Considerations of Arguments and Facts

that are related to ideologies and religions

Where is the discussion about
repugnant narratives in the Old Testament?

The Old Testament contains a narrative and some stories that I consider to be repugnant from a moral point of view. Moreover, I have noticed that a number of other people do not share my opinion about them. In some cases the disagreement seems to reflect different opinions about the literal meanings of these stories, but in other cases it may be due to our different interpretations of the "intended" or "symbolic" meaning of the texts in question. In the present article I shall discuss this notion of underlying meanings of texts in the Old Testament, starting with a few examples.

One story that I react against occurs in the context of the siege of Jericho by the invading Israelites. The story is about Rahab, a prostitute who lived in Jericho, and who switched sides and betrayed her own people, which led to the fall and the destruction of her home city. The other one that I reacted against was the story about Lot, a man who lived in Sodom and who sacrificed his two daughters to a mob in order to rescue a visitor. Besides these two specific stories, I also react to the overriding narrative in the Old Testament, describing how the Israelites took over the land of Kanaan and how their religion prescribed a genocide of the native population there. My objections were not against these stories as such, but against considering them to have a religious relevance from a Christian point of view.

I have discussed these stories in some earlier articles where I concluded with a proposal that the Church of Sweden should remove the Old Testament from its official doctrine, and only retain the New Testament. This proposal has of course fallen on deaf ears. When I have talked to officials of the Church about these matters, the usual answer has been that stories such as these must be interpreted symbolically, and that they have in fact always been intended in this way. I have then asked what is, or was the symbolic interpretation of these stories, but I have never met with an intelligible answer to this question.

Furthermore, it seems to me that while there is lack of explanations of the presumed underlying meanings, there are also rich examples of cases where an author has praised these stories under their literal meanings, with religious or ethnic arguments. For example, in the two articles mentioned, I have quoted several of these, including a case where a very renowned author applauds the story about Rahab and sees her as model of good behavior in the service of God.

The archbishop of the Church of Sweden, Antje Jackelén, belongs to those who wish to explain stories in the Bible that are "difficult to understand" by stating that they were just intended to be interpreted symbolically. The Church of Sweden is a Lutheran church, so it is also interesting to see how other branches of Christianity address the issue of interpretation of the Scriptures. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) stated the following in its encyclica Dei Verbum :

Under the watchful eye of the sacred magisterium, and using appropriate techniques they should together set about examining and explaining the sacred texts in such a way that as many as possible of those who are ministers of the divine Word may be able to distribute fruitfully the nourishment of the Scriptures to the People of God.

This admonition gives additional support to the arguments for the need to identify and communicate the 'underlying' or 'intended' meanings of places in the Old Testament where these meanings are not obvious even for the layman. For all these reasons, I have had a long-standing interest in what may be the systematic principles for the symbolic interpretation of texts in the Old Testament. This generalizes the question about the symbolic interpretations of the stories mentioned above.

It was therefore with great interest that I received an article by Paul Faller with the title "Old Testament Criticism -- A Survey of Methods" [pan-10603], where he describes thirteen methods for the analysis and criticism of Old Testament texts. I hoped that it might give some guidance concerning the principles for arriving at the 'symbolic interpretations' or, more generally, the 'intentions of the sacred writers' (the expression used in Dei Verbum ).

In what follows I shall report my observations in this respect while reading Faller's article. Several of the methods described there seem to be directly relevant for my question, and I shall first review them briefly one at a time. This will serve as background to the concluding discussion.

Methods of criticism as described by Paul Faller

One should notice, first of all, that the term 'criticism' is used here in a sense that is close to 'examination' and to 'analysis'. None of the methods that follow seem to have it as a goal (not even a minor goal) to identify weaknesses or faults in their respective objects of study.

Sociological criticism

The task of social-scientific criticism is variously understood, and there exists a spectrum of opinion about what this method of criticism should entail. Some scholars see it as the exploration of the social aspects of biblical issues. Others appropriate concepts and models from sociology and anthropology and attempt to explain ancient Israelite and early Christian developments using those models. Still others undertake an ethnographical study of the origins, development, customs and beliefs of ancient Israel or early Christian communities.

This is clearly relevant for studying the main narrative of the OT in its literal sense, as well as the conditions in Palestine that led to the formulation of this narrative. It may also explain why the OT was included in the Christian Bible. On the other hand, it does now seem to allow for any 'symbolic' meaning of the OT narrative.

Canonical criticsm

Canonical criticism begins with the assumption that biblical texts were generated, transmitted, reworked, and preserved in communities for which they were authoritative. It studies how these texts functioned in the believing communities. The emphasis may be on the function of the fixed text in the first communities to receive it, or on the process in the communities of producing the final text by adapting earlier traditions to make them function authoritatively.

Potentially quite relevant for the answers to my questions.

Narrative criticsm

Narrative criticism is the application of rhetorical criticism (described below) to stories, aiming to interpret the text in terms of its own story world... Questions, which concern narrative critics, are the establishment of the boundaries of the text under analysis, and a study of plot and character. Beginnings and endings are important to identify, since we make significant meaning out of them.

This may be useful as background information, but it will not in itself answer my questions.

Reader-response criticism

Reader-response criticism approaches biblical literature in terms of the values, attitudes, and responses of the reader. The reader is included in the definition of the literary work, for the work is not the text but comes into being when text and reader interact...

