The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  God Speaks from the Page

  Along with the Torah came books that recounted Israel’s history after the death of Moses, as well as the collected writings of various prophets and sages. Many of these texts went back to the distant past; indeed, parts of some were apparently preserved from at least the eighth century BCE (and a number of items arguably date from one or two centuries before that, or even earlier), although no one is sure exactly how they were preserved, or what the people doing the preserving thought they were doing. Indeed, where all these texts originated and how and by whom, as well as how they came repeatedly to be revised and edited, has been the subject of a great deal of research over the last two centuries.29

  Little by little, a specific group of these texts gradually crystallized, joined with the Torah as part of Israel’s sacred library. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer scholars a glimpse of this process in the making. The fragments of different scrolls found at Qumran represent some eight hundred documents. A little more than a quarter of these consist of bits and pieces of various books that are considered part of the Hebrew canon: thirty-six copies of parts of our book of Psalms, twenty-nine pieces of Deuteronomy, seventeen Exodus manuscripts, and so forth. It is striking that every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented among these fragments except for the book of Esther. (Was its omission the result of an intentional decision to exclude that book, or was the absence of a single fragment simply a matter of chance? No one knows.)30 Whatever the case, the fact that nearly all the books of the future canonical Bible were attested in the Qumran caves suggests that, by sometime in the late second century BCE, there may have been some widespread agreement on their importance and perhaps their sanctity.31

  Was this the first suggestion that a kind of proto-Bible existed? The problem is that those caves also contained other material—multiple copies of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, for example, as well as numerous sectarian texts, including hymns, prayers, legal writings, and others that seem to reflect specifically the beliefs and practices of the Qumranites themselves and (perhaps) the larger movement to which they belonged. Some of these other books are cited in the group’s writings as authoritative, as Scripture. So we have little indication that the idea of a widely recognized, defined canon existed; it rather seems that a somewhat more fluid collection of texts was held to be authoritative for the Qumran sect, but one that was not identical with the proto-Bible (or Bibles) of other communities.

  Eventually, however, the establishment of a delineated biblical canon was accomplished.32 Various writings from the late– or post–Second Temple period bear witness to the emergence of such a Bible. The book of Ben Sira, composed in the early second century BCE, ends with a catalogue of biblical heroes, and these are all found in our canonical Bible; indeed, they are presented basically in the order in which they appear in the Jewish biblical canon. Ben Sira’s grandson translated his grandfather’s book into Greek and, in a preface, refers to “the Torah and the Prophets and the others that followed them,” “the Torah and the Prophets and the other books,” and so on. While “the Torah and the Prophets” seems to refer to a fixed group—remember that prophecy was later held in some circles to have ceased with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, all of whom were connected to the period following the return from exile—the “other books” sounds deliberately vague.33 (Perhaps Ben Sira’s grandson was hoping his own distinguished ancestor’s book would forever be included among these “others.”) Ultimately, however, even these “other books” came to be specified by name, until all these in s were in and everything else was out; the Hebrew Bible was now complete.*

  The emergence of the Bible says a lot about Israel’s religion in the Second Temple period. There may still have been prophets around, but now, God spoke principally through the written word. His voice was heard—constantly—from the pages of the Torah and the other books. Indeed, the career of the Bible paralleled, in a subtle way, the rise of fixed, statutory prayer seen above. The two bespeak a common mentality. For, just as statutory prayers were instituted as a kind of regular, daily connection joining human beings to God via the fixed words and fixed times of these prayers’ recitation, so the emergence of a certified body of sacred texts created a similarly ongoing, daily connection in the opposite direction, joining God to His worshipers via the fixed words of His books. In both cases, what had once been spontaneous and undefined (prayers spoken at any time and saying almost anything; God speaking to humans whatever and whenever He saw fit) had now hardened into something regular, dependable, and unchanging. To modern ears, “hardening” may sound bad, but for ancient worshipers, it was surely a positive development precisely because of its fixed character. Those who recited statutory prayers at sunrise or sunset were not, as we have seen, necessarily seeking an answer; rather, their prayers were a way of establishing contact, a reaching out to bring near the universal, and therefore potentially distant, God. Similarly, God no longer manifested Himself in some dazzling, supernatural theophany (such as that at Mount Sinai), but He was nonetheless brought close simply because there was now a Torah scroll, or a whole Bible, in the room. Of course, His “presence” was not of the sort of thing we usually mean by this term; but He was present, speaking aloud, in the text—and in particular in the Torah’s commandments, whereby God’s voice was directed to everyone in the room.34 This is what 1 Baruch meant by saying, “Happy are we, O Israel, for we know what is pleasing to God.” What was pleasing to God were the things that He had commanded Israel to do, and in carrying out those commandments, Israel’s connection to the universal God was firmly established, day after day.

