The Bible As It Was

Dr. James Kugel

The subject I want to speak about this evening is the Bible’s most ancient interpreters.  By this I mean a group of Jewish biblical scholars who flourished somewhere between the third or the second centuries before the Common Era and on toward the end of the first or early second century of the Common Era.  I hope this terminology is clear.  Before the Common Era has come to replace, at least among scholars of religion and history, what used to be BC, and the Common Era has replaced what was referred to as AD.  I think the reason this has happened was that old terms were thought to be confessional in nature, particularly Christian in nature, and in the interest of objectivity I think for the last twenty or thirty years the scholars in those fields say before the Common Era.  I have to confess that I had a professor who was unimpeachable in Jewish Orthodoxy who used to say BC and AD and I asked him once about it and he said that in his mind BC stood for “Before Christianity” and that after all it’s a historical fact.  So, I said, “Fine but what about AD?”  He said, “Afteldat”  So after that I sometimes slip into the old abbreviations.

This is the field I’ve been working on for the last decade or so.  I’ve been concerned with these anonymous biblical interpreters.  We really don’t know the names of most of them and they began their work even before the last books of the Bible were done.  They were already interpreting the earlier books.  Their writings go back to the Third Century before the Common Era and these ancient interpreters are tremendously important.  They left their interpretations in books that are often not read these days, they are collectively called the Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudophygrafa but as I hope to show you their way of explaining biblical text was altogether unique and succeeded in utterly transforming the meaning of the Bible.  Their form of interpretation depended upon the unlikely alliance of tremendous imagination, tremendous freedom in playing fast and loose with biblical text, and on the other hand, with tremendous care and reverential attention to every word, every little detail in the Bible.

I thought I would give you some examples of how these ancient interpreters interpreted.  The first example I wanted to offer concerns a rather mysterious figure in the Hebrew Bible: Enoch.  The Bible actually describes Enoch in the midst of one of those great genealogies that some of you may know from the Bible where so-and-so begot so-and-so and he lived x number of years and he begot so-and-so.  Nowadays, for various reasons I noticed modern Bible translations don’t like the word begot, they say “became the father of,” which is kind of nice.  I think it’s basically the same idea.  Enoch appears in one of those lists. 

He comes in a list of such begots, Enoch becomes the father of Methuselah and Methuselah becomes the father of Lamac and so forth.  The only unusual thing about the mention of Enoch in this list is that it says, as you can see at a certain point that he was not because God took him.  It says that when Enoch lived sixty-five years he became the father of Methuselah.  Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years and had other sons and daughters, thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years.  Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him.  For all the other ancient people in this genealogical list it does not say this.  It says Methuselah, so-and-so died.  Here it doesn’t say die, it says he was not.  I think if one had to give a reason for why this might have been so I think it has to do with Enoch’s age.  Three hundred and sixty five looks like a nice lifetime to me but in the broader context of the people who are listed in this genealogy, he was still a youngster when he died.  Most of the other people live into their nine hundreds; Methuselah was most famous for his longevity, but it was true of others mentioned too.  They all lived eight or nine hundred years.  Here Enoch lives only three hundred and sixty five years.  The number is suspiciously like the three hundred and sixty five days in the solar year, and of course they knew how many days were in the solar year.  There may be some relation, but it seems as if the Biblical text has gone out of its way to stress that although Enoch had such a short life span, this didn’t mean that God didn’t like him and killed him off at an early age.  So it seeks to stress that he was good.  It says not once but twice that he walked with God and he was not killed off.   He did not die but he was taken in gentle fashion by God at the end of three hundred and sixty five years.