The value of reader-response criticism can be seen in a number of ways. It facilitates serious interaction with the text and frees readers to make sense for themselves. The method allows readers to interact with the text in the light of their own context and linguistic and literary competence. It also allows the obvious religious concerns of the text to impinge on the reading in a way that is appropriate to the reader's concerns.

An inventory of how a variety of readers have interpreted the stories mentioned above (and how they have taken a stand on them) would shed light on the actual meanings of these stories today, but it will not answer the questions about the intended meaning.

Advocacy/ideological criticism

Finally, a short word about ideological criticism, of which feminist criticism and the liberationist approach to biblical studies are current examples. Ideological criticism is also called advocacy criticism. These approaches advocate that their results be used to change the existing religious or societal situation. The biblical writers were, after all, not without their own advocacy!

Feminist exegetes raise questions that they feel others have never asked because of bias, either conscious or unconscious. They do so in the hope of filling in the biblical world and uncovering wealth previously overlooked.

Feminist criticism has made a number of significant contributions, working in the following areas: translation of the Bible in gender inclusive language, recovering the female image of God, and identifying woman characters and women as agents in the biblical narrative.

The purpose of this feminist criticism seems to be that one should find ways of interpreting the sacred texts so that they agree with a contemporary set of values. The weakness of this approach is that it tends to undermine the authority of those texts, since by extrapolation any message that one reads in(to) these texts today may be disqualified some time later.

In addition to these methods, some additional ones appear to be indirectly relevant, in the sense that their results may be of use for the directly relevant methods. I shall characterize them by brief quotations from Fuller's article:

Form criticism

Form criticism ... is concerned ... with the oral patterns of folk literature and their original settings in the life of the community. Examples of these formal, literary categories in the Bible are the song of triumph, the lament, and the parable. Form criticism tries to determine the historical settings in which these patterns or forms were employed before they became part of the biblical books...

The final step in the analysis of a particular form is to establish what it was intended to accomplish within the community. Was the lament, for instance, intended to inspire confidence in God? Or was it a legitimate avenue for complaint?

Redaction criticism

Redaction criticism is devoted to the study of how an editor or redactor used written sources, and what this interpretive editing says about the theological interests of the redactor. ... If form criticism is concerned with the different forms of literature in the Bible, redaction criticism is concerned with the way these literary pieces are made to serve the purpose of the writer.

Tradition criticism

Tradition criticism, or tradition history, is an analysis which traces the growth, development, and transmission of verbal traditions, particularly oral ones. A biblical tradition is a statement or expression containing the self-understanding of ancient Israel and/or the early Christian community. Being 'God's people' for example shaped the identity of Israel, and the way they developed as a people... So tradition criticism seeks to reconstruct the history of the transmission of the various individual traditions and tradition complexes that are found in the Bible.

Rhetorical criticism

Rhetorical criticism assumes that all biblical discourse is aimed at influencing a particular audience at a particular time... Because the prophets tended to oppose the religious standards of their audience, their speeches are the main object of rhetorical criticism.

Discussion

Several aspects of the general wisdom about the Old and the New Testament can be cited as examples of the various kinds of 'criticism' according to Faller's classification. With respect to the overriding narrative in the OT -- the conquest of Kanaan's land by the Israelites, as a result of their covenant with Jahve -- there are two distinct topics of criticism. (I shall continue to use this word in the sense adopted by Faller). One concerns the original authoring of the Tanakh in its Israelite context; the other concerns the adoption and interpretation of these texts by the early Christian community.

With respect to the first of these topics, there is a widely held belief that this narrative was formulated around the 6th century BCE, in order to bolster the confidence in the state of Juda as it was under strong external pressure. It would appear that Redaction criticism, Tradition criticism, and Rhetorical criticism could be very relevant for the study of this aspect.

There are widely different opinions about the accuracy of the general historical development as described in the Tanakh. Any discussion about why various aspects of the development were described the way they are, must therefore be based on an assumption that the account is not historically correct in these parts. This necessarily puts the prospective author in a defensive position that may not be easily chosen.

With respect to the topic of how the early Christian community got to adopt major parts of the Tanakh as its 'Old Testament', sociological criticism will clearly be relevant for the study of the relation between Jews and non-Jews in the early Christian communities. But another question of paramount importance can less easily be categorized, namely, the notion that Christendom has a 'new covenant' with God, a covenant that is open to people anywhere in the world, and not merely to Jews. The identification and study of this radical idea does not fit into any of the types of critique in Faller's list.

Let us then consider the two stories, about Rahab and about Lot. Considering all the methods of critique, one looks in vain for any method that could give a cue for a 'symbolic' meaning, or an 'intended' meaning if there were one besides the obvious literal meaning where both Rahab and Lot are described as good examples worth following.

Moreover, the wikipedia (en) lists a number of accounts that re-tell and discuss the story of Rahab, and it is striking that they describe her in positive words, with only one exception:

Rahab is a figure in the mythos of William Blake. She is pictured as a harlot, akin to the whore of Babylon, and figures alongside Blake's character of Tirzah, as representing materialism, false religion, and fallen sexuality. Rahab's embrace of Urizen, who loosely represents fallen reason, is seen as the consolidation of error necessary to bring about the Final Judgment.

Cited works