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[“What if the Hebrew Bible wasn’t meant to be read as “revelation”? What if it’s not really about miracles or the afterlife – but about how to lead our lives in this world? The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture proposes a new framework for reading the Bible. It shows how biblical authors used narrative and prophetic oratory to advance universal arguments about ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics. It offers bold new studies of biblical narratives and prophetic poetry, transforming forever our understanding of what the stories of Abel, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David, and the speeches of Isaiah and Jeremiah, were meant to teach. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture assumes no belief in God or other religious commitment. It assumes no previous background in Bible. It is free of disciplinary jargon. Open the door to a book you never knew existed. You’ll never read the Bible the same way again.” 

This was first posted March 13, 2013, reposted June 9,2015;  Published by the Cambridge University Press, this is a most helpful book to read if you wish to learn a different way of  approaching and understanding the Hebrew Scriptures.  As usual, to pique your curiosity enough to get you interested in reading the whole book, we are featuring only the book reviews published by amazon.com where you can download an ebook on your kindle, or get a hard or paperback copy delivered. Even if you don’t agree with everything the author proposes such as the interpretation of “I will be what I will be” as suggesting God is imperfect and changing, still it is worth the cost and the time you invest in reading.—Admin1.]

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Title:  The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Yoram Hazony 

Contents:

Part I. Reading Hebrew Scripture

1.  The Structure of the Hebrew Bible

2.  What is the Purpose of the Hebrew Bible?

3.  How does the Bible Make Arguments of a General Nature?

Part II.  The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:  Five Studies

4.   The Ethics of a Shepherd

5.  The History of Israel, Genesis-Kings:  A Political Philosophy

6.  Jeremiah and the Problem of Knowing

7.  Truth and Being in the Hebrew Bible

8.  Jerusalem and Carthage:  Reason and Faith in Hebrew Scripture

Part III.  Conclusion

9.  God’s Speech after Reason and Revelation

Editorial Reviews/Amazon.com Review

Image from amazon.com

[This was first posted March 14, 2013, reposted June 9, 2015;  the sequel to :  MUST READ: Another “How to” read the Hebrew Scriptures.

Whenever we recommend a ‘must read’ we usually provide a sampling of what we call ‘book ends’, excerpts from the Introduction and Conclusion of the book.  So these are from the Introduction, which was difficult to condense, though you’ll still get in idea of what to expect from the book.   The 3rd article is still part of this introduction, but since the author discusses what he does in this book, we will separate it as another post. Read ALL of these and the whole book, dear S6K visitors; if you’re bothering to read these ‘come-on’ posts, that means you’re interested enough to progress from MUST READ to MUST OWN.  Take our word for it, this book is worth the purchase!  As usual, reformatting and highlights added.—Admin1.]

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Introduction

What are we to make of the Bible?  It’s not easy to say.  But a common approach goes like this:  There are two kinds of literary works that address themselves to ultimate issues —

• those that are the product of reason;
• and those that are known by way of revelation.  

Works by philosophers such as Plato or Hobbes are works of “reason,” composed to assist individuals and nations looking to discover the true and the good as best they are able in accordance with man’s natural abilities.

The Bible, on the other hand, is “revelation,” a text that reports what God himself thinks about things.

The biblical texts bypass man’s natural faculties, giving us knowledge of the true and the good by means of a series of miracles.  So what the Bible offers is miraculous knowledge to be accepted in gratitude and believed on faith.  On this view, revelation is seen as the opposite of reason in that it requires the suspension of the normal operation of our mental faculties, calling on us to believe things that don’t make sense to us —because they are supposed to make sense to God.

The dichotomy between reason and revelation that is the basis for this understanding of the Bible has a great deal of history behind it.  The fathers of the Christian Church adopted it as a way of sharpening the differences between the teachings of the New Testament and those of the various sects of philosophers with which they vied for converts in late antiquity.  Many centuries later, the philosophers of the Enlightenment embraced this same distinction as an instrument with which to bludgeon the Church, using it to paint Christianity as a purveyor of superstition and irrationality.  Fideists and heretics alike have thus had ample reason to insist on this distinction, and many continue to do so even today.

A case can be made that the reason-revelation dichotomy does succeed in capturing something of what was unique and compelling about the teaching of Jesus’ apostles in the New Testament.  But it’s much harder to make sense of this distinction in the context of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”).   After all, the principal texts of Hebrew Scripture were written perhaps five centuries before the reason-revelation distinction was applied to them.  They were written by individuals who spoke a different language from the Greek in which this dichotomy was framed, and professed a different religion from Christianity whose virtues it was designed to emphasize.  Moreover, nothing in the principal Hebrew texts suggests that the prophets and scholars of ancient Israel were familiar with such an opposition between God’s word and the pronouncements of human reason when it is working as it should.  In addition, the texts of the Hebrew Bible seem largely uninterested in the subjects that made the concept of revelation so important and useful in explaining Christianity.  The hidden secrets of God’s previously unrevealed plan for mankind, the salvific power of faith, the availability of eternal life — none of these subjects are even top-forty in the Hebrew Scriptures, a fact so obvious and so jarring that it prompted Kant to argue that the Judaism of ancient Israel was not really a religion!

What is the Hebrew Scriptures?  

Many of the same kinds of things that are found in works of reason:

•  histories of ancient peoples and attempts to draw political lessons from them;
• explorations of how best to conduct the life of the nation and of the individual;
• the writings of individuals who struggled with personal persecution and failure and their speculations concerning human nature and the search for the true and the good;
• attempts to get beyond the sphere of the here and now and to try and reach a more general understanding of the nature of reality, of man’s place in it, and of his relationship with that which is beyond his control.  

God is, of course, a central subject in the Hebrew Bible.  But to a remarkable degree, the God of Israel and those who wrote about him  seem to have been concerned to address subjects close to the heart of what later tradition calls works of reason.

Which raises the following question:

• What if the analytic framework that originally assigned the Hebrew Bible to the category of revelation was in fact ill fitted to the older Hebrew texts?  
• What if its effect, historically, has been to force subsequent readers to see the Hebrew Scriptures as the early Christians saw them, eclipsing the concerns of the Jewish prophets and scholars who wrote them?  
• What if the texts of the Hebrew Bible, or many of them, are in fact much closer to being works of reason than anything else — only we don’t know it because this fact has been suppressed (and continues to be suppressed) by an alien interpretive framework that prevents us from seeing much of what is in these texts?

It is my contention that something like this is in fact the case; that read into the Hebrew Scriptures, the reason-revelation dichotomy becomes a kind of distorting lens — greatly exaggerating aspects of the old Hebrew texts that their authors would never have chosen to emphasize, even as it renders much that was of significance to them all but invisible.  This means that in reading the Hebrew Scriptures as works of “revelation” (as opposed to “reason”), we come pretty close to destroying them.  We accidentally delete much of what these texts were written to say — and then, having accomplished this, we find that the texts don’t really “speak to us” as modern men and women.

