Episode 232: David Lambert - Is the Bible “Scripture”?
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with David Lambert about how scholars define “scripture,” how communities throughout history have changed the meaning and nature of biblical texts, and whether or not the Bible can ever be universally understood as scripture. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What do we mean by “scripture”?
What kind of assumptions do people make about scripture?
What do scholars think about how and when the Hebrew Bible became viewed as sacred text?
How did ancient people throughout history understand what was going on with the books and writings that are now known as the Bible? How does that connect or relate to how we talk about it now?
How can we move toward a hermeneutic or a view of scripture that allows for a diversity of assemblages?
What does David mean by scripture being a “colonial project”?
What does David mean by the phrase "the tyranny of canonical assumptions"?
For religious communities moving into the future, or people who read the Bible devotionally, what does it mean if the Bible is (or isn’t) actually scripture? How does that change how people interact with the Bible?
Will there ever, or can there ever, be a universal understanding of what the Bible is?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
Is there one thing that we could possibly mean by scripture? And if not, maybe we need to stop looking for a moment in which the Bible became scripture, or a single process whereby the Bible became scripture, and instead recognize the ways in which the Bible is always in a process of becoming. — David
When you assemble the Bible in this way, and relate it to other things going on in your community, you're also defining and changing the nature of what it is as a text, what we ought to expect of it, what kind of work it does, and then therefore, what its meaning is and how to read it. — David
When you see this collection of stories as a very different kind of thing, not just about political alliances and all that, but rather about moral lessons, you change the nature of the text and your interpretation follows. — David
If we want to look at the Bible, let's look at it through the ages. Let's not coronate ourselves as the [one group to] decide what this means. Instead, let's look at the totality of how this text has been read in different communities. — David
We need to not just study the text, but we also need to study ourselves. We need to have a really clear historical consciousness of: what are our assumptions? Where do they come from? What histories are they a part of? — David
When we start to focus on the history of the text, not just in one time period or another, what's unique and different about each time period starts to come into view with the kind of clarity that we otherwise wouldn't have. — David
All notions of scripture have a context. There is no unadulterated “let's get back to the original.” There is Bible-in-context. And that should always be hyphenated. And it always has to go together. — Jared
What people do when they use the Bible is they are themselves participating in a process of determining what it is, the direction in which they take it. We have this responsibility to recognize that we are engaged in the process of generating what it is, what it means, what to do with it. — David
Mentioned in This Episode
February Class: Putting the Pieces Together After Deconstruction taught by Pete Enns and Jared Byas
Books:
How Repentance Became Biblical by David A. Lambert
The Bible As It Was by James Kugel
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
-
Pete
You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared
And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music]
Pete
Hey, folks! Listen, before we get started, we are really excited because this year we're putting on a class every! Single! Month!
Jared
Yep. And February is the month that it is. And so our class is called "Putting the Pieces Together After Deconstruction," and is led by yours truly—meaning both of us.
Pete
Both of us, right. Now, the class is live for one night only. Takes place on February 20th, from 8 to 9:30pm. And that is Eastern time, folks.
Jared
Eastern time, we say it but people do not listen.
Pete
This is where God lives. In the eastern time zone.
Jared
That's right. Like always, the class is pay-what-you-can until the 20th. And then it's going to be available later for download for 25 bucks.
Pete
Right. And if you want to get all our classes for free, here you go, you can become a member of the Society of Normal People for $12 a month, and you'll get an all access pass to all of our classes, past, present, and future. Plus, you'll get an exclusive members only Q&A session for each class.
Jared
So if you're interested in becoming a part of the Society of Normal People...
Pete
And they are.
Jared
-To get this class, you can go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join. If not, if you're just interested in the class, then go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/deconstruction.
[Music]
Pete
Welcome, everyone. This episode of the podcast is "Is the Bible Scripture?" And our guest is David Lambert.
Jared
Yep, David Lambert is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And he has a couple of books, How Repentance Became Biblical, which, originally we were going to talk about repentance...
