"Reading the Old Testament, An Introduction"

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JKing said:
What about my question? Is it right to think that Israel gathered up their neighbors’ stories and made up their history? Or is it equally logical to assume that the neighbors got their stories (which are very similar to Israel’s) from the Israelite oral traditions?

What do you think?
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Well, if you think your faith absolutely requires you to believe the latter, then I’m not sure I’d say that it’s absolutely impossible. But speaking purely from a historical point of view, it seems extremely unlikely (and I for one have no theological problem with the idea that God guided the Israelites through a process of sifting and correcting ancient Near Eastern myths). We have documentation of these other stories going back way before we have any historical evidence for the Old Testament. You can claim nearly anything is oral tradition–but historians are interested in what the evidence says.

If you want to defend the view you are suggesting, you will of course have to qualify your use of the word “Israelites,” since \many of these myths go back before Jacob/Israel and in some cases even before Abraham (we have some texts from the third millenium–Abraham lived around 18-1900 at the earliest). A good case can be made (this was very popular in 19th-century Catholicism, I believe, and some evangelical missiologists also believe this) that all world religions are corruptions of an original tradition handed down since the beginning. It is therefore possible that Abraham was simply the recipient of this tradition. (This appears to be a Mormon belief. At least, Orson Scott Card presents this view as true in his novel Sarah, and from the context I get the impression that he’s giving a Mormon theological interpretation.) However, Jewish tradition holds that Abraham was a polytheist, and in fact a maker of idols. That would indicate that the tradition was purified through divine revelation, rather than being preserved intact from the beginning.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
Well, if you think your faith absolutely requires you to believe the latter, then I’m not sure I’d say that it’s absolutely impossible. But speaking purely from a historical point of view, it seems extremely unlikely (and I for one have no theological problem with the idea that God guided the Israelites through a process of sifting and correcting ancient Near Eastern myths). We have documentation of these other stories going back way before we have any historical evidence for the Old Testament. You can claim nearly anything is oral tradition–but historians are interested in what the evidence says.
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Fundamentalism respects evidence only when it can be used to make its case. It’s a highly self-enclosing ideology, which is why all evidence is evidence for it. This is something Catholicism should get shot of, ASAP IMO. A dose of Bultmann on [objectifying (Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology) might not go amiss 🙂​

If you want to defend the view you are suggesting, you will of course have to qualify your use of the word “Israelites,” since \many of these myths go back before Jacob/Israel and in some cases even before Abraham (we have some texts from the third millenium–Abraham lived around 18-1900 at the earliest). A good case can be made (this was very popular in 19th-century Catholicism, I believe, and some evangelical missiologists also believe this) that all world religions are corruptions of an original tradition handed down since the beginning. It is therefore possible that Abraham was simply the recipient of this tradition. (This appears to be a Mormon belief. At least, Orson Scott Card presents this view as true in his novel Sarah, and from the context I get the impression that he’s giving a Mormon theological interpretation.) However, Jewish tradition holds that Abraham was a polytheist, and in fact a maker of idols. That would indicate that the tradition was purified through divine revelation, rather than being preserved intact from the beginning.

Edwin
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Interesting 🙂​

That idea about “corruptions of an original tradition” is one of the foundations of, I almost said “The Lord of the Rings”, but mean “The Two Babylons”. It’s amusing, & unsurprising, to find a pre-Fundamentalist Calvinist anti-Catholic author, & Catholic Fundamentalists, adopting similar types of explanation for the details of other religions than their own.

If true, the notion of what looks like a sort of “Pan-Israelitism” would wreak havoc with extra-Biblical evidence for the religions, cultures & histories of the rest of antiquity - it’s difficult enough to have uncertainties about (say) the number & names of Hittite kings because of the uncertainties of Babylonian chronology; this is because of the uncertainty as to when Babylon fell to them. That is just one date: multiply it by all the dates & other details that would have to change if Pan-Israelitism were valid, & the result would be chaos. 😦 Fundamentalism may not bother with Hittite kings, & doesn’t have to: but it can’t expect historians of antiquity not to mind when the study of antiquity has to be beaten senseless so as to conform to a theory based on fear of Biblical criticism.