  A More Perfect Bible

  There remained the problem of how the Bible was to be read. It was made up of texts composed at various points in Israel’s long history, texts that likewise seemed to reflect the different points of view of various sectors of Israelite society (the priesthood, the royal court, prophetic schools or guilds, and so forth). These two basic facts inevitably meant that the sacred texts from Israel’s illustrious past were full of contradictions, which could only lead to confusion. Did God favor transgenerational and collective punishment, or was each person punished for his or her sins? (We have seen passages that support both positions.) Did God descend onto Mount Sinai to deliver the Ten Commandments, as some passages asserted (Exod 19:20, 24:9, 34:5), or did He remain in heaven the whole time (Exod 20:19, Deut 4:36)? The answer certainly had implications for God’s very nature—was He truly corporeal, moving around the earth, or was He an essentially heavenly deity who ruled by remote control? There were numerous questions about specific religious practices. What exactly did the Torah intend by forbidding “work” on the Sabbath? And how in practice was someone to observe such a broad commandment as “You shall love your neighbor like yourself” (Lev 19:18)? It was the task of Scripture’s ancient interpreters to find answers to such questions.

  These text scholars were a varied group, or group of groups. In some sense such scholars had been around almost as long as the biblical texts they were interpreting. Modern research has highlighted the fact that virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible is the product of multiple acts of supplementation and rearrangement and further editing; all of these revisions constituted a kind of reinterpretation of the earlier versions, subtly (or not so subtly) changing the meaning for later readers. But even after the texts themselves had been revised for the last time (indeed, well before that time), ancient interpreters were busy explaining the meaning of the texts—often transforming them to fit current reality and current needs. Their work thus came to constitute what might be called the great Interpretive Revolution of the closing three centuries BCE and on into the first century or so CE.

  For the most part we do not know the names of these ancient interpreters, but by studying the earliest traces of their activity—particularly in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the bits of interpretation that have survived in the biblical Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha—scholars have learned much about their interpretive methods an
d the great influence they had on what became the Bible. One thing is clear: they had a definite program. Although the texts that they were interpreting had, in most cases, been around for centuries and often talked about people or events from the still more distant past, it was the interpreters’ goal to read them not as ancient history, but as fundamentally relevant writings addressed to people in the interpreters’ own day, as well as embodying some of the interpreters’ key beliefs and concerns. This meant first of all resolving any apparent contradictions within the corpus so as to give the texts a single, unitary message applicable to the present. In addition, the goal of relevance often meant transforming these ancient writings into lessons for the present day; for example, turning texts that had no apparent interest in ethical instruction into lessons of morality. Thus, the accounts of Israel’s remote ancestors narrated in the book of Genesis were reinterpreted so as to become stories with a message: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and the others were argued to be models of ethical behavior (which, at first glance, they certainly were not). The Torah’s laws underwent similar modification, making them applicable to current-day society and appropriate to later standards of behavior. The Bible’s famous dictate of “an eye for an eye” was thus explained by interpreters to mean that, while a person who knocked out someone’s eye had to provide the victim with monetary compensation, he was not to be punished by having his own eye knocked out. In other words, the true meaning of “an eye for an eye,” these interpreters said, was “not an eye for an eye.”

  Changes in the apparent meaning of the Torah’s words were not always so radical, but they were widespread: it is no exaggeration to say that nearly every page of the Torah included at least one verse that had been radically recast by ancient interpreters. And while their activity was at first focused primarily on the Pentateuch, the words of prophets from centuries past were similarly reinterpreted—often so as to highlight their eternal teachings about the ways of God with mankind, or sometimes to turn them into cryptic messages about events in the interpreters’ own time (another way of making ancient texts relevant to today).35

  But wasn’t this what prophecy had always been about? Yes and no. As we have seen, earlier biblical prophets were often involved in the events of their own day, discoursing with the powers-that-be on various matters. Nathan rebuked King David after his sin with Bathsheba, Elijah reproved King Ahab, Isaiah offered advice to King Ahaz about the Assyrian crisis, Jeremiah took on King Jehoiakim, and so forth. By the time of the ancient interpreters, however, those events were long past. Instead, such episodes were reread as ethical instruction; what counted was not how they influenced the events of the day, but the eternal moral lessons that they embodied or included.36 By the same token, the historical narratives from the book of Joshua through 2 Kings were read not so much as history as they were lessons in morality.37

  In keeping with this, the prophets themselves underwent a subtle modification. As one scholar has noted:

  In general it is fair to say that Christians seem to have been interested in the prophets as people, in what they did and suffered in the name of God, rather than as names of books or rather featureless recipients of oracles—a tendency shared with Josephus and Philo. This produces some surprising judgments on who are the “major” prophets. Habakkuk, to us a shadowy figure, was evidently a focus of some interest . . . We know, of course, from the evidence of Qumran that Habakkuk’s book was a focus of much interest around the turn of the era. Daniel, too, enjoyed a much higher status than he now has in mainstream Judaism or Christianity; as with Habakkuk and Jonah, this may reflect that there were more stories about him in Scripture than about some other prophets.38

  This is of course an important observation for the present study, one more indication of the way in which the “elusive individual” came to change the way in which people read Scripture. At the same time, this way of reading is also a manifestation of ancient interpreters’ concern for making the past relevant to the present, our present. Looking for lessons in ethical instruction in accounts of the distant past, to be acted on by each individual, is rather like pinning down divine commandments to specific acts—again, to be performed by each individual.