Pete
Yeah.
Jared
But this thing came up and we thought this is a fantastic topic.
Pete
This is pretty cool. This is pretty cool. So let's get into this, it’s a lot of fun.
David
[Music playing over a teaser clip of David speaking] “And so I've been really trying to say, is there one thing that we could possibly mean by scripture? And if not, maybe we need to stop looking for a moment in which the Bible became scripture, or a single process whereby the Bible became scripture, and instead recognize the ways in which the Bible is always in a process of becoming.”
[Music ends]
[Ad break]
Pete
David, welcome to our podcast!
David
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Pete
Yeah, it's an exciting topic too, and I think a challenging topic, but I can't wait to get into it with you. But let's begin with, just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background?
David
Well, I kind of got to Bible in a little bit of an unusual way. I grew up in the middle of Manhattan in New York City in a completely secular family. My family had escaped during World War II from Vienna. And so their religion was music and to some extent psychoanalysis. And I spent quite a time as a child playing an instrument myself, but it never really took. But I got interested in kind of these, some of these deeper questions and this way of living that has something in addition to the "normal" circumstances of everyday life (which really what music was for my family). And that's really how I started getting interested in questions having to do with religious studies and so it wasn't really until college that I had an opportunity to start exploring those things. And I very quickly realized that the most interesting way of doing it would be getting back in touch with my own—well, not my immediate roots, but my longer term roots. And so I got really interested in Judaism and started studying Hebrew. And that eventually brought me back to Bible.
But when I began, I really was interested in the history of religious thought and particularly medieval thought. And what's marked my whole way of approaching the Bible is realizing that it's not just an ancient document from ancient times, but that this text had a living history that this text had a purpose and roles that it was fulfilling, for instance, in the medieval period, that were very different than maybe what would have been its original significance. And so that experience of someone studying the Middle Ages and particularly Jewish biblical interpretation and philosophy, from that time period really showed me that this text wasn't one thing. It didn't have one kind of an existence. It could be part of very different kinds of projects and concerns and therefore interpreted in very different ways, and that ultimately paved the way for my current project.
Jared
Well, given that, you know, you mentioned earlier that the deeper questions and I think today's topic is one of those, you know, is the Bible scripture? So how did you get interested in that particular topic? And maybe within that, to not only just how did you get interested in the topic of is the Bible scripture, but maybe you can weave into that to what do we mean by "Scripture"? Because I think that's a good starting place for this conversation is, you know, how did you get interested? And what do we even mean by that word? Because I think there's a lot of assumptions that go into that.
David
Yeah, sure. There's a lot there to unpack. You know, when I was doing my training as a graduate student, there was a standard story, standard narrative that we were all given, which was that the Hebrew Bible was this collection of ancient Israelite texts that originally served all these different kinds of purposes. They weren't necessarily originally Bible, they didn't necessarily, you know, they weren't treated as some kind of sacred scripture. But that at some point in time, they became that. At some point in time, they went through either a process of transformation or a single important historical moment of transformation whereby they became, and assumed this status of, scripture. The problem with that narrative, which is what I'm really trying to work on, is that first of all, scholars can't agree on when that happened. Some think it happened as early as something like the sixth century BCE, maybe with the book of Deuteronomy. Others say no, you know, it didn't happen until after exile. It was really in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Others think it happened only in the Hasmonean period as a response to Hellenization. Others think it didn't happen until the destruction of the Second Temple as a way of replacing and having something to stand in for the lost temple. Some scholars thought that it was done by a powerful political party asserting the importance of this text. Others thought that, no, it's, you know, this kind of process of transformation over a long period of time, what many people came to call a canonical process or a process of scripturalization. So scholars couldn't agree on when this happened.
