How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  These examples illustrate a vital concept for us—Jews at the time changed their sacred text to “clarify” in their time and place what God is like. They changed the Bible to accommodate their culture.

  All this reminds me of a recent controversy among some Christians, namely, whether Bible translations today should use gender-inclusive language. Talk about a food fight. Whatever one might think of it, the argument that gender-inclusive language is simply “compromising” the Bible for the sake of culture rings rather hollow when we look at what Jews were doing about twenty-three hundred years ago: they produced a culturally influenced Bible translation, the translation that—oh, sweet irony—became the Bible of the New Testament writers.

  Another way of handling difficult portions of the Bible was to interpret them in a creative manner called “allegory,” which is how sophisticated Greeks also handled their religious literature. Allegory is something of a mindset. It was thought that the true meaning of any literature worth reading lay beyond the literal, surface meanings of mere words, and took on philosophical or symbolic meaning.

  Some Jews applied this notion to their scripture. God is infinite and not at all human, and so human words are not adequate for capturing what God is really like. The interpreter’s job is to look beyond these mundane words to find the true spiritual message submerged beneath, a message about the virtuous and moral life (a common topic of Greek philosophers).

  For example, according to one such interpreter named Philo,* there is more to the “burning bush” incident than meets the eye (Exod. 3:1–6). This is where Moses first meets God, but Philo, in typical allegorical fashion, said that this was no direct encounter with God (since God should not be seeable), but with a go-between—an angel. More important, the burning-but-not-consumed bush wasn’t really about God appearing to Moses in the desert. It has, rather, a spiritual meaning: it represents Israel’s courageous survival amid terrible suffering (enslavement).

  Philo similarly had a problem with God’s asking Adam, Where are you? after Adam and Eve hid from God for eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:9). Doesn’t God know?! He had to ask?! Philo handles this by rephrasing the question as “Where have you arrived, O soul?” meaning something like, “Way to blow it, Adam. Way to not be virtuous. What have you done?” Surely, that is what God was really saying, wasn’t it?

  Philo wasn’t the only one to defend the faith by adjusting scripture for his time. Another example (a favorite of mine) was the anonymous (probably Alexandrian) writer of the book of Wisdom of Solomon (in the Apocrypha), written to a persecuted Jewish community. This book is loaded with all sorts of Greek philosophical ideas, like the value of virtue and how the temporary body “burdens” the immortal soul; it generally interprets Israel’s history and beliefs in a way that reflects Greek philosophy and not at all ancient Israelite thinking.

  Actually, to take a commercial break, one great thing about the Apocrypha is that it was written almost entirely during the Greek period—it’s a window onto that period of Jewish history. And now I’ve gotten you excited about going out and reading the Apocrypha. You’re welcome.

  The bottom line is that God and the Jewish faith needed some defending, and hellenized (“Greekified”) Jews were up for the task of reimagining God. They had to, or risk watching their ancient faith melt away like a snowman on an August sidewalk.

  But Jews also had an internal challenge. God’s delay in coming to their aid and setting things right for them raised questions of God’s justice and goodness. Answering those questions meant reimagining God even more.

  God’s Honor Is at Stake

  “Is God just? Fair? Righteous? Dependable? Steadfast?” These are questions familiar to people of faith across the centuries, including ancient Jews. Given their circumstances—still strangers in their own land, even hundreds of years after the return from Babylon—these were active questions. “What kind of God is this?”

  One key way of reimagining God at the time concerns the resurrection of the dead—another thing that Christians may think is more or less fundamental to the biblical package, but that is not the case.

  You can read the Old Testament from front to back while standing on your head, and you’ll barely get a whiff of the idea that God raises the dead. Yes, it happens. The prophet Elijah revives a widow’s dead son (1 Kings 17:17–24). Ezekiel 37:1–14 is a vision of a resurrection, in which dry bones come back to life, a metaphor for Judah’s return from exile (see verses 11–14). But I’m talking about people en masse being literally raised from the dead at the end of the world for final judgment by God.

  The only place we find that specific idea in the Old Testament is in the book of Daniel: Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt (12:2). But that’s it. Otherwise the idea of a “general resurrection” for final judgment (as it’s called) doesn’t appear in the Old Testament—and the one place where it does, Daniel, is a book that doesn’t take shape until the second century BCE, right in the middle of the Greek period.

  Which brings me to my point: resurrection of the dead was an adjustment to the story, a reimagining of what God will do that arose (an unintended yet fitting pun) during the Greek period to solve a pressing problem that had to do with God’s justice and fairness to his people.

  What was that problem exactly? A key promise of God to Jews was that faithfulness to God is rewarded; namely, the faithful would take part in the coming restored kingdom of Israel. Two of the three pieces were already in place: they returned to the land after the Babylonian exile and rebuilt their Temple. The missing piece was a king from the line of David reigning from his throne in Jerusalem. Full restoration will be an act of God, God’s demonstration of justice and faithfulness to the children of Abraham.

  And yet decades and then centuries had gone by with no sign of a Davidic king, during which time—guess what?—faithful and obedient Jews died without seeing the restored kingdom.

