5.1 Part I: “The Anchor Bible Project and the Patriarchs”
Monday 29.12.1980
MANNIS: “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. He was present with God in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, and apart from him not a thing came to be. That which had come to be in him was life, and this life was the light of men. The light shines on in the darkness, for the darkness did not overcome it.”
GERMAIN: And so begins the
Gospel of John, part of the Biblical text. But is this Biblical text as we know
it myth or reality? Did figures such as Abraham and Moses exist? How
significant are the Dead Sea Scrolls for an understanding of the Bible? What
does the sensational discovery of previously unknown gospels at Nag Hammadi
in
The series is written by
Alex Groper of the
It has become increasingly
evident that a number of archaeological discoveries are casting doubt on the
historical value of some important Bible stories, and this is causing a number
of scholars to take up the task of retranslating the Bible in the light of
this new archaeological evidence. Tonight “The Bible and
Archaeology” begins with a look at one of the major publishing ventures
of our time, the Anchor Bible project, a 60-volume translation of the Bible
being published by Doubleday. Professor Carey Moore of
MANNIS: The qualities that Prof. Moore mentioned are vividly exemplified
by Dr. David Noel Freedman, Director of the Program on Studies in Religion at
the
FREEDMAN: There is, in my opinion, a very close relationship between the study of archaeology and the work of Biblical studies, but it comes at the point of history, a narrative. Much of the Bible is narrative and therefore we would expect archaeological research to provide background information and illumination on especially customs and practices and I'd say the framework on which the Biblical story is told. It's clear that archaeology can produce information that would bear on any book of the Bible and when it comes to particular words or linguistic questions generally, that certainly remains true. The areas in which people are most interested have to do with historicity, the verification or the disproof of Biblical narrative. This remains highly controversial and, characteristically, because the Bible is about a small people, a fairly unimportant collection of people, cities, events and so on, the points of contact are relatively limited.
GERMAIN: Despite the overall relevance of archaeological data for a better understanding of the Bible it still takes meticulous scholarship to put the massive amounts of material in a proper context. As editor of the Anchor Bible, Prof. Freedman is faced with the difficult task of choosing the scholarly contributors to the series and determining the criteria for their selection.
FREEDMAN: The basic approach was to get the best scholars to do the different books of the Bible on the basis of their reputation, their previous record and their interest, especially in the relationship of archaeological discoveries to the Bible. But the objective was first of all to have a non-sectarian commentary which would not be sponsored by or written by people belonging to a single denomination or a single confessional group. so that from the beginning, Protestants, Catholics and Jews were enlisted in this cause and people without any particular connection with religion at all. The basic charter for the Anchor Bible was to reproduce the original text in language that could be read and understood by anybody and to explain it in terms of what the supposed intention of the author was and to do for the modern reader enough in the way of background and explanatory information so that the modern reader would be as well-placed as the original hearer or reader of those words.And to me theological inference or development or speculation is outside of this particular commentary.
GERMAIN: According to Prof.
Freedman, one of the most important archaeological discoveries for the Anchor
Bible translation has been the unearthing of a large number of inscribed clay
tablets at the site of
FREEDMAN: The general opinion is that the language of Ugarit, in the period of the tablets, which is roughly the middle of the Second Millennium BC, let's say around 1400 on, the so-called Amarna Age, the language of Ugarit is certainly a Semitic language, generally regarded as a Northwest Semitic language, therefore belonging to the same family or group as Biblical Hebrew, and since most of the Hebrew Bible was written and set down from the end of the Second Millennium to the beginning of the First Millennium BC, the relationship would be of a slightly earlier close relative in the case of Ugarit since the materials on which most of the attention have been put are poetic epic materials from Ugarit, the bearing upon the Hebrew tradition, not only the prose but especially Hebrew poetry, has been enormous. What has emerged, and I don't think there's much controversy on this point, is that the poetic tradition of Israel is a lineal descent that comes right out of classic, ancient Canaanite tradition, of which the Ugarit tablets are an excellent example.
GERMAIN: In fact, at times the Ugaritic tablets are identical to Biblical passages. For example, in the Epic of Baal we have “Behold your enemy, Baal, behold you will kill your enemy! Behold you will annihilate your foes! You will take your eternal kingship, your dominion for ever and ever,” whereas in Psalm 92 we read, “Behold your enemies, Yahweh, behold your enemies have perished. All evildoers have been scattered. Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom, your rule is for ever and ever.” Marvin Pope, Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages at YaleUniversity, is another distinguished contributor to the Anchor Bible. He discusses his use of the Ugaritic material with Alex Groper.