And there was another problem. Scholars couldn't agree on what had happened, because they all had a different definition of Scripture. Some of them emphasized that to be Scripture is to be understood as having been revealed, divinely revealed, some kind of knowledge that existed in the heavenly realm which was now being revealed and bestowed onto humanity. Others said, you know, no, the real essential definition of Scripture is that it has authority. It tells you what to do, tells you how to live, particularly that it functioned for ancient Jews as law. That was a very common way of defining what the nature of this transformation was. Others focused more on its, you might call it, its kind of teaching value—not necessarily as authority, but more as instruction. Something that kind of gave you advice on how to live, something that you could learn from. How to be a better person, how to structure your own life. Then others really focused on, you know, what it is to be scripture, is to be something that is just a text that gets paid attention to, you know, that people read and people interpret and spend time interpreting it. So there's sort of four different definitions, I would say. Of course, there are more.
But you know, these four different definitions were really floating around. And the question that I raised, and I'm raising, and my current work is: if we can’t agree when it happened, and we can't agree what precisely happened, then what does it mean to be saying that it did happen? That is to say, that there was some process or event whereby this ancient collection used to be one thing, just a collection of books, and now became something quite different. One word that I like to use to describe this idea is that scholars kind of think it's a sort of an "alchemy," whereby one thing becomes another thing. And so I've been really trying to question that and to say, is there one thing that we could possibly mean by Scripture? And if not, maybe we need to stop looking for a moment in which the Bible became scripture or a single process whereby the Bible became scripture, and instead recognize the ways in which the Bible is always in a process of becoming, it's always in a process of changing, of developing. And at the end, it doesn't have a moment in which it achieves a certain kind of specific authority or identity or nature that then holds true for all of history, which is what's kind of behind that idea of Scripture, you know, that at some point back in the past the Bible became scripture and now it operates that way, as a kind of rule for the rest of its history. Maybe there is no such rule that was started in the past, but maybe instead, it's an ongoing process whereby individual communities in different situations, different historical moments, different geographic locations, are themselves involved in determining what the nature of this collection of texts is. In which case we don't really have a concept of Scripture, but rather, a series of what I call “assemblages.” Because what we have are each community in different ways assembling the biblical text as part of a larger series of concerns, a larger series of practices, of endeavors that they're engaged in. And when you assemble the Bible in this way, and relate it to other things going on in your community, you're also defining and changing the nature of what it is as a text, what we ought to expect of it, what kind of work it does, and then therefore, what its meaning is and how to read it.
Jared
So let's go back for a second, because I think what you just said, we can...Let's just unpack this for a while. Because I think for our listeners, at least for me, it's helpful to think about, okay, how did the ancient people through history—how did they understand what was going on with these books and writings and things? And how does that connect or relate to how we're talking about it now? Right? Because I guess, you know, within the tradition that Pete and I have, you know, been a part of for quite some time within Protestantism, and particularly within evangelicalism, there's this understanding that “it's always been a certain way.” So if you look back, it's always been very static. “The Bible has always been the Bible, it's this divinely revealed thing and that doesn't change, and we're the ones now coming along with our” (whatever the derogatory way of talking about it is) “this postmodern methodology” or whatever to change it.
So I want to go back to say, because I think I heard you say, no, if we go back and look in the how the ancient world would have seen these, there's more to it than maybe meets the eye in terms of this static once for all, we believe it's divinely inspired. And it's this collection of—it's a library that we don't touch, that starts to break down. And that has a direct effect now on how we see it in the way that you're talking about. So maybe we can start with: how did the ancients see it? And then let's maybe move to how does that impact this assemblage idea that you have now?
