The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Chosen by Whom and Promised by Whom?
The Hebrews (or Israelites or Jews) were the first nation or ethnic group in human history to become monotheists. There are many factors about the Jews which are unique, but that is one of the most important.
How and when did they become monotheists? It is impossible to verify that with any certainty. Many scholars claim that Abraham, inspired by God, became the first monotheist. Other scholars say Abraham believed in only one God for himself, while not denying the existence of other gods. To complicate matters, still other scholars deny that Abraham or any of the other ancient Hebrew patriarchs even existed.
From all this divisive academic debate we may validly conclude that it is impossible to verify how and when the Hebrews became monotheists, and whether it was God who inspired them to that conclusion or they themselves decided there is only one God. The Bible, via the books about the kings and the prophets, suggests that many Israelites were still worshiping the Canaanite gods in the eighth century BC. If that was true, it presumably means that more than a thousand years after Abraham, not all the people of Israel were monotheists. Nonetheless, those who were monotheists were part of the only people in the entire world at that time who did worship one God and one God alone.
Virtually all non-fundamentalist biblical scholars do not subscribe to the notion that God inspired and dictated every word in the Bible, or that the Bible is infallible or inerrant. Probably a large majority of ordinary Jews and Christians recognize the same unanswered questions about precisely how the Bible came into existence. In other words, most of us believe that God inspired those who wrote the Bible, but God did not instruct any writer exactly what to write.
Most mainstream biblical scholars assume the contents of the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, were not solidified until the time of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews in the sixth century BCE at the earliest. They agree that there was an ancient oral tradition of stories about God’s dealings with the Hebrews. These stories purportedly reached back as far as Abraham in the eighteenth century BCE (if there was an Abraham in the eighteenth century BCE). In the ancient world, very few people could read or write, so the traditions of all peoples were handed down in myths, metaphors, and stories.
Two of the most crucial convictions of the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews were that they firmly believed God chose them to be God’s Chosen People, and that further God promised them the Land of Canaan to be their own land in perpetuity. Their chosen-ness by God and the land promised to them by God became essential elements in their national and religious self-identity.
The people of Israel were never a large nation at any point in their history. Relative to the size and power of several of their ancient Middle Eastern neighbors, the Israelites were probably always a rather insignificant ethnic group. From Dan to Beersheba and from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is a very small patch of ground compared to the size of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia --- or Persia, India, or China, for that matter.
According to Genesis, Abraham and his descendants left northern Syria to live in the land of Canaan on the southeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. They were presumably there for only four generations, however. Genesis says that during the time of Joseph, all the Israelites moved to Egypt to avoid starving to death in a drought in Canaan. Jacob’s sons decided the rich and plentiful waters of Nile River would save Israel from extinction, since Canaan was not going to do it.
Apart from the Hebrew Bible, there are sparse records about the Israelites in the literature of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, or any other peoples in the ancient Middle East. Unless archaeologists find such evidence, we are forced to rely almost exclusively on the Hebrew scriptures. Therefore the historicity of events in the Bible is, of necessity, uncertain, sketchy, and objectively unverifiable.
The end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus hints that for four and a half centuries, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. Hebrew as well as Egyptian records of this captivity are very scanty, unclear, and almost non-existent.
The next major figure in Israelite history, according to the Bible, was Moses. When I was a student in a mainline Protestant seminary over fifty years ago, I cannot recall a single instance where any professor even gingerly hinted that the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph) might not have existed in history, or that Moses himself was of dubious historicity. Back then, I don’t remember reading anything that postulated such an astonishing idea. In the last three decades, however, I have read more and more biblical scholars who have suggested those revolutionary notions.
Perhaps I subscribe to magazines and newspapers with suspect book reviews. Maybe I read books from the wrong kind of book publishers. For fifty years I have preached what is purported in the Bible to be historically accurate in its essence. I now confess that I am prepared, apparently along with many other contemporary Christians, to declare myself agnostic (“without knowledge”) about the historicity of large sections of the early books in the Hebrew Bible. I also have come to accept questions about the historicity of many the claims of the Greek Bible. I am therefore agnostic of the absolute authenticity of much of what in former years I took to be absolute historical verity.
Nobody knows that biblical claims are either true or false, or that they are historical, mythological, or metaphorical. That simply cannot be determined beyond dispute. There are very few other reliable records that either authenticate or invalidate the supposed “historical” parts of the Bible. Without outside verification, the purported history of the Bible can never be established beyond question. Thus we can neither prove nor disprove biblical “history.” For fifty years I have preached the Bible as though it is historically true, because I believed and still believe it IS true, but I am no longer convinced it is necessarily historically true.