That text goes way, way back in Biblical history.  Hundreds of years later along come these ancient interpreters in the Third Century or so, this process actually started before that, and they looked at this text and they were puzzled.  After all, Enoch now in the light of the whole book of the Bible, seemed to be a kind of super righteous figure because it says twice about him that he walked with God, whereas even the righteous Noah was only said to have walked with God one time.  The same is true of Abraham.  Twice was certainly extraordinary, and what’s more, God takes him.  If he was so righteous, why did God take him?  Perhaps this is what ancient interpreters thought: that he really didn’t die at all.  After all, there was the other case in the Bible of Elijah.  Some of you may know that in the story of Elijah that he was an old man and he takes leave of his student, Elisha and a great chariot swings down from heaven and sweeps him up and he disappears.  What exactly happened to Elijah we’re not told there but it certainly came to be believed that Elijah had ascended bodily into heaven, and this belief was combined with another that said if you managed to make it into heaven alive you didn’t die.  People assumed that anything that exists in heaven, the angels or God himself, that anything up there is eternal and so Elijah essentially beat death.  He entered heaven alive and so the prophet Malachi says at the end of his book, “I am sending to you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the Lord.”  This was long after that passage about the chariot had been written and that passage in Malachi seems to assume that Elijah is therefore alive in heaven.  Well, if that happened with Elijah maybe the same thing happened with Enoch and when it says God took him it meant that God actually took him into heaven alive.

This belief is represented by one of our most ancient interpreters, perhaps I’m wrong in saying one.  There’s a very old translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek, the translation of the Septuagint that goes back to the Third Century before the Common Era, and when they came to translate that verse, Genesis 5:24, it says in the old Greek Septuagint translation: “And Enoch was pleasing to God and he was not for God transferred him.”  Now, you can say in Greek, that God had taken him.  If it says God transferred him it seems that these old Greek translators were interested in asserting that he somehow was not just taken and died, but that he had been transferred bodily to heaven.  That is how an assiduous reader of that old Greek translation, a Jew by the name of Phylo of Alexandria, understood the verse.  Phylo was a central figure who was born just before the Common Era and then died something like forty-five or fifty of the Common Era.  He comments on this same verse: “He (Enoch) was transferred, that is, he changed his abode and journeyed as an immigrant from the mortal life to the immortal.”  So, Enoch entered heaven alive. 

The same idea is present in another book, the book that is known in most Catholic Bibles as Ecclesiasticus not to be confused with Ecclesiastes.  Ecclesiasticus: the church book, also known in other Bibles as Sirach or Ben Sira in Hebrew.  Actually this was one of the rare ancient interpreters who we do know by name.  His name was Ben Sira and he lived in the Second Century before the Common Era and probably wrote his book right around the year 180 before the Common Era.  Here is what he says about Enoch:  “Enoch pleased the Lord and was taken up to heaven.  He was a sign of knowledge for all generations.”  What does that mean – the sign of knowledge?  Since Enoch was supposed to have ascended bodily into heaven and to have been resident there, a tradition grew up that attributed to Enoch the authorship a whole bunch of books.  It’s even called the Enoch Literature by scholars.  There are various books by Enoch and parts of them go back to the Third Century before the Common Era.  In fact, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1940’s, this great cache of old Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, one of the things they found were sections of four different parts of the book of Enoch, the oldest of them from the Third Century BCE.  Even the manuscripts themselves that they found among the Dead Sea Scrolls were the oldest manuscripts they found there.

So, why is it that this Enoch Literature grew up?  Why did people suddenly in the Third Century and even earlier start writing books of Enoch?  The fact is that Jews at this time were very interested in acquiring some of the learning that had flourished in Mesopotamia, in Chaldea, and other places.  They were interested in Chaldea as the center of learning about astrology and astronomy; the two things were really the same science there.  In Mesopotamia they knew all about the movement of the stars and the sun and the moon and this was deemed to be very, very important.  In many parts of the ancient world people go out at night you can actually see the stars and people looked in the heavens.  And they saw these little dots moving around and it seemed that they might be somehow controlling human fate.  In the old days a lot of people believed this and it was a real threat to the monotheism of ancient Israel.  So, people in ancient Israel didn’t like the idea of quoting these Mesopotamian scholars.  On the other hand they are very interested in how many days there are in the solar year, how many days there are in the lunar year, so there began to appear in Aramaic books written by Enoch, which explain these matters and this would make sense because if Enoch were up there in heaven he was in a great position to know all about the movement of the stars.  So through the devise of a pseudonymist attributed to Enoch, Jewish writers could cause this Mesopotamian learning to infiltrate into their own language and culture.

