Reading the Bible again for the First Time

by Marcus J. Borg

  Importantly, these stories are not just about the divine-human relationship in the past. They are also about the divine-human relationship in the present. The way the exodus story is used in the Jewish celebration of Passover each year illustrates this claim. In the liturgy accompanying the Passover meal, the following words (slightly paraphrased) are spoken:

  It was not just our fathers and our mothers who were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but we, all of us gathered here tonight, were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And it was not just our fathers and mothers who were led out of Egypt by the great and mighty hand of God, but we, all of us gathered here tonight, were led out of Egypt by the great and mighty hand of God.

  What does it mean to say that “we” (and not just our ancient ancestors) were slaves in Egypt and that “we” were led out of the land of slavery by God? It does not mean that we were there in the loins of our ancestors, as if our genes or DNA were present. Rather, the exodus story is understood to be true in every generation. It portrays bondage as a perennial human problem and proclaims God’s will that we be liberated from bondage. The story of Israel’s bondage in Egypt and her liberation by God is thus a perennially true story about the divine-human relationship. It is about us and God.

  Reading the Bible in a State of Postcritical Naivete

  Given the above, a major need for contemporary readers of the Bible is to move from precritical naivete through critical thinking to postcritical naivete. Though these phrases sound like intellectual jargon, they are very illuminating. They identify ways of reading and hearing the Bible that we can recognize in our own experience.15

  Precritical naivete is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state (if we grow up in a Christian setting), we simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories.

  To illustrate, I recall the way I heard the Christmas stories when I was a child. I assumed that the birth of Jesus really happened the way Matthew and Luke and our Christmas pageants portrayed it. Without difficulty, I took it for granted that Mary really was a virgin; that she and Joseph really did travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born in a stable; that angels really sang in the night sky to the shepherds; that wisemen guided by a special star really came to Bethlehem bearing gifts; and so forth.

  It did not occur to me to wonder, “Now, how much of this is historically factual, and how much is metaphorical narrative?” I simply heard the familiar stories as true. Moreover, it took no effort to do so. It did not require faith. I had no reason to think that things were otherwise than the stories reported.16

  Critical thinking begins in late childhood and early adolescence. One does not need to be an intellectual or go to college or university for this kind of thinking to develop. Rather, it is a natural stage of human development; everybody enters it.17 In this stage, consciously or quite unconsciously, we sift through what we learned as children to see how much of it we should keep. Is there really a tooth fairy? Are babies brought by storks (if children are ever told that anymore)? Did creation really take only six days? Were Adam and Eve real people?

  In modern Western culture, as mentioned in chapter 1, critical thinking is very much concerned with factuality and is thus deeply corrosive of religion in general and Christianity and the Bible in particular. As critical thinkers in that culture, most of us no longer hear the biblical stories as true stories—or at the least their truth has become suspect. Now it takes faith to believe them, and faith becomes believing things that one would normally reject.

  Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

  This way of hearing sacred stories is widespread in premodern cultures. In Arabia, traditional storytellers begin their stories with “This was, and this was not.” In Georgia (the country, not the state), similar words are spoken to introduce a traditional story: “There was, there was, and yet there was not.”18

  A favorite of mine is the way a Native American storyteller begins telling his tribe’s story of creation: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” If you can get your mind around that statement, then you know what postcritical naivete is.

  Importantly, postcritical naivete is not a return to precritical naivete. It brings critical thinking with it. It does not reject the insights of historical criticism but integrates them into a larger whole.

  Let me return to the Christmas stories to illustrate this. Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the Christmas stories once again as true stories, even though one knows with reasonable certainty that the primary elements of the story are not historically factual. Critical thinking in the form of historical criticism sees the story of the virginal conception of Jesus as a continuation of the theme of special births from the Hebrew Bible. It is aware that the story of the special star and the wisemen bringing gifts is not history but rather is almost certainly Matthew’s literary creation based on Isaiah 60. It knows that Jesus was most likely born in Nazareth and not Bethlehem, and so forth.

  In the state of postcritical naivete, one knows that the truth of the birth stories lies in their meanings as metaphorical narratives. Using both biblical and archetypal religious imagery, the birth stories speak about the significance of Jesus and about the divine-human relationship.19

  Though the movement from precritical naivete into critical thinking is inevitable, there is nothing inevitable about moving into the state of postcritical naivete. One can get stuck in the state of critical thinking all of one’s life, as a significant number of people in the modern period do. The initial movement into critical thinking is often experienced as liberating, but if one remains in this state decade after decade, it becomes a very arid and barren place in which to live, like T. S. Eliot’s “wasteland.”

