What Is The Bible and What Does It Do?

by Dave Mantel

If you read the title of this post in the voice of Arnold in Kindergarten Cop...then we're starting on the right page.

An ongoing, and seemingly endless, conversation in evangelical circles is: how do we interpret the Bible in light of more and more historical and scientific discovery in this modern age? As a Christian, whether you claim belief in the Bible as 100% without error, or a book of stories outlining a moral code for humanity to live by, or something in the large gap between, there is an ongoing question of why we believe what we believe about the Bible.

Recently, Rob Bell has been writing a series on his blog entitled "What Is The Bible?" It's a great read, whatever your own preconceived answer to that question is, and I really recommend it. It compelled me to examine just what I believe about the Bible, its authorship, divine inspiration, and purpose.

Something I have been curious about for a long time is how devout Jews look at the Old Testament—the Torah, specifically—compared to the evangelical world. The morning I started writing this post, Rachel Held Evans had a Q&A in her "Ask A..." series with Rabbi Rachel Rose. In this post, she answered, in part, some of the questions I was having. When asked ,"How do you interpret the passages where God seems to command things that are immoral?" Rabbi Rose answered,

The classical Jewish answer is that these rules were never intended to be taken literally, and were in fact never followed at all. For instance, in the case of the commandment to stone an unruly child, our sages placed so many conditions and qualifications on that commandment that it could never have been carried out...

In Jewish tradition, we frequently speak in terms of "Written Torah" (the text of the Hebrew Scriptures as they have come down to us) and "Oral Torah" (the ensuing centuries of conversations and interpretations of our sages and rabbis, which are also considered to be holy.) We always read Torah in the context of generations of commentators and interpreters, Rashi, Talmud, Midrash, all the way to new interpretations in the modern age...

She references an excerpt from the Jewish Virtual Library, Rebellious Son, in which the author asserts, in reference to Deuteronomy 21:18–21,

"There is no record of a rebellious son ever having been executed, except for a dictum of R. Jonathan stating that he had once seen such a one and sat on his grave (Sanh. 71a). However, it is an old and probably valid tradition that there never had been, nor ever will be, a rebellious son, and that the law had been pronounced for educational and deterrent purposes only, so that parents be rewarded for bringing their children up properly (ibid.; Tosef. Sanh. 11:6)."

One of the more easy examples, no doubt—stoning the rebellious son. But what about some of the more problematic texts that were enacted? Slavery? Polygamy? What about texts like Jonah or the Exodus that seem to live far from the current reality we know today?

Jonah: known for, among other things, getting vomited out of a fish.

In the series mentioned above, "What Is The Bible?" Bell says with regard to the story of Jonah,

"If you don’t believe it literally happened, that’s fine. Lots of people of faith over the years have read this story as a parable about national forgiveness. They point to many aspects of the surreal nature of the story as simply great storytelling because the author has a larger point, one about the Israelites and the Assyrians and God’s call to be a light to everyone, especially your enemies.

Right on. Well said.

Just one problem. Some deny the swallowed-by-a-fish part not from a literary perspective, but on the basis of those things just don’t happen. Which raises a number of questions: What’s the criteria for the denial? Do we only affirm things that can be proven in a lab? Do we only believe things we have empirical evidence for? Do we believe or not believe something happened based on…whether we believe that things like that happen or not? (That was an awkward sentence. Intentionally.) Can we only affirm things that make sense to us? Are we closed to everything that we can’t explain?

If we reject all miraculous elements of all stories because we have made up our mind ahead of time that such things simply aren’t possible, we run the risk of shrinking the world down to what we can comprehend. And what fun is that?

That said, there are others who say Of course he was swallowed a fish, that’s what the story says happened!

Fine.

Just one problem. It’s possible to affirm the literal fact of a man being swallowed by a fish, making that the crux of the story in such a way that you defend that, believe that, argue about that, and in spending your energies on the defend-the-fish-part miss the point of the story, the point about allowing God’s redeeming love to flow through us with such power and grace that we are able to love and bless even our worst enemies."