This deletion of much of the content of the Hebrew Biblical texts is not just a theoretical problem in hermeneutics or some other esoteric academic discipline.  

• It has a direct impact on the way the Hebrew Scriptures are handled in almost every intellectual, educational, and cultural setting in which the Bible is today considered for an appearance:  
• It affects the standing of the Hebrew Scriptures in the public schools, where they are neglected or banned outright because they are seen as works of revelation, not reason.
•  And it affects their status in religious schools too — certainly the Jewish ones, but Christian ones as well — where teachers and administrators confer in bafflement over how to transmit a love for the Bible to the next generation despite the fact that these texts are works of revelation, not reason.  
• It also dictates the way the Hebrew Bible is treated in the universities, where professors of philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history consistently pass over the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures as a subject worth researching and teaching to their students, since they see their work as the study of works of reason, not revelation.
• And what is true for the schools and universities is true for the rest of our culture as well.  
• Outside of religious circles, the Bible is often seen as bearing a taint of irrationality, folly, and irrelevance, the direct result of its reputation as a consummate work of unreason.  This taint ensures that for most educated people, the Bible remains pretty much a closed book, the views of its authors on most subjects unaccessed and inaccessible. . . . .

The ongoing exclusion of the Hebrew Bible from the universe of texts whose ideas are worth being taken seriously is increasingly a subject of discussion in the universities.  And in recent years a number of prominent scholars have actually published studies in which biblical texts are read as though they were works of philosophy — often with fascinating results.  But all this is still quite a preliminary, and there hasn’t yet been a book that takes on the question of the Bible as a work of reason in a systematic fashion.  

What I hope to provide in this book is the first direct and sustained argument in favor of approaching the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason.  

• More specifically, I will argue that the Hebrew Scriptures can be read as works of philosophy, with an eye to discovering what they have to say as part of the broader discourse concerning the nature of the world and the just life for man.  
• On the way, I will enumerate the obstacles — both prejudices and genuine problems of method —that stand in the way of reading the Bible in this way, and propose tools for overcoming them.  
• I will then take the reader through a series of studies in which I read the Hebrew texts as work of philosophical significance.
•  By the end, my hope is to have made it clear both that the Hebrew Bible can be fruitfully read as a work of reason, and how the Hebrew Bible can be read as a work of reason.
• It bears emphasizing that in arguing that the Hebrew Bible can fruitfully be read as a work of reason, I will not be defending any particular thesis concerning its status as revelation.  
• In particular, I am not interested in denying the Bible is a work of revelation.  

My point in this book is only this:  If we are forced to choose between reading these texts as reason or as revelation, we’ll get much further in understanding them if we choose to read the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason.  But I don’t actually think that the reason side of the Christian reason —revelation dichotomy is capable of doing full justice to the readers of these texts either.  As I’ve said, the reason-revelation distinction is alien to the Hebrew Scriptures and ultimately this framework is going to have to be thrown out as a basis for interpreting the Hebrew Bible.  But getting there won’t be easy.  

In Christian countries, the Bible has been read through this distorting lens for many generations.  Freeing ourselves from it, I suspect, will not be achieved in a single leap.  It will be a two-step process:

• The first involves coming to recognize the riches that the biblical texts have to offer as works of reason.  
• The second step involves discarding the reason-revelation distinction completely, and learning to see the world as it appeared to the prophets of Israel — before the reason-revelation distinction was invented. I have quite a bit to say about this second step, and I’ll touch on this subject again in my Conclusion.  

But the focus of this book has to be that first step:  coming closer to the ideas the Hebrew Scriptures were written to advance by learning to read them as works of reason.  If we can make headway on that, it will be plenty for this one book.  After that, I hope to devote a different work to the question of that second step.

If the reason-dichotomy works so poorly as a lens through which to read the Hebrew Scriptures as I’m suggesting, what holds this interpretive framework in place?  Why do intelligent people keep reading these texts this way, as though they were works of revelation, and have nothing significant to contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the word through reason?  There are certainly a number of factors at work here.  But only one, I think, has to be considered decisive.  This is the way people respond to the fact that these texts are punctuated by phrases such as: And the Lord said to Moses . . .  Or, in the case of the orations of Isaiah or Jeremiah, by expressions such as Thus says the Lord . . .

For many readers today, the presence of these phrases is enough to bring them, more or less immediately, to a number of conclusions about the authors of these texts.

•  First it is assumed that whenever these phrases appear in the text, the author intended to report that a miracle occurred — a miracle whereby knowledge is revealed to the mind of this or that individual without his having made use of the mental faculties that people normally use to understand things about the world.  
• Second, it is assumed that the author’s understanding of the world, in which a God or gods could miraculously impart knowledge to the minds of men, is no more than fantastic nonsense recorded by the weak-minded and gullible; or just plain lies set down in books by unscrupulous manipulators pursuing dreadful ends now forgotten. 

In either case, the very fact that these texts depict God as acting and speaking is enough to show that the authors of these books, whether weak-minded or lying, were not the kind of people from whom you’d want to try to learn anything.

So as lots of people see it, it’s the presence in the Hebrew Scriptures of all those instances of God speaking that makes the Bible a work of revelation, and rules out the possibility that these texts could be taken seriously as reason.

Now, you can’t avoid the fact that the biblical authors very often attribute speech and actions to God.  And you wouldn’t want to, either, because such attribution is an essential feature of what the biblical texts have to say.  But the line of argument that’s tacked on to this  —

• that these texts are reporting miracles every time God is depicted as saying something;
• that this way of looking at the world can have no more to it than rank superstition;
• that their promotion of such reports makes the biblical authors weak-minded or liars, and the texts themselves the product of weak-mindedness or lies;
• that this rules the Bible out as a work of reason – all this is something else entirely.

It’s basically a propaganda line worked out by French philosophes and German professors in their campaign to discredit the Bible and knock the Church out of the ring as a force in European public life.  Maybe there were good reasons for them to have adopted this line of argument when they did.  But there’s nothing in that to recommend it to us. Like most propaganda lines, it isn’t really fair. And when you look at it more closely, you see that it doesn’t make much sense, either.

So let’s take the bull by the horns.  

Is it true that in confronting a text that depicts God as speaking and acting, we really have no choice but to classify it as revelation; and, consequently, to rule it out as a work of reason?

The answer that should be given to this question is “No.”  

It is not true that we have to classify works that have God speaking and acting in them as revelation, and to rule them out as works of reason.  For if that were the case, then we would long ago have ruled out as works of reason some of the most famous works of philosophy ever written — works that are today unchallenged as works of reason, and, indeed, regarded as the basis for the tradition of Western philosophy.

[Author then illustrates this point with the writings of Parmenides “who lived 130 years later than the Israelite prophet Jeremiah (c. 647-572) writes philosophy as though it were — revealed to him by a god.” And he proceeds to discuss other Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato whose writings are insinuated as “receiving revelations and commands and dreams from the gods that give form and content” to their life and work.–Admin1.]