  A text discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls tells us something about the importance of studying the interpretation of Scripture in the life of their religious community.

  And wherever ten men [of the community council] shall be assembled, let there not be lacking someone interpreting the Torah day and night, continuously in shifts, one after another. And let the Many be sure [to devote] a third of every night of the year to reading together from the book and to interpreting the law and blessing together. (1QS Community Rule col 6:6–8)

  A Special Style of Interpretation

  How did the ancient interpreters manage to make such dramatic changes in the text’s apparent meaning? In part, it had to do with their specific style of interpreting. However radical were the “improvements” that interpreters introduced, they always had a particular scriptural hook on which to hang their reinterpretations and could thus claim that they were merely making explicit what Scripture had always meant:

  The fact that Adam didn’t die as soon as he ate the forbidden fruit—although God had said that he would “surely die on the day” in which he ate it—indicated that God never meant that Adam would instantly fall over dead. Instead, what He was saying was that Adam, although originally created to be immortal, would become mortal if he ate the fruit and so eventually die, which he did (at the age of 930). This narrative thus became an explanation of human mortality—passed on from Adam and Eve to all their descendants—and an object lesson in the importance of heeding God’s commands.

  The Torah says twice that Abraham and Isaac “walked together” (Gen 22:6 and 22:8) on their way to where Isaac was to be sacrificed. The first mention meant that they walked together physically, but the second indicated something else entirely: Isaac now understood that he was to be a human sacrifice offered up to God (although Abraham had never mentioned that fact explicitly), and he voluntarily accepted this role, demonstrating his willingness to be a martyr for his religion.

  In the first two of the Ten Commandments, God speaks in the first person, “I,” but after that He is suddenly in the third person, “the LORD your God.” The reason is that God spoke only the first two commandments directly to the people of Israel; the others He spoke to Moses, who then repeated them to the people. Why this change? Interpreters explained that ordinary human beings cannot stand to hear God’s voice directly—hence the need for Moses and later prophets to act as intermediaries, their words preserved in sacred Scripture.

  But the interpreters’ success also had to do with how Scripture was passed along, and who was doing the passing. In the ancient world, books were an expensive artifact; ordinary people did not possess them. If they knew Scripture at all, it was because they had learned it by heart in school, and this rote learning probably included not only memorizing the actual words of the text, but learning their standard interpretation as well. Such standard interpretations came from the ancient interpreters—some of whom were doubtless leaders of different groups or factions. They were the experts.

  It is also likely that many of these interpreters were wealthy men, people who could devote substantial time to studying the interpretations of their predecessors and transmitting their own refinements. As Ben Sira opined in the early second century BCE: “[Only] someone who has little daily occupation can be a sage,” adding somewhat snootily:

  How can a plowman become a sage, or someone whose glory’s in a goad’s straight shaft—

  Someone who drives an ox in the furrows, and whose sole conversation is with his own cattle? (Sir 38:24–25)

  Relatively few people enjoyed a way of life that allowed them the time to look deeply into Scripture and thus become interpreters; but this very circumstance meant that those who did constituted a small and prestigious company. Everyone else looked to them to explain the sacred
words of bygone times. Once introduced, their interpretations were passed on from teacher to pupil and from the old to the young; eventually, they were also written down (which is how we know them), incorporated into the writings of ancient sages and translators, inserted into retellings of biblical stories, into liturgical poems and legal compendia, and alluded to in passing in all manner of other compositions. Thanks to all these, the creations of these ancient interpreters came to be understood as simply what the text really means.

  These two activities—statutory, fixed prayers and the reading and interpreting of Scripture—could be carried on anywhere, and they ultimately became the central acts of piety in the period before and just after the start of the Common Era. But they also tell us something striking about the changing encounter with God during this period. Prayers that were recited each day at fixed times and without any specific request or expectation of an answer—such prayers give expression to the growing distance between God and the individual supplicant.39 Similarly, God’s voice, in bygone days heard firsthand by His prophets, has been increasingly displaced by the written word: His book was right here, while His presence remained elusive and difficult to conceive.40

  Important as these aspects of prayer and Scripture may be, they were far from all that was new in the religion of late Second Temple times. To help fill out the encounter between God and humans in this period, one further development must be considered.

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