At the same time, as modern or even postmodern readers, we cannot help but observe that sometimes Abraham is less than a paragon. He was capable of deception: when he entered Egypt he told his wife Sarah to say that she was his sister, fearing that when the Egyptians saw how beautiful she was they would kill him and take her. Sarah did so, and thus became part of Pharaoh’s harem, but Abraham’s life was spared. Our discomfort at this selfish duplicity is not necessarily anachronistic sensitivity to women’s equality: the same story has a variant in Genesis in which Abraham does not lie, because Sarah, the narrator incredibly tells us, was Abraham’s half-sister. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as God ordered, although praised since antiquity, is even more troubling: why would he not question such a horrific divine command? After all, he had boldly urged God to spare the lives of the innocent citizens of Sodom—why did he not plead for Isaac? Questions such as these arise from the complexity of the text itself, which thus invites interpretation by readers.
Abraham, Father of Believers
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often designated the “Abrahamic” religions because of their genetic and spiritual links with Abraham. Through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob, Abraham was the ancestor of the Israelites, and thus of the Jewish people.
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, and his genealogies link him directly with Abraham. For Christians Abraham also serves as a model of faith, a kind of spiritual ancestor.
Abraham’s oldest son was Ishmael, and from him other peoples were descended, including those we now call Arabs, one of whom was the prophet Muhammad, the human founder of Islam. Thus, like Christianity, Islam has a genealogical link with Abraham, and for Muslims, too, Abraham is a model, especially in his surrender to God (for that is what “Islam” means).
Abraham’s importance for all three religions is also clear in their scriptures. He is mentioned more than five dozen times each in the Old Testament after the narrative of his death in Genesis 25, in the New Testament, and in the Qur’an.
Deborah
Ben Sira’s catalogue includes only men—he was something of a male chauvinist, if not a misogynist. But the pages of the Bible include not just the stories of men: from the opening chapters of Genesis on we are introduced to remarkable female characters—independent women, strong women, women who deal directly with God and lead their people. To be sure, some of the women of the Bible are unnamed, such as Noah’s wife, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Job’s wife, probably because the patriarchalism of ancient biblical writers saw them only as adjuncts of their male protectors. But well over one hundred women are named, including the matriarchs Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah; the prophets Miriam, Huldah, and Noadiah; and queens and queen mothers, such as Bathsheba, Jezebel, and Athaliah.
Deborah is one of these named women, whom we may take as representative of them all. She is the principal character of a brief episode in the book of Judges, which is set in the transitional period between the death of Joshua, who had led the Israelites into the Promised Land after Moses’s death, and the beginning of monarchy under Saul, as related in 1 Samuel. The book is named for the twelve individuals called “judges,” a term that in ancient Israel as elsewhere in the ancient Near East designates leaders who exercised not only judicial but also military and political functions. Eleven of the twelve judges in the book are men; the exception is Deborah, who is also identified as a prophet.
There are two overlapping accounts of her activity, a prose narrative in Judges 4, and a very old poem in Judges 5, the “Song of Deborah.” According to Judges 4, as she sat in judgment under a palm tree Deborah sent for Barak and instructed him to muster troops from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and to join her in an attack on the Canaanites, who were oppressing the Israelites. In this shared leadership, Deborah takes the initiative and also decides on the strategy to defeat the Canaanites. In the aftermath of the battle, the fleeing general of the Canaanites was killed by another woman, Jael.
Following the prose narrative is a poem celebrating the victory, according to its heading sung by Deborah and Barak. This poem, one of the oldest in the Bible, describes how Yahweh fought alongside his people; like the prose text that precedes it and is probably derived from it, the poem mentions Deborah and Barak together as military leaders in the victory.
Because of her active military role, Deborah differs from women such as Rahab, Jael, and Delilah, who aided their allies but not as warriors. In later Jewish and Christian sources Deborah becomes the prototype of the warrior woman: both Judith in the book of the Apocrypha named for her and Joan of Arc are modeled on Deborah.
We know little more of Deborah. She is called “the wife of Lappidoth” (Judg. 4:4) and so apparently was married, although the phrase thus translated can also mean “woman of torches” and could refer to her incendiary character; perhaps not coincidentally, Barak’s name means “lightning.” She was “a mother in Israel” (Judg. 5:7), but what that means is unclear: Was she the leader of a prophetic group, whose leader if male would be its “father”? Or was she an authority figure, who if male could be a “father”? Or was she actually a mother with children? If so, the poem may imply amazement at how she transcended the typical status of a wife and mother.
The figure of Deborah raises again the complicated issue of the status of women in ancient Israel. Were her activities as prophet, judge, and warrior exceptional? Perhaps—that the Canaanite general Sisera was killed by a woman was apparently especially shameful. Yet apart from that hint, the biblical writers express no surprise at what Deborah accomplished, and we must be careful not to overstate the subordination of women to men in biblical times. In any case, we are fortunate to have this glimpse of a powerful woman, leading Israelite volunteer militia into battle.