  While we’re on the subject, we see this scenario played out in a more familiar place, Jesus’s birth story. In Luke 2:25 we are introduced to Simeon, who was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel. Translation: he was an obedient Jew who was hoping that during his lifetime he would see Israel “consoled” or “comforted”—which is straight-up Old Testament language for the return from exile. In fact, the Holy Spirit told him he would. So when he saw the infant Jesus in the Temple and recognized him as the Lord’s Messiah (verse 26),* he knew that he had seen God’s salvation (verse 30). The king has come.

  At any rate, as if the long wait wasn’t hard enough, the Greek period introduced some additional pressing problems that upped the ante considerably: martyrs. Pious Jews were killed for refusing to compromise on God’s Law. This came to a head in the early second century BCE. Under the rule of wicked king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (reigned 175–164 BCE), Jews were being coerced to convert to the state-sponsored religion of the Greek empire (supported and encouraged even by some Greek-minded Jewish groups!). Antiochus outlawed Jewish worship, erected in the Jewish Temple an altar to Zeus and an idol of himself—and killed a lot of people.*

  The apocryphal book 2 Maccabees recounts these tense times, no doubt with some literary freedom to make the point vivid. In chapter 7, we read of the gruesome martyrdom of seven brothers and their mother, all of whom were offered the choice to either eat swine’s flesh (unclean according to Leviticus 11) or be tortured and killed: scalped, tongues cut out, hands and feet cut off, and fried in a pan. But one after the other they refused, and the response of the second brother to his tormenters gets at why we are taking the time to look at this. Speaking to the wicked king, the brother says:

  You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws. (7:9)

  The brothers’ faith that God will raise them from the dead for being obedi
ent is a huge shift in Jewish thinking, brought about by the difficult reality that God seemed to be taking his sweet old time restoring the kingdom of Israel—centuries, in fact—while Jews were dying for their obedience to God. For God to remain just, for God to remain faithful, something had to give—and what gave was the finality of death. To be just, God would have to raise the dead.

  Before any of us get the wrong idea, questioning God’s justice has a long history for the Israelites. The books of Job and Lamentations and the lament Psalms (like Ps. 89) all take God to task for failing to keep up his end of the bargain to be with his people no matter what.

  But now the situation was different. God had to be reimagined to address an unexpected scenario: God’s long delay and (apparent) injustice.

  When the kingdom finally appears and the golden years of ancient Israel return, God will be faithful to all those martyred Jews: they will be raised from the dead so that they too can take part in the kingdom. Death is not their end. They will shine like the brightness of the sky . . . like the stars forever and ever (Dan. 12:3). Or as we see in the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, these righteous immortal souls will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will govern nations and rule over peoples (3:7–8).

  Resurrection is about God’s justice, and God’s justice became a more pressing issue than ever before when persecution of faithful Jews abounded and God’s absence was painfully felt. How, then, could they maintain their tie with their ancient belief in a just and faithful God amid these dramatically changing circumstances? By reimagining God as someone who is just and faithful despite appearances. God now raises the dead.

  The biblical script was not prepared to handle such a twist in the story. How could it be?! Adapting the story to the here-and-now realities of life was a wisdom move. What is God like? Is God good and just? Is God faithful? Yes. God must be. And here’s how.

  Angels and Demons

  Angels were not pudgy four-year-olds. They were intimidating heavenly intermediaries between humans and God. It’s sort of like the scenario in which you, as a common consumer, have a meeting scheduled with the company president and, instead, you’re met in the lobby by his assistant. It’s clear that this is your meeting. The president is in his high and lofty corner office and you’re not going up there.

  The Hebrew word for “angel” simply means “messenger,” and angels are certainly known to us in the Old Testament. The big one, of course, is the angel of the LORD, who pops in now and then to relay some serious command or bit of news from God. It is this angel who, among other things, kept Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac (Gen. 22:11) and announced the birth of mighty Samson (Judg. 13:3). Isaiah 6, to give one more example, gives us a glimpse of the heavenly throne of God surrounded by seraphs (fiery angels), each with six wings.

  So, we see angelic activity in the Old Testament, but angels become much more active after the exile and in the Greek period. We meet Gabriel and Michael in the book of Daniel* and other named angels, like Uriel and Raphael, in the Apocrypha. Angels seem to have a hand in either writing down the mysteries of God or guiding humans in understanding them—as in Daniel 9. Daniel is concerned why the exile was taking so long, since the prophet Jeremiah said it would only last seventy years (Jer. 25:11–12; 29:10). Gabriel answers by letting Daniel in on a little secret: seventy really means “seventy sevens,” or 490 years.

  The reason for this increased prevalence of angels is to make God more accessible. Prophets who relayed God’s word to the rest were becoming scarce, a thing of the past, one of the side effects of having God’s written word. Also, now that God’s honor had to be defended, more urgently than in earlier periods, it wouldn’t seem right for God to keep popping in and out of the daily and mundane affairs of humans, as Yahweh did when walking and talking with Adam and Eve. Other messengers are needed—and the heavenly realm was where they were found.