Some questions:
  • Is Israel diminished by not having invented writing, or the wheel ?
  • Then why must its ancestors be the source of all such things as are present both in the Ancient Near East *and *the Bible: as is required by the idea that all religious ideas in the Bible are totally free of all non-Israelite origins ?
  • How does it damage the Bible one bit that Israel used much that it did not create ?
  • Why must that damage its meaning as Scripture ?
  • Is the Church any the worse for not being derived totally & only from purely Jewish, Biblical, ideas ?
  • So why is the Bible any the worse for being influenced by non-Israelite cultures ?
 
Joel_Tunnah said:
If the OT is fiction, then Christ is the fulfillment of fiction.
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Well, He is.

But that doesn’t mean that the OT as a whole is fiction. I don’t think it is. I think Abraham was most likely a real person. (And in saying that I’m taking a relatively conservative stance–obviously I think it’s even more likely that Moses was a real person, that 2 Samuel gives a basically accurate account of the reign of David, etc.)

Edwin
 
Wouldn’t it be likely that authentic divine revelation would lack at least in part language to describe it, and that part would either have to establish new language or borrow from already established symbols to describe it? Wouldn’t these borrowed symbols retain what helped define the new concept and discard what didn’t at the same time validate what was held to be true of the borrowing tradition?

Wouldn’t a current faith that expresses with the most comprehensive and reasonable use of the entire deposit of myth be the best candidate to be the original religious tradition?
 
Benadam said:
Wouldn’t it be likely that authentic divine revelation would lack at least in part language to describe it, and that part would either have to establish new language or borrow from already established symbols to describe it? Wouldn’t these borrowed symbols retain what helped define the new concept and discard what didn’t at the same time validate what was held to be true of the borrowing tradition?

Wouldn’t a current faith that expresses with the most comprehensive and reasonable use of the entire deposit of myth be the best candidate to be the original religious tradition?
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I would imagine textual criticism would be helpful here.
 
Steve40 said:
Go by the best authoritative instruction on studying Sacred Scripture

vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-deus_en.html

PROVIDENTISSIMUS DEUS
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII
ON THE STUDY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

It goes after the moderist stench with the Chair of St. Peter.
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Why would you return to a statement made in 1893, when both Pope JPII and Benedict have talked about biblical interpretation? you belie your intent to delude people into thinking that hermeneutical tools aren’t used for biblical analysis.

You sure don’t like Church teaching much do you steve. Aways arguing the church isn’t conservative enough. First it was the USCCB and now this. At least be fair in your presentation please.

your “stench” statement is meaningless. try that again.
 
Joel_Tunnah said:
SpiritMeadow is a modernist. 1893 was a looooooong time ago.
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lol…now you were just dripping venom weren’t you. No 1893 wasn’t so long ago, but a hundred years today aint the same as a hundred years a thousand years ago. The times, they are a changing. Faster and faster.

In all seriousness, I find it amusing that the ultra-right needs to dip back into history to find support. They ignore the modern statements by popes and “to-be” popes.

I seriously don’t know what anybody’s definition of modernism is anymore.

I just left an extremely scholarly blog called “Sacramentum Vitae”. I found one of his archival blogs on Evolution. You know, after citing the popes statements at length…the blog writer found the Church actually in the mos tor second most liberal choice. Theistic evolution is about where the Church is now, no matter how others here try to obfuscate it by siting to earlier documents.

I feel terribly bad that people can get stuck like this in such a protestant attitude, and its not even high Protestantism either, but gosh, they agree with unchurched fundies who don’t even believe in Trinity. It’s hard-core bible belt stuff.
 
As I was reading the many post contained in this thread (and by the way - Goggle of Gear Thank you again for your contributions you above all others make coming into this forum worth coming here) something struck me and I would like to add my thoughts.

From what I have read it seems that too often we have either neglected or perhaps are not aware of a very important principle of Catholic theology. The principle is the “Principle of Sacramentality” which simply stated is God works through His creation.

If this is a starting point for our studies then it should be reasonable to see how the study of such topics such as evolution or in this case scripture can and should use all the modern tools science provides us today. Properly used science shouldn’t be seen as an adversary, just the opposite - it is human efforts using the tools God has given us (reason) to come to a deeper understanding of Divine Revelation.