What these texts suggest is the following:

• During 200 years between Jeremiah and Plato, there flourished a philosophical tradition –the very tradition that gave birth to western philosophy –in which the ability to conduct philosophical inquiry was frequently seen as partially or wholly dependent on revelation or some other form of assistance from a god.
•  In this tradition human beings were seen as being unable to attain answers to significant questions on the strength of their own native abilities, so revelation or some other form of divine assistance was needed if they were to reach the truth, which was the possession of the gods alone.
• Where philosophy in this tradition was successful, it was therefore presented as though it were words spoken or sent by a god, or under the direction of a god.

Yet despite the putatively revealed character of such works, they are today read as though they were works of reason, and not revelation –with historians and professors of philosophy writing about them and teaching courses about them as  if they were any other philosophical work.  Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, for instance, devotes a short chapter each to Parmanides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus without so much as mentioning the role of gods in producing their philosophies.  He does draw attention to the fact that Socrates believed he was guided by a divine voice, oracles, and dreams.  But nothing is said to follow from this.  And other histories of philosophy aren’t much different in this respect.  Virtually all of them take the fact that some philosophers presented their works as divine revelation in stride, either ignoring it entirely or mentioning it in passing without drawing any weighty conclusions from it.

Now, what would happen if we were to apply the same rules of interpretation commonly used in reading, say, the prophet Jeremiah, to Parmanides’ text about his ascent to heaven in a chariot driven by gods?  To his being led by the hand by the goddess and receiving commands from her?  To his writing down the words he heard from her mouth, and descriptions of the things she showed him, so mankind could attain truth?

Applying the standards that are often applied today in reading the bible, we’d have to assume,

• first, that whenever Parmenides describes the goddess as speaking or acting or showing him things, or when he describes himself riding skyward in the chariot, or the actions of other gods he encounters, he is reporting on the occurrence of a series of miracles to which he was witness —miracles whereby knowledge was revealed to him not due to the operations of his own faculties, but due to the will of the gods who chose to reveal this otherwise hidden knowledge to him.  
• Second, we’d assume that all this is no more than fantastic nonsense, and that Parmenides, in choosing to write these things down, must either have been weak-minded and gullible, or else an unscrupulous liar trying to manipulate his audience for the sake of ends now forgotten.  And then, having understood that Parmenides is either a fool or a liar for making such false presentations to us, we’d naturally conclude that his writings aren’t works of reason, and that they don’t, therefore, have anything significant to contribute to our own effort to understand reality.  We’d then dispose of Parmenides the way we’ve disposed of other ancient texts of unreason.

. . . . As the history of philosophy amply attests, we can’t expect the great figures of faraway times and places to see the world as we do on every issue, and not even on every issue we see as crucial.   . . . .Perhaps we think that in the case of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the invocation of divine revelation was merely a stylistic convention.  Or perhaps we believe that the goddess is a metaphor, after all.  Or perhaps we believe that in the old days people simply interpreted what we today call the “insight” of the human mind as the speech of a god.  Or perhaps we believe that Parmenides was in fact a little crazy, but it doesn’t matter because he came up with some good stuff too.  Or perhaps we believe that he inherited old traditions concerning the speech of the gods and developed them in such a way as to make the philosophical lines clearer, while retaining the old story line.   . . . .

So now the obvious question is this.  If it makes little sense to dismiss Parmenides’ philosophy from serious consideration just because it presented as the revelation of a goddess, why should anyone take up this same approach to the text, which would embarrass us in the case of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and apply it shamelessly to the authors of the Hebrew biblical works?  Is it not the case that however we wish to explain (or explain away) the character of Parmenides’ writings as works of revelation, these same explanations, or similar ones, will apply just as well to Jeremiah?

 If we can forgive the Greeks the strange gods and oracles that speak to them, looking beyond this difficulty and judging them by the content of their teachings, why should not this same standard be applied to the writings of the Jews?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is just this:  

We don’t approach the Greek texts by way of the same interpretive posture as we do the Jewish ones because we look at both through the prism of early Christian doctrine –that is through the prism of the reason-revelation dichotomy, which teaches us to see Greek wisdom as derived from reason, whereas what the Jews have to say is revelation.  

This dichotomy is applied a priori, without any need for further investigation or justification.  Permenides’ vision is studied as a work of reason because his is Greek wisdom; Jeremiah’s writings as revelation for no other reason than that his is Jewish wisdom.  And this a priori categorization is self-fulfilling.  For once scholars and educated people have been hard at work for generations trying to find what is reasonable and philosophical in Parmenides, they do find it.  Meanwhile, the work that is done on Jeremiah’s text remains tightly focused on whatever seems to qualify it as revelation.

But this is all wrong.  The idea that a given composition can’t be a work of reason — indeed that it can’t be philosophy –because it presents itself as revelation is nothing but a bare prejudice.   And nothing other than this bare prejudice of ours justifies denying Jeremiah the same consideration as Parmenides.  If approached with appropriate respect and common sense, the great Israelite prophet will, I think, be quickly found to have at least as much reasoned discussion and philosophy to offer as many others who have long been studied as philosophers.  And the same will be the case with many other texts of the Hebrew Bible, if not all of them.

For much of Western history, the reason-revelation dichotomy was maintained and elaborated primarily through the efforts of the Church.  But the cultural terrain has shifted, and over the last two centuries perhaps the most influential purveyor of this distinction has been the modern research university. Before proceeding to describe the outline of this book, I’d like to briefly consider the special role that the universities have played — and continue to play — in holding the reason-revelation dichotomy in place as the basis for our understanding the Bible.

The Christian reason-revelation dichotomy was intended to impart a conviction that works of revelation were in some important sense superior to works of mere reason, and therefore worthy of especial awe and respect.  So it’s not the Christian version of the reason-revelation dichotomy that is responsible for the common view that takes Parmenides to have been an epoch-making thinker, while Jeremiah is seen as a half-mad street preacher hearing voices in the air.  This view of things owes its force and currency to the philosophers of the end of the 18th century, who retained the reason-revelation dichotomy but reworked it to achieve ends entirely alien to those of the Christians who originally popularized it.  As is well known, French and German culture during this period was characterized by extraordinary enthusiasm for Greek philosophy and art.  In Germany, especially, it was common to speak of the classical Greeks almost as a kind of super-race, and to hold them up as the sole example of a segment of humanity worthy of serving as an ideal for contemporary Germans. . . . 

To find one’s ideal only in the Greeks.

To draw inspiration from the Greeks alone. 

