I will refrain from extensive summary, because I feel that if you are curious about plot development in the Bible there’s only a hair’s width membrane separating you from as much information and commentary about it as you could read in a lifetime. Our cultural awareness of these stories nudges the saturation threshold.
I will, however, speak to the character of the narrative. It is hard to say this without a pejorative connotation, but the thousand or so pages I have read have been very redundant. Not boring, really, just thematically repetitive to the point of monotony. A consequence is that I am again at a lack for examples of ambiguity significant enough to threaten the ideological integrity of the Bible’s meaning. There is some confusion over important but relatively modest points of religious protocol, but the message seems to be simple: devote the whole of your life to enacting God’s will or He will crush you.
As soon as God has liberated the Hebrews from Egyptian servitude, they begin to stray, and the cycle of offense and reparation that fuels almost every subsequent story arc is established. The sequence goes as follows: God has promised the Hebrews an eternal place of residence in the land of Canaan if they adhere to the laws of the covenant absolutely. Either a chorus of dissatisfied Hebrews or one of their leaders will anger God, and he will remove the security of his protection from them, sometimes after executing thousands of His followers. This results in oppression at the hands of foreign armies. A Hebrew judge, king or priest will then make atonement for past transgression and God will retrieve them from their disenfranchisement.
The most significant gift of divine favor is military invincibility. The Jews carve a bloody swath across Canaan and terrify the surrounding nations, though their superiority is constantly undermined by religious delinquency.
“What a barbarous faith!” you might exclaim. Well, maybe. Except that I don’t think any of it really happened. If you consider it on its allegorical merits, it makes sense.
During my freshman year of college, I was up very late one night channel surfing in the common room of my dorm. I hesitated when I turned to a sermon on public access being delivered by a normal-looking guy in a button-down white shirt, the uniform of the contemporary evangelical. I was surprised that what he said was fairly sophisticated: “Satan works by convincing you that you are not capable of greatness.” I turned the channel because the fact that I was relating to a televangelist in the middle of the night was making me uncomfortable.
I think that something very similar is at play in Old Testament metaphor. When you obey your sacred impulse, you are indomitable. When you betray it, you crumble. If you reject this premise, I understand, but it is one I find resonant.
It is an insight nurtured by reading the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, two texts purportedly authored by King Solomon. The first regards the cultivation of wisdom, which Solomon holds as life’s truest virtue. Wisdom is Godly, and it is primordial, existing even in the ethereal pandemonium from which the Lord fashioned the universe. It would be folly to attempt to summarize, but everything stems from one couplet:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction.
This is Bible of a different stripe. It is visceral, void of narrative. And its messages sit with the weight of legitimacy in your mind. Disregard wealth, avoid the petty, do not envy, pursue joy and you will encounter God. Fools do not have joy and will find ruination through their error.
Ecclesiastes is staggering. If I could select one book out of the Bible for the curious to read, it would be this one. It is the kind of thing your grandfather might try to tell you on his deathbed if you had a particularly wise and eloquent grandfather. The basic imperative is to enjoy the texture of life, to fill your person with happiness, celebration and contentment, because everything is transient and human achievement is irrelevant.
For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?
Sabbaths, bans on winking (it’s in there), commandments not to wear clothing of mixed fibers – these may not curry much significance with the non-Jew. But the agony of spiritual ignorance probably does. The Bible tells us that unhappiness is a snare, even a lie. It tells us that we can be godly, and when we are, we are ourselves. It tells us that if we do not cleave to our sense of transcendent beauty and justice, the armies of our soul will wither before onslaughts of doubt. We will be un-great.
But it is hard to see the metaphorical forest for all the literal trees sometimes. Especially when considering the popular mismanagement of the Bible’s most positive virtues.
Last week, I was driving from Los Angeles to San Diego at one in the morning, surfing the radio for something to keep me awake. I found a Christian program run by a DJ that spoke with that obnoxiously overpleasant tone so popular with pastors.
“We all have so many questions about the Bible. What other kinds of fruit did Eve eat? Did Jonah like fish? These stories are keyholes through which we can view the world of the Bible. And when we read them, we can sometimes even see ourselves with that wonderful cast of characters.”
Did Jonah like fish? DID JONAH LIKE FISH?