David
Yeah, sure. So I can give you one example. There are so many, of course. But one example would be biblical narrative. You know, why do we have these stories in Genesis, for instance, what was the purpose of the story? Well, from our perspective today, you know, we might look at these stories as opportunities to learn certain kinds of lessons, you know, whether about faith or morality. When you get back to the texts themselves, it's a little bit hard to see exactly how some of the things that these biblical figures did are necessarily meant to be models for us. You know, so you've got Abraham going down to Egypt, not exactly telling the truth about his relationship to Sarah with the result that Pharaoh take Sarah into his own house. And it's hard to see how this choice of Abraham's necessarily should be seen as an example for the rest of us, and so that really raises questions like what were these stories up to? And I think that from an ancient Israelite perspective, and in this view, most biblical scholars would agree, that these stories were important to the ancient Israelites for what they had to tell about their relationship to one another. So you know, you'll recall that basically, the end result of the book of Genesis is the formation of this nation consisting of twelve tribes. And Genesis in that sense is the story of how we got to that nation. What are the tribal relations, what are the familial relations that stand behind this nation? So if you're telling these stories as an ancient Israelite, you're talking about, you know—Why is it that I'm related to that tribe over there? Why is it that we have an alliance and are expected to come to one another's aid if attacked? Why is it that I'm not exactly that friendly all the time with the Ishmaelites, for instance. Or, yeah, sometimes we've got these tensions with the Edomites, who are set to come from Esau. Well, you know, that's because our ancestor, Jacob, you know, he also had this kind of run in with Esau. So that explains this kind of tension. So this kind of way of thinking about stories as telling the relationship between people, between tribes, I think, is one way of looking at what Genesis might have been.
Pete
And just to jump in here, David, you know, I think we've on the podcast, Jared and I, we've I think had people on here or just talking between ourselves of how in Genesis, there are some pretty clear markers of a monarchic context.
David
[Hums in agreement]
Pete
Which seems to be really the setting for the book of Genesis. And I agree with you, it's hard to read these stories that, you know, read something about Abraham. And the author might be thinking, "Hey, think David when you read this, or think about the future where this is going." And to say, well, this is now authoritative scripture. That's a hard jump to make.
David
Right.
Pete
If you think about it, it's like, well, what's this telling me? That this is about maybe politics, geopolitics, in some cases.
David
Ancient politics! Right.
[Ad break]
David
So what happens then, here's the really interesting thing, and really important. And I want to say, and emphasize, when I talk about change, that doesn't delegitimize the later point of view as itself part of the history of the Bible and as integral, essential, to what the Bible became, and therefore, I would argue what the Bible ultimately is too. So what happens is, when you get to the Second Temple period, and you get to a writer like Philo of Alexandria, who was exactly around the turn of the Common Era, living in Egypt in Alexandria, he himself was a Jew, trained, really steeped in the Greek philosophical traditions of his time. And he had this text of Genesis, and he said to himself, "Look, what is the purpose? How can I explain to Greeks and it makes sense in a Greek context and a Hellenistic context of why these texts are so important to us? What do they do for us?" And so he changed the whole narrative around. He looked at these texts and he said, you know what? They teach us philosophical lessons. They teach us how to be better people. And so he would enter into these long discussions of the various virtues that he saw the different patriarchs, as exemplifying, and that was a very important word for him—that the patriarchs were exemplars, they were models of how to behave. And of course, this was quite different from what I'm suggesting, and others suggested, as you suggested, the connection to the monarchy, potentially, what these texts would have originally done in their original political social contexts. But the point is, that's how texts live!
Pete
[Hums in agreement]
David
That's how texts change. And so in the hands—
Pete
That's how they survive.
David
Exactly! Right.
Pete
Yeah.
David
You know like, I mean, what did the politics in the Davidic monarchy matter to Philo living around the term of the Common Era in Alexandria? And so he did something really profound with it, and therefore changed, in that sense, the nature of the text. He turned it into this, these stories that we could learn from. He didn't change the words of the text, but gave them, and fit them into a different sort of situation, and therefore changed their meaning. And for Philo, this tradition was very much inherited within early Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others. And so this way of reading Genesis became pretty important within Christianity. And this is what I mean by an assemblage—that in a sense Philo assembled the text in new ways. Not just interpreting it differently, but he assumed that the very purposes of the text were different. And when you see this collection of stories as a very different kind of thing, not just about political alliances and all that, but rather about moral lessons, you change the nature of the text and your interpretation follows.