These were fighting words in Christian Europe, and one doesn’t have to think too hard to figure out whom they were aimed up.  The elevation of the Greeks to the sole source of learning and knowledge announced a profound reconfiguration of Christian Europe’s self-understanding —a reconfiguration in which the old Judeo-Hellenic synthesis was declared to have been, in retrospect, a mistake; and all that was Jewish in the history and thought of Europe would henceforth be deemed as having been, in fact, detrimental and unneeded.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment applied their formidable skills to constructing an understanding of European history that worked in just this way.  Associating the texts of the Jews with ignorance and superstition, they argued that no genuine works of reason had arisen among the Jews and that nothing was originally Hebrew had made a significant contribution to the history of ideas.  Kant, for example, wrote that it is safe to bypass the Hebrew Scriptures in a history of the development of Western thought because they were written by an ignorant people, who gained whatever wisdom they may later have obtained from the Greeks.  

As he writes:

The Jewish faith was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization; for whatever moral additions were then or later appended to it in no way whatever belonged to Judaism as such.  Judaism is not really a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws [Only later was Judaism] interfused, by reason of moral doctrines gradually made public within it, with a religious faith — for this otherwise ignorant people had been able to receive much foreign (Greek) wisdom.

[He then discusses a similar argument by Hegel.–Admin1]

. . . the leading thinkers of the German enlightenment introduced a new twist into the history of the reason-revelation dichotomy, mixing contempt for revelation with an acid anti-Semitism to create a new view of Western history, in which absolutely nothing of worth is to be attributed to the Jews.

The impact fo this way of looking at the history of the West was immense.  From 1810, the German universities were, under Humboldt’s leadership, reorganized, with the new natural sciences rather than Christian philosophy at their center.  This revamping of the universities was in many respects an extraordinary success, placing vast new resources in the hands of scholars capable of conducting research int he natural sciences and mathematics.  German universities quickly became the world center for academic achievements in a dazzling array of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, biology, and medicine.  But the scientific worldview was not supposed to be limited to mathematics and natural science alone.  History, too, and the study of religion, were also refashioned as sciences.  . . .  In the decades that followed, the German universities became an international engine for the dissemination of the Enlightenment philosophy. . . . and the Enlightenment interpretation of the history of western ideas as well. And it is this interpretation that is studied and taught, almost exclusively, in universities around the world today.

[Author discusses same approach including the political thought of Christianity as found in the New Testament and the writings of the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. . .  and on to “revisionist” histories . . .–Admin 1]  

In these works, and in every other competitor I’ve seen, the contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideas of the West is either passed over in silence, or else dismissed in a handful of (often quite offensive) sentences.

[He gives an example in the 3-sentences attribution of Sheldon Wolin–Admin1]:

For the religious experience of the Jews had been strongly colored by political elements . . . . The terms of the covenant between Jahweh and his chosen people had often been interpreted as promising the triumph of the [Jewish] nation, the establishment of a political kingdom that would allow the Jews to rule the rest of the world.  The messiah-figure, in turn, appeared not so much as an agent of redemption as the restorer of the Davidic kingdom.

Thus according to Wolin, a thousand years of Jewish political thought prior to the advent of Christianity can be effectively nutshelled as the belief that the Jews should seek ultimate political power with the aim of establishing their rule over the entire planet.

[Author cites Bertrand Russell’s and Anthony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy–Admin1] 

This work refers to the Hebrew Bible for the first time in a section entitled “Judaism and Christianity,” which begins as follows:

For the long-term development of philosophy the most important development in the first century of the Roman Empire was the career of Jesus of Nazareth.

[Kenny then proceeds to discuss the moral teachings of Jesus, nowhere returning to consider what ideas may have entered philosophy from the Hebrew Scriptures.–Admin1]

The trend is perhaps at its most blatant in moral philosophy — a field that one intuitively supposes must have been influenced in some significant way by the constant exposure of Western thought to the Hebrew Scriptures over more than 20 centuries.  Yet this possibility is all but absent from the best overviews of the field of moral philosophy.  

[He cites books discussing ideas of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hume and Bentham–Admin1]

. . . But neither of them makes even a passing reference to the Hebrew Bible.

[He continues to explain the lack of attribution to the Hebrew Bible–Admin1]

. . . I suppose this isn’t any more remarkable than the fact that even university Bible studies programs often tend to devote little or no attention to the question of the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures were written to advance.

[He then describes the “source-critical” method for studying the Bible–Admin1]  —-which understood the biblical texts as “corrupt” –the result of centuries of tampering and abuse by anonymous scribes representing mutually hostile religious sects.  This tampering is said to have resulted in texts that are little better than patchworks of fragments that are at times less than a single verse in length.  The hypothetical authors of these text fragments – J, E, P, and D – are seen as different “layers” in the biblical texts, with the later laters (P,D) effectively defacing the texts that had been composed earlier on (J, E).  For Julius Wellhausen and the founders of the source-critical method, none of this is innocent either.  They saw the later layers as having been written by the inventors of “Judaism,” whether the earlier layers had been written by authors whose worldview was much closer to being Christian — so that in the hands fo the scientific Bible scholarship of Enlightenment Germany, the Jews turn out not to have been the authors of the Old Testament, so much as those who perverted and corrupted it.  The anti-Semitism of the authors of this theory has been commented upon by Jewish scholars working in the field of biblical studies time and again.  But here, too, as with Hegel’s history of philosophy, it is simply assumed that the truth of the theory is independent of its anti-Semitic provenance.

In light of this picture of a corrupt and fragmented Bible, the idea that the biblical texts could be capable of advancing a consistent view on any subject has come to seem far-fetched in the eyes of many scholars.  And indeed, the majority of academic Bible scholars have, for over a century, avoided the investigation of the ideas the biblical texts were written to advance for precisely this reason.  The result is that today the field of biblical studies produces a steady stream of works on the philology, compositional history, and literary character of the biblical texts.  But the ideas that find expression in the Bible — the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy of the biblical authors — have all too often eluded the interest of academic scholars of Bible.  Moreover, the incapacity to deal with the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason affects numerous other academic disciplines, including the history and archeology of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the history and philosophy of law, the history and philosophy of science, the history of Western languages, and more.

The upshot of all this is that there may be no real reason for treating Parmenides as an epoch-making thinker, while Jeremiah’s writings continue to languish under the weight of their ill repute as works of unreason.  But it makes little difference.  At the universities, the reason-revelation dichotomy continues to barrel onward, the many centuries of accumulated momentum carrying it through.  Each discipline passes responsibility for inquiring whether there is something wrong to its neighbor.  None seem to feel the disgrace and danger that a profoundly flawed understanding of our history may bring in its train.

Continued in:  

• MUST READ: Another “how to” read the Hebrew Scriptures – 3

Image from amazon.com

[First posted March 14, 2013.  

 Yoram Hazony, author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture explains the organization of the contents of his book. We have painstakingly featured this book in 3 installments to encourage our website habitues to get your own copy because it belongs to the few categories we have pushed not only as MUST READ but MUST OWN!  Through these 3 long reads on just the author’s introduction and explanation of what to expect, there is much already to be learned, all the more the whole book itself!  So, if you are on a truth quest much like us Sinaites who provide this website as a resource center for the likes of you and ourselves, then please read the rest of this highly recommended book in your personal copy. Highlights, reformatting added.]