The reality is, the Bible was written by human beings. They had agendas, they had stories to tell. They were from ancient times, writing to ancient peoples. Their world was completely different than our own. So what does that mean? It means that the most important questions we can ask when studying the Bible are, "Why is this here?" and "What was the author's intention in writing this this way?" Without beginning with those kinds of questions, it would be easy for us to start stoning our disobedient sons to death in the middle of town. And I, as an occasionally disobedient son, am not a fan of that outcome.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ramsey.Psalter.1310.jpg
Photo 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Lastman_-_Jonah_and_the_Whale_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Idolatry: It's Complicated

by James Davisson

Like Faith or Salvation or Brisket, Idolatry is a religious concept that sounds much simpler than it is.¹ "The Bible says 'don't worship idols,'" you may say, "how complicated is that?"

Complicated. As with pretty much anything in the Bible, the instruction to not worship idols has been interpreted in lots of different ways over the years. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians have said "Yo, it's cool to make images of Jesus and the saints and whatever as long as you're not actually worshiping the images" whereas Protestants have tended to be like "Nuh-uh, sounds like idolatry to me bro" and the Puritans were like "NO RELIGIOUS IMAGES EVAR NOT EVEN THE CROSS." Guys, I love the Puritans so much. Not even ironically.

Judaism has tended to side with the Protestants on this one, basically saying "Look, even if you worship God while you look at an image to help you out, that's still idolatry, mang." Slightly further afield, Islam has said "Definitely no pictures of God or Muhammad. But prolly stay away from pictures of people too. And animals. You know what? Just to be safe, best stick to calligraphy."

So the spectrum on idolatry runs from "Religious images are totally fine as long as you don't worship them" to "Just, don't even draw things, dude." So it's pretty dang complicated, just within the Abrahamic religions.

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The root of these conflicting ideas is how idolatry gets talked about in the Bible. As far as much of the Hebrew Bible is concerned, Israel's worship of idols is Reason #1 for the exile: Israel wasn't faithful to God, so God sent them away. And the exile is pretty much the Big Problem in the Hebrew Bible that its authors have to deal with, so idolatry is super important and gets a lot of press throughout the ol' HB.²

Mostly, though, the HB is content to be like "HEY YOU: stop worshiping Baal, God doesn't like it" (but, you know, more poetically than that). It's taken for granted that the Israelites knew why they shouldn't worship idols and that the authors didn't really need to go into detail about what people were actually doing when they worshiped one.

This is Baal. Not to be confused with YHWH.

But sometimes they did, actually, go into detail about that. And that's when things get a little weird:

As a thief is shamed when caught,
     so the house of Israel shall be shamed—
they, their kings, their officials,
     their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, “You are my father,”
    and to a stone, “You gave me birth.”
For they have turned their backs to me,
     and not their faces.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
     “Come and save us!” (Jeremiah 2:26-27, NRSV)

I'm sorry, what? No, Jeremiah, no, I don't think anybody was actually doing that. When you worship another deity besides God, that's, uh, quite different from going up to a tree and being like "What's up, Dad?" To say the least.

In fact, what the HB is doing here and elsewhere is confusing worship of a god, who is represented with a physical object, with worship of a physical object itself. Check out Isaiah, for example, who has a whole riff on this:

The carpenter...cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!” (Isaiah 44:13-17, NRSV)

In other words, "Some people are so dumb, they think they can just make gods out of stuff, you know? Isn't it stupid to cut some wood, burn half of it, and think the other half is going to save you?!"

Which, again, is not what you're doing when you worship an idol. When you worship an idol, you think there is a certain god out there, and you make an image that you then use to help you direct your worship towards him. That's what Isaiah's contemporaries were actually doing when they made and worshiped idols.

In my Biblical Hebrew class in college, we read and translated Isaiah 44 together,³ and while we were doing so, the professor mentioned the fact that Isaiah hadn't properly described what idolaters were actually doing. He said that scholars actually still disagree about whether Isaiah merely didn't understand or, what I think is more probable, that he was simply parodying or satirizing them in this passage.⁴ Satire or not, though, it's kind of an odd thing to find in one's Bible.

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If this view of idolatry is incorrect, why is idolatry wrong? There are a couple ways that people have answered this question, having to do with different interpretations of what idolatry is, which has led to the complications I talked about at the beginning.

