Reading the Qur'an - The Qur'an and the Old Testament

Left: my Study Qur'an, a present from my wife. Right: my Hebrew Bible, a present from my past self.

I spent the last month reading the second surah of the Qur'an, Al-Baqarah, The Cow. It's named after a bit of dialog in verses 66-71 between Moses and the Israelites about sacrificing a special cow. Al-Baqarah is full of incidents like this one, that refer to the books that Christians call the Old Testament (OT), so in reviewing Al-Baqarah this post will focus on the varying ways that the Qur'an quotes, reshapes, references, and reinvents the OT.

Before that, let's back up slightly and talk about Al-Baqarah as a whole. It is the longest surah by far, comprising about one twelfth of the Qur'an, and having 286 verses. It covers a huge range of topics, including theology, law, history, cosmology, and spirituality. It also contains one of the most important verses in the whole Muslim tradition, the Pedestal Verse:

God, there is no god but He, the Living, the Self-Subsisting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. Unto Him belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth. Who is there who may intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows that which is before them and that which is behind them. And they encompass nothing of His Knowledge, save what He wills. His Pedestal embraces the heavens and the earth. Protecting them tires Him not, and He is the Exalted, the Magnificent. (2:255)

The Pedestal Verse is one of the first verses that Muslims memorize, is often recited when setting out on a journey, and can be found on the walls of many mosques and homes. And you can see why--it's a beautiful description of the nature of God, and of God's majesty and power over creation, and his ability to protect it. As a Christian, though, I often find the Qur'an's vision of God to be missing a key element--love.

The Bible frequently treats God as a lover, who is passionate about the covenant people, often to the point of jealousy. So far in my reading of the Qur'an, I haven't encountered this metaphor, or any sense of God's love for humanity--except for God's compassion and mercy, which comes up at the beginning of each surah of the Qur'an, all of which begin: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.* Instead of love, the Qur'an seems to emphasize God's justice and power. To my Arminian mind, it reads a little like a parody of Calvinism. (This is all premature of course--I've only read about a sixth of the book so far!)

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The Qur'an draws on the Old Testament regularly and in a variety of ways, but in general it does one of two things with the OT text:

1. In some cases, the Qur'an will paraphrase, repurpose, and/or expand an event from the OT. So far in my readings, the story is never a direct quotation, and is typically used to make some kind of point that would have been outside the scope of the original text. 
2. Often, though, the Qur'an will simply take characters from the OT and make completely original uses of them. The characters' essential traits are often familiar, but the events of the stories are entirely new. Sometimes, the characters are named, without any story to speak of at all--they simply appear as names to make a rhetorical point.

De Geschiedenis van Adam en Eva (detail), Jan Breughel de Jonge, Wikimedia

A good example of #1 is the story of Adam and the naming of the animals. Here's the OT version: 

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (Genesis 2:18-20, NRSV)

Here's the Qur'an's version: 

And when thy Lord said to the angels, “I am placing a viceregent upon the earth,” they said, “Wilt Thou place therein one who will work corruption therein, and shed blood, while we hymn Thy praise and call Thee Holy?” He said, “Truly I know what you know not.” And He taught Adam the names, all of them. Then He laid them before the angels and said, “Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.” They said, “Glory be to Thee! We have no knowledge save what Thou hast taught us. Truly Thou art the Knower, the Wise.” He said, “Adam, tell them their names.” And when he had told them their names He said, “Did I not say to you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you disclose and what you used to conceal?” And when We said to the angels, “Prostrate unto Adam,” they prostrated, save Iblīs. He refused and waxed arrogant, and was among the disbelievers. (2:30-34, "The Cow")

As you can see, there is a shared story element--the first man, Adam, reciting the names of every living creature--but the context, the purpose, and even the event itself, are all quite different. In the OT, Adam names the creatures himself, whereas in the Qur'an, he is merely taught the names. In the OT, the purpose of the story is to introduce Adam's loneliness and lack of a partner, whereas in the Qur'an, the story demonstrates Adam's superiority over the angels. In the OT, the context is a larger narration about the origins of God's creation and the expulsion of the first humans from paradise, whereas in the Qur'an, the context is a demonstration of God's superiority and sovereignty over all.

