The Bible Doesn't Say That Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the way that one thing leads unpredictably to the next, Irene Goodman can take double credit for this book. For nearly a decade she has been my agent, trusted friend, and guide to the world of publishing. She found a publisher first for my book about Bible translation, then for my exploration of material left out of the Bible; this time, she even suggested a topic, hoping that I would write this book. I did. Thank you, Irene, for your help and for your kindness.

  Irene also introduced me to the wonderful folks at Thomas Dunne Books.

  Though writing a book is mostly a solitary endeavor, publishing one requires a team, and the nature of that team in large part determines the quality of the experience. In this regard I have been fortunate. My primary contact at Thomas Dunne Books, Peter Joseph, has offered support and guidance that have made me a better writer, and his pleasant demeanor has made the process of creating this book a thoroughly enjoyable one. Thank you, Peter.

  Peter’s team includes a variety of other talented people, and I’m grateful to them: Melanie Fried, his assistant; Terry McGarry, for her diligent and insightful copy editing; Rob Grom, for designing the cover; Laura Clark, team leader; David Stanford Burr, production editor; Joy Gannon, production manager; Karlyn Hixson, in charge of marketing; and Kathryn Hough, publicist.

  It was Tom Dunne’s vision to put these people together, so I’m in his debt both for publishing my work and for introducing me to these people. I’m similarly indebted to Sally Richardson, St. Martin’s Press Publisher.

  Bowen Road, West Fourth Street, West Sixty-eighth Street, and Hooker Avenue have something in common: They have all been home to remarkable communities of creativity, support, collegiality, and enthusiasm. It has been my great fortune to be part of all four, and I’m especially grateful to the people I met at each one.

  Space obviously doesn’t permit me to list every person who has helped me reach where I am today, but I must single out a few, starting with my father, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. In addition to everything else that he has done for me, he has been my lifelong study partner.

  I’m also particularly grateful to: Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, who helped me thrive; Marc Brettler, for his compassion and knowledge; Rabbi Billy and Cantor Ellen Dreskin, for their support, honesty, and wisdom; David and Karen Frank, for their kindness and thoughtfulness, and for opening so many doors; Rabbi Stuart Geller, for his compassion, support, and humor; Rabbis Paul Golomb and Shoshana Hantman, for keeping me sane (or am I assuming facts not in evidence?); Jennifer Hammer at NYU Press, for publishing my first book in a way that made me want to continue; Danny Maseng, for expanding my horizons; Doug Mishkin, who lives his life with the same musicality, joy, purpose, and tenderness that he brings to his music; Lauren Rose, for her support and enthusiasm; Rabbi Allan “Smitty” Smith, for believing in me; Rabbi Jaimee Shalhevet, for her insight; Tal Varon, who by personal example reminds me to walk humbly; Janet Walton, for being clear on what matters; and Rabbi Danny Zemel, a modern-day prophet.

  Finally and mostly, I remain endlessly grateful to my parents, Sally and Larry, for giving me a good life.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Bible doesn’t say that God performed miracles.

  The Bible doesn’t say “Thou shalt not covet” or “God so loved the world,” doesn’t say that homosexuality is a sin, and hardly says anything about modern baptism or kosher food, the rapture, monogamy, or evolution.

  These misconceptions and many more like them stem from a fundamental misunderstanding about how to read the Bible, combined, frequently, with ignorance or ideology that leads people to misrepresent the Bible to others.

  An old joke asks a reporter to boil down an economist’s evaluation of the economy to one word. “Good,” says the reporter, accurately quoting the economist. Then when asked to expand the economist’s message to two words, the reporter quotes, just as accurately, “Not good.”

  The same thing happens with the Bible. People quote a word or a phrase out of context as “what the Bible says.” In a strict literal sense, the Bible does say what they report, but only in the way that the economist who thought the economy was failing did say, “… good.”

  This is just one way out of many that modern readers misunderstand what the Bible says.

  Technically, of course, the Bible doesn’t “say” anything. Like all other written texts, it sits there waiting to be read. But even so, most people have a sense that the point of reading a text is to figure out what’s there, and the “what’s there” part is what the text says.

  As it happens, a variety of intellectual movements arose last century to question even this basic premise. Researchers wondered if a text had any meaning without a reader. They asked whether the author or the reader gets to decide what a text means. They concluded that all reading is a matter of interpretation. But even so, most people have a sense of what kinds of interpretation are acceptable when it comes to figuring out what a text says.

  For example, on April 16, 1912, The New York Times ran the headline “Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg.” Even though it was a headline, most people agree that the newspaper “says” that the Titanic sank four hours after it hit an iceberg.

  A devious reader might wonder if maybe the newspaper was vague about how long after hitting the iceberg the Titanic sank, because “four” sounds like “for,” and maybe the newspaper only says that the Titanic was in the process of sinking “for hours.” But most people know that that’s not what the Times headline says, in spite of the coincidence of two words that happen to sound the same.