For Christians and Jews (and, I suppose, Musilms), the basic reason that idolatry is wrong is simple: it's worshiping gods that are not God. Israel (and, by extension, Christians) made a covenant with God to worship only God and no one else: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:2-5, NRSV). In other words, idolatry is wrong because it's the same thing as worshiping other gods.

In this orthodox icon, St. George is totally owning that dragon.

This interpretation is what gives us the Orthodox/Catholic view: it's okay to make religious images because we're not using them to worship other gods.⁵ I'm cool with that, but others have pointed out that God seems to not only be saying "Don't worship other gods" but also "Don't worship God by making images either." This has led to the other, more extreme views of idolatry, all the way up to the awesome Puritan version.

The big question I have about that is: then just why is it wrong? I don't think we need to have a debate about why, say, murder or theft is wrong. I'm down with God leaving the reasons for those commandments pretty vague, but if what God intended to say in Exodus 20:2-5 was "Don't even make images of me, bro" then it's a little frustrating that God left out the "why." I guess, for me, it's a little like declaring that you're not allowed to eat shrimp: while murder and theft have clear negative consequences, shrimp is just shrimp. Without a clear "why," it's just puzzling on the face of it.

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I recently read the deuterocanonical book The Letter of Jeremiah, whose entire premise is mixing up idols and the deities they represent.⁶ The commentary in my Bible suggests the following:

What was the danger of idolatry to which this text and others point? The danger is that the worshiper may come to believe that the deity is manageable, subject to the control of the worshiper, able to be won over, placated. Israel's God is sovereign and utterly free, and Israel is called to hear, obey, and adore. (The New Interpreter's Study Bible, pg. 1531)

I think that comes the closest to articulating why using an idol, even an idol that's supposed to represent God, might be dangerous. 

Idolatry is a weird subject. The Hebrew Bible is a little hazy about what it actually is, and it doesn't seem to fully grasp why people might participate in it. But, like just about any religious subject, I think talking about it and examining people's different perspectives on it is inherently good.

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1. Off hand, I actually can't think of any truly un-complicated religious concepts. "God loves you" is tempting, but I'm betting I could find plenty of people willing to complicate even that if I tried.
2. I don't know about you, but typing out "the Hebrew Bible" every time just seems silly to me. I'm going to call it "the HB" when I feel like it for the rest of this essay. Christians: just mentally replace the letters "H" and "B" with "O" and "T" and you'll be fine. Stop hyperventilating.
3. We actually worked directly from pictures of the Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was awesome. I still have my copy of this book, and inside, between the pages and the cover, is a photocopied page from another book I found to help me decipher the script in the Isaiah scroll, which is pretty different from the square script I was trained on in Hebrew class.
4. This is a fairly common way of talking about this subject in ancient Jewish thought. For another example, Check out this passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book written several centuries after Isaiah and Jeremiah (it's included in some Christian groups' Bibles, but not in others. I just read it as part of my ongoing attempt to read through the whole Bible, Apocrypha included.).
5. Note that this interpretation runs into the problem of the relevance of this commandment in modern times, when Christians have long since ceased to believe that other gods exist. This, I think, has led to the common explanation that things like money, status, power, and even cars can be "idols" that we "worship" if we care about them more than God. I like this interpretation, though it probably has relatively little to do with the author of Exodus's original intent.
6. Sample verses: They deck their gods out with garments like human beings—these gods of silver and gold and wood that cannot save themselves from rust and corrosion. When they have been dressed in purple robes, their faces are wiped because of the dust from the temple, which is thick upon them. One of them holds a scepter, like a district judge, but is unable to destroy anyone who offends it. Another has a dagger in its right hand, and an ax, but cannot defend itself from war and robbers. From this it is evident that they are not gods; so do not fear them. (Letter of Jeremiah 1:12-16)

Photo sources:
Photo 1 (modified):  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Worshiping_the_golden_calf.jpg
Photo 2:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baal_Ugarit_Louvre_AO17330.jpg
Photo 3:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orthodox_Bulgarian_icon_of_St._George_fighting_the_dragon.jpg

My Theological Progress

by Dave Mantel

I remember my first crisis of faith. I was about 11 years old, sitting on my bedroom floor, when I asked my mother, “How do we know this stuff is real?”

