Repent

And Judah acknowledged that the deed which he had done was evil, for he had lain with his daughter-in-law, and he esteemed it hateful in his eyes, and he acknowledged that he had transgressed and gone astray, for he had uncovered the skirt of his son, and he began to lament and to supplicate before the Lord because of his transgression.  And we [angels] told him in a dream that it was forgiven him because he supplicated earnestly, and lamented, and did not again commit it.  And he received forgiveness because he turned from his sin and from his ignorance, for he transgressed greatly before our God;   Jubilees 41:23-25a

Acknowledged/ Lament/ Supplicate – David Lambert’s examination of the biblical idea of repentance[1] is radical and critically important.  His study demonstrates that our concept of repentance is not found in the Tanakh.  Our idea of acknowledging wrongdoing, remorse, confession, supplication and penitence leading to forgiveness begins to emerge during the rabbinic period after the fourth century BCE.  It is enlarged during the subsequent centuries until it becomes the norm of later Judaism and Christianity.  Augustine, Luther, and Calvin treat repentance as a spiritual necessity, but, as Lambert demonstrates, the idea of personal agency, guilt, and penitential ritual is nowhere to be found in the Hebrew Bible.  Research like this probably upsets a lot of apple carts.  We are so confident that repentance is an essential element of salvation that we can’t believe it is a Second Temple period development.  This is especially true if we come from evangelical cultures where repenting is a mandatory practice of true piety.  But Lambert’s work suggests that repentance as we understand it is not an ancient idea.

Why?

The short answer is that repentance presupposes a concept of personal human agency (responsibility) that was not part of the thinking of the ancient world until Greek philosophy dominated the Hellenistic age.  Lambert notes that repentance requires a concept of human interior space, that place where our “soul” needs self-examination in order to be in alignment with what is right.  This interior space depends on a more fundamental idea, namely, that a human being is the combination of spiritual and material elements which are often at odds with each other.  What emerges is “a new kind of personal piety evidenced in the late Second Temple period,” a piety concerned with “individual perfectionism . . . secured by pious deeds.”[2]

We recognize this as yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov in Judaism or sinful nature in Christianity.  Amazingly, the Hebraic idea of nephesh and neshama doesn’t really support these dualisms.  In the Hebrew Bible, personality is homogenized.  Acts, thoughts, emotions are inextricably bound together.  What is human is the whole, not the combination of parts.  As a consequence, the idea of personal, reflective, soul-searching repentance just isn’t the way the authors of the Hebrew Bible think.  They are interested in public, social consciousness in concert with obedience to divine imperatives, not individual, personal perfection.  The goal of the Tanakh is voluntary obedience for the sake of God’s honor, not personal improvement for the sake of obtaining a divine reward.

After an examination of the Tanakh, Lambert examines the development of personal repentance in later books like Jubilees.  He notices that Jubilees rewrites the stories from Genesis in order to incorporate the concept of repentance, an action that does not occur in the original Genesis account.  Notice Judah’s reaction in this text from Jubilees.  Jubilees turns Judah into a repentant tribal chief, complete with remorse and supplication, who is granted divine forgiveness on the basis of his changed character.  None of this is in the Genesis account, but it becomes the filter for how the story is understood in the rabbinic period.  And, of course, that filter changes how we understand the story, even if we’ve never read Jubilees.

Here’s the point of this lesson:  some of the crucial concepts of our religious worldview depend on constructions of what it means to be human that are derived from Greek philosophy, not from Hebraic Scriptures.  I have often argued that the idea of the Trinity could not have been possible before the Greek conception of Man emerged.  Now we discover that the same thing is true for our idea of repentance.  One must wonder how many other “normal” religious ideas are actually the product of Plato rather than Moses.

Topical Index: repentance, David Lambert, Jubilees 42:23-25a

If you’re interested in an examination of Lambert’s book, and you did not participate in the online series, you can find the recordings here. 

[1] David Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, & the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016).

[2] Ibid., p. 161.