  We need to be led into the state of postcritical naivete. It does not happen automatically. This is one of the major tasks in our time as we learn how to read the Bible using a historical and metaphorical approach.

  In the rest of this book, we will explore what it means to read the Bible as a combination of history and metaphor. Using the tools of historical criticism, we will seek to illuminate the ancient meanings of biblical texts by setting those passages in their historical context. We will also explore the meanings that arise out of taking seriously the fact that the Bible is a religious classic whose texts have a surplus of meaning that goes beyond the particular meanings of the texts in their ancient contexts. We will see what it means to read the Bible as a true story (and as a collection of true stories) about the divine-human relationship.

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  THE HEBREW BIBLE

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  4

  Reading the Creation Stories Again

  We begin with the Hebrew Bible, commonly known among Christians as “the Old Testament.”1

  As in most recent scholarship, I will use the term “Hebrew Bible” instead of “Old Testament,” for two reasons. The first is respect for Judaism. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible is the Bible, not “the Old Testament.”

  The second reason pertains to Christians. For many Christian readers, the adjective “old” implies outmoded or superceded, as if the “New” Testament were intended to replace the “Old” Testament. Commonly accompanying this usage is the notion that the “Old” Testament speaks of a God of law and judgment, whereas the “New” Testament speaks of a God of grace and love. Though this stereotype is widespread among Christians, it is simply wrong: both visions of God appear in both testaments. The notion that the New Testament (and its God) replaces the Old Testament (and its God) was rejected by early Christianity in the second century.2 Despite a continuing Christian tendency to relegate the “Old” Testament to second place, it is for Christians just as much
“Bible,” just as sacred scripture, as is the New Testament. When Christians do not see this, we not only reject much of our heritage but impoverish our understanding of Jesus, the New Testament, and Christianity itself.

  Within the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible has three main divisions. In English, they are called “the Law,” “the Prophets,” and “the Writings.” In Hebrew, they are, respectively, Torah, Neviim, and Kethuvim. The first letters of each of the Hebrew terms form the acronym Tanak, a common Jewish term for the Hebrew Bible as a whole.

  The Torah is the first and foundational division of the Hebrew Bible. It consists of five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Though the books themselves do not say anything about their authorship, both the Jewish and Chris-tian traditions have attributed them to Moses. Thus they are sometimes spoken of as “the five books of Moses.” And though the most common English designation for this group of books is “the Law,” the Torah contains much more than what is commonly meant by the word “law.” The word “torah” itself means more; it can be translated as “instruction” or “teaching.” The Torah does indeed include the laws of Israel, but it also contains the stories of her origins. It is “instruction” and “teaching” about the people’s story and identity, as well as the foundation of their laws. In other words, it combines narrative and legal traditions.

  The Torah is also commonly called “the Pentateuch” (as we saw earlier), a Greek word meaning “the five scrolls.” In fact, this is probably the most commonly used term for these five books.

  The Pentateuch begins with Israel’s stories of creation, to which we now turn.

  Israel’s Stories of the World’s Beginnings

  Ancient Israel’s stories of the world’s beginnings in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are among the best-known parts of the Bible. Almost everybody in Western culture has heard of them:

  The creation of the world in six days

  Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their temptation by a talking serpent, and their expulsion from Eden

  Their sons Cain and Abel, and Cain’s murder of Abel

  The great ages of early people, with Methuselah topping the list at 969 years

  The giants born from the sexual union of “the sons of God” with “the daughters of men”

  Noah’s ark and the great flood

  The building of the Tower of Babel, its destruction by God, and the fragmentation of humankind into different language groups

  Major battles about the factual truth of these stories have marked Western culture in the modern period. Prior to the birth of modernity in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the factual truth of Genesis was accepted in the Jewish and Christian worlds without controversy, even though its stories were not always read literally.3 There was little or no reason to question their factuality. Theology and science alike took it for granted that the universe was relatively young and that the earth and its continents, mountains, oceans, and varieties of life were created in very much the same form in which we now find them. Common estimates of the time of creation ranged from 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE.

  Around 1650, the age of the earth was calculated with great precision by an Anglican archbishop of Dublin named James Ussher. Using the genealogies in Genesis, Ussher concluded that creation occurred in the year 4004 BCE.4 His calculation was made just in time to collide with the birth of modern science. Geology and paleontology soon began to point to an immeasurably older earth. The challenge to the factual reading of the Genesis stories of creation was intensified by Charles Darwin’s argument for evolution in On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Suddenly the issue was not simply the age of the earth but the development of present life forms from much earlier life forms through natural processes.