So, as a result Enoch became famous for his knowledge of the stars and that’s really what Ecclesiasticus or Sirach means here.  He was a sign of knowledge for all generations because he knew of astronomy.  All this tradition developed out of an interpretation of the strange wording of that particular mention of Enoch in the Genesis genealogies.  He was not for God had taken him, and God had taken him then became God had transferred him to heaven, and since he was a resident in heaven he might be one who would be privy to all this lore.  You can even see an illusion to the same tradition in the New Testament in the letter to the Hebrews in Chapter 11, that great catalogue of biblical heroes distinguished by their faith.  It says, “By faith was Enoch taken up so that he should not see death.”  In other words, taken up here is again understood as entering heaven alive.  And he was not found because God had taken him.  Now before he was taken he was attested as having pleased God.  But this still left unanswered the question of what Enoch had done to find favor in God’s eyes and gain this great privilege of entering heaven alive.  The biblical text simply says that he walked with God, which was understood, again in that old Greek translation, it is restated that he was pleasing to God.  What could Enoch have done that was so pleasing to God?  It’s interesting that a number of texts state that Enoch’s big virtue was repentance: That he had turned back to God.  In fact that same verse in Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach, the one that says in the original Hebrew that he was a sign of knowledge.  Actually, there is an old Greek translation of the book of Ben Sira, and we are lucky in this case to not only know the name, but the identity of the translator who was none other than Sirach’s own grandson who apparently knew Greek very well and may have been a resident of the Greek speaking city of Alexandria in Egypt.  He undertook to translate the famous book of his grandfather into Greek.  When he got to this verse he changed it or at least that is what it looks like.  Instead of it saying that Enoch was a sign of knowledge it says he was a sign of repentance for all generations.  I’m not really sure if the translator changed this.  Frankly, it seems there were actually two editions, even in Hebrew, of Ben Sira’s book and it may be that the grandson was using the later enlarged edition that included this switch.  How this enlarged edition came about was really a problem for scholars.  The original Hebrew of Ben Sira was lost for centuries and only rediscovered at the very end of the Nineteenth Century. Now we have some new fragments of the Hebrew original from the Dead Sea Scrolls.  But the Greek version, the translation of the grandson, was what people had known for a long time and scholars, until recently, have been wrestling with the textual problems of this book before they came up with the notion that there were, even in Hebrew, two different editions of this text.

In the later editions (that include “a sign of repentance”) the same idea underlies other texts from these ancient interpreters that talk about Enoch.  There’s another text among the biblical Apocrypha or the deutero-canonnical works that is called the Wisdom of  Solomon, or the Book of Wisdom.  There Enoch is mentioned and it says in the following terms, “There was one named Enoch who pleased God and was loved by him and while living among sinners was taken up.  He was caught up lest evil change his understanding or guile deceive his soul.  Being perfected in a short time he fulfilled long years for his soul was pleasing to the Lord, therefore He took him quickly from the midst of wickedness.”  So, the author of this text and we don’t know his name, but he probably lived in the First Century before the Common Era.  The author of this text writes in a very subtle fashion, but when you think about it, he’s really offering an argument in these words for why Enoch died at such an early age.  He was living among sinners and God wanted to spare him the pain of a long life among those sinners and so he took him at a relatively early age.  But it also says about him that he was perfected in a short time.  Now what does he mean by that?  It’s almost as if he knows the same tradition as found in Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach, that Enoch was a sign of repentance.  In other words, he perhaps wasn’t perfect to begin with but he became perfect in a short time and then God, after he lived to the age of three hundred and sixty five, lifted him up to heaven.  In fact, that same tradition is found in this other interpreter that I mentioned, Phylo of Alexandria who says:  “What is the meaning of the word… .”  Scripture legislates about the sources of all good things at the beginning of Genesis.  For not very long after the forgiving of Cain it introduces the fact that Enoch repented, informing us that forgiveness is wont to produce repentance.   So, all of these traditions seem to somehow know that Enoch was a model of repentance. 

