[Dialogue] Spong 4/2 The Torah

[KroegerD at aol.com]

April 2, 2008 
The Origin of the Bible, Part  III
Breaking Open the Books of Moses – The Torah  

The Bible began to be written, relatively speaking, only a short time ago.  
When one considers the fact that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old 
and  the birth of the planet Earth can be reliably dated between four and a half 
and  five billion years ago, the beginning of Bible writing near 1000 B.C.E. 
is very  recent. Scientists now date the appearance of human life on this 
planet  somewhere between two million and 100,000 years ago, depending on how one  
defines human life. The beginning of civilization is placed by 
anthropologists  about 15,000 years ago. The person we call Abraham, who is regarded in the 
Bible  as the founder of the Jewish nation, is generally dated about the year 
1850  B.C.E. Yet the earliest strand of continuous material in the Bible 
appears to  have been written in the 10th century B.C.E., making it a relatively 
late  arrival on the scene. People have been trained by the Bible itself to 
think that  the biblical story begins at the moment of creation. Bishop James 
Ussher of  Ireland, using the Bible’s “inerrant words” and dates, asserted that 
creation  actually occurred on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. One of his 
later  contemporaries, James Lightfoot, added the note that it was at 9 a.m. GMT! 
If we  want to analyze the Bible, first we need to comprehend the fact that 
the  earliest part of the Bible to be written was only about 3000 years ago, 
between  950 and 1000 B.C.E. That fact alone immediately introduces a note of 
radical  relativity into the biblical assertions of many people.  
Next comes the realization that if Abraham lived around 1850 B.C.E., and the  
earliest written part of the Bible is after 1000 B.C.E., then everything that 
we  learn about Abraham in that story had to have been passed on orally for 
about  900 years or through as many as 45 generations before entering written 
form.  That knowledge forces us to embrace the fact that this biblical story 
can not be  historically accurate, but has the character of folk tale and myth 
in which the  facts of history are all but lost inside the developing 
tradition. Abraham might  well not even have been a Jew. He was identified with the 
shrine at Hebron.  Isaac, who is described as his son, was identified with the 
shrine at Beersheba  and Jacob, called his grandson in the Bible, was identified 
with the shrine at  Bethel. Their identifications with specific shrines opens 
up the possibility  that these three patriarchs may originally have been 
unrelated Canaanite holy  men, whose lives were later intertwined and interpreted 
as the founding  generations of the Jewish people to provide justification for 
the Jewish  invasion of this land that occurred around 1250 B.C.E. The 
purpose of these  patriarchal tales in Genesis was to establish the Jewish claim 
that they were  only taking over this land that God had promised to their 
ancestors hundreds of  years earlier. As rational claims these things make no sense, 
but as propaganda  they constituted then and still do now powerful influences 
in human history.  
Other facts about the biblical story are even more threatening to those who  
treat the Bible magically, and who pretend that in its words both historic  
accuracy and literal truth have been captured. Moses, who is an even more  
pivotal person in Jewish history than Abraham, lived some 300 years before the  
earliest part of the Old Testament was written. This means that we must embrace  
the fact that everything attributed to Moses in the Bible, including the 
Exodus  from Egypt and the giving of the Law at Sinai, are sacred traditions that 
passed  through oral transmission for as many as 15 generations before 
achieving  permanent status in a written form. How much did these crucial Moses 
stories  grow in that oral period? Did the Red Sea come to replace the Sea of Reeds 
as  the center of the splitting of the waters story? Did the discovery of the  
droppings of the Tamarisk tree in the wilderness, with its white flaky 
residue  lying on the ground, give rise to the story of God raining heavenly bread 
called  manna down on the hungry Hebrew people? Did an eruption of burning 
natural gas  in that oil and gas rich desert give rise to the story of God’s call 
to Moses at  a burning bush that was not consumed? What was the process 
through which the  community’s code of laws, including the Ten Commandments, went 
before they  settled into the familiar form that we find in Exodus? Is the 
number “ten” for  the commandments more important than the content of the ten? Is 
the fact that  the Bible contains a multiplicity of versions of the Ten 
Commandments an attempt  to explain the biblical story that Moses broke the clay 
tablets containing the  Ten Commandments when he saw that the people of Israel 
had forsaken the God who  had brought them out of Egypt for a Golden Calf, and 
that he, therefore, had to  return to Sinai to get a second version? How much 
of the story of Exodus is  history and how much of that narrative has been bent 
to conform to the  developing liturgy of the Passover that was designed 
primarily to let the Jewish  people observe the moment of their national birth 
liturgically? None of these  were questions that could be raised until the idea 
that the Bible is not an  eyewitness account of ancient history was both faced 
and accepted. With each new  discovery the Bible began to be viewed as a quite 
human book that needs to be  examined critically and not as the 
divinely-inspired literal word of God that  was inerrant because it had been revealed by or 
even dictated by God on high.  