I was raised in a pretty conservative household and had a pretty sheltered upbringing. Luckily, when I asked this question, my parents didn’t call for an exorcism or send me to some kind of camp for lost sheep. As I look back, I see how lucky I was. There are really two ways modernist Christians deal with doubt and questions of the faith, one: by reprimanding the doubter and reminding them that all the answers are found in inerrant scripture, or two: encouraging questions because all the answers are found in inerrant scripture. My mother’s response was the latter. She gave me some books that I don’t remember reading—probably something by Lee Strobel—and we called it a day.

I think probably the first time I heard that there was another view of scripture other than the two extremes of “inerrant” and “completely false” was in one of my first college courses at Olivet Nazarene University. We were going over the Nazarene statement of faith, and they read their view of scripture: that it was “inerrant in all things pertaining to salvation.” That caught my attention right away. This was in pretty stark contrast to the belief of my upbringing, even though most of the wording was the same. There was that “inerrant” word again. But the clause was that it was only applicable to things pertaining to salvation. I would come back to that idea many times over the next few years.

As I began to fully embrace college life and adulthood, I began reading some of the more “controversial” literature popular with some of my friends—books like The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, Velvet Elvis, Love Is An Orientation, The Way of a Pilgrim…you get the idea. Not exactly controversial (though I guess they are in some conservative circles). As I started to read these books written by Christians who had worldviews that were so different than the one of my upbringing, I began to have more and more questions about the beliefs that I held.

I won’t bore you with the details, but as I started to ask more questions, I found that many of them didn’t seem to have black and white answers—even in this inerrant scripture I had been pointed to for so many years. It’s not that people couldn’t find answers. There were plenty of answers to the questions I was asking, often accompanied by a slew of references and verses as support. The pattern I began to see, though, was that sometimes there were two, or three, or more, completely different answers for the same questions, using the same inerrant scripture as reference. What was I supposed to do about that? Start verse counting? “OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!”

Even more confusing was the fact that on many of the issues I was having my key conflicts with, I began to discover different whole sects of Christianity that had their own traditions and interpretations of the  issues, some for thousands of years, that differed greatly from my conservative, evangelical upbringing. Yet, they all still claimed Christianity as their religion, and they all claimed that their particular view on these issues is the correct and "orthodox" one.

Why do I bring all of this up; tell you this anecdote of my spiritual adolescence? Because I believe it’s not just my story, but the state of an entire generation of post-evangelical Millennials who have a lot of questions that they’ve been carrying around for a long time, but maybe have no idea what to do with them. Or maybe you’ve just grown weary or bitter from carrying these burdens for so long with nowhere to put them.

At this intersection of the modern/post-modern generations within Christianity, it is important for us to remember that many of the “answers” that have been spoon fed to many of us since birth are relatively new constructs, the idea of the complete inerrancy of scripture, for example.

That’s not to say that we should start throwing our babies out with all of our bath waters (side note: you realize that must have been a thing in order to become a colloquialism like this, right? Think about that.) There are many things that can and should be held to as orthodox within the Christian faith. However, those things might not necessarily be what you think they are—especially if you’re a protestant evangelical in the West. Believe it or not, 100-year-old traditions may seem long to you and your church plant, but compare them with Catholic or Orthodox traditions which are based on literally thousands of years, you hopefully begin to gain a little perspective.

So how do we, the post-modern, post-evangelical, Millennial generation get our stuff together and figure out what’s what? You may have seen this coming:

We need to ask more questions.

Shocker, I know. But this is so important. The modern evangelical old guard, if you will, the Pat Robertsons, the Mark Driscolls, and the John Pipers of the world, they will tell you that questions and doubting are not beneficial to your faith, that doubt will destroy your walk with the Lord and lead you straight to hell. They will tell you to fact check them, until you actually do, and then they will either reprimand you or blow you off. And this is all from a place—an indoctrination—of “We already have all the answers. If you’re asking questions, you are not a good enough Christian.” Shaming the very thing that I believe can transform the Church to be looked at as something more than the current homophobic, bigoted, child molesting, hateful, hypocritical thing we are now.

