I Love Getting New Books
(Image via The Jewish Publication Society)
Yesterday1 I received my copy of Judy Klitsner's Subversive Sequels In The Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other. (Thanks to James McGrath for mentioning this book on his blog.)
There is a lot of discussion about contradictions and other inconsistencies in the Bible. This is because the Bible is chock-full of such inconsistencies. Some of them are minor, but many of them are quite significant.2
I think it's very important to acknowledge and try to understand those inconsistencies, since they reflect the very human composition of the Bible, and can give us important insights into the views and intentions of the generally anonymous authors whose works we are reading. (I also think that any sort of legitimate Bible study needs to give a lot of consideration to the social context in which the material was written and to the goals and intentions of the writers, rather than simply asking "what was God trying to tell us?". That's a topic for another post, though.)
In any event, I'm moving Subversive Sequels to the top of my reading stack, and hope to get a review up within the next week, give or take.
Jay
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1Barely yesterday. I'm writing this at about 2 AM, having been woken up half an hour ago by my cat announcing that she was hungry. My cat is not svelte - surely she could have endured another few hours on stored non-sveltness before she had to wake me up...
2There are a number of books dealing with this subject matter. A few on my shelf are: The Bible Against Itself: Why The Bible Seems To Contradict Itself by Randel McCraw Helms, 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History by Gary Greenberg, and R.E. Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible.
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November 7th, 2009 - 18:36
I think by most reasonable standards the most subversive book in the Bible is Job.
November 7th, 2009 - 20:13
Care to elaborate?
November 8th, 2009 - 12:18
Two words, arguably covered by the first: theodicy and apologia. (In no way meaning so speak for Mr. Zelinsky.)
November 8th, 2009 - 20:17
That was more or less what I was thinking. Job deals with the basic question of theodicy and is far as I’m aware the oldest text to actually raise the question. But the text also clearly rejects many of the standard ways of dealing with theodicy. And the final answer of the text, which is God basically saying to Job that God’s reasoning is beyond human understanding, is deeply undermined by the first chapter where we find out that the entire reason Job suffers is because of a bet God made with Satan.
November 9th, 2009 - 08:50
Job also preemptively undermines the concepts of heaven and eternal life, stating quite clearly in at least two places that death is the end.
Most of the discussion I can recall about Job through the years has painted the character as a model of patience and perseverance in the face of adversity, but I think overall it’s less about that and more of a discussion about God’s nature and motives, which seem oddly human here.
November 11th, 2009 - 11:40
I’m sure you’ve read it by now, but Ehrman has a lengthy and illuminating discussion of Job in “God’s Problem”. I may be remembering incorrectly, but I believe he states that Job is likely composed of a prose work interwoven with an originally separate lyrical poem, both of which had mutually exclusive morals. Somewhere along the line, both texts got put through a Cuisinart and what remained was the Book of Job.
I’m definitely going to have check out the Klitsner book though.
November 14th, 2009 - 17:12
Correct. Job is something of a chimera. It’s not quite so haphazard as the term “put through a Cuisinart” might suggest, but there are fairly clear indications that it was put together from multiple sources.
November 11th, 2009 - 13:14
Ooh, exegesis. I take it you are not worried about being seduced into heresy? Actually, I do know a couple of clergy who eschew such studies for that very reason. After all, the divinely inspired KJV is the only true version, in their view.
Sometimes I wish that I learned more how such apparently unrelated texts get “put through a Cuisinart.” For all I know, there is an exegetic specialty for exactly that (palimpsests excepted).
November 14th, 2009 - 17:10
Not worried a bit. I think it’s much more useful to try to sort out what the original authors were trying to get across in their own contexts than to try to twist the words around to mean what I want them to mean.
The subject of textual transmission is a very interesting one, to be sure.