GROPER: How has Ugaritic specifically aided you in your translation of Job in the Anchor Bible series?
POPE: Well, I think, again, that there’s probably no book of the Bible on which the Ugaritic text has made more contribution and has more relevant impact than the Book of Job. The reason there is quite simple: Ugaritic is our oldest and most extensive existing west Semitic poetry and besides the philological and poetic forms it also supplies the mythology, the religion, the mythological poems, the doings of the gods and goddesses of the pre-Israelite west Semitic religion of Syria.
GERMAIN: Prof. Pope has used Ugaritic to help clarify an obscure verse in Job. “Forthwith she sets face towards El at the springs of the two rivers, amidst the channels of the two deeps. She penetrates the domain of El and enters the pavilion of the king, Father of Exalted Ones.”Prof. Pope compared this passage to the one in which Job searches for wisdom: “In the rocks he hews out channels, his eye sees every precious thing. The sources of the rivers he probes, bringing hidden things to light. But wisdom, where can it be found? Where is the place of understanding?” The result was that the obscure reference to the merging of the rivers could now be traced to a specific place in Northern Syria, near the site of Ugarit. Yet despite the great usefulness of Ugaritic for Biblical studies and the obvious similarities between the language of Ugarit and the Hebrew of the Bible, there are irreconcilable differences between the two cultures. Prof. Freedman:
FREEDMAN: The contrast between the religion of Israel and the religion of Ugarit is total. Ugaritic religion is predictable, it belongs in a spectrum of Near Eastern religion and there are variations in detail, but it fits the Fertile Crescent like a glove. Biblical religion—no matter how much the details, the colouring of the language is affected by its context—is unpredictable. You could not produce Biblical religion simply by putting together elements from the other religions. On the other hand, the Israelites spoke a language which non-Israelites spoke, they lived in a culture which was common to all. they used the same kind of pottery, they lived in the same kind of houses; in other words, everybody must recognize this dual character of the Biblical tradition, it is part of its context, part of the general cultural, linguistic, literary history, but it is also quite distinctive.The distinctiveness of Biblical tradition is not, I think, in its use of figures of speech, and not in its use of metrical patterns but rather in the specific content, centring around the notion of a single god. Monotheism is a dangerous word to use but I don’t know what word we can use to define the Biblical religion against its environment; about that I also don’t think there’s much question.
GERMAIN: The Anchor Bible translator is not only faced with crucial religious issues, but as Prof. Carey Moore found out, with problems of a more mundane nature.
MOORE: In my studies in Esther I decided that there was one book that I needed that was published in Paris in 1848 in Latin and it was a translation of an Aramaic work which had probably at one time been in Greek. Now a book like that—1848, Paris, France—is not in very many libraries. I told our librarian here what I wanted, I gave her the information and within one week I had it in my hands. Now I think the story is interesting because it underscores the desire all of the Anchor people have for examining lots of evidence in books and articles that we should look at but we should not expect other people to. Time and time again I’ve been disappointed by some of the “good promising books” in the field, and time and time again I’ve been surprised by an obscure article or by perhaps an obscure writer and I think that the Doubleday project requires that the scholar does all of his homework.There was a 16th century form critic scholar of England who said that 90% of what he had to read was not worth reading, but he had to read it in order to know that. I think that it must be the experience of all the Anchor translators that when you start out, you read dozens and dozens of articles and books in English, French and German and Hebrew, Latin—when you’re finished, you can make a list. There are exceptions, but you could probably make a list of less than twenty books and articles which, had you read only those, you might have known 90% of what you later on knew by doing all the rest. But the point is that you can’t know that until after you’ve got it. It’s like going through a maze: you know that there are some blind alleys but until you try this one you don’t know that. And this, I think, while frustrating, is also part of the joy of research, because there are times when it’s frustrating—you work so hard before you solve the problem to your satisfaction, and in some instances you may never solve it to your satisfaction—but then there are those gratifying instances when very quickly it would seem, and subsequent reviewers and subsequent scholars seem to concur, that this is the right answer. So it’s the uncertainty, it’s the quest.
