative process. 

In the Jahwist account, as in so many forms of social psychology today, morality, the knowledge of good and evil, is founded on the repressing or sublimating of the sexual instinct.  In Christian typology the souls of all human creatures, whether they are biologically men or women, are symbolically female, forming the body of the bride Jerusalem or the people of God.

Legend and commentary filled up the blank with myths of a fall in other myths besides the Jahwist.  We have the story of Lilith, alleged to be the first wife of Adam, and the mother of all devils, and the story of the fall of Satan after a war in heaven.  The two myths were of course combined later, when the serpent who initiated the fall of Adam and Eve, and who is nothing but a serpent in the Jahwist account, is assumed to be a mouthpiece for Satan.  The fall of the rebel angels is referred to in the New Testament, but is most elaborately recounted in the Book of Enoch. 

Once we "hear" a mythos or story being read, or read it ourselves in temporal sequence, we then make a gestalt or simultaneous apprehension of it which is usually described in a visual metaphor as an act of "seeing."  Having heard it, we see it, and then grasp its simultaneous meaning -- what Aristotle would call its dianoia. 

Every work of literature makes an appeal to us to grasp its total meaning in a single act of apprehension, and it is a common device for a novel, let us say, to bear the title of some visual emblem which symbolizes that total apprehension -- such as D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  It is because of the importance of this attempt at simultaneous understanding that the word structure, a spatial metaphor derived from architecture, has become so prominent in literary criticism. 

The visual "emblem" of the structure of the creative narratives would obviously be some form of axis mundi image, something that suggests the linking of all aspects of the creation in a single concept.  For the Priestly account the most natural form of axis mundi image would be the ladder, or staircase, of Jacob's great vision at Bethel, an image of which mountains and towers are predictable modulations.  for the Jahwist account the readiest image would be the world tree, or tree of life, that stretches from earth to heaven in so many mythologies.

 One of the most important facts in the history of religion is that in later thought the cosmological ladder is assumed to represent a structure of hierarchy, order, rank, and degree.  Two by-products of this ladder cosmos have been of particular importance in the history of thought: the great chain of being and the Ptolemaic universe.

 This hierarchical world consolidates into four main levels: the highest is that of heaven, in the sense of the presence of God, the next the paradisial home originally intended for man, the next the theologically "fallen" natural environment we live in now, and at the bottom is the demonic order.

We are told that close behind the Priestly account in Genesis lies a much older myth in which creation took the form of a victory over a dragon, out of whose body the cosmos was formed.  Many biblical writers, including those in Isaiah, Ezekiel and the Psalms, are familiar with the dragon-killing myth as a poetic symbol for the creation, and for them the dragon-killing is associated not only with the original creation, but with the deliverance from Egypt and the final restoration of Israel.  At the end of Job we have a speaking God pointing out to Job the monstrous dragon from whom Job has apparently been delivered.

 The Jahwist account has bequeathed to later ages the sense of god as a benevolent designer who made all things for the convenience of man.  It is largely this account that kept the criticism of the arts in so infantile a state for so many centuries, for here God himself is the supreme artist, and no human art can be more than the faintest of shadows of his workmanship. 

In the Middle Ages a quest of love, so closely approximating the regeneration of the soul in orthodox Christianity as to amount to a parody of it, was established as a central theme of literature.  But we are never ar from the sense that the ultimate quest is not so much the sexual union of a man and a woman as the union of all human beings with the nature that forms their environment, a nature usually mythologized as a mother, in which the primitive metaphorical identity of the subjective and the objective has been reestablished.

 The world-tree image appears chiefly in the parody form, notably in Ezekiel and Daniel; the ladder image finds its parody in the story of the Tower of Babel.  A common feature of such ziggurats, as they are called, was a spiral staircase.

 The concept of a Chain of Being, a ladder with steps up or down, is one of authority, and one that maintains that authority.  When one revolts from authority, a special declaration is stated or written that severs all ties, that breaks that authority, and often implies or asserts that there are no authorities in the sense of a chain -- all are equal.  Under the hammer blows of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the ladder as a spatial metaphor for the axis mundi, and as a cosmic vision guaranteeing the birthright of established authority, finally disappeared.  The word climax, incidentally, comes from the Greek word for ladder.

 A myth has two aspects: it is part of a vision of the cosmos, constructed from human concern, and it is also very likely to be seized on by whatever establishment or pressure group is in power and expounded in their interest.