Well, where does this idea come from?  Of course, I have to say repentance was a central, I might even say the central theme, of rabbinic Judaism.  It was so important that people, no matter what sins they might have committed, be able to return to God, that’s really the word for repentance.  In Hebrew it means a kind of turning back and it was important to stress that this was a possibility that no matter how low you have sunk you can turn back to God, or as the famous rabbinic text says: “The gates of forgiveness are always open.”  This isn’t just a rabbinic idea, it’s an idea that is found in the Bible.  The prophet Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in particular, stress the importance of repentance.  They say it is possible no matter what to turn back to God.  Ezekiel says: “God does not delight in the death of the sinner but in his returning, turning back to Him, says the Lord.”  This is a biblical idea, but when you think about it there really weren’t any role models of repentance in the Bible.  You look in the book of Genesis and none of the people who sin turn back – repent and turn back to God.  It’s not true of Abraham or Sarah, Isaac or Rebecca, Jacob and his wives.  They sometimes do terrible things, or at least questionable things, but they don’t seem to repent of them.  Moses is not a model of a penitent sinner.  I guess the only possible biblical example might be David in the sense that he had this elicit affair with Bathsheba, but even there he doesn’t really repent.  God announces his punishment and he seeks to have the punishment reduced or lifted, and for that reason entreats God, but it’s not a pure form of repentance such as later interpreters would have delighted in. 

So there really wasn’t any model, unless it was Enoch whom God took.  On the one hand we don’t know really what Enoch did that was so great, but if it was repentance that would be a good reason for God to have caused him to enter bodily into heaven.  In fact, it’s a great case for the importance of repentance.  But how could you say that Enoch was a penitent?  I’m sure if you had one of those good old time scholars like Sirach or Philo of Alexandria standing in front of you instead of me, at this point you might say in answer to that question: “Well, it’s just obvious.  You just have to read the Bible and you will see that he is a penitent.”  You have to go back to the verse that we began with that says when Enoch had lived sixty-five years he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah for three hundred years and had other sons and daughters.  He walked with God after the birth of Methuselah – the implication is that before the birth of Methuselah he did not walk with God.  Interpreters understood, because of this wording, that Enoch, like a great many of you, had a dissolute youth and had been plunged in sex, drugs, bungee jumping up until the age of sixty-five, and finally decided to get married and settle down.  He had Methuselah and after that he led a perfectly blameless existence, and it was this fact that he had given up all the corruption of his youth and turned to God at the age of sixty-five that made people understand that he was a model of penitence.  That explains the profusion of texts, most of them written in and around Alexandria in Egypt that describe Enoch as a penitent sinner.

I want to turn to another example perhaps a little more familiar to some of you and that is the story of Jacob and Esau.  Jacob and Esau are the two sons of Isaac and Rebecca in the Bible and Esau is the slightly older first born son.  If you read the biblical account, Esau comes off as a kind of happy go-lucky fellow who likes to hunt, he’s a kind of outdoorsman chasing down these animals.  I suppose you could describe Esau as a kind of undiscerning athlete, not a deep thinker, and he likes going out and hunting animals.  Jacob is not like that.  In fact, he seems to be the opposite.  He is a stay-at-home, a kind of mama’s boy.  The contrast between the two of them couldn’t be clearer in this verse in Genesis 25:27.  It says the two boys after they were born, the two boys grew up.  “Esau became a man of knowledge about hunting, a man of the field, but Jacob was a simple man dwelling in tents.  Isaac loved Esau because he ate of the hunt, but Rebecca loved Jacob.”  Jacob seems to be the less favored son in this description, not only because he’s a kind of stay-at-home and a mama’s boy but because he’s also the younger son and the older son in biblical society was the privileged one.  But Jacob makes up for his lesser status by his cleverness, even trickiness.  First he gets Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of lentils.  Now the birthright was the natural gift of the first born.  According to biblical law he would actually get a double share of the father’s inheritance, so this is big money, and Esau is foolish enough to give up his birthright for just a bowl of lentils.  In that instance, Jacob kind of gets the better of him, and then later on when Isaac wants to give Esau his fatherly blessing, Jacob dresses up like Esau.  Poor Isaac at this point is blind, he can’t see, and it had been said earlier that Esau was a hairy man and Jacob not hairy.  To fool Isaac Jacob puts animal hides on his arms and actually puts on Esau’s clothes.  The text says they are “delightful,” and the scholars think it might have originally meant smelly clothes.  He puts them on in an attempt to deceive those senses of Isaac that are still functioning, the sense of touch and smell, and he ends up fooling his father and getting his father to bless him instead of Esau.  Perhaps in biblical times this cleverness and trickiness was much admired in lots of ancient societies, one has but to think of Achilles in Greek literature and the figure he cuts of being a clever hero.  Jacob, like Achilles, was clever and a bit of a heel I might say in his moral conduct.  He must have been a hero in biblical times for these stories lovingly to be passed down.  What’s more, Jacob getting the better of Esau really foreshadowed political events.  That is to say, later on Jacob’s descendents, the people of Israel, were to get the better of Esau’s descendents, the Edomites.  The Edomites originally were a more powerful kingdom, they actually were a kingdom at the time when the future kingdom of Israel was just a random collection of dis-unified tribes.  But when they did manage to unify themselves finally into a kingdom under King David, they handily overpowered Esau’s descendents, the Edomities, so in a way Jacob’s own life vis-à-vis Esau was a kind of foreshadowing of what was to come. 