  Another example comes from Shakespeare’s Juliet, who laments, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” In this case, many modern-English speakers need to learn a little bit about seventeenth-century English to understand the poetry. The word “wherefore” means “why,” not “where.” The words “art” and “thou” match our modern “are” and “you.” Juliet is asking Romeo why he had to be Romeo, whom she couldn’t marry, instead of someone she could marry. So most people agree that Shakespeare’s Juliet asked “Why are you Romeo?” And even if there’s a stage of interpretation that converts Shakespeare’s English into our own, most people agree that it’s reasonable.

  By contrast, it would be entirely unreasonable to suggest a connection to the arts based on the word “art,” and even more absurd to wonder if Juliet chose the nine-letter word “wherefore” because she wanted to show how she felt about Romeo, and another word that has nine letters is “affection.” To claim that Shakespeare’s Juliet was expressing affection for Romeo with her choice of the word “wherefore” is to misrepresent what the text says.

  However, when it comes to reading the Bible, these sorts of interpretations have become standard. Words get swapped for other words that sound the same, or that have the same letters, or the same number of letters, or letters whose numerical values have some particular importance, and so on. Or passages that share a word are interpreted as reinforcing each other even if they are otherwise unrelated.

  These kinds of interpretations—and many more like them—strike many modern readers as odd or even worthless. But though they do not tell us “what the Bible says,” they are not without value. They are not more bizarre or less insightful than, say, Impressionism or Cubism in art.

  The impressionist painter Monet painted his famous water lilies in hundreds of different ways, each one capturing a different aspect of his flower garden. It is hardly the point that none of the oil paintings is as accurate as a photograph would be. Likewise, some of Picasso’s art barely resembles what that great twentieth-century artist was depicting. In 1932, for instance, he painted his then-mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter in a work called Le Rêve (The Dream). In the painting, Ms. Walter’s left eye is detached from her head, but the critic who argues that eyes don’t separate in this way has simply missed the point of art.

  Similarly, the various religious methods of interpreting the Bible bring it to light in unique and meaningful religious ways. It makes little sense to condemn those religious approaches in terms of how they might work in secular settings, just as it is a mistake to use accuracy as the only metric of art.

  On the other hand, a curious soul might wonder what Monet’s flower garden or Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse actually looked like. Equally, many modern readers wonder what the Bible said before it was interpreted and filtered through religious rhetoric.

  Our goal here is to answer that question, to explore the original Bible.

  Or to look at things differently, we might imagine a particularly cherished vacation destination: the Galápagos Islands for some, New York City for o
thers, or Jerusalem, or the Vatican, or maybe our parents’ birthplace. We’ve heard stories, but they are both incomplete, missing some aspects of what the place is like, and exaggerated, overstating other aspects. The storytellers have their biases, so they emphasize what is important to them, inadvertently or even purposely tailoring their descriptions. We may have photographs, too, but how can a photograph truly capture the original?

  Guidebooks about this destination are plentiful as well, but they all distort the actual place. A color photo of one building focuses our attention on it, but it also necessarily diverts our attention from something else. And the descriptions reflect the prejudices of the authors: An architect might write a book stressing the building styles, where a cyclist might care more about car-free zones; one gourmand might care more about fine dining, while another might emphasize dessert spots. And the guidebooks might even contain mistakes.

  So, too, people who read the Bible primarily in translation and guided by established religious trends get great insight into those religious trends and the role the Bible plays in them, but the focus on one particular view of the Bible necessarily presents a warped view of the original Bible.

  In this sense, our journey here over the next couple of hundred pages will be like visiting the Bible itself, stripped of its later interpretations, the biases from agenda-laden theologians, the distortions of both accidental and purposeful mistranslations, and the various impacts of history.

  We’ll see that some of the most familiar biblical passages are the most severely misrepresented today: the theological creeds, the ethical guidelines, and the key stories. We should hardly be surprised. Those passages achieved their fame because of their centrality, and that very centrality came only as the passages were continuously reinterpreted.

  As we work through the texts, we’ll see five recurring themes.

  The first is simple ignorance. That’s a strong word—and it often conveys a sense of shame, as if to say, “What’s wrong with you that you don’t know that?” But that’s not our point here. Rather, we simply mean the understandable lack of knowledge among people who can’t reasonably be expected to be experts in ancient languages and culture. When we say that someone is ignorant about how the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, we mean it in the same way that even a frequent flier on an airline might be ignorant about how turbulence and velocity impact aerodynamic lift.