  On the downside, the heavenly realm also included evil beings—fallen angels. Though belief in fallen angels is common among Christians, the chief one being Satan or the devil, the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about them. In the New Testament God is said to have consigned some angels to hell (2 Pet. 2:4), but, again, this passage shows the influence of Judaism on the New Testament.

  Satan is a word that comes up in the Old Testament, but its meaning shifts as we get closer to the time of Christ. We meet “the satan” in the book of Job (chaps. 1–2), where he is a member of God’s “divine council.” “Satan” isn’t a name here, but a descriptive title meaning “the adversary” or “the accuser.” In the book of Job, “the satan” accuses Job of only being pious because he got something out of the deal (a perfect life); he also accuses God of letting Job get away with it. But in Numbers 22:32, for example, the “accuser” is none other than the angel of the LORD.

  But for Satan as a specific enemy of God (though not yet with the red tights and pitchfork, an image given to us by medieval Christianity), we need to wait for an evolution to occur. The presence of an anti-God figure solved (somewhat) a problem caused ironically by Judaism’s deep belief in only one God: Why do bad things happen? Where does evil come from? Who is responsible?

  In a world where many gods existed, you could pin horrid events on some erratic divine being. Sure, one of the gods was at the head of the table and ultimately responsible, but they couldn’t always be relied on to stay on top of everything. But once you believe that your God is the one and only God, accounting for the presence of evil in the world gets tricky, which philosophers and theologians dutifully call the “problem of evil.”

  It’s a real problem. If God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing and yet bad things happen, might it be that God is none of those things? Blaming human misery on a very powerful divine archenemy keeps God from having to take the blame—though you’d still need to ask why God allows that dark figure to exist, but let’s not get sidetracked.

  The descriptive title “the satan” of the Old Testament became Satan, the name of this powerful evil being (known also by other names in early Judaism like Mastema and Belial). We see here an adjustment to Jewish thinking that wouldn’t have occurred if the need hadn’t presented itself. This figure shows up, of course, in the New Testament, as Satan and also the “devil” (from the Greek diabolos, meaning “accuser”). That stands to reason, given the fact that the New Testament was written after this development took place.

  The Satan we take for granted is a new addition to the ancient tradition. Satan, actually, is a great example of a New Testament “given” that wouldn’t exist were it not for the Jewish reimagining of God that went before.

  Not Your Father’s Judaism

  Jewish thinking about God was deeply affected by Greek culture, and we’re really just seeing the proverbial tip of the proverbial iceberg.

  Christians have said rather freely for almost two millennia that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and present everywhere at once (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent). We do not always realize how completely dependent these ideas are on the ways Greek thought influenced Judaism before Christianity and how ill-fitting these descriptions of God are, biblically speaking.

  In the Old Testament, God is not everywhere at once, but moves from place to place, even if one of those places is high above the created order on his heavenly throne. And rather than all-knowing, God clearly sometimes has to find things out.* An all-powerful God is consistent with the Old Testament, where God moves nations and puts the heavenly bodies in their place, but the pressing implications of that wouldn’t be felt until the Greek period.

  These descriptions of God were introduced under the influence of Greek thought, and yet they came to form the foundation of the language that Christian theologians use to speak of God. We Christians just think of these as biblical concepts, but they are actually tied to how Jews reimagined their ancient God for a new day.

  And, as we’ll see, reimagining God yet again for other reasons is the heart and so
ul of the Christian faith.

  If we had more time on our hands, we could get into all sorts of other adjustments to the tradition influenced by Greek philosophy: Is life fated, predetermined, by this all-powerful God? Do we have free will? And what happens after we die? Does our body ever come back or are we disembodied souls?

  Likewise, we could go on and on about how Jewish society reflected Greek and later Roman ways. The Sanhedrin, a body of Jewish civic leaders who had authority to adjudicate cases, is a Greek idea; the term means “sitting together.” A synagogue was a house of prayer and study, and its name was likewise derived from a Greek term meaning “assembly.” Both institutions arose as innovations in Jewish life after the exile and are known to us from the New Testament.

  Now, I don’t want to paint a false picture that every Jew was on the same page when it came to reimagining God for a new time and place. Jews during the Greek and later Roman periods had very sharp disagreements over how best to be faithful to the past in a changing world. How far should they go to adapt to Greek ways? A lot? A little? Not at all? There was no script to follow. Some Jews were quite accommodating to new ways while others held their ground—not unlike the differences among Christians today.

  We know from the New Testament and other ancient documents that Judaism sported no fewer than four broad ways (“parties”) of addressing the collision of past and present, especially in how to respond to the Roman Empire.

  The Sadducees and Pharisees, both prominent in the New Testament, had some rather significant differences in beliefs, including very different attitudes toward their Roman landlords. The Sadducees were more willing to keep the peace with the Roman government that gave them control over the Temple, while the Pharisees, who focused on legal interpretation, were less inclined. The Zealots were keen on overthrowing the Romans by violent means. The Essenes were recluses, sectarians choosing to avoid the conflict by removing themselves from it and waiting it out. (The desert hideout at Qumran, where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found, was probably an Essene community.)