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The Hebrew Bible is the modern university’s blind side.

The Hebrew Bible remains a closed book for the overwhelming majority of educated men and women.

. . . . Given these circumstances, it seems there is a need for an introductory work that can serve as a gateway to the new approach to the investigation of biblical texts — a gateway that will permit scholars, educators, and interested lay persons to better understand what is happening and what is at stake, and, hopefully, to take part themselves in the enterprise of retrieving the ideas of the biblical authors and bringing them into a more open dialogue with the ideas of the Western philosophical tradition than has been possible until now.  This book is intended to serve as such an introduction.  More specifically, I’ve written it with two purposes in mind:

First, it is intended to provide a methodological framework that makes clear what I take to be the implicit assumptions of some of the best works on the Bible as a work of reason that have appeared to us thus far;Second, it is intended to provide what I hope are some provocative examinations of the philosophical interests of the authors of the Bible.  My hope is that this methodological framework and these provocative examinations will together suffice to make the project of investigating the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason seem more plausible and engaging, both to those who have been skeptical about it, and to those who have been interested in and excited about the prospect of such a project but have felt it to be lacking in clear direction and to extend these assumptions so as to permit more rapid advance in the direction of a well-articulated understanding of the philosophical content of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The book is divided into two main parts, followed by a conclusion:

Part I,  consisting of Chapters 1-3, offers an interpretive framework for reading the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason or philosophy, including a discussion of the Bible’s internal structure, the purposes for which it was written, and the ways in which the biblical authors use biblical narrative and prophetic oration to advance arguments of general significance.  Together, these chapters provide a proposed roadmap for “how to read the Hebrew Scriptures” as works of reason and philosophy.

Chapter 1, “The Structure of the Hebrew Bible,” is devoted to a survey of the internal structure of the Jewish Bible.  I suggest that from the point of view of the philosophical reading of Scripture, the most important literary unit of the Hebrew Scriptures is the narrative sequence of nine works extending from the book of Genesis to the book of Kings — the first half of the Jewish Bible —which collectively can be called the History of Israel.  I then discuss the other principal works of the Jewish Bible in their relation to this History, and make a first approach at answering the question of why the compilers of the Bible brought together such a diversity of viewpoints and genres in a single anthology.

In Chapter 2, “What is the Purpose of the Hebrew Bible?” I argue that the principal interpretive framework of the New Testament, which sees the Bible as having been written to bear witness or give testimony to the occurrence of revelations and other miraculous events, is largely absent from the Hebrew Scriptures.  I suggest that the History of Israel as we have it was composed with the purpose of preventing the disappearance of the Jews as a people after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem and their exile from their land.  It therefore reissues the law of Moses and calls for its observance.  But the narrative in which the law is embedded also strives to provide a broader framework for understanding the significance of this law, offering what I think we should recognize as a philosophical argument for the importance of Israel’s covenant with God not only for the Jews but also for “all the nations of the earth.”  The crux of this argument is that the law of Moses, alone among the laws of the nations, is fitted to man’s nature and directed toward his well-being.  The History thus holds out the prospect of “life and the good” for all mankind, and charges the Jews to keep the Mosaic law both for their own well-being and as bearers of this prospect.  The narrative tracts of the History of Israel should therefore be seen as intended, among other things, to establish political, moral, and metaphysical truths of a general nature within the context of an effort to explain  and understand that which is of particular relevance and concern to the Jewish people after the destruction of their kingdom.  I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the way in which they amplify and argue with the standpoint advanced in the History.

The picture that emerges from this discussion is one that sees the biblical authors as concerned to advance arguments of a universal or general significance.  But this flies int he face of a series of common prejudices concerning the proper form for the presentation of such arguments.  For example, narrative is often said to be a medium that focuses one’s attention on the particular, not the universal.  Similarly, the metaphors that appear in almost every line of prophetic oratory are considered to be the stuff of poetry, not reasoned argument.

In Chapter 3, “How Does the Hebrew Bible Make Arguments of a General Nature?” I therefore look at some fo the techniques the biblical narratives and prophetic orations use to advance arguments applicable to the generality of human experience.  I conclude the chapter with a look at the way History and the prophetic orations present their particularistic teachings —concerning the covenant and the Mosaic law — as being based upon, and growing out of, universal characteristics of human nature and of the nature of God’s creation more generally.

Having proposed a framework for reading the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason, I turn, in the next part of the book, to applying studies fo the thought of the biblical authors.  Part II, Chapters 4-8, thus offers a series of five interrelated studies that examine the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible.

I begin in Chapter 4, “The Ethics of a Shepherd,” with an exploration of the ethics of the History of Israel, focusing especially on the book of Genesis.  The Bible is often said to advocate the ethics of obedience.  But I suggest that this view involves a serious misreading of Hebrew Scripture.  Nearly all the principal figures throughout the biblical corpus are esteemed for their dissent and disobedience — a trait the biblical authors associate with the free life of the shepherd, as opposed to the life of pious submission represented by the figure of the farmer. At a certain level this emphasis on disobedience is not too surprising.  Since the biblical authors saw most of the human sources of authority with which they were familiar as corrupt, it makes sense that they were advocates of dissent and resistance in dealing with human institutions.  The biblical narratives, however, go much farther than this.  Abel, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and other biblical figures are at times portrayed as resisting not only man, but God himself, with God going so far as to give Jacob the name Israel, “for you have wrestled with God and with man and have prevailed.”  I suggest that in these stories, the biblical narrative endorses what I call an outsider’s ethics, which encourages a critique even of things that appear to be decreed by God in the name of what is genuinely beneficial to man.  For in the eyes of the biblical authors, what is genuinely beneficial to man is that which will ultimately find favor in God’s eyes. 

Chapter 5, “The History of Israel, Genesis-Kings: A Political Philosophy,” argues that the History of Israel was also composed with an eye to advancing a consistent political philosophy.  This part of the Bible issues biting criticism of both the imperial state familiar to the ancient Near East and of its opposite, political anarchy.  In place of these, the narrative advocates a new and intermediate form of political association:  the unification of all Israel under a limited state, to be ruled by an Israelite whose thoughts “are not lifted above his brothers.”  This limited state would differ from the imperial states of the ancient Near East in that it would be constrained with respect to its territorial ambitions, the size of its military, and the resources it would expropriate from the people in the form of taxes and forced labor.  Such a state has set out on “the good and the just way,”  and can hope for success and longevity.  Thus the freedom of the Israelites is understood to depend not only on maintaining a ban on idolatry, as is often said, but also an adherence to a political theory of a limited government over one nation.   The ultimate collapse of the Israelite state is attributed by the biblical narrative to the abandonment of this political theory by the Israelite kings.

The ethics and political philosophy of biblical narratives treated to this point raise pressing questions of epistemology, and in particular the question of how human beings can escape the circle of their own opinions to attain knowledge of that which is enduring and true.