  The nineteenth century was a time of intense conflict between science and the Bible. Some intellectuals and village atheists delighted in using science to debunk the Bible and Christianity. Among Christians, some adjusted quickly to the new scientific claims and integrated them into a nonliteral reading of Genesis.5 Others felt that the truth of the Bible and Christianity were under attack.

  The controversy continues to this day, though it involves a much smaller number of Christians. Advocates of scientific creationism still defend the factual accuracy of the six-day creation story.6 Expeditions are launched every few years to Mt. Ararat in Turkey, in search of the remains of Noah’s ark. Some still think of the Garden of Eden as a real place and seek to figure out its geographical location. (Most often it is pinpointed somewhere in the Middle East, though I recall seeing a pamphlet arguing that it was in Wisconsin.)

  But contemporary biblical scholarship does not read these stories as historically factual accounts of the world’s beginnings. Instead, it sees them as ancient Israel’s stories of the world’s beginnings and interprets them as profoundly true mythological stories. In this chapter, I will describe these stories as seen through the lens of contemporary scholarship. More specifically, I will offer a historical-metaphorical reading, focusing primarily on the creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis.

  First, though, I will describe how I heard these creation stories the first time.

  Hearing the Creation Stories the First Time

  As a child growing up in the church, I heard the stories in Genesis in a state of precritical naivete and thus heard them as true stories.7 Though I cannot recall a time when I took the six days of creation literally, I am sure I did so in very early childhood. And I would have done so without effort, even as I apparently let go of hearing them literally without conflict. When I learned about dinosaurs and the immense age and size of the universe in elementary school, I did not experience a religious crisis.

  But as I think back on those years, I realize that I continued to take Adam and Eve quite literally as the first two human beings and that letting go of them was more of an issue. In elementary school, I learned about early humanoids with names like Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and Peking.8 But it was not until my teenage years that I was struck by the implications of the evidence of such creatures. When I entered the stage of critical thinking, I began to wonder if I was supposed to identify the earliest of these with Adam and Eve. But I thought of these early humanoids as hulking brutes, perhaps barely capable of language. They did not seem likely candidates for Adam and Eve, whose sons Cain and Abel had engaged in the complex tasks of farming and herding—and Cain had even built a city.

  So I began to take seriously the likelihood that Adam and Eve had not been real people. But if that likelihood turned out to be true, what were we to make of the story of the first sin, commonly called “the fall,” in the Garden of Eden? If “the fall” was not historical, how (I wondered) would this affect the Christian story of universal sin, our need for redemption, and Jesus’ death as the necessary sacrifice? Something more seemed to be at stake in the historical factuality of Adam and Eve and “the fall” than was involved in lengthening the six days of creation to geological epochs. Resolving these questions was a major theological problem for me. As I wrestled with it, the foundations of my religious understanding began to shake. If the story of Adam and Eve was not “true” (as a modern teenager, I thought of truth as that which was factual), what happened to the truth of the Bible and Christianity as a whole?

  I now see these chapters quite differently. Reading them through the lens of historical scholarship and with sensitivity to their meanings as metaphorical narratives has enabled me once again to see them as profoundly true stories. And because their purpose is not to provide a factually accurate account of the world’s beginnings, it is beside the point to argue whether they are accurate or mistaken factual accounts. They are not God’s stories of the world’s beginnings; rather, they are ancient Israel’s stories of the world’s beginnings.

  As we look at these stories now, we will ask two key questions: Why did ancient Israel tell these stories? And why did they tell them this way? A hi
storical-metaphorical approach provides illuminating answers to both.

  Historical Illumination

  The first eleven chapters of Genesis need to be understood not only as the introduction to the Pentateuch, but also in the context of the Pentateuch as a whole.

  They are ancient Israel’s stories of her prehistory. By that I mean two things. First, they are Israel’s account of humankind in the time before her own particular history, a history whose telling begins with the stories of Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of Israel. Abraham and Sarah, then, are the first historical figures in the Bible.9 Their names appear in a genealogy at the end of Genesis 11, and the story of their call to be the ancestors of Israel begins in Genesis 12. Everything before them is Israel’s prehistory and functions as a prologue to the Pentateuch and Israel’s story of her own ancestors.

  Second, to call these early chapters of Genesis prehistory means that they are not to be read as historical accounts. Rather, as ancient Israel’s stories about the remote beginnings before there was an Israel, they are to be read as a particular kind of metaphorical narrative—namely, as myths, about which I will soon say more. For now, I simply note that while myths are not literally true, they can nevertheless be profoundly true, rich in powerfully persuasive meanings.