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[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.