To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin [“Can the Bible Be Trusted?,” July-August], focuses on the Bible’s historical accuracy but says little about the Bible as a source of moral values. The Bible, he declares, “is unique in its ability to evoke in us the illusion that it is not an illusion.” But if, for the sake of argument, one takes the view that the Bible is neither divine revelation nor historically accurate, how does Mr. Halkin explain the fact that people trust the Bible as a source of moral values?
If Abraham and Isaac never existed, what vehicle would civilization have employed to transmit the traits of generosity, devotion, loyalty, and so on that both Abraham and Isaac espoused? Even if Joshua and the Israelites knocked down the walls of an otherwise empty Jericho (or even if the walls never existed in the first place), does that diminish in any way Joshua’s leadership skills in taking over the stewardship of the Israelite nation after Moses’ death?
Mr. Halkin concedes that the religious education of his childhood probably led to his being able to read the Bible “convinced it really happened.” If so, one may ask whether the Bible’s moral lessons would have had the same effect on civilization had it been written with less of an eye to literature and more of an eye to history. To this question, Mr. Halkin has no answer.
Doron Becker
Potomac, Maryland
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin does good work in explaining why the Bible, though unreliable as history, still resonates as literature. Yet the Bible has a third function: it is often touted as the preeminent source of ethics. Can the Bible be trusted here?
Some biblical ethics are exemplary: loving your neighbor as yourself, showing concern for the widow and orphan. Some are deplorable: killing the Egyptian first-born, capital punishment for insolent children. And some are ambiguous: mitigating slavery (but only for Hebrew slaves), granting inheritance to a daughter but bypassing the widow.
If such laws are good by definition because they are in the Bible, we are in trouble. If, however, we may determine which ones are acceptable and which are not, that is another matter. Even the rabbis modified or semantically canceled those rules that were seen as too egregious (like the stoning of a stubborn and rebellious son).
If the Bible is a touchstone for ethical discussion, and an occasional source of pride in the Jewish heritage for some ethical advances, all the better. But we must always be willing to call a spade a spade, and give demerit where demerit is due. Blind faith in anything, even the Bible, can be dangerous. As Mr. Halkin concludes, “The Bible is not a book for children.”
Adam Chalom
International Institute for
Secular Humanistic Judaism
Farmington Hills, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin’s essay is rich and provocative, as always, but as a philosophical brief, it has me mystified. For a while, he seems to be saying in effect that the literary attributes of the biblical text are such that the text could not have these attributes unless its propositions, in whole or part, were really true—about history, if not about God and ontology. But he expressly disclaims this intent at the end of the essay. So perhaps he means that the Bible could not have had the psychological/cultural impact it has manifestly had down the generations unless its hearers believed the stories to be true. This certainly is the case, but, alas, it is also a truism, one that would apply equally to generations of Greek youths raised on Achilles or to 8th-century Angle children hearing about Beowulf.
Mr. Halkin has a genius for making the biblical text simmer and throb, and is worth reading for this reason alone, but I am left wondering exactly how he thinks he has answered his essay’s title question, which is not about beliefs but about truth—isn’t it?
Theodore S. Voelkel
Winchester, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Although the thrust of Hillel Halkin’s argument is not affected by it, a minor oversight should not be allowed to mar his essay. Genesis 24 speaks of Abraham’s major domo, Eliezer, not Isaac, as Mr. Halkin states, traveling to Haran with camels. There is no sign in the biblical text that Isaac ever left Canaan. Years later, Isaac’s son Jacob did indeed make the trip to Haran; he fled to his, not Isaac’s, uncle Laban, and the text gives every indication that he journeyed on foot with only his staff in his hand.
Devorah Robinson
Flushing, New York
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To the Editor:
In his stimulating article, Hillel Halkin states that “oral traditions constantly mutate” in the process of transmission. Apparently, the transmission of justly famous literary phrases—and their authors—undergoes the same transmogrification. Mr. Halkin assigns the phrase “suspension of disbelief” to Keats, when, of course, it was Coleridge who wrote of “That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Biographia Literaria, Ch. 14).
Milton Birnbaum
American International
College
Springfield, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
I applaud Hillel Halkin in presenting, with his characteristic erudition, the newest manifestations of the supposed conflict between Scripture and truth. This battle was long escaped by the traditional rabbinic technique of overinterpretation, which yielded legal and ethical meaning from the simplest (and often least obvious) of biblical passages. The Bible was seen by the rabbinic consensus as a treasure trove of values and standards. Those with trained and pious eyes could see and determine much more than could any mere pedestrian reader.
It is modernity and the myth of scientific history that have brought this issue to the upper reaches of Judaism’s contemporary agenda. We moderns do not like to be fooled or treated like gullible children, as Mr. Halkin so cogently observes. Is the Bible true (history) or make-believe (fiction)? And if it is not the former, who needs the latter?
If I may briefly expand upon Mr. Halkin’s somewhat tentative response, the answer lies in the very nature of truth and history.