Is the Historicity of the Bible a Useful Topic for All Believers?
Without the Jews and the Jewish Bible, the evolution of western religious history would be vastly different than it is. Were there no Jews, there would certainly be no Christians and no Muslims. No one ever would have heard of Jesus or Muhammad had there been no people who compiled the Hebrew scriptures, taking five hundred or a thousand or perhaps eighteen hundred years to accomplish this world-changing feat. Neither Christianity nor Islam would have any theological basis without the framework established by the Hebrew Bible.
Up until half a lifetime ago, when I was about forty, I had no doubt that the Bible was correct when it postulated that God works directly in human history and in personal lives. G. Ernest Wright, One of the Old Testament professors at my seminary, wrote an important book called God Who Acts: Biblical Theology As Recital. He said that we come to know who God is by what God does and did. The Bible is the record of what people affirmed to be the acts of God.
However, as time (my time) has moved on, increasingly I have come to question whether it can be authenticated that God ever indisputably involves Him-Her-It-Self in human affairs in an historical sense. We can believe He does ( I am still sufficiently old-fashioned to call God “He”), but we cannot know it historically. We know there were Roman, British, French, and Russian Empires. We know that there were American, French, and Russian Revolutions. Many contemporary records about them were written at the time these epochs or events occurred.
However, we cannot have historical knowledge of a similar sort about much of biblical “history.” Scholars may argue whether the Hebrew patriarchs or Moses lived in history, but in the minds of most ordinary Jews, Christians, or Muslims, including ordinary clergy, unquestionably they did.
What I am suggesting is this: To most synagogue, church, or mosque members, nothing is gained, and much is likely lost, in trying to turn a discussion about biblical historicity into a public and widely publicized debate. The average believer has not acquired sufficient technical academic background or interest to sort out what the arguments mean, let alone whether they are valid. They are valid, but unless the clergy and others can make them intelligible to people not schooled in the arcane intricacies of the study, these issues will only confuse, irritate, enrage, or undermine faith. If it hard for the clergy to affirm alternative understandings rather than the traditional ones, how much more difficult is it for lay people?
For an indeterminable but also undeniable number of religious folk, questioning the historicity of scripture is a dangerous and potentially disastrous exercise, however well intended it may be. Religious leaders who insist on embarking on the exercise, however mildly they do it, need to do so with great care and caution.
Karen Armstrong is a brilliant scholar who easily and convincingly addresses her hesitancy to affirm certain aspects of the biblical narrative. For example, in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, she writes, “Readers of the Pentateuch are often confused by the patriarchs’ ethics. None of them are particularly admirable characters….But these are not morality tales. If we read them as political philosophy, things become clearer” (p. 108).
That insight is an eye-opener. It postulates that many biblical narratives, and in both Testaments, should be understood not as history per se but as underpinnings for desired theological/political formulations the biblical writers wanted to become widely accepted. We are not required to approve everything done by plodding Abraham, conniving Jacob, or wheeling-dealing Joseph. Instead the writers want us to perceive these people --- historical, fictional, or fictionalized --- to be instruments in the hands of God for God’s purposes in the world.
From the standpoint of everyone who finally agreed to adopt the Pentateuch in the fifth or fourth centuries BCE, two of the overarching features they wanted to highlight were that the Jews were God’s Chosen People, and that the land of Israel was their perpetually Promised Land. But were they, and was it?
Biblical “History” As Theological Orthodoxy
The people who wrote the Bible wanted to establish a particular theological orthodoxy. They might have disagreed with those two words as being too indelicate or crass to describe their elevated purpose. Nevertheless that was their basic intention.
From Greek, “orthodoxy” literally means correct or proper or right teaching. Those who originally wrote the Bible wanted those who eventually would read it to have the correct and proper theological understandings of who God is and what God does. All of the writers believed it was God who inspired them to write what they wrote.
Tradition says that Moses wrote the first five Old Testament books. Nowadays that notion is accepted only by fundamentalists, and probably not even by all of them. Therefore if the first five books of the Hebrew Bible did not achieve their present form until four or five centuries before the time of Jesus, it is very likely their theological themes were being worked and re-worked for many centuries. Thus Jewish scholars did not imagine that everything which went into the entire Old Testament was to be understood as a literal depiction of God’s acts with Israel.
