Bursting the Bubble

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.  Isaiah 40:8  NASB

Word of our God – The Foreword to the New American Standard Bible (1995) reads as follows:

The New American Standard Bible has been produced with the conviction that the words of Scripture as originally penned in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek were inspired by God.  Since they are the eternal Word of God, the Holy Scriptures speak with fresh power to each generation, to give wisdom that leads to salvation, that men may serve Christ to the glory of God.

The conviction is typical of nearly all Bibles—and believers.  We have been taught that the printed text between the leather covers is what God said in the ancient past, and what He wants us to hear today.  In fact, our faith depends on this: what the Bible says is true.

But what “Bible”?  The assumptions behind this sentiment are not supported by scholarship.  I don’t mean that academics reject the idea of divine revelation.  I mean that the naïve view that the “Bible” is God’s word needs some serious correction.  Historically and linguistically, our concept of “Bible” is culturally dependent and not in line with the original texts or the ideas of the ancient believing communities.  Two contemporary scholars help us unearth our assumptions:

Emanuel Tov

The processes of writing, interpretation, and rewriting have been an integral part of the development of the biblical literature since the days of its creation. These processes characterize all literatures that were created in antiquity. Since we picture the beginning of several genres of the biblical literature as oral compositions, the rewriting actually took place as rephrasing; creative minds constantly rephrased earlier formulations.

When the compositions were committed to writing, early scribes felt free to make the same changes that were made during the oral transmission stage. Learned scribes took the liberty to deviate from the earlier text when inserting large and small changes such as those mentioned above.

All types of exegetical traditions display the richness of the exegetical activity; they illustrate the liberty taken by scribes and authors to expand and change the biblical text. The biblical text was sacred, but this sacrosanctity did not prevent its continuous development; on the contrary, it was the impetus for its ongoing development as a very central and popular text.[1]

Sidnie White Crawford

In Second Temple Judaism, there is neither a finally closed canon of scripture nor a finally fixed text of what became the Jewish canon. During the Second Temple period we begin to see development or progress toward a canon of scripture, beginning most obviously with the Torah or Pentateuch (also known as “the Law,” “the Law of Moses,” “the books of Moses,” etc.). The shape of the Torah, I would argue, was in place by the third century B.C.E., when the Septuagint translation was made, although the text was still very much fluid.

. . . if we equate the words “Bible” and “canon,” then it is certainly not appropriate to speak about Bible or biblical texts in this period. By the end of the first century C.E., we are moving much closer to our present Jewish canon.

Further, the word “Bible” in English or “Bibel” in German conveys the idea of a codex, with a set of books in a fixed order with a fixed text, found between two covers. All of these connotations are simply incorrect in the Second Temple period, so it is better not to use the word at all.

It is important to keep in mind that for different communities different collections of texts were granted this special authority . . .

. . . a translation of the Greek ta bibliía, “the books.” Notice that in Greek the noun is plural, rather than singular. The plural acknowledges the “collection of authoritative books,” which became an “authoritative collection of books.” What the Bible was not in the Jewish community was one book, which the English “Bible” or German “Bibel” imply, but rather a collection of scrolls.

. . . the term “Bible” has a distinctly Protestant ring to it. . . So when we use the term “biblical text,” we are essentially using a Protestant term for a Protestant phenomenon, and we tend to think of the Protestant Old Testament.

There were at least two text editions of Exodus circulating in antiquity, one that stems from a scribal school that placed its emphasis on strict copying, and another that expanded the text through exegesis while copying. . . That is, the shape of Exodus was fixed (beginning in Egypt with the birth of Moses, and ending at Sinai), but the text was not.

What does it mean that the LXX translates a Hebrew text of Exodus that differs in many ways from MT Exodus? According to the Letter of Aristeas, the Vorlage of LXX Exodus was a temple text. Whether or not the Letter of Aristeas is historically accurate about the translation of the Septuagint, the notion that LXX Exodus was translated from a text of Exodus kept in the Temple argues against the idea of Tov that only one text-type (proto-MT) was the Temple text. So was one type blessed by an authoritative body? Or were all of them, at one time or another? Is it possible to tell? The same questions would apply to Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Psalms, etc. So even when we use a more neutral terminology (“the text of Exodus in antiquity”) we still have to define our terms carefully. [2]

Finally, we need to remember the statement of Harry Orlinsky:

it is only the Hebrew books (not even their order beyond the Torah, i.e., the order of the books that came to constitute the Prophets and the Writings) that were canonized, not the Hebrew text of these books. The Hebrew text of the Bible was never canonized or fixed.[3]

The Bible?  Take out your academic pin and burst the bubble.  But before you collapse into religious despair, before you throw up your theological hands and scream, “What can I believe now?” remember that thousands and thousands of followers of the God of Israel never had a Bible, and they did just fine.  Maybe the problem isn’t the book.  Maybe the problem is what you thought about the book.

Topical Index: Bible, text, word of God, Isaiah 40:8

[1] Emanuel Tov, “Exegesis of the Bible Enriched by the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Scribal Practice, Text and Canon in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill), pp 225-246.  See https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004410732/BP000028.xml

[2] Sidnie White Crawford, “‘Biblical’ Text—Yes or No?” in What is Bible?, eds. Karin Finsterbusch and Armin Lange (Peeters, 2012), p. 113. For the complete article, see https://skipmoentw.s3.amazonaws.com/PDF/Biblical_Text_Yes_or_No.pdf

[3] Harry M. Orlinsky, “The Septuagint and its Hebrew Text,” p. 552, n. 1.