So start to ask questions. Do your homework. Start to refine your questions into scalpels that can help cut out some of this rotting offal that’s been sitting here for decades. Don’t be afraid of criticism, or Church history, and don’t be afraid of the questions. God is not scared by our little questions. There is nothing we can ask or look in to or seriously contend that God can’t answer. Don’t be afraid of the mystery, the unknowing. Some things are not meant to be answered. Some things don’t even have an answer. We must learn to be OK with that. And we must begin with ourselves.

And finally, don’t be afraid of doubt. Rob Bell says in his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God,

“For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.”

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/starfire2k/3631902258/ 
Photo 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Descent_of_the_Modernists,_E._J._Pace,_Christian_Cartoons,_1922.png

Some Oddball Books of the Hebrew Bible (Part 2)

by James Davisson

Part 1 of this post is here.

I'm discussing a few of the weirder books in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is about the relationship between God and God's people, Israel, but a few of its books are missing one or the other.

From William Russell Flint's "Song of Solomon"

SONG OF SONGS:

What it is: Song of Songs (AKA Song of Solomon) is a book of love poems (or, uh, lust poems—a sizable portion of them is devoted to the speakers' descriptions of their significant others' rockin' bods).

What it's missing: God. Song of Songs makes no mention of God, and though it is clearly set in Israel, it never mentions the Law or the covenant between God and Israel.

How it got in there: It's included in the Bible because the whole thing has been interpreted as a metaphor for God's love for Israel (and then, later, as Christ's love for the Church). While this was undoubtedly not the original intent of the book, there is certainly value in reading Biblical books in new lights and finding meanings in them beyond what their original authors intended.

Why it's interesting: The authors of the Hebrew Bible felt free to reinterpret and rethink older works, and the New Testament reinterprets and rereads the Hebrew Bible in a new light constantly. Without new interpretations for new contexts, the Bible would only be an interesting artifact of a specific time and place several thousand years ago, rather than a book that informs and shapes the lives of millions of people every day. Finding a book of sexy love poems like the Song of Songs in the Bible is certainly odd, but I think reinterpreting it as a divine message of love is beautiful and interesting.

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"Obadiah the Prophet," James Tissot

OBADIAH:

What it is: Obadiah is a book of prophecy written after Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians and some of its people were taken into exile.

What it's missing: Israel. Obadiah is (nostly) missing "Israel," but in a different way from Job. Obadiah is Jewish and is writing from Judah, but he directs the content of his book almost entirely at a foreign nation, Edom. He is really, really angry at Edom and calls down God's judgment on them because they moved into Jerusalem and took advantage of its people and possessions after the city was sacked. And that's about it, really; Obadiah's so short, it is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that hasn't been divided into chapters. (The New Testament is rife with such books, though, which include Philemon, 2 and 3 John, and Jude.)

With one other exception (it's the next item on this list), all the prophetic books of the Bible are focused squarely on Israel, calling out her people for their wrongdoings and injustice, and warning them of the coming judgment if they don't change their ways.

How it got in there: I'm not aware of any controversy in including Obadiah in the Hebrew Bible. A good bet for the reason why is Obadiah's hopeful ending, which predicts the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. (So Israel is technically in Obadiah, though again, not at all in focus like a typical Hebrew Bible book.)

Why it's interesting: The fact that Obadiah is sure God will bring justice on the wicked Edomites conveys the idea that God is the God of everywhere, not just Israel, just as the book of Job does. But it communicates that idea in a disconcertingly violent and unsettling way, and it's not the main point of the book.

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"Nahum," Russian Orthodox icon

NAHUM:

What it is: Nahum is a book of prophecy about the fall of the capital of Assyria.

What it's missing: Israel. Nahum is just like Obadiah: it's a prophetic book, written by a man from Judah, that is directed entirely at an outside nation. In this case, it's Assyria, but Nahum is even more strange to my ears than Obadiah, because he's not attacking someone over a specific injustice, but simply gloating over the doom of a long-hated enemy.