David
David, the second king of Israel and the founder of a dynasty that lasted more than four centuries, pervades biblical tradition, with more space devoted to him and to compositions attributed to him than to any other human character in the Hebrew Bible except for Moses. As is also true of Moses, we have no independent confirmation that David ever existed, but all except the most skeptical scholars think that the broad outlines of his life as presented in the Bible are historically accurate.
The primary narrative of David’s rise from shepherd to king of Israel and of his long reign is 1 Samuel 16–1 Kings 2. Like other extended narratives in the Bible, it is very much a composite. Drawing on a variety of sources, the biblical historians construct a picture of a complex character—as the subtitle of a recent book about David aptly puts it, he was “messiah, murderer, traitor, king.”1
His capsule biography is as follows. Born in Bethlehem as the youngest of seven brothers, he was unlikely to get any substantial inheritance, and so he joined the newly formed army of Israel’s first king, Saul. In it he excelled as a warrior, and he married Saul’s daughter Michal. Eventually, however, he and Saul had a falling out, and David and men personally loyal to him became mercenaries for Israel’s enemies, the Philistines. Near the end of the eleventh century BCE, when Saul died in battle against the Philistines, David became king, first of the southern tribe of Judah and then of the northern tribes, uniting the kingdom under himself in his newly designated capital, Jerusalem. He reportedly ruled for some forty years, perhaps a formulaic round number, but in any case a long reign. During it he was able to dominate the larger region, in part because of the relative weakness of the great powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. After some murderous rivalry among his sons, he named one of them, Solomon, as his successor before he died.
In the primary narrative about David we are given a multidimensional portrait of a gifted, even charismatic leader. David was a brilliant military strategist, as legends about his early prowess as well as his victories as king show. He was a consummate politician, rapidly achieving prominence in Saul’s court, and able to persuade both northern and southern Israelites to accept him as king even though he had fought for the Phi
listines. He was also a talented poet and musician. Several poems attributed to David are included in 2 Samuel, and one that is almost certainly authentic is his lament for Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan, David’s close friend (2 Sam. 1:17–27). Because of David’s reputation as composer and lyricist, authorship of many other biblical poems, including half of the Psalms, was attributed to this “sweet singer of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1).
This sketch is based on various types of evidence, much of it propaganda. But not all. There was another side to David, which the biblical historians also present in detail. The opening words of the account of his affair with Bathsheba are: “Now it was the springtime, the time when kings go forth to war, but David stayed in Jerusalem” (2 Sam. 11:1). David’s army, along with the ark of the covenant, was across the Jordan in Ammon, attacking its capital Rabbah. True kings, the narrator implies, are with their troops—but not David. And because he stayed in Jerusalem, he glimpsed Bathsheba bathing, slept with her, and then recalled her husband Uriah from the battlefield so that the pregnancy that had resulted would be attributed to him. When Uriah refused the comforts of home, David sent him back with sealed instructions that he be stationed in a vulnerable part of the battlefield and left undefended. So David, the warrior, the king, the poet, was also an adulterer and a murderer by proxy, and he is rebuked by the prophet Nathan for his actions. The biblical writers tell us all this and much more, depicting David as a deeply flawed hero.
Jerusalem, the holy city
According to 2 Samuel 5, toward the beginning of his reign David moved his capital from Hebron, the traditional site of the burial of Abraham and his family, to the non-Israelite city of Jerusalem, which became known as the city of David. Then, to provide divine legitimation for his rule, he brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, so that the city of David also became the city of God.
David’s son Solomon built the First Temple there, so Jerusalem became the religious center of ancient Israel and thus the geographical focus of Judaism. The prayer “Next year in Jerusalem” near the conclusion of the Passover seder illustrates this centrality, as does the late biblical identification of the site of the Temple as the mountain where Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac (2 Chron. 3:1).
As an observant Jew, Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and there, the Gospels tell us, he was arrested, executed, buried, and, according to Christian belief, raised from the dead. Because these events took place in Jerusalem, it became the holy city for Christians.
Muslims accept as essentially valid the earlier revelations found in the Bible, and so for them Jerusalem is also sacred because of its associations with David, Solomon, and Jesus. Jerusalem’s status for Muslims is further enhanced because according to Muslim legend, the prophet Muhammad himself was miraculously transported from Mecca to Jerusalem, from which he was taken to heaven to converse with God.
Jerusalem’s continuing importance as holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims—and hence as focus of conflict in the Middle East—is directly due to David’s having made it his capital more than three thousand years ago.