Read the writings of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, neither one has a problem using the best of modern biblical scholarship.
However, if you read their criticism of modern biblical scholaship, especially the writings of Pope Benedict, their criticism is pointed at those scholars who look at the bible as a human work and a human work of the past alone and the scriptural scholars who fail to see God working through human history in a dynamic way. In other words those scholars who have no foundation rooted in the principle of sacramentality.

However, if we apply this principle to our study of scripture then we really shouldn’t have any real problem when a scholar points out that many of the stories of the OT have their roots from myths or stories that predate the Hebrew Text. Why, because here we find God working through the whole history of man and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit continued to reveal Himself through these human events and literature. Even if many of the stories we find in the OT predate the existance of the Hebrew people and literature we should ask us why were these assimulated into the text of sacred scripture? And if we do not see God in action here then are we not the ones who are failing to understand the dynamic that all scripture is alive and as with any life there was and is constant growth and development?

I think that failure to use the principle of sacramentality (God working in and through His creation) as a bases or starting point of our scriptural studies opens us up to the same criticism Pope Benedict has of many scholars - we have turned the scriptures into a dead peice of liturature, stuck in the past with little or no understanding how it points to the future and worse failing to see God’s activity through out the whole process.
 
Which is exactly the point of Boadt’s book…to open up the scriptures by a more complete understandins of the people and times from which they arose…God’s revelation to man…making scripture relevant and real in our time…

I am curious to know how many of the posters in this thread have actually read and studied scripture with Father Boadt’s book?

I posted this earlier in the thread:

Father Boadt specifically instructs the reader that his text is no substitute for the Holy Scriptures. He instructs the student to read the bible. In fact Boadt writes
The Old Testament is a great storehouse of experience, but we must ecome familiar with each book and each prophet as an individual so that we can choose to read one or another section as we have need, or as our own mood demands at the proper moments of our lives. No part is useless or worth passing over altogether - if we wish to know Israel, or the roots of modern Judaism, or even the New Testament…In short we must seek out each book of the Old Testament for its own time…Finally, the way to read the Old Testament is meditatively and prayerfully. We should take the time to think about the message…
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God 's revealed Truth is passed on to us in the Holy Scriptures…in Numbers we have a humerous story about a talking donkey [called an !**] while the story is humerous [and I do believe that the Jews saw the humor] the point of the story is clear…do not fail to hear and obey God as you do so at your peril! To the rainbow as a sign of God’s promise to man, something that is visible, beautiful, univerally found throughout the world…God’s message is in the passages…it cannot bt help to understand the social, cultural and spiritual aspects from shich they arose in order to more fully comprehend the meaning for us today…

That some may find the studious tedious or their faith so shallow thay cannot see the inspiration of God in the human process of the written word is hardly the writers fault, whether that writer is one of the Prophets or the Scripture scholar named Boadt or Scott Hahn or Pope Benedict XVI [Ratsinger]…

every author has his critics and fans…
 
I actually bought the book because of this thread and should get it this week sometime. I was very depressed last week because I tried to study Genesis on my own and was getting hung up on the inconherence and holes in the story. Particularly Melchizedek (who I can’t for the life of me figure out why a priest of Zadok woud be called the priest of the Most High or Jehovah…)
 
SpiritMeadow said:
I would imagine textual criticism would be helpful here.
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Thank you. And Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting would make evident the OT’s role as a developement of the original faith. I think a textual critique would have to include modern developements of it’s use in order to do that.

I read the OT as JPII suggests as quoted in a previous post.
 
Steve40 said:
Go by the best authoritative instruction on studying Sacred Scripture

vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-deus_en.html

PROVIDENTISSIMUS DEUS
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII
ON THE STUDY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

It goes after the moderist stench with the Chair of St. Peter.
Click to expand...

While it has plenty to teach us, the most recent acts of the Church’s teaching authority have the benefit both of what he taught in 1893, and of what has been taught in the interval.​

And Biblical studies are not where they were in 1893 either - one of the most significant differences between the study of the OT then & now (of many), is the better understanding of the Bible’s contents which the Church owes to the realisation that the Bible contains many different types of literature. We owe this to such saintly men as Father M.-J. Lagrange (d. 1938), who was a Biblical scholar of great distinction, & has been declared Venerable. If his work as a critic had been wrong purely because it was critical, he would not have been declared Venerable.