Pete
[Hums in agreement]
Jared
Is it important—okay, so let's move to that. Because, again, for me, I see this as an ancient practice. We have Philo, we have a lot of examples, I think in the Second Temple period around kind of these apocalyptic readings where we're sort of bringing things up to bear on our present circumstances. How does this interact with a view of maybe—I don't know what to say, but I don't want to oversimplify here—but like divine revelation? Because what I often see is one group will baptize their assemblage as, "No, this is what God actually meant by it." And what's a way forward, if we've been, you know, indoctrinated into a way of thinking of Scripture as top-down, God gave us not just the words of the text, but how it means something. And it just so happens that how it means to me as a 21st century, you know, middle-class American, is the way God actually intended it, and move toward maybe a hermeneutic or a view of scripture that allows for this diversity of assemblages?
David
Yeah, there's so much there, I think the direction to go in is the direction that certain parts of the field of biblical studies have gone in. Which is simply to say—if we want to look at the Bible, let's look at it through the ages. Let's not pretend that we're the only ones, let's not coronate ourselves, you know, as who decides what this means. And instead, let's look at the totality of how this text has been read in different communities. And when you do that, and when you experience the differences, you realize not just how this is a matter of different individuals having different ideas, but how this text is taken to be something fundamentally different in different places at different times. And at the same time, you start to learn the history of how it came to be viewed in the way in which you today view it. And what I always tell my students is, the way they grew up reading the Bible is a legitimate part of its history. It's part of what the Bible came to be in certain places at certain times. And they should understand that, but they should also be able to enter into a dialogue with what the Bible's been in other places and other times, that might differ from their own perspective. So it's not about—
Jared
Just even recognizing that their reading has a history...
David
It has a history!
Jared
—is a big light bulb.
Pete
Yeah, that's huge for a lot of people, because they have different assumptions. And along those lines, David, you've written elsewhere, you use a couple of phrases that I think are very pertinent. I think, if I interpret it correctly to what you're saying here. And one is speaking of scripture as a "colonial project," that's very interesting. And then, I think related to that is you have this phrase, "the tyranny of canonical assumptions." Can you riff on those phrases and help elucidate maybe, this picture that you're painting for us about the Bible and scripture?
David
Sure, yeah. I mean, one of the problems, of course, is that the language that we use as part of everyday speech, quickly comes to be seen as inevitable, natural, obvious, and universal. And so it's hard for us to realize the history of the terms, and to realize the ways in which they don't simply apply across all periods and all times. When I talk about scripture as a “colonial” endeavor, I'm moving in that case, beyond just the Bible. And I'm looking there at how, especially in the 19th century—but I think it continues in various ways into the 20th century—scholars from places like Oxford and Germany as well, went around the world and identified what they took to be examples of scripture from other religions.
And on the one hand, this was really a wonderful endeavor in the sense of sort of expanding people's horizons, getting to know other religions, other people, other texts. On the other hand, you can see how the assumptions behind that might be problematic. What does it mean to take a term from Western languages that has been applied to the Bible, namely “scripture,” and now assume that if people in other cultures, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, have texts that they're using, that their relationship to those ancient texts can be described by the same term as if it functions in the same way? And so there was one project in particular that went around and created 50 volumes. This is called "The Sacred Books of the East." This professor from Oxford, Max Mueller, collected 50 volumes, with the help of other scholars, of “sacred texts” from elsewhere in the world. But the assumption behind that was kind of like “yeah, these are other people's Bibles.” But were they really? Did those other texts really function in that way as a Bible, as scripture for people—for other people. And so I think the use of that language was in that sense that kind of part of this colonial endeavor of collecting other people's things, and assuming that they had the same kind of relationship or significance as they had for you.