GERMAIN: And probably the most important quest which lies at the heart of the Anchor Bible project has been going on for almost 2 000 years: the quest for the true word of God.
MOORE: Now it was roughly around 90 AD, in the generation after the destruction of Jerusalem, that the Jewish people, their rabbis, their priests and scribes, addressed themselves to the question of what was God’s holy word. Their decision represents what we call today the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament. The problem is, however, that we do not have a transcript of what happened there at Jamnia, which is the name of the small town in Palestine where the rabbis and scribes all convened and made their decisions. the earliest mention of the books of the Old Testament which might be of value is Josephus, who tells us that the Jews had 22 sacred books. the problem is that he doesn't tell us what 22. Then in the 2nd century AD, we have a Hebrew list and the book of Esther is included—but the problem is complicated by the fact that as late as the 3rd and 4th century AD there in Palestine there were Jewish scholars who did not regard the Book of Esther as canonical. Two of them, Rabbi Huna [benHiyyah] and one other fellow were going through a number of sacred books and they came upon the book of Esther and said, “this doesn’t defile the hands”, which is to say, it’s not a holy book. Scholars investigating the canonical history of other books have been able to establish that the book of Ecclesiastes, for instance, was not wholeheartedly accepted by all of the Jews, and it’s a complicated story—and it’s not just complicated, there are a lot of missing pages, that’s the truth of the matter—the evidence is missing and lots of people draw all sorts of inferences from lack of statements.
GERMAIN: Though archaeology cannot provide us with all of the answers, it can give us surprising insights. For Prof. Moore, even a visit to a museum can illuminate an obscure verse from Esther.
“The king gave a week-long party for all of the men staying in the acropolis of Susa, for both the important and the unimportant alike, in the courtyard of the king’s pavilion. The courtyard was decorated with white and violet cotton curtains, which were fastened by linen and purple cords through silver rings to marble columns, and couches of gold and silver were on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl and coloured stones. And the drinks were served in gold goblets with no two alike.”
MOORE: Whenever I go to the MetropolitanMuseum in New York City, one of the places I always go is into the Persian exhibit, because there is a magnificent—and I have a picture of it in my book—of one of the drinking cups of the Persian king. And it’s a winged lion, and it’s a beautiful thing. And I think that the reason I’m bringing this out is that it underscores for me one of the principle values of archaeology; namely, it illuminates, it clarifies. I don’t know what people visualize when they read that the king had a great banquet and the people drank from goblets of gold and each cup was different, one from the other. I suspect that unless they’re very different from most people they tend to think of a gold goblet sort of something analogous to something we ourselves drink from. And yet the ancient Persians didn’t have goblets like that so far as I’m aware; their goblets were very differently shaped so that once you have seen this breathtakingly beautiful gold goblet you can never read the book of Esther in the same way.
GERMAIN: It’s amazing how such a small thing as a goblet can change our understanding of the Biblical text. Dr. Kevin O’Connell is currently translating the Book of Exodus for the Anchor Bible. He believes that the Bible itself is still changing.
O’CONNELL: The Bible, and religious literature in general is not a closed, not a fixed frozen unit, but it’s something alive and changing and developing. In itself it contains contradictions and different points of view, all of which, at different points of time are helpful to us. The point is not to find that perspective which say, unifies everything, or that perspective which is most congenial with my presuppositions and say, “that’s what the Bible means.” But it’s rather to listen to the interactions between these different sources over the centuries, to understand that every one of them has strengths and weaknesses.
GERMAIN: If the Bible is still in a state of evolution, can such a project as the Anchor Bible, with its vast scholarly resources, get at the truth of the Biblical narratives? Prof. Carey Moore:
MOORE: I think that it would not be fair to say that the readers of the Anchor Bible or any other great publication read the “truth”. The truth is, the truth is a fairly elusive thing. I was struck in preparation for this program by the fact that I reread what I had written in the Introduction in 1971, and I found that there were points there that I no longer agreed with, that I wish I could do a revised version, because there's been subsequent study done by myself; there's been work done by other scholars, and therefore the biblical scholar is never announcing the truth, but rather but what he sees today on the basis of the evidence. This is something I learned from Dr. [William F.] Albright. It was a standing joke at Johns Hopkins [University], “What does Dr. Albright think today? Because this most-published man was constantly revising his thinking and when he first told us why, I didn't agree with it, I guess I didn't understand it. But what he said at one point was that a scholar that says something clearly, not categorically, not in a pontifical fashion, but says something clearly, without a whole host of qualifying phrases and all of that, avoiding such things as “it seems to me”, “it's quite possible that”, “perhaps”—you know. But a scholar says something clear and offers his reason, that that scholar does more for scholarship—even if he be 90% wrong—than the scholar that has perhaps many more of the “true answers” but has so many qualifying phrases, so many caveats and the like, that he can never really be proven wrong.