 Truth of correspondence is really a technique of measurement, where the standard or criterion of measurement is outside the verbal structure.  (It is quite intelligible to say that Marxism grew out of the myth of Prometheus, as Freudianism did out of the myth of Eros.)

 Metaphor says that A is B: at the same time it suggests that nobody could be fool enough to believe that A really is B.  The word is is really there to destroy the sense of an intervening space between the personal element A and the natural element B, and leads us into a world where subject and object can interpenetrate with one another, as freely as they did in Homer's day.

 Myth does not, like history, present a past even as past; it presents its as present.  But its present is not the unreal present of ordinary experience.

From Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: "Odysseus' Scar"

 When the housekeeper Euryclea discovers the scar on Odysseus' leg and thus recognizes him when no one else knows who the stranger is the action is externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion.  The events are clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear -- wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor -- are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.

 The element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems.  The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension.  Homer knows no background.  What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and reader's mind completely.

 The "retarding element," the "going back and forth" by means of episodes, seems too, in the Homeric poems, to be opposed to any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller was right in regard to Homer when he said that what he gives us is "simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures."  Schiller's words are meant to be universally binding upon the epic poet, in contradistinction from the tragic.  Suspense throughout is meant to "rob us of our emotional freedom."

 But Auerbach disagrees that such is the case with all epics with regard to retardation -- which Schiller, as far as the absence of "emotional freedom," will grant only the tragic poets.  For Auerbach, the true cause of the impression of retardation appears to lie elsewhere -- namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.

 The basic impulse of the Homeric style was to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations.  This procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground, that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute.  Any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.

 The incident with Odysseus he compares to the test of Abraham with regard to the sacrifice of Isaac.  When God speaks to Abraham and he then answers, where are the two speakers?  The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things, which lies at the heart of the comparison of the two stories.  Abraham's answer to God, "Here I am "(more like "behold me" [Hinne-ni]) is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him.  Moreover, the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, God is not there too in the foreground.

 We are told nothing of the journey except that it took three days.  Even the place is ambiguous -- "Jeruel in the land of Moriah" -- only has significance as a geographical place since it has special relation to God as designating the scene of the act, though it must not really be named.

 In the story of Abraham's sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers in once direction, to concentrate them there.  Unlike Homer, to externalize thoughts, on the contrary, this serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed.  Homer gives us the immediate present, pure and without perspective.  The most important thing in the Abraham story is the "multi-layerdness" of the individual character; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.

 The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings.  Delight in physical existence is everything to them.  They conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning.

 But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham's sacrifice -- the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories.  The Bible narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition demanded of him -- in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition.  What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward "realism"; it was oriented toward "truth."  [Note: Speiser doesn't readily agree that the story is entirely the work of the Elohist; he sees J's hand in the story because of the characterization.  It may have been that a redactor changed the name of the God to "Elohim" -- certainly, God is later referred to "Yahweh" within the story.  At the least, there may be an imposition of E upon J or vice versa by some later redactor.] 

The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical -- it excludes all other claims.  The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us -- they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.  Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with "background" and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning.

 In the story of Isaac, it is not only God's intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation.  Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality. 

Different Styles: Greek and Hebrew:

The Homeric poems present a definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty.  Interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality.  But this process nearly always also reacts upon the frame, which requires enlarging and modifying.

 In the Old Testament, if certain elements survived which did not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them.  And so the reader is at every moment aware of the universal religio-historical perspective which gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose.  The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer.

 The Old Testament writer has not only made them once and for all and chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating.  And in the characterization, there is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation.

 It is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general.  Their structure is different.  Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition.  It runs far too smoothly.

 The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent.  Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it.  The Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology.

 In the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the ruling class -- others appear only in the role of servants to that class.  As a social picture, this world is completely stable; wars take place only between different groups of the ruling class; nothing ever pushes up from below.  The world is firmly patriarchal.  In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but, given the nomadic existence, the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class distinctions are not felt.

 So too the Old Testament has a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublime that is found there.  Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic -- a later classical tradition would not do so.  Yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament.  For the great and sublime events in the Homeric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class.  In the Old Testament figures can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job).  In the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace.

 The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.

 The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, "background" quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.

 Homer's realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical-antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of everyday happenings; in tragedy especially there was no room for it.