The tyranny of canonical assumptions is actually a term that another scholar used a number of years ago, Robert Kraft, and I'm pretty sympathetic to it, you know, the idea that we basically need to understand the history of literature around the Bible based on the sort of assumption that there was this canon. And what Kraft was arguing was that there were all kinds of texts that were written outside of the canon that were also really interesting, like this book of Jubilees, which I work with as well. And so he wanted to say, "You know, we really need to get beyond the tyranny of these canonical assumptions and look at some of these other texts as well." And I think that's true. I think that's important. At the same time, what bothers me is less the idea that there was a Bible at a pretty early date—scholars have generally been kind of pushing back the dating of when do we finally have the biblical canon? And I think that's largely justifiable. But what's more interesting to me is Kraft and others, they wanted to see other texts, outside of the Bible, as also functioning as scripture at that time. But I want to ask, "What do you mean by Scripture? What is it?” You're saying, "Okay, there wasn't just the Bible that was important to these people, there were other texts." But what I want to say is, maybe the more important question is: not what other texts were there, but what was the relationship even like to the biblical texts, and to those other texts? Because that's not something we can take for granted. That, to say, the relationship was one of these texts or scripture, and therefore we interpret them, that doesn't fit the full range of diversity of the ways in which people have seen biblical and non-biblical texts and what they've done with those texts.
Jared
Yeah, I see those in some ways as similar. Even when you say "other texts" outside the Bible, there's already an assumption that these function one way, and everything outside of it functions in a radically—again, in my tradition—it would be in a radically different way. So why would we look at Jubilees? Why would we look at these books? Because they're not “in.” And so there's this categorical "in vs. out," which I think goes back to that colonial project idea, where there's an assumption that authority or religious authority is based on this "in vs. out" category. We can rest assured that we have certainty in what we know and what we're doing, we can be right, if we can identify the "in” things, and then have that be our foundation rather than the "out” things. And I remember, even just anecdotally—I think it was probably somewhere in either undergrad, or in seminary—having that exact same conundrum that you expressed with different religious texts of looking at, you know, trying to assemble, "what are other people's Bibles?" and that was my starting place. So I would grab the, you know, the Bhagavad Gita. Or then with Buddhism, it became even harder, because I'm like, "Well, what's the...I need the...What's the Buddhist Bible?" And it was like—not only did I not question my assumption, I just grabbed what I could. And I kind of made my own canon.
Pete
[Laughs]
Jared
Of like Buddhist writings, because I just couldn't get outside of that assumption. So I think that what I'm hearing you say, and I think it's worth talking about a little more, because I think this might be a new idea for people is that we have to question our own assumptions. When we say “the Bible,” or when we say “scripture,” we've already downloaded so much baggage for what we mean by that, then when we go back and look at other books that were being circulated and read and talked about in the ancient world, we've already categorized them in this hierarchical way. Is that a fair way to say that?
David
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, what I've tried to do in my work is argue that we need to not just study the text, but we also need to study ourselves. We need to have a really clear historical consciousness of: what are our assumptions? Where do they come from? What histories are they a part of? So that when we do go back to those ancient texts, we can encounter them with a readiness for them to surprise us and to change or redefine the categories that we're working with, like what's “in” and what's “out.”
[Ad break]
Jared
Can I maybe—I might get a little nerdy here and if so, Pete, you can pull us out. But I wonder what your thought is on this relationship with the text where we have to maintain some kind of distance, right? To be surprised means we're going to encounter something other than ourselves. So there is something to, and the way maybe we would historically talk about this in biblical studies, is the “authorial intention.” So is there a place still in the way you're thinking about it for approaching text, trying to understand would the original—maybe that's even problematic to even use that word “original,” but somebody wrote something with some intention. And is it valuable to respect and honor that before we then change the meaning? So, when Philo is changing the meaning of these ancient Hebrew Bible texts—what eventually became the Hebrew Bible—Whenever Philo is doing that work, is there something important to being self-aware that there is distance between our community’s reading of this, and the text itself? Because in some ways, I feel like I'm very sympathetic to, whenever any community interacts with the text, we're changing the meaning because we can't help but sort of merge these horizons, so to speak. But I do feel like, again, coming from, I'll just say, kind of my evangelical background, where it didn't feel like the original intention of the text was at all respected and it was there as an immediacy to interpreting the Bible as though it was written to us and for us, and there was no space between it—that also felt dangerous.