  Still, those frequent fliers don’t usually pass themselves off as engineering experts. But people who haven’t read the Bible carefully sometimes nonetheless spout proclamations about it, either to bolster its value or to mock it. The Rapture (which, as we’ll see in chapter 30, is when nonbelievers will be left on earth as believers are transported to be with the Lord) isn’t in the Bible, so believing in the Rapture is no reason to value the Bible. And the Bible doesn’t contradict evolution (chapter 2), so believing in evolution is no reason to dismiss it.

  Related to ignorance is the second theme: historical accident. Some passages were inadvertently misinterpreted before the Bible spread around the world, so the mistaken interpretations became mainstream. This is where we get Adam and Eve’s famous apple from the Garden of Eden (chapter 26), which wasn’t an apple, and two very different understandings of the theologically important “Man does not live by bread alone” (chapter 21).

  The third theme is a culture gap. Our modern, scientific, Western approach to life is all most of us know, just as the cultures of the Ancient Near East, which created the Bible, were all the ancient readers knew. So when we read biblical texts through a modern lens, we necessarily miss some of the ancient impact. Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) compares God to a person most people have never met: a shepherd. But the ancient imagery was one of familiarity, and (as we’ll see in chapter 16) the shepherding wasn’t even the original point; it was simply the cultural backdrop against which the poetry was painted.

  The fourth theme is mistranslation. The Bible has been translated into literally hundreds, perhaps even thousands of versions. Some of these became mainstream, like the Septuagint, the early translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek; the Vulgate, the mid-first-millennium-A.D. translation of the Old and New Testaments into Latin; and the King James Version, the seventeenth-century translation of the Old and New Testaments into English. Not surprisingly, these translations were imperfect, but because of their centrality, the errors in them often became just as mainstream as the original words themselves. This is where we get famous but inaccurate renditions like “In the beginning God created…” for the start of Genesis (our chapter 1) and the equally famous but just as inaccurate “God so loved the world” for John 3:16 (our chapter 10).

  The fifth and final theme is misrepresentation. From time to time, people purposely misquote and otherwise misrepresent the Bible’s text, in furtherance of a particular agenda. This is where we get the virgin birth of Isaiah 7:14 to which Jesus is compared in Matthew 1:18 (our chapter 24); in the original there was no virgin birth in Isaiah. And it’s frequently where we get the texts that are cited in support of or opposition to today’s most bitter cultural debates: homosexuality, abortion, marriage, pacifism, the death penalty, and so forth. The Bible doesn’t say that homosexuality is a sin (as we discuss in chapter 39), in spite of prominent leaders who say it does; and it doesn’t say that war is always evil, in spite of people who like to quote Isaiah: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (our chapter 20).

  These five ways of distorting the Bible’s original message have various common elements. Two are worth pointing out here.

  The first is mistaking tradition for the original. One early tradition about the Ten Commandments quotes them as saying “Do not covet,” but, in fact, that is not what the original Hebrew means (our chapter 8). Similarly, modern Jewish dietary laws—“keeping kosher”—find their roots in the Bible. But most of the modern details come from tradition. For instance, even though cheeseburgers aren’t kosher today, there’s nothing in the Bible that even mentions them (our chapter 29).

  A more subtle way of mixing up tradition with the original is to assume that a traditional interpretation of a biblical passage is the only way of reading that passage. In the context of homosexuality (our chapter 39), for instance, one common argument in support of same-sex couples is the observation that the same word, “cling,” describes both Adam’s relationship to Eve and the relationship of one woman, Ruth, toward another, Naomi. That kind of reasoning may make for an interesting discussion, but the similarity of language doesn’t mean that the Bible says Ruth and Naomi were lesbians.

  A second common element is ignoring the context of an original passage. The joke above about the reporter and the economist shows how misleading that can be.

  We see that an accurate quotation out of context is just as bad as an inaccurate quotation. This lack of context is why many people think that Isaiah’s proclamation about not lifting up swords is about pacifism, for example; we’ll see in chapter 20 that, in its larger context, that wasn’t what Isaiah meant.

  In addition to local contexts that help us understand what individual passages mean, we also have to pay attention to the larger context of the Bible itself. One common way to distort the Bible is to quote one verse but ignore another one on the same theme. People who say the Bible commands us to “beat our swords into plowshares” are (almost) right, because those words are in Isaiah 2:4. Less well known is the prophetic counterpart in Joel 3:10: “Beat your plowshares into swords.”

  Some verses are quoted as, well, Gospel, like Jesus’s famous antiviolence exhortation to “turn the other cheek” instead of taking revenge (Matthew 5:39, among others). But Luke 19:27 also quotes Jesus as commanding an audience to bring his enemies forth and “slaughter them in my presence.”

  In these cases, and many more like them, the full context of the Bible offers two (or more) different opinions, but some people, often on purpose, quote only one of them.

  So we keep in mind five ways that the Bible gets distorted: ignorance, accident, culture gap, mistranslation, and misrepresentation; and two common elements that they share: misapplying tradition and missing the context.