We have to jump forward some centuries from the time when these texts, these stories, about Esau and Jacob were first written down to the time of the ancient interpreters, down to the end of the biblical period, the Third or Second Century BCE.  Now Jacob is a problem because he is the ancestor of the people of Israel and should be good.  He should be good not only as a hero but in a moral sense.  Instead, he is presented like a bit of a liar, and a cheat at least, in the stories I mentioned.  So, what can you do?  Ancient interpreters furiously set about touching up Jacob’s image, and tried to make him as good as they could, and at the same time tried to make Esau as bad as they could.  If you look at the book of Jubilees, the book of Jubilees was written somewhere around the year 200 BCE and it was written by a great biblical scholar.  Like so many biblical scholars of that time, this one didn’t write a commentary on the book of Genesis.  Writing commentaries came in some centuries later.  It was a favorite practice of the church fathers, but at this point with a couple of exceptions, people didn’t write commentaries.  Instead, they would retell biblical stories with their interpretations thrown in the retelling.  Their assumption was that you and I both know the biblical story by heart.  We also know the problems associated with it, and so in retelling the story they tried to address those problems and present their own answers.  So look at how, in Jubilee 19:13 is really simply a kind of retelling, a translation of the verse in Genesis 25:27 but look at how he changes the text.  “And Rebecca bore to Isaac two sons, Jacob and Esau and Jacob was a smooth and upright man and Esau was fierce.  A man of the field and hairy and Jacob dwelt in tents and the youths grew and Jacob learned to write, but Esau did not learn for he was a man of the field and the hunter, and he learned war and all his deeds were fierce, and Abraham loved Jacob but Isaac loved Esau.”  So, this is what they call a radical restructuring.  Here Esau really becomes almost a monster, the detail of his being hairy which was mentioned in the Genesis account for two reasons: to explain how Jacob could try to disguise himself, but also because in the territory that Esau’s descendents would inherit the land of Edom there is a big mountain, Mount Saeel, which really means Mount Hairy in Hebrew.  So, he himself became sort of hairy and his hairiness here becomes a sort of sign of his monstrousness and of his animal nature.   In fact, like some great hairy animal who loves killing, not just a hunter but he delights in the blood of slaughtered animals.  So that certainly is a change.

In the biblical text it said Isaac loved Esau but Rebecca loved Jacob.  Here it says Isaac loves Esau but Abraham loves Jacob.  The author of the book of Jubilee, as I said, was quite a scholar and he did a number of calculations that led him to believe, and it’s just the simple truth, that although Abraham’s death is mentioned before this, if you count up the years Abraham was  still alive at the time when Jacob and Esau were born.  In fact, he lived forty more years after their birth.  So, certainly Abraham got to see these two boys.  It doesn’t say in the Bible how Abraham felt about them but precisely for that reason the author of Jubilees feels he has license to express Abraham’s opinion, and Abraham is an even more admirable figure that Isaac, so Abrahams loving Jacob is a sign of Jacob’s preeminence.  Now he is no longer a mama’s boy. 

But what about this matter of Jacob learning to write?  It says in a passage in Jubilees that he learned to write and Esau did not.  In fact, the same thing appears in two ancient translations of the Bible into Aramaic, a language related to Biblical Hebrew.  It says in the translation, it’s called the Targum, “And the two boys grew up and Esau was a skilled hunter, a man who went out to the fields and Jacob was a perfect man who frequented the school house.” And in another Targum there is another translation and a wonderful story that was actually found in the Vatican library by a great Catholic scholar by the name of Alejandro dies Macho from Spain.  He discovered what so many people had overlooked, that this old translation was sitting there in the library misidentified.  It had been identified as the Targum, the Aramaic translation written by an amateur, a neophyte, who wasn’t quite learned enough, which in the end was is incorrect, but it is still called the Targum of Neophyte. 