Past teaching certainly deserves respect - that is not the same as treating it as final. It’s not - the teaching, & scholarship, of the past, is never a reason to ignore that of the present. To ignore either is to mutilate the Church’s tradition - to make it two traditions, instead of one. If we ignore the past or the present in the interests of one or other, we can’t prepare the way for the work of the future; which is not fair to the Church of the future. 😦 🙂
 
Ravyn_Guiliani said:
I actually bought the book because of this thread and should get it this week sometime. I was very depressed last week because I tried to study Genesis on my own and was getting hung up on the inconherence and holes in the story. Particularly Melchizedek (who I can’t for the life of me figure out why a priest of Zadok woud be called the priest of the Most High or Jehovah…)
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Mechisedek is not a pagan priest. I believe it is related to the original preistly function of families…fathers and/or sons blessing and caring for the spiritual needs of tribes/families/clans…

It has been a while since I studied the intricasies of the jewish priesthood and how officce developed…

The NT identifies Jesus as a preist on the order of Mechizedek…

That relationship also has a part in the universal priesthood of the Christian conferred at baptism…

Some scholars have hypothesiezed that Shem is Melchisedek…count the years in scripture and Shem could still be alive in the time of Abraham…they believe that Abraham was the first descendant upon which he could hand off [pass on] the blessing to [Abraham being a righteous man…]

Whether he is Shem or some other person; Melchisedek is the High Priest of Salem - Salem [Shalom] meaning Priest/King of Peace…There is an offering of bread and wine … When Abraham wins a war over these fierce kings…he goes and make tribute to the High priest instead of what would have been more common, the parade of power extracting tribute from those conquored…etc…
 
TOME said:
Read the writings of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, neither one has a problem using the best of modern biblical scholarship.
However, if you read their criticism of modern biblical scholaship, especially the writings of Pope Benedict, their criticism is pointed at those scholars who look at the bible as a human work and a human work of the past alone and the scriptural scholars who fail to see God working through human history in a dynamic way. In other words those scholars who have no foundation rooted in the principle of sacramentality.

I have no doubt that you are correct on this. Some scholars have indeed lost their faith through pursuit of the “truth” of the scriptures. But oddly, just as many it seems have come to faith in the same way.

Scholars have a hard task assuming they have no opologetics agenda. The are to do their work “scientifically” which of course is the a tried and true way to determine facts in the world, yet maintain a faith that requires strict adherence to dogma. The tension is undoubtedly real. From time to time I cringe myself at reading, “Mark undoubtedly had Jesus say…to further his Messianic secret theology”. The “had Jesus say” stuff smacks of unbelief. I doubt that it is, but it is necessary to follow carefully the independent, scientific methodology required of the scholar.

Joel Marcus mentioned this in his Mark 1-8 treatment of what effect the Gospel of Thomas has on Mark. He notes that the arguments have now become tinged with what he calls, unscientific or subjective motives. Since Thomas is uncononical, certain arguments suggest that that is the motivating force, rather than the actual evidence pro or con on the issue. (The issue btw, is whether Thomas though undoubtedly written much later than all the Gospels, may contain early material, early enough to possibly having been used by Mark).

It is sad that people become so frightened that such analyses as we have today somehow will destroy faith. I think they have little or no effect either way. In reality, these matters attract the attention mostly of those who have an interest in this kind of thing either as profession or hobby. Out of these new understandings often come the most amazing pastoral lessons which hopefully do find their way into homilies. We lose that when we allow unfounded fear to motivate what we read and study.
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SpiritMeadow said:
TOME;2884308:
Read the writings of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, neither one has a problem using the best of modern biblical scholarship.
However, if you read their criticism of modern biblical scholaship, especially the writings of Pope Benedict, their criticism is pointed at those scholars who look at the bible as a human work and a human work of the past alone and the scriptural scholars who fail to see God working through human history in a dynamic way. In other words those scholars who have no foundation rooted in the principle of sacramentality.
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But I did not perceive that Lawrence Boadt is a scholar who does not have a foundation rooted in the principal of sacramentality…read the book…he discusses the need to prayerfully read scripture to make it relevent to today…I quoted from the book what the man himself said…