GERMAIN: If the scholars are so unsure about their own work, how much do we really know about what happened in ancient biblical times? We can only speculate about the Creation and the Flood, but by the time we reach the Hebrew patriarchs, we expect to know the facts. We would like to believe that at some point the Bible reflects real history and the people in it are real people.
Let's start with the Patriarchs. They were the ones to whom god gave the land of Israel.
JACKSON: “The Lord said to Abram, Leave your own country, your kinsmen, and your father's house, and go to a country that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation.”
MANNIS: “And Abram set out as the Lord had bidden him, and journeyed from Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan with his nephew, Lot, his wife, Sarah, and all his household.
JACKSON: “After Lot and Abram had parted, the Lord said to Abram, Raise your eyes and look into the distance from the place where you are. North and south, east and west, all the land you will see I will give you and your descendants forever. I will make your descendants countless as the dust of the earth. Now go through the length and the breadth of the land, for I give it to you.”
GERMAIN: Abraham is the first of the patriarchs. God renewed his promise to his son, Isaac, and to his son, Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel. One of Jacob's twelve sons is Joseph, who is known for interpreting dreams.His brothers sell him into slavery and Joseph is taken into Egypt, where eventually he becomes the Pharaoh's prime minister. The question is: are we dealing with historical events and real people? Dr. Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool, in England, is one of the scholars who is looking for the historical Abraham. His method is to take a detail from one of the stories and see if it can be confirmed.
KITCHEN: There's an interesting thing in the patriarchal period, an interesting detail, which still shouldn't be overlooked, and that is how much they paid for Joseph, sold for twenty shekels. The correct average price for a promising young man in about the 18th century [BC], far too expensive for the 3rd millennium when 15 would have sufficed, dirt cheap for Moses' day or the Persian Empire, when it runs from 30 - 80 shekels, and I can't see our dear Hebrews as being either diddled or being able to diddle anybody else. So he fits in the early 2nd millennium on a detail like that.
KOLOS: Joseph, in the Joseph narrative, is said to possess a multi-coloured robe. Do we know whether the ancient Hebrews really wore multi-coloured robes?
KITCHEN: In the strictest sense, of course, no, since we have no illustrations of the Bible from the Bible, but it is possible to look at the famous pictures of the Semites in the scene of BeniHassan in the tomb of the Monarch Mentuhotep in the Middle kingdom, which I think would be earlier than Joseph; some might think it would be nearly contemporary. And there they're certainly wearing long coloured garments, and similar styles, broadly speaking, are still popular in the New Kingdom in Egypt. The Canaanites who come to Egypt in the days of 1500, 1400, 1300 BC and the amusing thing is that the translation “coat of many colours” is not absolutely certain; there are some who think it means “a coat of long sleeves” and this is one of those rare examples, I think, of where you can have your cake and eat it because these coats are multi-coloured and often have long sleeves. So you can translate it either way and still have archaeological confirmation if you so wish. It's a bit of a gem.
GERMAIN: Dr. Kitchen is also prepared to look to Mesopotamia for customs which may explain a Biblical episode. For example, there is Abraham's messy domestic situation. He has two wives and two sons. While Dr. Kitchen looks at the Bible as history most Biblical scholars would rather look at how the Bible was written. Certainly Abraham did not write his own autobiography. Professor Frank Moore Cross is the Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at HarvardUniversity and is one of the leading Biblical scholars of our time. He believes that the story of the Patriarchs was around a long time before it was written down.