It says there also that Jacob was a man perfect in good works, dwelling in school houses.  Well, where did they get this idea?  Again, if you could ask the author of Jubilees, how can you say that he learned how to write or that he dwelt in school houses, and these other things, and that it doesn’t say that in the Bible, he would respond that of course it does, and that we just weren’t reading it correctly.  In this case, if you look at the last passage, Genesis 25:27, it does say that “he dwelt in tents,” and it says tents in the plural.  The question that ancient interpreters had is why should one have to dwell in more than one tent?  You only need one tent.  Now, if they were out to make Jacob out to be a bad fellow they would have claimed that he was some sort of philanderer and he was hopping from tent to tent or something like that, but they wanted to say Jacob was good, and so they say if it said that he dwelt in tents in the plural that it must mean in addition to the tent in which he lived he frequented some other tent, and what could that other tent be but some sort of school house.  At the time when Esau was off hunting animals Jacob was diligently learning to write and becoming a scholar.

Still there was this other problem of Jacob’s lie to his blind father.  At the time of this incident of Isaac’s fatherly blessing Jacob the Bible says, “So, he Jacob went to his father and said, ‘Father, here I am.’  ‘Who are you, my son?’  And Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau, your first born’.  Then Jacob approached his father Isaac who felt him and said, ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ ”  So he’s confused and he doesn’t really know and then he decides after all that it must be Esau and gives him his blessing. 

But here the Bible makes no bones about it, Jacob just lies.  The wonderful thing for ancient interpreters is that when the Bible was transmitted it was transmitted without any capital letters and without any periods or commas or any punctuation at all.  That leaves a little ambiguity in the biblical text and if you’re eager to celebrate Jacob’s virtues you might be able to do it just by kind of redividing the words.  In fact you can read the same passage and it would go like this.  “He Jacob, went to his father and said, ‘Father’ and he said ‘Here I am.  Who are you?  My son?’  And Jacob said to his father, ‘I am.  Esau, your first born…’ in fact, you could even read that as Esau is your first born, because the verb “is” in the present tense is not expressed in Hebrew so if you read it that way then really Jacob didn’t lie at all.  Well, someone who read it that way was the author of the book of Jubilees.  Listen to how he restates the same passage.  “He, Jacob, went to his father and said ‘I am your son.  I have done as you told me.  Come and sit down and eat of what I have caught father so you may bless me.’  And Jacob went close to his father and he, Isaac, felt him and said the voice is Jacob’s but the hands are the hands of Esau and he did not recognize him because there was an order from heaven to turn his mind astray and he said, ‘Are you my son Esau?’  And he said, ‘I am your son.’”  This version only tells the truth.  In fact, it is interesting that according to the book of  Jubilees, he is often not satisfied with a single argument so he offers a second argument in Jacob’s favor. He says look, this is after all the father of these two boys, he’s lived throughout their lifetime with them, not only does he know their voices but he knows everything about them even if his eye sight is failing now he certainly ought to have been able to tell them apart.  So, if he didn’t it was a sign that God had somehow disturbed his mind, an order that came from heaven so that he wouldn’t recognize Jacob.  There was an order from heaven to turn his mind astray and then he gave him the blessing and that was a sign that this was indeed God’s will.

You can see the same tradition in a much later source called midrash, but again based on ancient rabbinic commentary it said, “Who are you my son?”  And Jacob said to his father, “I am Esau your first born.”  He stopped in the middle.  He said, “I am, but Esau is your first born.”  