Adam Honored by Angels, Persian Miniature c. 1560, Wikimedia

There are probably less radically altered stories than this one, but for the most part, the Qur'an seems to delight in taking rather small seeds of plot from the OT and growing wildly different story trees from them. 

Abraham is a key figure in the Qur'an--he will certainly merit his own entry on this blog in the coming months, if I can find the time--and he often appears in way #2, an OT character plucked from the original and given new things to do in a new text. Here's a pair of verses where he appears in in this surah, with no obvious OT parallels: 

Hast thou not considered him who disputed with Abraham about his Lord because God had given him sovereignty? When Abraham said, “My Lord gives life and causes death,” he said, “I give life and cause death.” Abraham said, “Truly God brings the sun from the east. Bring it, then, from the west.” Thus was he who disbelieved confounded. And God guides not wrongdoing people. (2:258, "The Cow") 

And when Abraham said, “My Lord, show me how Thou givest life to the dead,” He said, “Dost thou not believe?” He said, “Yea, indeed, but so that my heart may be at peace.” He said, “Take four birds and make them be drawn to thee. Then place a piece of them on every mountain. Then call them: they will come to thee in haste. And know that God is Mighty, Wise. (2:260, "The Cow)

We see the essential character of Abraham, at once trusting profoundly in God in 2:258 (as he does in the OT when he trusts God's promise of land and descendants), but also challenging God (as he does when he bargains with God in the OT). Yet these specific tales, of Abraham's dispute with a man doubting God's sovereignty, and of God resurrecting some birds as proof of the final resurrection, occur nowhere in the OT, not even in highly altered form.

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What are we to make of this? Islamic tradition, and the Qur'an itself, holds that the Bible as Christians know it today is in part a revelation from God, but that Christians and Jews have corrupted it:

So woe unto those who write the book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a paltry price. So woe unto them for what their hands have written and woe unto them for what they earn. (2:79, "The Cow")

(This verse and others like it--e.g., 7:157, "The Heights"--are often interpreted to refer to intentional alterations to the Bible, made to remove supposed prophecies about the coming of Mohammed, God's final prophet.) So one way to see this relationship is the Qur'an restoring the corrupted message of the older text: the altered stories and the new ones are what ought to have appeared in the old. Another way to understand these two texts is to propose, as many have, that there were alternative, unrecorded traditions about OT figures circulating by word of mouth throughout the near east in antiquity, and the Qur'an simply references and makes use of these existing stories.

In his 2010 book, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext, Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the Bible is key to interpreting the Qur'an. He even goes so far as to say that the Bible is a better guide to Qur'ranic interpretation than the life of Mohammad, which is both the traditional and secular academic norm for interpreting the book: "[T]he Qur’an ... should not be read in conversation with what came after it (tafsir [traditional early interpretations including accounts of the life of Mohammad]) but with what came before it (Biblical literature)" (pg. 13).

In Reynolds' somewhat radical view, the tafsir, the early interpreters of the Qur'an, appear to be inventing episodes in the life of Mohammad in order to explain the text. These interpreters claim an unbroken chain of memory from the time of the prophet centuries earlier, but appear to have forgotten a number of highly salient details, such as the purpose of the mysterious unconnected letters at the beginning of a number of surahs (pg. 19), or who the Sabians, a group who are named alongside Muslims, Christians, ad Jews, actually were (pg. 20). Reynolds casts doubt on the tafsir as reliable sources, and points us to the material that we know pre-exists the Qur'an as a means of divining its meanings: the Bible.

At all events, it is clear that the OT is a valuable resource for understanding and engaging with the Qur'an. If nothing else, it provides a place to compare and contrast story elements and recurring characters, which makes for a fine way of investigating the author's purposes and meanings. If a story has been altered, we can ask: what has been changed, and to what end? If OT characters appear in the Qur'an, are they recognizable or not? What rhetorical, theological, or historical purposes do they serve? Regardless of whether Reynolds is right about the reliability of the early interpreters of the Qur'an, the OT has proved a great place to go for thinking in depth about Islam's scripture.

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*This formulation is called the Basmala, and it's actually missing from the ninth surah, which has led some to speculate that it may have originally been the second half of surah eight. Psalms 9 and 10 in the Old Testament are like this--together, they appear to form an acrostic poem, in which every other line begins with successive letters of the alphabet.

Bibliography:

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext. London: Routledge, 2010.

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

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