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 Open
for Interpretation
By
Margaret Black
The
Bible: A Biography
By
Karen Armstrong Atlantic Monthly Press, 302 pages, $21.95
Karen Armstrong writes with such sanity, sympathy, and clarity
about a subject fraught with polemical hysteria that you almost
ignore her substance because you’re appreciating her form.
No wonder she is admired by members of all three Abrahamic
faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)—she discusses their
commonalities and differences with such palpable good will,
all the while applying sense and strict analysis to the discussion
at hand.
In The Bible: A Biography, Armstrong does just what
the title asserts, she tells the life story (to date) of the
collection of writings which came to be called the Old and
the New Testament. Not content with simply outlining the production
and collation of the diverse works that make up the Bible,
she carries the story forward to the present day, sketching
how the Bible was read, regarded, used, and interpreted through
the Middle Ages, past the Enlightenment, into the present
day. Here lies the most serious problem with the book. Written
to accommodate the requirements of the series for which it
was written—Books That Changed the World—the volume is simply
too short for the scope covered, especially since it is written
for a general audience. Nevertheless, it has certain great
strengths.
Armstrong emphasizes an important point for contemporary readers,
that scripture, the written sacred documents of Judaism
and Christianity, had long oral beginnings, and that in both
these faiths, “even after they were committed to writing,
there was a bias toward the spoken word. . . . From the very
beginning, people feared that a written scripture encouraged
inflexibility and unrealistic, strident certainty.” Alas,
that has repeatedly been so.
Our author’s account begins during the “Babylonian captivity”
of the Jews in the sixth century bce. It was then that the
hand of God proffered a scroll to the young priest Ezekiel,
saying “Eat this scroll.” Armstrong calls it a prophetic moment
for “the time would come when Israelites would make contact
with their God in sacred writings, rather than a shrine.”
In Babylon, priests began reviewing and editing the many scrolls
they had brought with them from Jerusalem, hoping that this
collection would help their people remain a coherent nation.
They “did not regard these writings as sacrosanct and felt
free to add new passages, altering them to fit their changed
circumstances. They had as yet no notion of a sacred text.”
Eventually three collections developed: the Torah (the teachings
of God), the Prophets, and the “writings” (a lot of “other”
texts, many of which came to be known as “Wisdom”).
Armstrong artfully brings the influence of Hellenistic thought
into the deliberations of various commentators and locates
the visionary book of Daniel (joined at the hip, nowadays,
with the Apocalypse of St. John) squarely in the midst of
a political crisis, the Maccabean war. From there she moves
to the various radical Jewish sects at the turn of the millennium,
and the story of a new Jewish sect that transforms into Christianity.
Here begins what is one of Armstrong’s greatest strengths
in this little book. She interweaves discussions of Christians
coming to grips with their faith and the developing scriptures
of the New Testament with analysis of similar processes occurring
in Judaism, which simultaneously experienced a great efflorescence
of intellectual activity and the development of midrash,
or scriptural exegesis. This process of midrash was important
because “the meaning of the text was not self-evident. The
exegete had to go in search of it, because every time a Jew
confronted the Word of God in scripture, it signified something
different. Scripture was inexhaustible.” Most readers will
at best be familiar with one history or the other, but not
with both.
Nor will many readers know how profoundly each story was shaped
by the political, economic, and social circumstances of each
succeeding era. With Christianity, we need only think of the
radical shift from a persecuted faith to legalization and
shortly thereafter to establishment as the state religion.
Doubtless in part because her space was limited, Armstrong’s
story from here on analyzes only Latin Christianity and European
Judaism. During the early Middle Ages, some Christian scholars
saw the need to learn Hebrew and understand what the texts
of the Old Testament meant to Jews, while during the same
period, Jews living peaceably in the Muslim world were applying
the rational approaches of the Greek philosophers to an understanding
of their scriptures. One characteristic of the Protestant
reformation was its reliance on the Bible as the sole source
of religious authority.
As Armstrong points out, however, “Sola scriptura had
been a noble, if controversial ideal. But in practice it meant
that everybody had a God-given right to interpret these extremely
complex documents as they chose.” With the expansion of scientific
rationalism in the eighteenth century, both Jewish and Christian
scholars began looking at their documents afresh, but at the
same time, especially in the besieged world of Jewry, there
was an upsurge of mysticism, which eschewed such an approach
to the divine altogether. Armstrong races us through to the
present day, where she points out that an “emphasis on the
literal reflects the modern ethos, but is a breach with tradition,
which usually preferred some kind of figurative or innovative
interpretation.”
Armstrong fears for the life of her subject, fears that the
Bible is in danger of becoming a dead letter or "a toxic arsenal
that fuels hatred and sterile polemic." She seeks "the development
of a more compassionate hermeneutics," one that "could provide
an important counter-narrative in our discordant world." Amen
to that.
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