In any case I wanted to turn to a last example which is the story of Abraham.  Abraham appears suddenly on the stage of history at the end of chapter 11 in the Book of Genesis.  He’s mentioned in passing at the end of chapter 11 and then his story begins in earnest in chapter 12.  Terah took Abraham his son, Lot his grandson, and Sarah Abraham’s wife, and they went from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran they settled there.  Now the Lord said to Abraham “Go forth from your country and from your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you and I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great so that it will be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse and all the families of the land will be blessed because of you.”  Ancient Biblical scholars when they read this passage immediately had a question about it.  What does Abraham do or what has he done to deserve all these good things that God promises him?  He’s really given a full ticket of blessings.  What exactly has he done to deserve this?  The  Book of Genesis tells us nothing about this.  Not before and you can see this begins by saying that he left with his father Terah but it doesn’t say anything about his meritorious deeds and there’s no  kind of clarification.  The only thing that might shed some light on this problem, which no doubt bothered Biblical scholars for centuries, is a passage that comes much, much later in the Bible, in the Book of Joshua.  There Joshua is addressing the people in Joshua 24 and Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, your ancestors lived of all beyond the Euphrates.  Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor, and they served other gods (serving other gods is a terrible thing to do, very bad, and they did this.)   Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and led him through all the land of Canaan.  So what light might this shed on God’s blessings that are offered to Abraham in Genesis 12.  Well, it says that Terah and his sons served other gods.  They served other gods and maybe at first reading, or even tenth reading, this seems to say that they were all worshiping the wrong gods, they were all bowing down to these false gods.  But then it does say, “Then I took Abraham.”  If you were an ancient interpreter and a careful reader of the Bible, you would say what do you mean I took Abraham?  Didn’t it say that all these people migrated together, why is Abraham being singled out in this verse.  So ancient interpreters, very ancient interpreters, came to the conclusion that what this meant was that those other people mentioned, they worshipped other gods but that Abraham uniquely did not, and Abraham must have somehow understood way back then that there really is only one true God and that all these other gods are false gods.  In fact, it later came to be understood that Abraham rebelled against his father.  His father worshipped other gods and Abraham was a rebel and the discoverer, as later tradition has it, of monotheism.  Terah worshipped other gods and Abraham, in fact in later tradition, Terah becomes not just a worshiper of other gods but an idol maker, someone who makes statutes to these other gods, and Abraham quite literally is turned into an iconoclast, someone who breaks those idols.  So here, for example, is how he’s presented in Jubilees.  Some of you may know these traditions because they were passed on as part of ancient Jewish and Christian lore:  Abraham, the iconoclast, the first monotheist and so forth.  But they go back way before rabbinic Judaism or early Christianity, they go back at least to the Book of Jubilees, maybe even a little further than that.  Here’s what Jubilees says, “And the child Abraham began to realize the errors of the land that everyone was going astray after graven images worshipping these idols.  And he began to pray to the Creator of all that he might save him from the errors of mankind.  And he said to his father, ‘What help or advantage do we have from these idols worship the God of Heaven.’”  And the same tradition appears in later interpreters.  Josephus, the First Century Jewish historian says he, Abraham, thus became the first person to argue that there is a single God who is Creator of all things.  It doesn’t say this in the Book of Genesis but since they had to explain why God had promised all these good things to Abraham and basing themselves on that verse in Joshua that describes Abraham’s father and brother as worshiping other gods, they concluded that Abraham was uniquely the one who worshipped the one true God.

I want to focus on another really tiny minor problem that also bothered ancient interpreters.  It is right there in the text.  If you look in the passage from Genesis 11:31 to 12:3, God says to Abraham, “Go forth from your country and your kindred to the land that I will show you.”  But just before that in Chapter 11, just at the beginning of this passage he’s already left his country.  It says in Chapter 11 that Terah took Abraham, his son, and they went from Ur of the Caldeans to go to the land of Canaan.  Now the Lord said to Abraham, ‘God forth from your country.’” Well, he’s already gone.  So, this was a bit of a problem.  Basically, there were really only two possibilities for solving this problem.  One, is the flashback solution that God spoke.  The text tells us in Chapter 11 that he left Ur to go where God was telling him to go and then in Chapter 12 we come back and narrate the same incident as a kind of flashback in greater detail.  Again, a sort of advantage if you’re an ancient interpreter is that unlike Latin or Greek, ancient Hebrew doesn’t have a pluperfect so there is no specific way of saying he had said, so you could even translate this Chapter 12 as the Lord had said to Abraham go forth from your country……well, that’s the flashback solution.

This was adopted by Phylo of Alexandria among other ancient interpreters.  The other solution was to say that leave your country means not just leave the city of Ur where you are from, but it uses country in the broadest sense, which includes all of Mesopotamia.  So, he leaves Ur and he goes to Haran and the God says to him leave this whole area, this whole land, and go to the land that I will show you.  It’s interesting that on this point there was no unanimity at all among Biblical interpreters in ancient times.  Phylo said he was in Ur, other people said he was in Haran, Josephus among them. 