CROSS: The Biblical material which we have concerning the Patriarchs, including Abraham as the central figure, are materials which have a long traditional history. In their present form, in my opinion, they were edited in the [Babylonian] Exile in the 6th century BC (or BCE) so the traditions concerning the Patriarchs are deposited at a fairly late date in history. If one then turns to literary traditions this is roughly what one sees in the Abrahamic story. You're getting a movement of peoples, you're not getting a man, Abraham, who does this and that. I hasten to say that if you read carefully patriarchal traditions you are frequently moving in a dizzying fashion between a tribe and a people and an individual. So the material itself clearly is reflecting what the ancestors were like in general, what the people was like as well stories which are individually focused.
GERMAIN: To Prof. Cross the patriarchal stories are the culmination of a long line of Biblical story telling. Again, we have to ask whether these stories are basically true or represent fables and myths. Abraham Malamot, Professor of Biblical History at the HebrewUniversity in Jerusalem, thinks that it is a combination of both.
MALAMOT: Well, you see, there are really two extreme approaches which neither of them is satisfactory. On the one hand the purely fundamentalistic approach to Biblical tradition, which accepts almost with blind—blindly—the tradition as such.And of course this is from a scientific point unacceptable, non-permissible. On the other hand there is this so-called—forgive me for the expression—”nihilistic” approach which claims that the entire proto-history of Israel is fictitious and is the outcome, the literary outcome, of the third millennium. Some, like Van Sittart and Thompson go to very late times, Van Sittart especially even to the Babylonian Exile and later. And this nihilistic approach throws the entire Biblical tradition overboard. Now on universal principles, I would say, a tradition has an historical value in itself. We see this in the modern research on Homer, on the Iliad, on the Odyssey, which is parallel to the Biblical proto-history from a methodological point of view. We give today much more credibility to what is called “tradition.”You see, instead of negating the entire Biblical tradition pertaining to the proto-history of Israel, I would rather introduce a very well-known concept of anachronisms.Of course, we know that the proto-histories has been transferred orally for many generations. I spoke before of the Patriarchal times, of hundreds of years. Now in the process of transfer there crept, of course, into the tradition, anachronisms when this tradition was put into writing, like with Homer.
GERMAIN: Anachronism represents misplaced concepts in time. They can be found in the literature of any period.
MALAMOT: Perhaps you remember that [in Shakespeare's play] in the night prior to Julius Caesar's being murdered, Brutus hears the clock striking three. Now, this is a sheer anachronism. Shakespeare took the churches of his own time with the bells striking and put them into Caesar's Rome.
GERMAIN: Anachronisms take many forms. Theodore Gaster, Professor Emeritus of Religion at BarnardCollege, ColumbiaUniversity, and author of the book, Thespes, [and of the book, The Dead Sea Scriptures, the best-known edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in English] is convinced that our idea of how the ancient Near Eastern people lived, is wrong.
GASTER: Well, what I am basically trying to do in Thespes and in all my other works is to try and draw a picture of how a man in the ancient Near East—and by ancient Near east I mean something between the 2nd and 1st millennia BC—how these people looked at the world, what happens when a Babylonian, let's say, woke up in the morning and he had no idea of a universe and he had no idea of nature and he had no idea of time in our sense. Well, what kind of a world was he entering into day by day? What was moulding his thoughts? And then I tried to find the echoes of this, or representations if you like, in religion. I'd try to say to myself, well, now these people had ideas about death. But if they had different ideas of what a human person was, then their view of death is going to be very different from our's. They're not going to talk about the dissolution of body and soul. If somebody comes to me and says, what's the Babylonian's idea of the soul? My answer is: that's the wrong question! You've got to ask, what did the Babylonians have instead of the soul? Not what—it's as absurd to ask what's their idea of the soul as to ask what was their idea of electricity. You're going to commit continual—what I call ideological anachronisms. That's merely a 64 dollar—or perhaps I should say here 64 shekel word!—for as if you're doing the same sort of thing as when you draw a picture of Moses and put spectacles on him.