How it got in there: Like with Obadiah, I'm not aware of any controversy over including Nahum. My commentary suggests its value lies in "a belief in God's just government of world affairs," a belief that has never been easy to sustain, least of all in our own day and age. 

Why it's interesting: Assyria was a regional superpower in Nahum's day, and it had obliterated the northern nation of Israel about a century before he wrote. In Nahum's time, though, Assyria's capital city Nineveh was sacked by the Babylonians and Medes. Assyria generally had a reputation for cruelty and the people of Judah had a lot of reason to hate them, so it's unsurprising that people would be happy about another country's army crushing Nineveh. But it's pretty strange to see a Biblical book dedicated almost entirely to rejoicing over another nation getting a vicious beatdown.

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SUMMING UP:

The Hebrew Bible is a weird place, and never more so than when it's defying expectations and including books that break the mold. While none of these books is my favorite, I'm glad they're all included. Looked at together, they show us even more strongly that this idea I leaned on pretty heavily in the first post is true: the Bible is a discussion among many ideas and a dialog among many stories; it's not a single, clear narrative or unified text.

For Christians, a huge part of what makes the Hebrew Bible important is that it was Jesus' Bible, and every part of it has the potential to inform us about who he was and what he had to say. Even the parts that seem especially odd to modern readers like me. Regardless of its messiness, the Hebrew Bible is deeply valuable.

It would be great in some ways to have a Bible that was written by a single person from start to finish. It would probably have fewer internal contradictions and be clearer about what it expected from us. There are religions that have this kind of scripture, or something close to it: Mormonism and Islam both come to mind. But as Christians, the Bible is what we have. In its way, it's incredibly beautiful, and the diversity of voices, stories, and ideas can lead to more fruitful conversations about the nature of God and faith.

But only if we let it. The notion that the Bible is a frequently fictional and often contradictory book is not new, but it is still controversial in most Christian denominations, and even where it is not, we rarely discuss what it means or think about it honestly and openly. And I really think that should change.

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Photo Sources:
1. mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tissot_Obadiah.jpg
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nahum-prophet.jpg

Some Oddball Books of the Hebrew Bible (Part 1)

by James Davisson

I recently finished reading the Hebrew Bible, the first and biggest step in an ongoing project to read through the Christian Bible in its entirety (Apocrypha included! I'm reading Sirach right now.) The Big Idea of the Hebrew Bible the relationship between two key things: God and God's people, Israel. And while most books of the Bible have both of these things (God and Israel), I noticed in my reading that there are a few books that are missing one or the other, which makes them stand out and seem a bit, well, odd.

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"Queen Esther," Andrea del Castagno

ESTHER:

What it is: Esther is the story of a Jewish woman in Persia who marries the king and saves the Jewish people from destruction.

What it's missing: God (...and Israel, sort of). This book famously does not directly mention God anywhere. It's also set entirely outside of the land of Israel (though it's still about the Jewish people).

How it got in there: Esther has had trouble getting into/staying in the Bible for both Christians and Jews because of the lack of God, as well as the generally non-religious character of the book. (Note that the Greek translation of the book added several passages of a very religious character; this version can be found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. These additions probably reflect discomfort with the lack of obvious religious meaning in the book of Esther.) It's noteworthy that the character of Esther in the book appears to be entirely assimilated to the surrounding culture in Persia, as she is not only married to a gentile, but also eats non-kosher food, and in fact neither she nor her cousin Mordecai seem to follow or acknowledge the Jewish religious laws.

There's definitely a strong case for including Esther in the Bible, since God's providence can certainly be seen working through people in the book, perhaps best in Esther 4:13-14. Also, in spite of taking place outside of Israel, it still has a message very directly intended for the Jewish people: take heart, be hopeful, and stay strong in tough times; look, you've been through worse before and come out okay.

Why it's interesting: What's interesting to me is that Esther is often regarded in scholarly circles as a piece of fiction, rather than history. Not only is there no external evidence to indicate that any of the events are historical (Queen Vashti, for example, does not exist in the historical record apart from this book, nor does Esther herself), but there are also a number of apparent historical inaccuracies. What's more, the book itself seems to be intended primarily not to record history but to convey satire of the enemies of the Jews and a message of support to the Jewish community.