The last example comes from the New Testament in the Book of Acts, Chapter 7.  This is the speech that St. Stephen speaks before he’s martyred, and you have to admire Stephen.  Here’s a man, an angry rebel ready to stone him and they say to him do you have any last words and he says that yes, as a matter of fact, there’s a little matter of biblical interpretation I would like to clarify.  So this is what he says, “The God of Glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran, and he said to him go forth from your country and so forth and then he departed from the land of Caldeans and lived in Haran.  In other words, he wants to take a position on a much debated topic in his day.  Where was Abraham and he comes down in the Ur camp. 

I have to mention that my own hero, the author of the Book of Jubilees, as usual, comes up with a very clever solution. According to him Abraham leaves Ur of the Caldeans and travels to Haran and in fact settles down there and lives there with his father.  After some years he gets a message from the people back in Ur and they say he should come back to Chaldea that all is forgiven.  So he doesn’t know what to do, should he stay in Haran or go back to Chaldea.  The pious hero that he is he prays to God and he asks this question of  God, what shall I do, shall I return to Chaldea or stay in Haran?  And  God answers him with the words spoken in Genesis 12, “Leave your homeland,” (in other words don’t go back to Chaldea, leave it behind you along with your kindred, and leave your father’s house here in Haran because his father is now living in Haran) and go to the place I will show you.”  So now God’s words in Chapter 12 of Genesis have an entirely new meaning.  They are really answering two different questions – should I go back to Ur or should I stay here in Haran and the answer in both cases is no.  Leave Ur, don’t stay here in Haran, leave your father’s house and go to the land I will show you.

Well, this all is just a very brief sampling of the extensive interpretive work of these ancient interpreters.  In the process of interpreting, this is really my main point, they transform the Bible.  In a sense, they made the Bible.  The Bible had been important for Jews for centuries.  That’s why they survived even through the time of the ancient interpreters, but it might well have been possible for Judaism remain what most of the other religions that we know from that period and that place were, namely, temple centered religions in which the principal act of piety was the offering of animal sacrifices in a sanctuary, a temple that was thought to be the deity’s house on earth.  This was true in Judaism, continued to be true but starting in the centuries I mentioned, starting really in the Third Century, Scripture was becoming more and more the centerpiece of Judaism.  It is odd to think of it but the principal act of piety was no longer offering sacrifices, I wouldn’t say no longer but along with these pious sacrifices was a new act of piety which was reading Scripture, studying Scripture, and living by Scripture.   That was an enormous change in Judaism, one that early Judaism passed on to Christianity and was adopted by the early Christians.  Both of these religions were book religions and I think yet another daughter, Islam, inherited the same book religion tradition from these two predecessors.  I don’t think any of this would have been possible without the work of these ancient interpreters.  They were the oned who transformed the book, transformed these original etiological tales and other stories into stories about how to behave, and turn figures like Jacob and Abraham and Enoch into moral exemplars.  In the process they transformed the book into this great book of learning by which all  subsequent generations could direct their lives.  That was very much the Bible as it was back in those centuries and to a surprising extent I think it is still the Bible as it is today.

Third, the whole postmodern tilt of our intellects raises profound questions about whether our monumental attempt to get back to what the text “originally” meant or what “the author” actually “intended” has been doomed to frustration from the very beginning.  Some recent literary criticism doesn’t sound so unlike the pages of Kugel's book.

The Bible as it was, the Bible as it is, the Bible as it will be: as Holmes said to Watson, “The game's afoot!”  James Kugel has illuminated the way that, two millennia ago, past and present coexisted that is, for them “is” meant “was”Cand has suggested that in our own time they might do the same that is, “was” might mean “is.”  Our recent national preoccupation has focused attention on the verb “to be” in a way not seen since Hamlet soliloquized.  There may still be uncertainty in the White House, in the halls of Congress, and in the courts about what the meaning of “is” is, but in Kugel’s book we have been instructed by a master scholar and teacher on what the meaning of “is” was and what the meaning of “was” is.

Patrick Henry retired in 2004 after twenty years as executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minnesota.  He taught in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College, 1967-84.