Pete
[Hums in agreement] Jared, that is a very good question and I will allow it.
Jared
Thank you.
Pete
Yeah.
Jared
Carry on.
Pete
Go ahead, David.
Jared
It’s passed the test.
David
[Laughs] Well, you know, I don't know if I would talk about authorial intention. But I think that biblical scholars and this field has really been around in a robust way for, you know, 200, 300 years now. I think we've gotten pretty good at being able to try to situate and place the words that we have in the biblical text in an ancient Israelite or Ancient Near Eastern context. So we're able to bring comparative evidence, whether it's from elsewhere in the Bible, or from other Ancient Near Eastern texts, to bear on the reading of the Bible, to try to see what kind of meanings and structures and purposes and designs texts are trying to assemble in something like or closer to their original context. That's not quite the same thing as authorial intent. You know, it's pretty hard to try—and I think maybe in some ways, it might misdirect us to try—to intuit what the author's original intent might have been. But to place the words and to see what kind of world is being created in the text, generated by the text, and to understand that world against the backdrop of other ancient texts that I think we can do. And I think it's really important to try to do that, even though we're not, you know, fully able to relive or reconstruct the actual ancient realities, to try to do that, and then set it against and in comparison to later ways of reading those texts.
Because when we start to focus on the history of the text, not just in one time period or another, what's unique and different about each time period starts to come into view with the kind of clarity that we otherwise wouldn't have. So I'm really a big fan of saying, "You know what, let's look at the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Israelite context. But also, let's look at it in its second temple Jewish context, in its Hellenistic Jewish context, in its early Christian context, in its rabbinic Jewish context, and let's see the ways in which the Bible is changing.” And multiple, right? That there's a kind of multiplicity to the Bible, not just between one period and another. But even within each one of those periods and places there's never a sense in which the Bible is just a single thing.
Jared
So maybe then to rephrase it—because again, I think this is maybe language that our listeners have heard—this idea of authorial intent maybe misdirects us because of exactly what you said earlier, around this idea of assemblage. That maybe it's time to maybe move away from the Bible as an entity in a vacuum, as though it ever exists apart from a context and then there are—that's the ancient context that is closer to when it was written, there are further away contexts both geographically but also chronologically—time and space and culture. And so it reminds me of a phrase we like to use here at the Bible for Normal People that "all theology has an adjective." And it's almost like “all interpretations of the Bible have a context.” And that...
Pete
All notions of scripture have a context. Right?
Jared
All notions of scripture have a context. There is no unadulterated, “let's get back to the original,” there is Bible-in-context. And that should always be hyphenated. And it always has to go together.
David
That's right. Another way of thinking about that—which I, language I like to use, is the idea of the global and the local. So on the one hand, you know, we all have the same text, right? Like the Bible is this recognizable thing. It has a certain kind of global existence, but it doesn't really achieve its existence—a global idea doesn't really have any reality except for the ways in which it ultimately interacts with local communities, local sites, local realities. So it only really becomes, and exists, in interaction with the particular places that it's used. The global has to become local to have any kind of real meaning and purpose.
Jared
And maybe that's, you know, another picture might be, you use the word "assemblage." You know, there's these things that we might look, even as us like, as an organism, as an entity. And it looks like we're unified and we're one thing but as you get smaller and smaller, and look closer and closer, it's actually these assemblages. That, you know, if you look close enough, this is just connected to that. And it breaks down into these various assemblages and parts that connect to other things. And that's kind of how I hear you're talking about that. When we say "the Bible," we're talking about a collection of Bible readings in contexts throughout history and throughout location.