In Chapter 6, “Jeremiah and the Problem of Knowing,” I suggest that the book of Jeremiah grapples constantly with this question.  Indeed the central theme of the book can be said to be the question of how it is possible for the individual to distinguish truth from falsity and right from wrong lin the face of the wildly contradictory views being promoted by prophets, priests, and political leaders.  Jeremiah’s reflections on how this problem arises and the solutions he offers are shown to constitute an early and substantively interesting attempt to develop a theory for knowledge.

The question of what is meant by truth in Hebrew Scripture is pursued in Chapter 7, “Truth and Being in the Hebrew Bible,” which seeks a reconstruction of the metaphysical presuppositions of the biblical authors.  I begin by observing that in the Hebrew Bible, truth and falsity are not usually qualities of things that are said, but of objects:  In Scripture, we find that things such as roads, men, horses, bread, and seeds can be true or false!  Examining the way the Hebrew word for truth (emet) is used in the Bible, I conclude that an object is considered true to the extent that it can be relied upon in the face of hardship and changes in circumstance.  But how does this work? It seems to leave the biblical authors without a coherent way of understanding what is meant by true speech.  Answering this question, I suggest, forces us to look more carefully at the Hebrew term for spoken words (davar, pl. devarim), which is also the principal term used in biblical Hebrew to refer to objects.  I argue that the biblical authors don’t subscribe to a metaphysical picture in which word and object are independent from one another because they don’t see the world and the mind of the observer as independent from one another. They recognize the object as understood as the only reality, and hold that true speech (or true things) is that which can be relied upon in the face of hardship and changing circumstance.  In fact, this is what is meant by God’s word.

In Chapter 8, “Jerusalem and Carthage: Reason and Faith in Hebrew Scripture,” I turn to consider the place of faith in Hebrew Scripture.  In contemporary discourse faith is often opposed to reason (as in the familiar opposition between “Jerusalem” and “Athens”).  But I argue that the kind of faith that is usually invoked in establishing this opposition — in the writings of Tertullian or Kierkegaard, for example –cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible at all.  Indeed, I make the case that the tradition of inquiry found in the Bible is opposed to “faith” in this sense.  I then examine the biblical conception of faith, which refers to the belief that God can be relied upon to keep his promises, especially concerning the effectiveness of the Mosaic law in bringing well-being to mankind.  Although Moses is depicted as emphasizing the efficacy of the law time and again, the narrative itself limits the extent to which Moses, or indeed any man, can have such knowledge in its portrayal of Moses’ attempts to learn God’s nature.  Thus the narrative is found to both enjoin observance and at the same time to criticize the ideal of a perfect trust in God.  I suggest that the absence of a commandment to have faith in God reflects the biblical teaching limiting the desirability of a perfect faith.

I end this book with a Conclusion and Appendix that seek to tie up loose ends and suggest some directions for further thought and discussion.  In my brief Part III, Chapter 9, entitled “God’s Speech After Reason and Revelation,” I return to the question of whether an approach that treats the biblical texts as works of reason can be a sufficient basis for a full understanding of the teaching of Scripture.  A significant difficulty, I suggest, comes from the fact that the medieval understanding of what is meant by reason  – the one traditionally employed in making the reason-revelation dichotomy work – has been under fire for centuries, and no consensus has yet emerged as to what should replace it.  Moreover, the common understanding of what is meant by revelation, which depends heavily on Greek metaphysical assumptions, may also begin to totter if something like what I’ve proposed in Chapters 6-8 concerning biblical conceptions of truth and being turns out to be right.  These two considerations lead me to suggest that with our understanding of both reason and revelation in motion, we may find the in-principle differences that made the reason-revelation dichotomy seem plausible in the Middle Ages growing more and more difficult to maintain.

Finally, I’ve attached an appendix entitled “What is ‘Reason’? Some Preliminary Remarks.” Throughout this book I use the terms reason  and philosophy without attempting to define them. But philosophers and others who are interested in what I mean by reason are invited to take a look at this appendix, which offers a short sketch of my views on this subject.  In it, I point to the fact that the traditional reason-revelation distinction depended on a medieval understanding of reason as a series of deductions proceeding from self-evident premises (or from reports of the senses, which are also evident in themselves).  But the success of modern physical science has forced a radical revision of this view.  Newton’s science was, after all, based on abstracting general laws (or propositions) from experience.  Deductions from these general laws were then confirmed or disconfirmed through further experience, and these results were used to confirm or disconfirm his general laws.  This shift in the way we conceive of the functioning of human reason is important to the present discussion because it sheds light on why it was so difficult for many medieval thinkers to recognize reason in the Hebrew Scriptures.  After all, if what counts as reason is mostly deductions of chains of propositions from other propositions, there really isn’t much of this to be found in the Bible.  But our view of what reason is has changed, and as a consequence the question of whether the kinds of argumentation characteristic of biblical instructional narrative or of prophetic oratory of reason should, as it seems, be considered an open one.

In the Appendix, I point to a possible path for updating and developing Newtons’ conception of reason to incorporate the growing body of scholarship that sees metaphor and analogy as fundamental to the way the human mind reasons about abstract causes or natures.  On the view I present, metaphor and analogy appear at a level of conscious human reasoning that is prior to and more basic than the articulation of such reasoning in terms of propositions.  Newton’s Principia, for example, relies heavily on metaphor and analogy in the forging of its basic concepts, which are only subsequently interrelated by means of a superstructure of mathematical propositions from which deductions can be taken.   As soon as one recognizes that the operations of the human mind involved in analogical reasoning are basic to human reasoning concerning general causes or natures — and that neither Newtonian science nor any other form of advanced human reason seems to do without it — it becomes much easier to see that many, if not all, of the biblical authors are indeed engaged in reason, and that it is the exercise of reason they hope for in their readers as well.

*The Christian Bible consists of two distinct collection of works, which Christians traditionally call the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament,” respectively.  The Old Testament found in most Christian Bibles is a translation of a body of originally Hebrew-language works that Jews call the Tanach or Mikra,  which I will refer to as the “Hebrew Bible” or the “Hebrew Scriptures.”  The books of the Christian Old Testament also appear in a somewhat different order from that of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Unless otherwise noted, all references to “the Bible” in this work refer to the Hebrew Bible, which is the Bible that is in use almost universally in Jewish institutions of learning and synagogues around the world.

*Some readers will want to know more precisely what I mean by the terms reason and philosophy.  This is a fair question, but answering it requires a detour into issues distant from the present discussion.  Rather than go into these matters here, I’ve positioned an outline of my thinking on the subject in an appendix at the end of Chapter 9.  

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[Read the post:

• MUST READ: Another “how to” read the Hebrew Scriptures – 3

   This is Chapter 9 of our MUST READ/MUST OWN book: The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Yoram Hazony. The author used two words throughout his discussion and now takes the time to explain what he means by each word. Reformatting and highlights added.—Admin1.]