In the late 1800s, a group of scholars in Germany led by Professors K. H.  
Graf and Julius Wellhausen began to study rigorously the details of the first  
five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  
These books, called the Torah or the Books of Moses, constitute the most 
sacred  part of the Hebrew Scriptures and were traditionally required by the Jews 
to be  read in their entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year in the 
synagogues of the  Jewish world. These scholars began to apply to these texts the 
insights of  literary criticism. To do this, they had to set aside the claims that 
these  works constituted the “Word of God,” or that they possessed some 
magical  relationship with truth. The results were salutary and more than anything 
else  opened the doors to a new academic interest in the Bible itself.  
Analyzing these texts carefully, these scholars discovered that there were  
many observable differences that could be noted which led them to the 
conclusion  that the Torah consisted of several strands of what had once been 
independent  material. One strand referred to God by the name Yahweh, or at least by an 
 unpronounceable set of consonants that were written as YHWH, and it called 
the  holy mountain of the Jews Mt. Sinai. Another strand of material called God 
by  the name of Elohim and it called the holy mountain Mt. Horeb. A third 
strand of  material reflected life in the Kingdom of Judah in the seventh 
century. Still  another strand appeared to be dated during the time of the Exile and 
perhaps  even later. When they began to separate these strands from one an
other, other  insights became available. The material that called God YHWH 
appeared to be  centered in Jerusalem for it extolled the institutions identified 
with  Jerusalem, such as the King, the High Priest and the Temple. It reflected 
that  period of Jewish history in which the nation was undivided and was ruled 
from  Jerusalem. The strand that called God Elohim reflected the values of the 
 northern part of the land of the Jews that achieved independence from 
Jerusalem  rule in a rebellion led by a military general named Jereboam against the 
newly  crowned Jerusalem king named Rehoboam, who was, the Bible tells us, the 
son of  Solomon and the grandson of King David. That rebellion, which 
occurred around  the year 920 B.C.E., was successful and brought into being a new 
Jewish state  called the Northern Kingdom, or Israel. Ultimately, this new nation 
had its  capital and worship center in the city of Samaria and traced its 
Jewish roots  back primarily to Joseph, whom it called the “favorite son” of the 
patriarch  Jacob. Joseph was said to be the child of Jacob by his favorite 
wife Rachel and  his father was said to have endowed him, among other things, 
with a coat of many  colors. The patriarch Joseph in this narrative of the 
Elohist writer was always  juxtaposed to his older brother Judah, who remained the 
dominant ancestral  figure of the Jewish people whose life centered in 
Jerusalem. Judah was the son  of Jacob by Rachel’s older sister Leah. According to 
this story Jacob had been  tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rachel by their 
father Laban. Only by  marrying Rachel’s older sister did Jacob also manage 
to win Rachel as his second  wife. Leah was described in this text rather 
cruelly as being unloved and even  as having eyes that popped out of her head like 
those of a cow. This Elohist  document was designed on many levels to counter 
the claims made by the tribe of  Judah that they were destined to rule over 
these northern ten tribes. In the  service of this theme the Elohist writer went 
so far as to assert that Judah  betrayed his younger brother Joseph by 
selling him into slavery for twenty  pieces of silver. In time, however, Joseph was 
said to have used this act of  treachery to save all of his brothers including 
Judah from death by starvation,  which he did by taking them down into Egypt, 
where they remained for 400 years,  eventually falling into slavery, from 
which Moses would ultimately lead them to  freedom in their “promised land.”  