Truth comes to us in many forms. Scientific truth—say, the elements of the periodic table—is established by techniques of repetitive and quantifiable accumulation and organization of data. Emotional truth—say, your mother’s love—can neither be proved nor quantified, but is nevertheless abundantly true. Moral truth—say, the wrongness of the deliberate taking of innocent life—is neither scientific nor emotional but determined by reference to religious dogma and confirmed by the focused application of human rationality.
It is only the advent of modernity and of the concomitant myth that history is a scientific enterprise that has confused our capacity to read the Bible’s narratives. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi cogently argued in his seminal work Zachor, the purpose and intention of history is and always has been the organization (or, better, the manipulation) of the past in order to justify the present. Can there be any question that a Confederate history of the American Civil War or a revanchist German history of World War I or a Marxist history of the fall of the Soviet Union would yield far different accounts from those of a conventional rendering?
As the Genesis account of Creation makes clear, the Bible is not interested in science or scientific truth or scientific history. Its presentation of sacred history yields a God-centered universe, whose governing Central Authority rules according to a grand moral design.
Are King Lear or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn true? Not as science, surely, but as expositions of moral and emotional values, certainly. And so is the Bible, only more so.
[Rabbi] Clifford E.
Librach
Sharon, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin argues that in my new book, The Mythic Past, I give an extremely negative response to the question posed in the title of his article. This is unfortunate, since the book does not deal with this question, but asks, rather, whether biblical archeology and the scholars in the field can be trusted. I do not practice Bible-bashing but engage in a debate that has been pivotal in biblical studies and research in the history of Palestine since 1974. By linking me with an anonymous clique of those he calls “biblical minimalists,” however, Mr. Halkin misrepresents and seriously distorts my views.
Some of the arguments that Mr. Halkin implicitly misattributes to my book are: (1) that there is no historical basis to biblical narratives in Genesis through 1 Kings; (2) that biblical history begins with the separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah; (3) that the oldest parts of the text of the Bible are no earlier than the late-6th century; (4) that Canaanites were responsible for changes in the settlement patterns of Palestine from the 16th to the 10th centuries B.C.E.; (5) that much of the Bible was composed coevally with the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls; (6) that the Book of Psalms is contemporary with the Thanksgiving Psalms of the Dead Sea Scrolls; (7) that the Bible’s authors invented “old Israel” in order to appoint themselves its religious heirs; (8) that the Bible is an obviously inconsistent, unrealistic, and tendentious document; and (9) that the stories of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son in the Bible and in Jubilees share a common intellectual world. I neither believe nor argue any of these things.
Toward the end of this long series of distortions, Mr. Halkin suggests that I have read the Bible with a tin ear by playing down the literary sensibilities implied in texts that behave in strikingly unliterary ways. But this is quite similar to my argument, in the third section of my book, that the Bible does not consist of collected literary texts. The Bible presents secondary texts: commentaries on the tradition that reflect the discourse of scholars. It is this that links Genesis and Jubilees. Similarly, I discuss the two variants of the tale of David finding Saul asleep in 1 Samuel 24 and 26 to show that the biblical text is not interested either in telling stories or in recounting events. The Bible is, rather, telling a moral tale about the role of the king as servant of the divine.
Mr. Halkin asserts with surprising confidence that such variants “demonstrate [their] authors’ conviction” that they had no right to expand or diminish the tradition. This anachronistically attributes to the biblical author common rabbinic sensitivities of more than a half-millennium later. The relationship of Chronicles to Genesis and Kings, of Jubilees to the Pentateuch, and of the whole of the Qumran corpus and Josephus to biblical literature more than shows that biblical traditions exercised a right to change, expand, debate, and paraphrase freely. Hardly something I play down or ignore, this is one of the most important themes of my book and is treated at great length.
Mr. Halkin further attempts to reject my dating of biblical texts by stating that oral traditions—unlike texts—are inherently undatable. This is in fact my own point. I argue for a chronology for biblical texts in the Hellenistic period. This is where the evidence is. At any earlier time, we have something other than the texts one can read today in the Bible. The wisdom, songs, and stories that the authors of these texts have collected have a literary tradition behind them that we can prove goes back at least to the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E. and—I think—to the earliest stories ever told.
Like Mr. Halkin, I too have argued that the Hebrew language cannot be used to date biblical texts, and I too have found the purported anachronism of Genesis 24 so trivial that I did not even mention it. In fact, I argue—ad nauseam, I am afraid—that the whole issue of historicity is irrelevant.
Although much in Mr. Halkin’s essay leaves me uncertain as to whether he agrees with me and has even borrowed from my book freely, if surreptitiously, to argue against his fictive “minimalism,” I am appalled by his insinuation that I would endorse the following proposition:
If the Jewish people’s claim to a 4,000-year-old relationship with Palestine is largely imaginary, and the first real Jews were Hellenized Babylonian-Canaanite mischlings who projected a self-serving national legend onto the past, is not the better claim [to Israel] that of the “real” Canaanites—the Palestinians?