Instead, this unknown and unknowable group of Jewish sages likely perceived the first several chapters of Genesis to be mythological, not historical. They may sensibly have supposed that much of what was written about the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, and the Judges was story rather than history. Mythology was a major factor in the ancient world, but it has relatively little influence on modern thought.
In addition, the people who put their the final editorial imprint on the Hebrew Bible saw much of it to be poetry, such as Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets. Poetry is literature, and literary, but usually and frequently it is not meant to be taken literally. Mountains and hills did not literally break forth into singing, even though Isaiah said they did, nor do the trees of the field clap their hands, because trees do not have hands.
Modern people do not think like ancient people. That should surprise no one. Too often for us, if something is not literally true, it is not true. However, such inflexible thinking may lead to false conclusions. It can take us into intellectual dead-ends. So let us ask ourselves a question. Did God first choose the Jews, or were the Jews the first people to choose God?
Theological orthodoxy insists there never were scores or hundreds of gods. In modern cosmology, we would agree, declaring that even before the Big Bang, there was only one God.
Did the only God who was and is God choose the Jews? The Jews certainly thought so. On the other hand, it may be that in the very slow evolution of humanity, God was waiting for a group of people, any people, to realize there is only one God. It was the Israelites who at last made that proclamation. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one!”
If it took many hundreds of years for the Bible to “jell,” and hundreds more years before the Old Testament canon was approved sometime in the second century BCE, do you suppose the Jews might have projected back to the time of the Abraham of Genesis that God chose them? All Jews were not monotheists in patriarchal times; probably most were not. The books of Joshua, Judges, and I Kings clearly state that many Jews up to the eighth century BCE were polytheists. The Bible demanded allegiance to God and monotheism; that was its bedrock theological orthodoxy. But an ethnic allegiance by most of the Jews took more than a millennium to coalesce.
God chose the Jews, the Bible said, to proclaim the supremacy of God. The Jews were not chosen as an honor to them or in recognition of them; they were chosen for a purpose, to be a light to themselves and to the Gentiles.
So, did God choose the Jews, or did the Jews choose God? And did God promise the land previously controlled by the Canaanites to the Jews?
According to the Hebrew Bible, the God who slowly revealed His nature to the Jews through many generations also seemed to insist that He was the God of all other peoples. He was as concerned for the welfare of Ammonites and Edomites and Canaanites as for Israelites. It was hard for the Israelites to accept that, but the most enlightened among them, especially the prophets, decreed that it was so.
If God did promise Canaan to the Israelites as their permanent possession, it proved to be a problematic promise. Israel was located on one of the two primary trade routes of the Fertile Crescent. It was as though it straddled I-95, I-5, I-80, or I-10. Everyone going everywhere went right through it on their way. For all of history that small sector of geographic turf has been fought over. The Jews controlled all of it for only five or six hundred years of biblical history and seventy years of modern history. It was strategically too important to too many large nations for it to be controlled by one small nation indefinitely.
What passes for biblical history was history perceived through Jewish eyes for presumably two millennia and then a small slice of Roman history for a century through Christian eyes. However, every bit of anyone’s history is simply events which are selectively and subjectively interpreted through somebody’s eyes.
The entire world in both hemispheres has been immeasurably blessed because one of the world’s smallest ethic groups gradually came to believe that there is only one God. They declared that God to be good, loving, and just. Their theological foundation was the basis for their religion. It also became the fundamental bedrock for the two largest religions in the world today.
Conclusion
This essay is not directed to academics. Their field of expertise is far above and beyond whatever credentials I have. Rather it is written for preachers and lay people who read fairly widely in the fields of theology and biblical studies.
Questioning the historicity of holy scripture is probably a mistake for the majority of Jews, Christians, or Muslims. It is far more likely to confuse or anger them, or to erode deeply-held convictions to no good purpose.
Still, Karen Armstrong is right: If we read biblical stories as political philosophy, things do sometimes become clearer. Sensibly explained, progress can be made when the intended points of ambiguous scriptural stories are quietly presented.
To the preachers who read this, you may decide to do what I shall do for however many remaining years I have in the pulpit. I shall concentrate on those passages which seem theologically sound, whether or not they may be historically accurate. And I will refrain from addressing passages which raise unanswerable questions to no avail, such as whether water was turned into wine or people were literally raised from the dead. Nevertheless, there is one resurrection story with unanswerable questions I shall continue annually to address, because it is so central to the meaning of Christianity.
“The Chosen People” and “The Promised Land”: What should be the theologically orthodox position on those crucial biblical concepts? And should the Jews or anyone else insist on a particular position?
John Miller is the pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. Many other of his writings can be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwallshhi.com.