Father Boadt, wrote a text book for instruction. The book covers the history, socialogy and culture if the old testiment peoples, the peoples that surronded the and from which they emmerged. He covers the archeological finds…the book is not a spiritual tome…it cannot be everything to all people…

I think a person could read the book as a freshman in college and receive [absorb] certain information…

reading the same text as a forty-something…with additional life experience, cultural and social experience and wisdom…you would have a different take…

Same person, same text book, same OT = Different reponses at various stages of life!

Every 18 year old is not the same, nor has the same knowledge of history and scripture…how do you [or the author] account for that?

I have a feeling that many posters have not read this book and yet have come to the conclusion that it is heretical in some way…

I have read it…and…

I have not lost my sense of the sacramentality of scripture…I still believe that the scriptures are inspired. That the OT is God speaking to me [to the church, to the people of God]
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I believe the Church looks at the Genesis stories, for example, from the eyes of faith, and not from the lens of archeology, secular history or astronomy. If the rationalists and the positivists would like to look at the Bible from the viewpoint of secular history or profane literature then that is their outlook. As for me, I would rather “walk by faith, not by sight" (cf. II Cor. 5:7). And so would the traditionalists and the conservatives in the Pontifical Biblical Commission before, and the Protestant fundamentalists. The Bible is a book on religion, and not a book on history or science. It is like writing a book about 911 not to give another reportorial account of what happened, but to give an account of what happened with the end in view of looking at it as an act of God in the lives of men and giving it a religious interpretation.

Outside of the Bible, we cannot “prove” that the Genesis characters are “historical.” However, as archeologists would put it, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. So, we are not to say either that they did not exist. It could also be possible that these people existed, but the stories told about them have been quite romaticized, just like The Sound of Music. Maria von Trapp may be a real person, but he way it was told in the Hollywood version of her life may not be exactly the way it happened in real life. So, while we say that the Fall and the Flood were real events, the way they were told in the Bible may not be literally the way it happened.

“Mythos" does not mean that the stories were just-so yarns and figments of the imagination because the original meaning of the word has something to do with the stories about the gods, thus, mythology. The Bible is the story of Israel’s monotheistic God and how He related to them, the way the ancient Romans and the Greeks told their mythological stories about their gods and goddesses, which they fashioned in their own images and likenesses.

When the ancient Jews told their oral histories, about the events in the Exodus, for example, and later wrote them down, they did not intend to write history the way Macaulay of Gibbon would write history, or the way Christina Amanpour of CNN would write a news report about the 911 terrorist attack. Even our modern historians write their history from their own points of view, which could be colored by their biases and preconceived ideas. Thus, what we sometimes get out of them is not history, but their interpretation of history or their version of the story. Hence, the Jews could have given a version of history from the prism of the Jewish faith to give certain explanations about the realities of life and to give certain encouragement amid the difficulties of life. Thus, Saint Paul said that such things were written down to make us vigilant (cf. I Cor. 10:11) and to instruct us (cf. II Tim. 3:16).

Of course, this does not undermine the fact that the Scriptures are inspired by God because inspiration means that the authors were moved by God to write down what He wants to be written. Could not God who is the Lord of Nature inspire an human author to to write about a natural calamity that He allowed to happen to teach men a lesson? While secular men would explain the event as a natural occurrence, the inspired author would look at it as an act of God. I am not saying that this is what had happened in the Exodus story. What I am saying is that should we find out later on that there are actually natural explanations for some events that happened in the Bible, this should not diminish our faith in God or undermine our belief in His inspiration for after all, God communicates with us everyday in the things that happen to us, for after all, as saint Therese of the Child Jesus would say: ”Everything is Grace.” This is exactly what the Jews are telling us. God intervenes in human history. He could do it ordinarily in everyday life, or extraordinarily through miracles.

We are only referring here to the Primeval and Patriarchal stories, for example. Of course, the life of Jesus, which is relatively recent, is another story. What did C.S. Lewis say about Jesus’ incarnation? Myth became fact!
 
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