We rarely (or for some of us, never) talk about the fictional character of some Biblical books in church or other religious contexts. For the most conservative audience, of course, the possibility of fiction in the Bible is not up for debate, as it is widely held that the Bible is inerrant.

But even in more progressive circles, the idea that parts of the Bible are fictional is poorly understood and very rarely discussed. I think we could get a much better understanding of the nature of the Bible and our relationship to it if this was the subject of the occasional sermon or Bible study.

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"Job's Tormentors," William Blake

JOB:

What it is: Job is the story of a good man, named Job, who suffers a lot and asks why he's suffering.

What it's missing: Israel. Job doesn't live in Israel and neither he nor his "friends" (they're really crappy friends and longwinded to boot) appear to be Jewish. Unlike Esther, where setting the book outside the Jewish homeland doesn't keep the book from having a pretty Jew-specific message, Job's lack of Jews or the land of Israel is very pointedly directing the reader toward the universal character of its ideas. The book of Job is about answering the question "Why do good people suffer?" The (somewhat unsatisfying) answer is basically "God is the God of everything, and it's complicated, so it's rude to ask, thank you very much." But since God is the God of everything, it makes sense to set this book outside of Israel, have it feature gentiles, and generally signal that "hey, this is the answer for everybody, not just Israelites."

How it got in there: Unlike a couple of the books on this list, Job appears to have been embraced immediately as an important theological work, and its inclusion in the Bible has never been controversial. We have evidence of its inclusion in the canon from the earliest possible date; there is even an Aramaic translation of Job among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest collection of Biblical manuscripts we have.

Why it's interesting: Job is an even more obvious work of fiction than Esther, which at least has the decency to be set in a definite historical time and place (Persia during the Jewish exile) with at least one historical character (emperor Xerxes). Job, on the other hand, is set in the land of Uz, which may or may not have ever been an actual place. The introductory story has all the hallmarks of a folk tale (repeated building actions, over-the-top quantities of death, and formulaic numbers) and some of it actually takes place in heaven, which is very unusual in the narrative books of the Hebrew Bible (and an impossible place for a historian to speak about with any certainty). Furthermore, the middle part is five dudes talking to each other (in poems!), and the climax is God speaking from the whirlwind. All of this bears very little resemblance to an attempt to record a real, historical event.

Instead, we can say with confidence that the author of Job did not write it as history, but as a way of discussing the big question he had in mind. Job is so clearly fictional that even the ancient Rabbis said "there was no such creature as Job; he is a parable."

The fact that these two books, Esther and especially Job, are essentially "made up" does not have to be threatening, because in a very important sense, being fictional is not the same as being false. For a prime example, we need look no further than Jesus: Jesus told stories to illustrate his points, and Christians know that these stories Jesus told were fictions, but we also firmly believe that they express eternal truths. We can believe the same things about books like Esther and Job.

Why it's even more interesting: As interesting as this idea is, there's an even bigger and more interesting one that Job opens up for us: that there are different, and indeed, disagreeing ideas in the Bible about really big, important topics. In the case of Job, the disagreement is about whether good is rewarded and evil is punished. Large portions of the Hebrew Bible either assume or state directly that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous. Job, on the other hand, points out the fact that this does not seem to be borne out in reality and asks why this is so.

I really wish that the disagreements among the Biblical authors were something that could be freely discussed and thought about by open-minded Christians, and I especially wish it were more often addressed directly in church services. Partly because smart people recognize the contradictions and it drives some people away. And partly because not talking about this fact and dealing with is can lead to unnecessary error, doubt, and even sin by faithful Christians.

(Okay, I'm done talking about fictional books in the Bible for now. I could also talk about Genesis, Daniel, Jonah, and others, but most of these books have both of the elements, God and Israel, that the rest of the"oddball" books in this list are missing, so I'll leave them to one side. Part 2, with three more oddball books and a summary, will be up later this week.)

Update: part 2 of this post is now available here.

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Photo Sources:
1: http://www.womeninthebible.net/paintings_esther.htm
2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Blake_1793_Job%27s_Tormentors.jpg