The Flood of Noah is one of the most familiar stories of the Bible. But even those who know it well often don’t think about how it actually envisions the world (or rather, universe) or know about comparable stories from other (even more ancient) Near Eastern cultures (though some will know about the Epic of Gilgamesh).  If you are among that crowd, here is the post for you!  These are two more side-boxes from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press), slightly edited here. ******************************* BOX 3.4 THE THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE The mythical thought world of ancient writers—including the writers of the Bible—was entirely different from the one we inhabit today. Nowhere does that become more clear and obvious than in considering their “cosmology”—their understanding of the world we live in. Modern cosmologists tell us that our little planet is part of a solar system circling a rather average star in a galaxy with something like 200 billion stars; that there are some 100 billion other [...]

Was Noah’s flood meant to destroy the giants born to women seduced by angelic beings?  And what exactly was the point of circumcision? I continue here my discussion of Hebrew Bible points of interest by sharing two more of the side-boxes found in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press).  These are both taken from my chapter on the book of Genesis. ***************************** BOX 3.1 SONS OF GOD AND THE DAUGHTERS OF MEN One of the most mysterious stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the Flood narrative (chapter 6) where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them, leading to the Nephilim. The word “nephilim” means “fallen ones.” According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants. Apparently, for the story in Genesis 6, there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, and their offspring were giants. [...]

Some blog readers have requested more posts on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.  I'm happy to comply!  We begin with the foundational issue of which books are in each, in which order, and why are they so very different but also in some senses just the same. In my textbook The Bible: A Literary and Historical Introduction (Oxford University Press; a new edition of which will appear in about a year, co-authored this time with Hebrew Bible scholar Joel Baden) I explain it all and lay it out in charts.  Here it is, in compact form: The Bible in Hebrew and in English have the same books, but they are numbered differently (e.g., the twelve minor prophets in the English Bible are counted as just one book in Hebrew). They are also organized differently. Different Christian denominations have different books included in their “Old Testament,” as Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches include books that Protestants consider to be the “Apocrypha.” These books are excluded not only from the Protestant Bible but from the Hebrew [...]

In my previous post I started to explain which manuscripts we have of the Hebrew Bible and broached the question of whether we know they were "accurate."  That is, if we read the stories of Genesis, or the book of Isaiah, or the Psalms, can we be sure we're reading what the authors originally wrote?  Or could things have been changed? In this post, I explain some of the complications of knowing what the original authors of the Hebrew Bible wrote, based on what we know about Jewish scribal practices over the centuries.  It turns out that what we know is not actually what we often hear, that Jewish scribes going all the way back to the beginning had ways of making sure they never changed a single letter of what they copied. We start with .... The Masoretic Text The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today, and that is at the basis of all modern translations, is called the Masoretic Text. It is called this because the Jewish scholars [...]

When talking about “how we got the Bible,” there is obviously a lot more involved than understanding how and when the canon came to be collected and more or less fixed.  Knowing which books are in the canon is not the same thing as knowing what words were originally in the books. For that we have to move to the related question of the “textual tradition” of the books, of how they were copied for many centuries before the invention of the printing press. I have talked a good deal about that with respect to the New Testament on the blog, but far less about the Hebrew Bible.  Since I’ve just finished with some posts on the canon, now I can turn to the question of the text: what do we know about how it was copied?  Can we trust that we have what the authors wrote?  What are the complexities involved? This will take two posts.  I will be drawing from my discussion in my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd [...]

In my previous post I discussed the traditional view of when the Hebrew Bible became a fixed canon in stages, with the final decisions being made at the end of the first century CE at the "Council of Jamnia." Today scholars tend to present a somewhat fuzzier picture of when and why the canon came to be formed, although there do seem to be some fixed points. It is widely held that the five books of the Torah were accepted by nearly all Jews as a set canon by the fifth century BCE, in the early post-exilic period. One piece of evidence comes from the Bible itself, in a post-exilic book, Ezra. The scribe Ezra himself is described as being “skilled in the Torah of Moses that the LORD the God of Israel had given” (Ezra 7:6). This suggests that it was widely known that there was a “Torah of Moses” and that the educated elite were sometimes being trained in understanding and interpreting it. The Torah is and always has been the [...]

 How did we get the Bible, these 66 books in particular? Over the next couple of years I’m planning on reading massively on the Canon Part 2 (the New Testament), in particular on what we know about why certain books came to be included and yet others were left out, as the topic of my next book.  And I’ll be talking a good bit about what I’m thinking about that here on the blog. The topics that I’ll need to be covering  are so wildly varied that I’m guessing that about two-thirds of time it won’t even be obvious to blog readers that a post is even related to questions of canon.  We’ll almost certainly have to be dealing with such widespread issues as Roman imperial efforts to obliterate Christianity; teachings of universalist salvation in the early church; The Arian Controversy (think: the Council of Nicea); Paul’s confrontation with a talking lion he had earlier baptized; letters allegedly written by Jesus himself and…. and oh, there is so much to cover! I’ve decided that here [...]

Most of the so-called “minor prophets” (called that because their books are shorter than those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) are both terrific and terrifically under-read.  So I think maybe I should post a bit on each of them (there are twelve). (I started last week with Zechariah)  One of my favorites is Hosea, which tells a heart-wrenching story and delivers an unusually powerful message. The following is an edited version of my discussion in my book The Bible:  A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press). ****************************** No prophet of scripture emphasizes the deep and profound love of God for his people, and his bitter sense of betrayal for their unfaithfulness, more than the eighth-century Hosea. Here God is portrayed as the lover of Israel, which has rejected his adoration and become a whore. Hosea was a contemporary of Amos and was prophesying in the north during almost the same time as Isaiah in the south during the reigns of kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah and of Jeroboam [...]

Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ****************************** Box 1.2: Woman Wisdom as God’s Consort? We have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a divine consort, his “Asherah”  (Note: if you're interested in this topic, we have just published a one-lecture course on it by Dan McClellan: The Israelite Goddess Asherah.) This was never accepted by the strict henotheists who wrote the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, but in Proverbs, a book of Wisdom, there is a passage that some interpreters have thought represents a kind of modified or “tamed” view of Yahweh and his divine female companion from eternity past.  Here she is not Asherah, but Wisdom herself, shown to be speaking in Proverbs 8:   The LORD created me at the beginning [or “as the beginning”] of his work, the first of his acts of long ago Ages ago [...]

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction.  It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was  discussing Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), almost universally thought by scholars to be written by a different author from chapters 1-39 (themselves written by Isaiah of Jerusalem in the 8th c. BCE). Second Isaiah was writing after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem (including the temple) in 586 BCE, while the leaders of the people and many of the elite had been taken into exile in Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. ****************************** No passage of Second Isaiah has intrigued readers and interpreters – especially among Christians – more than the four passages that are dedicated to describing a figure known as the “Suffering Servant.” Some scholars have called these passages “songs,” or “songs of [...]

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction.  It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the flood narrative, where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them leading, to the Nephilim.  The word Nephilim means “fallen ones.”  According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants.  So what is going on here in Genesis?  Apparently there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, cohabited with them, and their offspring were giants.  It is at that point that God decides to destroy the world.  The situation was too weird even for him. This brief episode has parallels in other ancient mythologies.  It is common [...]