I still defend the Bible as a crucial document in our spiritual history, and one from which we still derive precious insight. But it is hard – well, impossible – for me to see its narratives as anything but very instructive, very beautiful fictions. At their unadulterated core lies a mode of faith whose character is distinct, is legitimate. That identity should not be held hostage by the trappings of literalism, whether they be condemnations of homosexuality, endorsements of slavery or musings over the dietary preferences of illustrative characters.
Talking to Alan Nasser, my advising professor for the duration of the quarter, is a lot like deep-sea fishing. You drop your lure to the bottom expecting a familiar fish or two, only to pull up a tentacled and impossible something-or-other. Cursory boatside examination is inadequate for categorization. Full autopsy is required to understand its fearful symmetry, and even when every squirting nodule has been labeled, you remain somewhat uncertain that nature exercised its most cogent judgment in its creation.
This is how I felt when I heard the sentence "Jews no longer exist." I learned long ago to deactivate my "crackpot" alarm around Alan. He says things that seem wildly inappropriate to the point of delusion, and then proceeds to outline his reasoning in a way that always seems to make sense, even though I generally don't agree with him. In this way he has presented theories ranging from a predicted violent uprising of black Americans in the 1980's to why he feels women are more prone to homosexuality than men.
The four things a Jew doth make, according to Mr. Nasser:
1. Aversion to injustice. Jews have generally oriented themselves on the extreme left of the political spectrum. American anti-semitism may be a direct consequence of immigrant European Jews' tendency to be outspoken socialists, communists and anarchists.
2. A history of persecution, especially at the hands of European Christians.
3. A shared historical/ethnic heritage.
4. Belief in the tenets of the Old Testament.
These four pillars have been crumbling for some time. Their sense of justice has been undermined by their support of Israel and its vindictive policies and there has been a general drift into mainstream liberalism. Jewish persecution is no longer a reality; the sense of victimization that has become central in the Jewish self-conception has been amplified out of proportion by the Israeli media to justify the state's aggression. The very premise of the Jews as sharing a common ethnic heritage is questionable in light of controversial new research published by Israeli geographers and anthropologists.
I don't know enough about Jewish history to really comment on these assertions, except to say that they seem in some way totally wrong.
Regarding the religious beliefs themselves, he applies a "cluster" litmus. Complex things, he says, are defined by clusters of properties. What is a lemon? It is something that is smaller than a watermelon that has pocked yellow skin and tastes citric. If a similar object was smaller than a watermelon, had pocked skin and it tastes like lemon but it is blue, is it still a lemon? What if the same blue fruit was the same size as a watermelon but its juice was indistinguishable from lemon juice?
The Bible appears very unambiguous on this issue. God's lemon shalt be yellow, and shalt be small, and shalt taste of lemons, and the lemon that is blue shall rouse the anger of the LORD and shall be struck from the face of the earth for all time.
You often hear people talk about the self-contradictory nature of the Bible. Indeed, some popular translations, especially the New International Version, were actually streamlined to eliminate many of these contradictions. But as far as God's requirements of His chosen people go, I see only black and white.
We see the essence of the Old Testament God's will in the story of the Tower of Babel:
Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words.
It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.
They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
The LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.
"Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech."
So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.
I feel that this story conveys the most essential imperative of the Old Testament, or at least as much of the Old Testament as I have read: we are not to value our own agency over divine commandment.
The point is reiterated over and over again, in almost every passage. The story of Abraham and Isaac, one of the Bible's most well-known, is just as powerful. Abraham, the founding patriarch of the Jewish and Christian faiths, is told by God that he must make a three-day journey to a mountain where he is to sacrifice his son Isaac, who had been divinely gifted to Abraham's infertile wife Sarah. When they reach the top of the mountain, Isaac carrying the wood that is to immolate him, Abraham moves to kill his son with a knife. At that moment, an angel appears to him and tells him to stop, as God is appeased that he did not hesitate. Abraham then notices a ram whose horns are entangled in a bush behind him, which he sacrifices in place of Isaac.
The lesson is that human judgment must be sublimated, utterly, to the will of God, and that trust must be absolute.