As these strands came to be viewed as quite different stories written to  
reflect quite different times in history, these scholars began to recognize that  
they had cracked the code of biblical origins. The first five books of the 
Torah  were not written by Moses or indeed by any single author. They were a 
composite  of written materials that had been blended and intertwined into a 
single story  over a period of as much as 500 years. Biblical scholarship had 
taken an  enormous leap into modernity. The old claims, held so tenaciously for so 
long by  so many, were shaken to their very foundations. The era of critical 
biblical  scholarship was being born.  
We will return to this brief overview later and develop each of these four  
strands of the Torah in much greater detail, so stay tuned.  
– John Shelby Spong  
P.S. For those wanting more information on the Asilomar Conference go to 
_www.westarinstitute.org_ (http://www.westarinstitute.org/) .  
Errata and  Apology
In my recent column on sexism and racism in this presidential campaign, I  
referred to a comment by Carl Bernstein on "Hillary's thick ankles." I got that  
reference from a quotation from feminist writer Robin Murray's recent article 
in  which she mentions "Carl Bernstein's disgust with Hillary's thick ankles
." I  made the assumption, falsely I now recognize, that this comment had to 
have been  made in the public arena for it to be quoted in this article in this 
way. Since  Carl Bernstein is a regular contributor to CNN I jumped to the 
conclusion that  it was in that context that the comment was made. I now know 
that this is  incorrect and to the degree that I am able I want to correct the 
record and  apologize to Carl Bernstein.  
The quotation to which I referred comes originally not from a media comment,  
but from Bernstein's serious and generally sympathetic biography of Hillary  
Clinton. Its context was also quite different. Bernstein was quoting boys who  
were Hillary Clinton's high school classmates describing how they saw her at  
that time. In fairness to Carl Bernstein, he also described some unflattering 
 ways in which Bill Clinton's high school classmates had remembered him. The  
meaning I had ascribed to the quotation in my column was misleading at best 
and  clearly wrong at worst.  
The most important thing that a columnist needs to do is check sources, even  
when we assume that they are credible. I used this quote both in a piece in a 
 series call "On Faith," published by the Washington Post, and also in my  
regular weekly column published by Waterfront Media. The Waterfront Media column 
 was actually filed on the Friday prior to the Tuesday Texas and Ohio 
Democratic  primaries, to be run on Wednesday after a winner in those primaries had 
been  declared. My original assumption in the column was that Senator Clinton 
would  lose one or both of these primaries and be forced to withdraw from the 
race.  
When she surprised the world yet again and won both of them, the column had  
to be cancelled radically revised and held to run a week later. A column 
already  on file was run instead. During that week I received the communication 
from  Robin Morgan with her Bernstein reference. It fitted my thesis so well that 
I  added it to the column as part of the revision without checking the 
accuracy of  my source and repeated it in the piece for "On Faith."  
Carl Bernstein called me later to point this out, to make me aware of the  
original context and to ask for a retraction. I am pleased to be able to do just 
 that, both because I greatly admire this man and the service he has provided 
for  my country, and also because the quotation disappointed me, coming as I 
assumed  it had from what seemed to me a surprising source.  
By this statement I hope to repair the damage to truth done to my readers,  
both at "On Faith" and Waterfront Media, caused by my use of this line without  
understanding the original context that in fact changed its meaning and also 
to  any diminution that Carl Bernstein's impressive public image has endured. 
Carl  Bernstein has assured me that my apology has been accepted. Apart from 
that  comment, however, I stand by the thesis and theme of both pieces, namely 
that  sexism is both rampant and largely unadmitted in American politics.  
John Shelby Spong 



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