GERMAIN: When we think of the Patriarchs, we see them riding camels over long desert journeys. The Bible specifically mentions that they owned camels but did they? Professor Malamot:
MALAMOT: We know, and here I accept Albright's investigations of the entire issue, that the camel became domesticated only beginning with the 13th and especially 12th century [BC] so there were no domesticated camels, and I don't speak about the single camel, before that period. It means if Abraham had camels, or if the Patriarchs crossed the desert from Palestine to Aram, Haran and back or to Egypt on camels, this is anachronism because the Patriarchs belonged to a social set-up of ethnomads. You see, I can bring even mathematical proofs: out of the 20 000 documents found at Mari, not a single one does mention a camel in connection with any of the Canaanite caravans; all of these caravans used the ass or donkey and on the other hand you have Egyptian portrayal of the 2nd millennium and there does not occur in, let us say, Sinai, a single picture of a camel, of Canaanites going down to Egypt on camels, but only on asses.
GERMAIN: Prof. Kitchen also follows the trail of the camel and comes to a different conclusion.
KITCHEN: One has to go through the whole of the evidence for genuine camels, would-be camels and non-camels, and very curious evidence has been offered. And I think that there's just about enough to show that really the animal was known in the 3rd millennium but it would have been wild and therefore irrelevant. In the 2nd millennium, early and middle and late, there's just enough evidence to suggest that it was a known animal that could have beenused and domesticated, but not in an urban context. It's outside of the urban context, as Abraham himself is for the most part. There's a lexical list which originated in Mesopotamia, in their classic form in the early 2nd millennium—they occur there—and there's a famous example at Tell-el-Alarkh which may be a camel.It could also be a reindeer or something else unusual; it's a matter of reading of signs, and there's a small statuette from Byblos which is certainly the figure of a camel, a kneeling camel. The famous professor Albright said it has no hump; in this case the reason is simple—the hump was socketed in. If you look at the actual animal, it's missing, so when you get down to arguing over humps it does become rather pathetic. Perhaps, I think there is sufficient evidence to say that the camel is an exotic creature used to a limited extent, and that's all it appears as in genesis. It's not the main animal, the main animal was the donkey or the ass, and camels and horses are very much on the margin and used on the marginal areas of the land. I think it's as simple as that.
GERMAIN: Anachronisms sometimes have greater significance than humps on a camel's back. When it comes to God's promise to Abraham Prof. Cross finds a political anachronism.
CROSS: It's interesting that the promise which is given is precisely for the land and the land in question conforms precisely to the limits of the Davidic-Solomonic state, which indicates that the tradition, at least in my opinion, was shaped at least at one period by the ideal imperial boundaries of ancient Israel. Hence the present form obviously of the revelation to Abraham at this point and the Covenant of Abraham has been reworked in light of later interests.
GERMAIN: These “later interests” are the people who wrote down the patriarchal stories and committed these anachronisms. They even confused the people whom Abraham met with people of a much later time. Dr. Kitchen:
KITCHEN: If the narrative in Genesis was being scribed in at the earliest the days of Moses, if you were very conservative, a thousand years later if you're not, then it could be a term of a later period used for people of an earlier period. The interesting thing about the so-called Genesis Philistines is that they're completely different in their character and nature from those of the Classic Period, of the Judges, they're not warlike, they don't live in the Pentapolis, they haven't got Philistine names (if we know what those are, really), they might even be Asiatic names—they seem to be completely different from the later Philistines. I wonder if, in fact, they're a scribal change from a term like “Kyreti”, the inhabitants of Crete and the Aegean Isles, the area traditionally where people bring Philistines from.
GERMAIN: If Abraham is said in these stories to have met people who did not exist until five hundred years later, did he live at all? nearly every scholar agrees that the patriarchal stories have a kernel of truth in them. But as stories, passed on from generation to generation, something else happened to them. Professor Malamot of the HebrewUniversity:
MALAMOT: Erstwhile personalities like Abraham or Eber, who is supposedly identified with one of the kings of Ebla—Ebrom—might have been in actuality historical personalities in the 3rd millennium and became later mythologized. You see, I could use a joke, a kind of joke. I always, when I'm asked, “Did Abraham actually live?” or for that matter, did Moses live, I mostly answer, “no, definitely they did not live. But they had cousins by the name of Abraham or Moses!”Here you have the entire problematics in a nutshell. It must not be this Abraham who is mentioned in the Bible, but the figure as such makes historical sense with literary embellishment.