The entire narrative of the early Hebrews is one of punishment for abrogation of this duty. God repeatedly exterminates Moses's followers by the thousands for seemingly minor infractions. A huge portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is dedicated to an accounting of Levitical law, the holy strictures of behavior required to adequately serve the Lord. This includes the ten commandments.
The most interesting of the commandments, to me, is the second: "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth." At first glance, this seems like one of those anachronistic bits of useless litigiousness that no longer curries any relevance in the world, like "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk." But it is a hugely powerful intellectual conceit, and one that has defined much of the history of religion.
Muslims take the second commandment notoriously seriously. Remember the riots over the Danish cartoon of Muhammad? Their art is entirely non-imagistic, usually only geometric patterns. Fanaticism? Pointless anachronism? No. I see the line drawn in the sand, and I actually identify with it.
In some way, any representation of an object alters our relationship to the object. The religious conviction is that the representation perverts that relationship, cheapens it. I don't think I agree, but I do believe that your interpretation of the object will be forever indentured to its representation. An analogy from my own life is bird watching.
The first time I ever spotted a House Finch, I had been trying to identify the source of a particularly elaborate and beautiful call I had been hearing in my neighborhood for two weeks. Finally, I trained my binoculars on a spectacularly colored bird in my backyard; it was faintly brown with a bright orange breast and head. My first reaction was that it looked like something out of a rainforest. My second was amazement that such a stunning animal could have gone unnoticed by me for my entire life. The third was joy.
Later, I pored over a giant atlas of San Diego bird life my dad had received as a gift from the local natural history museum. It took me over an hour, but I finally identified the bird. I was weirdly crushed. The House Finch is the most common songbird in the entire city. It is entirely pedestrian, as far as birds go.
Now, whenever I see a House Finch, I no longer see a mysterious and charming creature. I see "House Finch, anthropophilic finch that favors habitat along urban gradients." Maybe this is my fault. But I always tell people who mention an interest in the hobby to learn as few bird names as they can. To name is not to know.
It can be said, and I think convincingly, that a similar phenomenon is at play in all representational art. I'm not going to wax snob, because I love art. I love it dearly. But the holism of the universe, our immediate sensory experience of the world, is translated through an infinite number of cultural and aesthetic filters that render it more familiar than maybe it really is.
The nucleus of this faith is submission. Call it a handicap if you want, I'm not fully prepared to levy that judgment on a way of life I don't really understand. But from this fact arises a major conflict: according to the explicit and implicit meanings of the Bible, in order to be fully faithful to the Hebrew God, you must subject yourself totally to His will. This means following with utmost competence all of his commandments, no matter how minute. Nadab and Abihu, after all, were consumed by divine fire when they burned the wrong kind of incense as an offering to God. This, in turn, means that we are not to worship selectively, because the audacity of exercising our mortal judgment in favor of the whole of the Word is an abomination. So to be a Jew in the way outlined in the Bible, don't you have to literally believe that every detail of Levitical Law is of consequence, and will be met with punishment if betrayed?
As we all know, almost nobody follows the Bible in this way. A.J. Jacobs, a popular author, tried for a year. His book, "The Year of Living Biblically," is fairly uninteresting (his insights are generally something along the lines of 'Golly, sacrificing chickens is weeeeird! But I feel so spiritual!') but he does encounter a number of ultra-orthodox Jews who attempt his touristy experiment for the whole of their lives. Obviously, this is not representative of the Jewish mainstream.
Even if I knew enough about the tradition of rabbinical interpretation and Jewish culture to make some kind of diminutive evaluation of their general abandonment of this zeal, I wouldn't. But I have to think that being a "secular" Jew is incompatible with that most crucial of philosophical considerations: to interpret is to betray. If this is no longer the belief, what does it mean to be Jewish?
Regardless, I think the claim "there are no more Jews" is a total fallacy. Every culture, every belief system evolves. Clearly, the Hebrew world has changed, but that does not mean that it has ceased to be Hebrew, or that it is in some way more complicit in injustice than once it was.
I am very glad I decided to do this project. Like birds, it is another case of finding that something which previously appeared dull yields strange and wonderful new things to consider. And like birds, I wonder if they can really be named at all.
Right now I am eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast. Its constituent ingredients are sourdough bread, creamy-type peanut butter (none of this reduced fat ridiculousness) and a jam marketed as "spreadable fruit."