• First, Jeremiah sees an almond tree, which in winter appears as a barren stick with neither leaves nor fruit, but is called a shaked in Hebrew – a cognate of the verb shakad meaning “to be diligent” – because it blossoms in January and bears fruit within three weeks, the first of the trees in Israel to awaken from its barrenness and fulfill its hidden promise each year.⁸Jeremiah’s second metaphor, a seething pot with its face to the north, depicts Jerusalem in a manner that is close to home: The cauldron roils with moral decay and political instability, and Jerusalem, bounded by steep precipices on all sides but the north, can only be militarily conquered from that direction.⁹ This is a metaphor that invokes not the future hope of the city, but its slide toward destruction.
• Jeremiah looks upon the kingdom, endangered and troubled, but sees the fulfillment of God’s promise that Jerusalem will flower and bear fruit. This is difficult metaphor to extract from the events of Jeremiah’s day, and God responds to Jeremiah’s metaphor by telling him he has “excelled in seeing.”

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[First posted on April Fools Day, 2015; as the song goes, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”  Ponder this.

We have always wondered:  Why is the One True God, YHWH, threatened by “other gods” when no such gods exist?  Our answer:  because the one created being made in His Image has the propensity to invent gods or make himself a god.  Yes, there is no competition when no gods exist, but the problem is YHWH has to compete with non-existent gods in the mind and heart of the only sentient creature who is able to willfully worship something, if not himself.  So where does that leave the One True God? Competing with none-gods! What a conundrum.

One of our favorite attributions to Jesus when we were still Christians was “KING of Kings” and “LORD of Lords,” demonstrating that while there are human powers and authorities, i.e. kings and lords who rule known kingdoms of the world, there is Someone who is both human and divine who is above all human kings and lords. That’s overstating the obvious, at least from the Christian perspective.  

Little did we know the True God was competing with another God for our recognition and worship of Him!  As Sinaites, we now embrace the God of Israel, YHWH, as our God, our Lord, and our King.  He is ONE as in ALONE,  and not a Trinitarian Godhead whose configuration is confusing — three thrones for three persons or three persons sharing one throne? There is only One Throne for the one and only King and Ruler of the universe.

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This is Chapter 9 of Jon D. Levenson’s MUST READ/MUST OWN Sinai and Zion.  Reformatted with highlights added.–Admin1]

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 In our analysis of Israelite monotheism, we identified two themes that can be termed royal in nature, a general one and a specific one.

• The general theme is that —

YHWH is king and that all other beings, including the other gods, are therefore subordinate to him.

The comparative materials suggest that nothing in this notion of the kingship of YHWH, of divine sovereignty, conflicts with the idea of human kingship. On the contrary, just as the story of Marduk’s assumption of sovereignty did not undermine the kings of his city, Babylon, so did YHWH’s sovereignty offer no critique of the institution of human kingship in Israel. In fact, we shall see in the next chapter that some texts present the sovereignty of the world as a kind of unequal diarchy, in which YHWH has invested the Israelite monarch with the authority to rule a global domain in the name of YHWH (e.g., Psalm 2).

The perception of YHWH as sovereign is modeled upon the familiar image of human sovereigns, but without the demand to choose one or the other. YHWH’s temple, for example, is termed a palace (see Ezra 3:6), his prophets are viewed as royal envoys (Isaiah 6), and one of his sacrifices is termed “tribute” (minha).

The analogy between divine and human sovereignty was known in Israel; it is explicit in a post-exilic polemic (fifth century B.C.E.) against the priesthood, in which a prophet asks rhetorically whether the governor will accept maimed sacrifices of the sort the Jews are bringing to YHWH (Mal 1:7-9). In this passage, there is no tension between divine and human sovereignty.

• The second royal theme derives from the Near Eastern suzerainty treaty of the sort that we have been examining. What brought this theme into the discussion of monotheism was the proscription of other suzerains which is essential to the alliance. This proscription is the ultimate source of the prohibitions upon the worship of other deities in Israel, and, I have suggested, it underlies the depiction of them as unworthy, even, finally, unreal. We may call this second royal theme YHWH’s suzerainty. It is a more specific theme than the one of sovereignty in that, in origin, it is limited to the relationship between states and thus cannot be predicated of every king.

A king is sovereign by definition, but suzerain only if he is an emperor, that is to say, a master of vassals. In fact, they must acknowledge only one suzerain, the great king of their alliance. In the case of the treaty of Mursilis and Duppi-Tessub, the suzerain confers sovereignty upon his vassal or at least affirms that he will uphold his vassal’s kingship, if Duppi-Tessub proves faithful in covenant.

I drew a parallel between this and the statement in Exod 19:6 that Israel will, if she observes the covenant (v 5), become YHWH’s “kingdom of priests and a holy nation,”

In short, all of Israel is endowed with sovereignty, for the nation as a whole has become royal in character. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the mitsvot, the covenant stipulations of the Sinaitic pact, are as often couched in the second person singular as in the plural. Both Israel as a nation and the Israelite as an individual stand in the position of royal vassals of the divine suzerain.

Unlike the sovereignty of God, his suzerainty does place a limitation upon the potential for a human counterpart. If there can be only one suzerain, how can Israel enter into a covenant with any other lord?

Hence, we find, especially in those books in which the covenant idea is prominent, an unqualified rejection of Realpolitik, since all (human) alliances are equated with apostasy. Hos 7:10-13, for instance, contrasts Israel’s overtures to Egypt and Assyria with fidelity to YHWH their God.

“I am their redeemer,” YHWH complains,

“but they have plotted treason against me” (v 13).

This is the plaintive cry of the grieving and spurned suzerain. His vassal appeals to the conventional suzerains, the lords of politics, and in the process proves herself not only mindless, but rebellious and treasonous.

YHWH has redeemed them.

That is his claim and consorts with other lords, the great powers, in hopes of obtaining that of which YHWH has already proven himself supremely capable: deliverance.

The radicalism of this aspect of covenant theology must not be missed. The covenant with YHWH is here presented as the alternative to conventional political relations. Israel (Ephraim) must choose one or the other. It is either Egypt/Assyria or YHWH, but not both, for the divine suzerain will not tolerate a human competitor any more than he will a divine one.

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This proscribing of international politics is thus the political equivalent of covenantal monotheism. In each case, Israel’s special identity demands a radical separation from the ways of the nations.

The whole world is YHWH’s,

but Israel is to be his

“treasured possession…

a kingdom of priests

and a holy nation”

(Exod 19:5-6),

a sacral state, not a political one.

What are the implications of divine suzerainty for Israel’s internal governance? If all Israelites are vassals of the great king, then it follows that one Israelite may not be set up over his fellows as king. There is no such thing as a “vice-suzerain” to whom vassals in covenant may do homage without harming their relationship with the great king. In short, the directness of the two-party relationship of YHWH and Israel, including even the individual Israelite, precludes human kingship.