GERMAIN: Literary embellishment often gives way to imaginative flurries, but in the ancient Near East both the written and the spoken word were considered sacred. The literary embellishments of the Biblical stories do not get carried away by flurries of the storyteller's imagination. The religious undercurrent tempered literary expression, but allowed mythology to flourish. Is this to mean that there are myths in the patriarchal stories? Prof. Theodore Gaster:
GASTER: A myth is a function of religious psychology and not of literature, and literature is merely one medium. In the same way that a tune is one medium of music, but a tune is not in itself music. The myth is an abstraction and myth can express itself in ritual, in art, in language and in 101 other ways. One is the story in Genesis of Jacob at the Brook of Jabbok.
JACKSON: “And the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, We came to thy brother Esau, and he comes to meet thee with four hundred men. Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. And he rose up that night and took his two wives and his two womenservants and his eleven sons and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them and sent them over the brook, and he sent over all that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”
GASTER: Jacob is being chased by Esau and…[tape change]…with very good reason, and he comes to the Brook of Jabbok and he sees a mysterious character and this character is described in the Biblical narrative in one passage as a god, in another passage as a man, and when Hosea the prophet alludes to this incident he calls him an angel. So let's compromise and say that he's a supernatural character and leave it at that. Now, what is the real story? The story is that when a man is going to cross a river, the current may be against him. And therefore in many civilizations it is believed that the river is being infested, so to speak, with what I'm going to call “Mr. Current”. And Mr. Current has to be, is full of folk motifs. A lot of people get shocked at this, they say, “What! the Bible full of folk motifs?” So let me if I may inject one word about that. A lot of people have said that this is infidel stuff, and so on. The point is this, that if the Bible is the word of God then you are saying two things about it. You are not saying only it's of God, you are saying it's a word, and you're saying that whatever revelation—whatever you may mean by that—whatever revelation there is in the Bible is channelled and canalized through the human intellect and therefore is going to be expressed in terms of folklore, vocabulary of whatever culture the particular writer happens to belong to, and there's nothing wrong whatsoever with saying that the Bible writers use contemporary folklore just as preachers in the Middle Ages used to illustrate their sermons by common stories. There' s nothing exceptional in saying that at all, and people should not be frightened any more than if I come along and say to my daughter, “Now look, I don't want you to let wolves whistle after you in the street. Look what happened to Red Riding Hood.” I don't have to prove that the Red Riding Hood story is historical. The point of my telling the story is its moral value. If you say of the Bible the Bible is true, you are not saying the same thing as saying it's accurate. The Hebrew writer takes the story of a man struggling at a river and they'll say that's Jacob, and we'll take stories of men chopping down trees and saying “I did it with my little axe” and we'll say that's George Washington. The story is found anywhere and therefore one of the ways of making a mythological story applicable to a particular environment is a) to identify the hero with a quasi-historical character, to identify the places with places which are well-known—this happened in Brooklyn, then the Brooklynites are immediately interested.
GERMAIN: There is another dimension to the traditional and folkloric nature of the patriarchal stories. They form the basis of the modern Judaeo-Christian religion. This religion and the history of the state of Israel would both be a lie if such stories were disregarded. Prof. Malamot:
MALAMOT: What is meant by tradition? These are stories, narratives, oral and sometimes supported in written records, which go down from generation to generation. Of course they have literary embellishments. They are involved with folk stories, but we cannot do away with them as pure fictitious material. And on this point I would say that the tradition in itself has historical value. Should all this early Biblical tradition been forged, for a forgery you need two partners: the one who forges and the one who is ready to accept such a forgery. Now I ask, are the people of Israel, who are so well-known for their deep historical consciousness, a partner to a forgery or an acceptance of an entirely fabricated early history of their antecedents?
GERMAIN: Tonight, on “Ideas” you've heard the first in a five-part series on “The Bible and Archaeology.” Tonight’s program, “The Anchor Bible Project and the Patriarchs”, was prepared and written by Alex Groper, who teaches archaeology at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and is a director of the university’s Society for Mediterranean Studies, and Daniel Kolos, Egyptologist and freelance broadcaster on the ancient Near East. The series is produced by Richard Handler. Technical assistance for tonight’s program was by Lorne Tulk. Readings were by Harry Mannis and Lorna Jackson. the executive producer of “Ideas” is Geraldine Sherman. A reading list is available for the series by writing “Ideas”, Box 500 Station “A”, Toronto, OntarioM5W 1E6. Join us tomorrow night when we’ll look at the children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land of Canaan. For “Ideas”, I’m Russ Germain. Good night.