Despite the very mixed view we get of David from the primary narrative, subsequent literature glossed over the reprehensible aspects of his life. For the authors of the book of Kings he became the model king, the touchstone against whom all subsequent rulers of his dynasty were assessed, usually negatively. When the authors of the books of Chronicles, writing in the fifth or fourth century BCE, retold the story of David, although they used the books of Samuel as their principal source, they omitted any negative aspects, such as the Bathsheba affair and his son Absalom’s revolt. Finally, because his reign was remembered as a time of peace and prosperity, and therefore one of special divine blessing, later generations would model a hoped-for future leader on this “anointed of the god of Jacob” (2 Sam. 23:1).
An anonymous early Christian writer wrote a catalogue of Israelite heroes similar to that of Ben Sira and concluded with a summary of the “cloud of witnesses” too numerous to mention:
And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. (Heb. 11:32–34)
For this author, as for Ben Sira, these individuals are heroic models, and believers have continued to view them as such. Many are also engaging literary characters, whose narratives have fascinated readers and inspired writers, artists, and composers regardless of their own beliefs.
Chapter 12
The enduring significance of the Old Testament
Museum visitors may be tourists, intending to broaden and deepen their appreciation of culture. For the last two millennia, the Bible has been an inspiration to creative artists—sculptors, painters, playwrights, novelists, composers, choreographers, and many others. They have taken biblical personalities and events and interpreted them in their respective media. This influence of the Bible is so pervasive that to make a catalogue of artistic works based on the Bible would be not just tedious but virtually impossible. To take just one example, there are thematic allusions to the book of Job in the works of Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Beckett, and in the twentieth century alone more than a dozen novels and plays based on it by such writers as H. G. Wells, Muriel Spark, Neil Simon, Robert Frost, Robert Heinlein, and Archibald MacLeish. A recent catalogue raisonnée of the book of Job in art contains some 150 examples of artists’ interpretations of the book of Job from the third century CE through the twentieth.
The Bible has also repeatedly been used in popular culture—in films, songs, and musical comedies (there is even one based on the book of Job). Biblical phrases permeate casual speech, often in clichés whose origin may be unrecognized, such as “the skin of my teeth,” taken from Job 19:20. And, for better and for worse, the Bible has influenced such fields as law, medicine, science, and politics.
To appreciate these myriad cultural connections, it is not necessary either to be familiar with the biblical traditions or to be a believer, just as Bach’s cantatas with biblical librettos can be heard in a concert hall as well as in a church. Moreover, just as Brahms’s German Requiem was written for concert performance rather than for a funeral, and Bernstein’s Mass was intended for the stage, so too the Bible continues to be used by creative artists without necessarily explicit religious intent. Because biblical characters, events, and ideals are woven into the fabric of our culture, knowing them helps us better understand our past and therefore ourselves.
Museum visitors may also be pilgrims, in a sense. For Jews and for Christians, despite some differences in content and order, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is sacred scripture and as such has a special authority. Its significance is axiomatic and needs no rationale. For believers it is heard and read as Monteverdi’s masses and Bach’s cantatas were in their original liturgical settings, in the context of a community of believers.
For individuals and communities of faith throughout the ages, the Bible in all its complexity has been understood as a single book, written by a single divine author. Yet many voices are preserved in the Old Testament, and a crucial issue of interpretation is how to hear those voices. Should we, as modern critical scholars have suggested, try to distinguish them, in their particularity, paying attention to what each voice is saying? Or should we, as premodern and some postmodern scholars have suggested, focus on the polyphonous effect of the whole? Perhaps both are necessary and possible.
Consider the notion of generational punishment. The Ten Commandments state it explicitly:
I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing sons for the iniquity of fathers, to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exod. 20:5–6)
Yet
this understanding of divinely imposed collective punishment is elsewhere explicitly contradicted, as by the prophet Ezekiel:
The person who sins shall die. A son shall not suffer for the iniquity of a father, nor a father suffer for the iniquity of a son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own. (Ezek. 18:20)
For the prophet, divine justice should correspond to a principle of the Israelite legal system, according to which “fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their parents; only for his own crime may a man be put to death” (Deut. 24:16). In Ezekiel, then, we have a development in thinking, even an outright rejection of an earlier view enshrined in the Decalogue and attributed to God himself.
As this example shows, the multiplicity of voices in the Old Testament requires that readers engage in interpretation, since the different voices are not always in harmony. Moreover, because of this often dissonant polyphony, any argument based solely on what the Bible says, as though it speaks with only one voice, is fundamentally flawed. As Shakespeare observed, even “the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (Merchant of Venice I.iii), and politicians, pundits, and popes who use it as a collection of proof texts to be selected almost at random, disregarding original meaning and context, do so by ignoring the book as a whole. Moreover, no community of faith today would accept every biblical command as binding, so the view of the Bible as an absolute and timeless authority is challenged both within the Bible itself and in subsequent religious history.
The Old Testament_A Very Short Introduction Page 12