Spreadable fruit. Providing you an identical experience to prole "jelly," without the associations of sugar and overprocessing and unhealth. The exact same product, repackaged, muted, an illusion of newness and betterness bottled for consumption by a public too nervous to Just Eat.
Clearly, I find euphemisms odious. And sometimes dangerous. My current least favorite is the word "spirituality." I guess it might have meant something at some time, but right now, it means the opposite of something. It is akin to opening my bottle of spreadable fruit to find it full of topsoil. Not that I most certainly live in a glass house, but I have to throw a couple stones here. My generation's spiritual bearings can be gauged somewhere between Dances With Wolves, that one book on Urban Taoism read in 8th grade and "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" MySpace quizzes. I'm being snarky. But too often I think our self-description in this regard boils down to "I don't need to confront this," or, "I'll deal with it later."
The alternative is the word "religion," which provokes images of zealots with bloody swords, Pentecostals dancing catatonically in tents, witch burnings. So we find ourselves at an impasse: our dialogue is reduced to an exchange of only the grossest, most extreme generalizations. We concern ourselves with worst cases and unattainable fantasies.
For lack of a better term, I am siding with religion for now.
My supervising professor for this project, an old-guard Marxist and unlikely religious sympathizer, said of secular liberalism, "There's nothing there. There's not even a there there." I agree. We don't really construct ideological frameworks anymore, we just react to those of others. Being constantly on the defense against dogma has scooted us into a dialectical nether-corner where all we can really offer is universal anxiety, a default assumption that fervent belief in anything is suspect.
At some point between the rise of Elvis and the first time Ginsberg recognized the despot-toppling spiritual potency of Getting Blowjobs All The Time, we were all supposed to just…move on. Regarding our history as a religiously motivated world, we are meant to believe that the baby deserves to be thrown out with the bath water; it has, they claim, been wearing Jerry Fallwell’s blimpy face for the whole of history. But the churches are here, and the churches are important, and all of those empty seats left by our enlightened parents are filling up with people who think gays are evil and Jesus endorses smart missles. I refuse to turn my back on our religious tradition just because it's hard to talk about at parties; in the face of a culture increasingly divorced from any kind of self-identifying narrative, I'll take what I can get.
And regardless of religion's political baggage, it's still worthy. I can't pretend to be a true believer, or even an adherent to a particular faith, but I do feel that the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that it can be touched, and that doing so requires discipline, devotion and practice above all things. I also know that when we probe the bottom of American mythology’s spiritual change jar we encounter only baubles, shards, Doctor Phil. I can't believe that everyone having seen Star Wars is the same as living in a community that explores, together, the most fundamental conflicts and yearnings of the human soul.
I admit that this interest is fairly new. My childhood experience of religion was pretty identical to what I imagine other kids of secular, liberal families went through. I was dragged to the occasional Christmas mass, digging at my buttcrack, watching my feet swing over the edge of the pew while my mind pored over the strategic nuances of upcoming games of Pogs. I was once sent to a single session of Sunday school at a Presbyterian church, where my boredom was alleviated only when undigested spaghetti came rocketing out of my friend’s mouth halfway through dinner. He was, he joked, “allergic to Jesus.” I didn’t get any of it. The extent of my religious conviction was the occasional prayer for Brooke from 4th grade to notice that I was her eternal admirer and guardian. She never did.
Then, at some point at the end of last year, when I was sleeping on a couch in the living room of a house that bragged festering pots of uneaten rice, all-Goodwill ironic decor and carpets that had to be replaced by the landlord after we moved out, I decided to read the Bible. I bought a copy of the King James Version and got six books in before getting bored. It was back to a life of debasement.
Then, a few months later, I bought, on impulse, a DVD set of interviews with Joseph Campbell, the legendary mythologist. In between the hilarious blue-screen sequences superimposing Bill Moyers over a an image of the night sky with spooky masks floating around behind him, Campbell explains in very eloquent terms the social necessity of myth. It caught my imagination in the way that keeps you from falling asleep at night. It made me eye The Book over and over again.
So now I'm going in for the kill. Armed with a more user-friendly and translationally faithful edition (New American Standard), I am reading the Bible in its entirety. And then the Qur'an. And then I'm taking a nap.