For polemical purposes, Mr. Halkin—by way of a modern, politically-motivated racist dichotomy—overlooks my contention that the Canaanites are mythic Israel’s fictive counterpart, as well as the fact that neither the Jews of antiquity nor their tradition are to be understood in terms of national legends, whether ancient or modern. The biblical tradition is anti-nationalist. It is universalist.
In a footnote, Mr. Halkin adds that though my argument “carries a strong whiff of secularized Christian supersessionism,” I do not “push such reasoning to its limits.” This half-hearted retraction of some of the malice in his earlier attribution does not lessen its slanderous potential as a description of my work Hardly motivated by Christian supersessionism, I specifically identify biblical supersessionism as the foundational ideology of Christian anti-Semitism. Readers are invited to examine my detailed and text-based discussion of Judaism and ethnicity that has given occasion to this final cut of Mr. Halkin’s.
Thomas L. Thompson
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
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Hillel Halkin writes:
It is tedious to have to remind Thomas L. Thompson of what he wrote in his own book, but since he appears to have forgotten, I have no choice. All nine of the positions that he claims I have “misattributed” to him are set forth in the pages of The Mythic Past, often at length and in more than one place. For example, in regard to Point 1 (“that there is no historical basis to biblical narrative in Genesis through 1 Kings”), Mr. Thompson writes on pp. 190 and 206:
The patriarchs of Genesis were not historical. . . . I have argued that there is no room [in real history] . . . for such kings as those presented in the biblical stories of Saul, David, and Solomon. The early period in which the traditions have set their narratives is an imaginary world of long ago.
Point 2 is stated on p. 81: “The formation of biblical narrative was a process that created the Israel we know. It had its earliest roots in the period of Assyria’s domination of Palestine.” This domination began in the mid-8th century B.C.E., well after the supposed split between Israel and Judah.
Point 5 can be found on p. 199:
The Maccabees [whose dynasty, beginning in 168 B.C.E., overlapped the composition of the Dead Sea Scrolls] . . . galvanized and altered our understanding of Jewish monotheism as an exclusive worship of the one and only true God. . . . It was in this context of “Talibanism” [sic], reflected in the formation of the traditions in the Books of Maccabees, that the major collections of the Hebrew Bible took their definitive shape.
Point 6 is set forth on p. 238: “The Book of Psalms is a large collection of poetic texts presented as 150 songs. . . . [I]t is quite clear that the process of song collection and writing, which created our biblical book, was not yet complete when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.”
Point 7 is stated on p. 78: “[T]he Bible created an entire past for its ‘old Israel.’ It built this fiction out of traditions, stories, and legendary lore. . . .”
Point 8 is argued on p. 72:
The biblical traditions reflect but incoherent, part fictive, remnants of a past. . . . Dependability in reflecting the past had nothing to do with the selection. It is the meaning that the stories could bear that brought about their preservation and transmission.
Point 9 appears on p. 337: “The common ground between the composition of Jubilees and Genesis is impressive. . . . Jubilees and Genesis must be seen as sharing a common intellectual world.”
This leaves Points 3 and 4, Mr. Thompson’s positions on which I should have stated more accurately: these are that he holds that nearly all of the Bible was written in or after the late 6th century B.C.E.; and that he disapproves of the word “Canaanites” when used in opposition to “Israelites,” since he believes the opposition to be a false one and thinks the local inhabitants “responsible for changes in the settlement patterns of Palestine from the 16th to the 10th centuries B.C.E.” lived at a time when no people corresponding to biblical Israel existed.
As for what I called Mr. Thompson’s “secularized Christian supersessionism,” what better demonstration of this could there be than his remark in The Mythic Past about the “context of ‘Talibanism’ ” in which the Bible must be read or his comment in his letter on the “anti-nationalist” and “universalist” nature of biblical tradition? Of course, “universalism” and “Talibanism” do not exactly go together, but that is precisely my point: for Mr. Thompson, as for Christianity in general, the “Old Testament” consists of two intertwined books, one preaching an inclusivist religious universalism and the other an exclusivist religious particularism from which the first book needs to be liberated. Judaism, needless to say, makes no such distinction. Why Mr. Thompson thinks it malicious of me to attribute to him (quite rightly) such a reading of the Bible escapes me, however. Does he think I am accusing him of something shameful?
Both Doron Becker and Adam Chalom raise the question of the Bible as a source of moral values. Mr. Becker suggests that, were the Bible less powerful as literature, it would be a less effective moral guide. Mr. Chalom argues that, on the contrary, the Bible’s literary power is dangerous because it can lure us into accepting moral standards that should be rejected. Together they make the point that, for good or for bad, the Bible is an unusually seductive book. I agree.
Since the ending of my essay was deliberately left to the reader to interpret, I can hardly blame Theodor S. Voelkel or Clifford Librach for their interpretations. In writing my last sentences, though, I intended neither to disclaim nor to affirm the truth of the Bible’s propositions about history, God, or ontology. I did wish to imply that, to the extent that we take the Bible seriously as literature, we must take the nonliterary truth of these propositions seriously, too. I do not think this true in quite the same way of other great works of literature.
I thank Devorah Robinson and Milton Birnbaum for their corrections.
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