YHWH is her suzerain, YHWH alone.

Even within Israel, therefore, the covenantal institution undermines the basis for politics.  Hence, in some biblical texts, the institution of human kingship, which lay at the very center of the religions of many other ancient peoples, was denounced as an act of treachery against God.

As an example, consider this exchange between the victorious general (“judge”) Gideon and the men of Israel:

22  The men of Israel said to Gideon,

“Rule over us—you, your son, and your grandson as well,

for you have rescued us from the power of Midian.”

23  But Gideon replied,

“I will not rule over you, and neither shall my son.

YHWH will rule over you.”

(Judg 8:22-23)

And when the people demand a king from Samuel, last of the “judges,” YHWH answers him with these words of dejection and grief:

Heed everything the people say to you,

for it is not you whom they have rejected,

but me whom they have rejected as their king.

(1 Sam. 8:7)

Here, “king” is to be read in the light of suzerainty, for the demand for a human king is a rejection of the divine king. The two cannot coexist. In the theo-politics of this stream of tradition, there is no room for earthly government. The state is not part of the solution to the problems inherent in human society, but itself one of the problems.

The difference between sovereignty and suzerainty should not be overdrawn. After all, the two concepts are expressed in biblical Hebrew by the same word, “king” (melek). Just as law, the proper concern of kings, and covenant, the concern of suzerains, combined into an indissoluble mesh in Israel from an early date, so did the concepts of YHWH as king and YHWH as lord in large measure merge.  We usually do not know which nuance lies behind the term melek.  

The issue is further complicated by the fact that early Israelite kingship was elected in character, a fact reflected in the continuing ceremony in which the people acclaim the new king as their sovereign, even though YHWH designated him.

In the case of David, the king responds to his election by making a covenant with his subjects (2 Sam 5:1-3). It is quite possible that in some instances in which the Hebrew Bible speaks of a covenant with YHWH, the reference is to a royal one like that between Israel and David in 2 Samuel 5 and not to a suzerainty treaty along the lines of the Hittite exemplars. It is impossible to know for sure.

I have stressed the distinction between sovereignty and suzerainty in order to shed light on the bifurcated attitude towards human kingship in ancient Israel.  In some texts, on the one hand, the divine and the human monarchs appear together, with no tension between them. This model we shall examine in Part 2.

On the other hand, there are texts, such as those we saw from Judges 8 and 1 Samuel 8, in which divine and human monarchy are mutually exclusive. Any king other then YHWH is an intruder into the pristine covenant relationship; his establishment derives from an act of defection.

In this theology,

Sinai serves as an eternal rebuke

to man’s arrogant belief

that he can govern himself.

The state is not coeval with God.

Rather, it was born at a particular moment in history

and under the judgment of a disappointed God.  

In a better world,

one in which man turns to God with all his heart,

it would not exist.

Moreover, this anti-monarchical stream in Israelite religion served to inhibit a simple identification of the people Israel with the states they evolved. For the theological tradition maintained that Israel had been a people before she was a worldly kingdom, a people to whom laws and even a destiny had already been given. She owes neither to the state.

Thus, it is of the utmost significance that—

 the Torah, the law of the theo-polity,

was, for all its diversity,

always ascribed to Moses and not to David,

to the humble mediator of covenant

and not to the regal founder of the dynastic state.

In Israel, law was not coterminous with the state; the latter found its justification only within the context of Torah, and the Davidic dynasty itself, as we shall see in Part 2, was established through a variation of the idea of covenant, which affirmed in its own way the suzerainty of YHWH.

Israel was a sacral state before she was a political state, she had her law (according to the canonical theology) before she raised up a king, and what is perhaps unparalleled in human history, she survived the destruction of her state and even dispersion into the four corners of the world without the loss of that essential identity conferred at Sinai.

She was “a kingdom of priests and a holy people” both before and after she was a kingdom of a more mundane kind.

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[This picks up from the first post:  MUST READ: SINAI & ZION – 1,   by Jon D. Levenson, featuring Chapter 1 where he presents an interesting perspective on how to read and understand the biblical record of what Israel experienced on the mountain of Sinai.  It cannot be read as ‘history’ per se, but more as a pattern for Divine Revelation that continues beyond that ‘moment’ on Sinai: 

 

“history in the modern sense is not the goal of the Sinai narratives: they present the Sinaitic experience as disclosing the essential, normative relationship of YHWH to his people Israel.”

 

Book Reviewer FrKurt  Messick well explains the book in a nutshell:

 

Levenson uses the two traditional stereotypical topics that Christians tend to use toward the Hebrew texts, namely,

*the Law (Torah)

*and Temple,

and recasts these – tracing —

*a Sinai tradition (law, or, more particularly for Levenson, Covenant )

*and a Zion tradition (Temple),

—he works through scriptural implications by means of historical and theological methods.

 

Levenson sees two of the primary building-blocks of ancient Israel’s culture and religion being mountain traditions –

*the mountain of Sinai, and

*the mountain of Zion

(Levenson also sees the crisis of Exile and restoration as important, but puts this beyond the scope of this volume).

 

Our goal for sharing our MUST READ resources is to encourage readers to move towards MUST HAVE.  The book is downloadable as ebook from amazon.com.  Reformatting and highlights added.—ADMIN1.]

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• The first speaks of an intersection between the lives of God and of Israel.

The two meet at Mount Sinai.

Moses, the representative of Israel,

ascends the mountain onto which

YHWH has descended.

• The second movement, however, speaks of a barrier between God and Israel, which if transgressed, will turn the moment of destiny into one of disaster.

Only Moses may ascend.

Even the priests are in jeopardy

until they have renewed their sanctity.

It is as though God beckons with one hand and repels with the other.

The twofold quality of the experience narrated in these verses has been explored by the theologian and historian of religion, Rudolf Otto. As is well known, Otto defined “the holy” by the words mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a Latin expression that admits of no good English equivalent, but which we can render as “a fearsome and fascinating mystery.” It is just such an ambivalent sense of mystery that pervades the account of the theophany, the apparition of God, that was believed to have occurred on Mount Sinai.

The Sinaitic experience is here presented as simultaneously supremely relevant to human experience and distant from it and foreign to it. In its quality of indivisible charm and threat, it is eminently exotic, lying outside the boundaries of what is familiar.

• We do not know even the location of the mountain.
• Its identification with Jebel Musa, on which a Christian monastery stands today, is relatively recent and open to doubt.
• In fact, some streams of biblical tradition know the mountain by a different name, Horeb, and we cannot affirm with any confidence that the two sets of tradition, that of Sinai and that of Horeb, derive from the same event and were not welded together in the centuries of retelling the stories.
• In fact, the expression Mount Horeb occurs only once (Exod 33:6), although two passages speak of “Horeb, the mountain of God.” The other fourteen occurrences of “Horeb” mention no mountain at all. Instead,  things tend to happen “at Horeb.”

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