Pete
Yeah.
Jared
Hmm. So can I ask, what are the implications of what you're saying for religious communities moving into the future? In terms of, how does the average person—who doesn't just study this text as an academic pursuit, but you know, devotionally, religiously—how does this idea change how they interact with it?
David
So there are a lot of different aspects to that. But I think one is, I would say, comes down to the word "responsibility." Because what people do when they use the Bible is they are themselves participating in a process of determining what it is. They bear a lot of responsibility for the direction in which they take it. So I could just give you an example. When I teach Introduction to Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament Literature in North Carolina here in Chapel Hill, I choose which passages to discuss. I choose which methods, what conversations to have around the Bible. There's a way in which I'm kind of making my own Bible. And so I bear a lot of responsibility for how I choose to talk about the Bible, and I don't want to hide behind—and here's where the responsibility comes from—I don't want to just hide behind saying, "Oh, well, this is how biblical scholars have always talked about it," or, "This is the way the Bible is," or, "This is what the Bible has been." No, we have this responsibility to recognize that we are engaged in the process of generating what it is, what it means, what to do with it.
Jared
That’s good.
Pete
That's very realistic. And I think it's a wise and—I'm trying to not overstate—But a wise and accurate assessment of the real lay of the land, which will take a lot of getting used to, and understandably so, for people raised in certain traditions. But I hope we're all listening here to what's going on. It's a complicated matter to talk about the Bible as scripture and to impose our notions universally is actually denying the very force that gave the Bible that staying power.
David
Yes.
Jared
Which is that subjective element, you mean? That the—
Pete
It’s always there.
Jared
Yeah, the creative, embodied, participatory nature.
Pete
Yes, which is embodied, which is contextualized, which is particularized. And how do you escape that?
Jared
Right.
Pete
Yeah. Anyway, yeah, we don't need you for this last part, David, we're just gonna be talking back and forth between ourselves.
[Everybody laughs]
Jared
You've given us too much to think about here! Too much to think about. But as we, you know, as we wrap up our time here, is there anything else that you know—Again, I think there's a lot of people who, they're just now getting glimpses of what you're talking about and it's starting to make sense as they let go of maybe that universal understanding, which is what was downloaded for a lot of us. “Well, no, there's only one way to read the Bible. And it's always been read that way. If you go back to Paul, and Jesus, and Abraham, and Moses, they all read it this way. You know, and they had it in a bound book.” There's this understanding that we are here carrying on a universal monolithic tradition, and I think for people who are just coming out of that, would you have any other advice for them on, here's maybe a step to take or a here's a way to look at this that might not be so scary? Or a practical thing for them to move further into this as they're trying to learn about it and embrace it.
David
What I would say is look for clear, scholarly work that tries to place the Bible in some context other than your own, so that you can see what else can be done with this text. And for me, I think the eye-opening book was this book of this scholar who eventually became my advisor, James Kugel, his book, The Bible As It Was. And what he argued and showed was that around the turn of the Common Era, so the Bible as it was being used by Jews in this period, by Christians in this period, was never just the Bible! That it also consisted of certain traditions that traveled along with the Bible as to how to read it. And what he really simply does is he breaks down the biblical stories from the first five books, from the Torah, and he breaks them down into different stories and shows you how these traditions keep popping up among very different authors. Rabbinic readers, early Christian readers, and that shows that they were inheriting a common tradition. And the readings are both surprising and sometimes familiar to us as well. And so it's just a really good example of a text that, a scholarly text, that allows you to enter into, as he puts it, "the Bible as it was" at this time period around the turn of the Common Era.
Jared
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, David, for coming on and expanding our notions of Scripture and Bible. I think it's, it was fascinating and very helpful. So thank you so much.
David
Thanks so much for having me and for your questions!
[Outro music plays]
Jared
Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.
Pete
And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.
Jared
And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.
Outro
You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.
[Outro music ends]
