Under God: The People of Ancient Israel – Episode 6:

Lessons from the Bible

This series provided a brief history of Jewish history, particularly how ancient Israel’s stories of origin came to be and how they evolved over time.

My goal was to give a nickel or dime tour of Richard Elliott Friedman’s scholarly work as described in a few of his books.

Hopefully it was interesting in its own right, but I also think that we can draw a few helpful lessons from everything covered here.

Lesson One:

When Guests Are Over:

Break Out the Fancy Silvertongues 

The central theme of this history, as well as the writing of Israel’s sacred national history, is the need to unite a disparate collection of peoples. Initially, there was the need to integrate the tribe of Levi into the host nation. Then later, there were various splits and rivalries that needed to be resolved in order for peace to be established.

The purpose of Israel’s sacred stories and written histories was not some dispassionate accounting of everything that happened, in the hope of preserving a factually accurate rendering of objective truth. 

• The purpose of storytelling and record-keeping was to marshal an all-encompassing narrative that could grant meaning and order to the people.
• To define who they were and what they needed to do.
• To establish a common origin, common activities, and common goals, in order to bring rival factions together.

The purpose of the stories was to turn many into one.

To summon the magic of e pluribus unum.

Do we not also have those same underlying needs for our own society?

Obviously in our society, facts matter, science matters, and historical accuracy matters. But a lot of the social and political problems that we face today won’t be solved by better data or more scientific breakthroughs.

At one level, we face a problem of misinformation and information overload…

But at a deeper level the problem is widespread distrust of established experts, and widespread cultural fragmentation. 

When everyone looks to different authorities and tells different stories… well, then people can’t even agree upon basic facts about reality.

Let alone unite to solve problems. Everything is rendered meaningless, reduced to fuel for more argument. Society begins to crack up, and break down.

The ancient Israelites knew quite well about the problem of fragmentation.

In the book of Genesis, just before Abraham is established as the father of the people of God, the Torah relates to us the perfect metaphor for the epistemic crisis that we’re currently experiencing: God’s curse on the people of Babel after they built their tower. 

Let’s learn from the lesson of Babel. Let’s not engage in talk about the inevitability of progress through facts and science, or smug declarations about the end of history. Such talk, absent anything else, is just a vain attempt to build another tower: nothing that will lift our current curse of fragmentation.

It will only make it worse. Instead, let us marshal inspiring narratives to bring people who see things differently to our side. Then we can have some hope in establishing order, maintaining peace, and mobilizing for collection action to solve our other problems.

Lesson Two:

Humble Pie is a Dish Best Served Warm

In my last series on the gospel of Mark, I presented an argument that the very first life-and-times story of Jesus was in fact a largely symbolic and polemical work: one primarily about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E.

I took a chunk of the ideas from R.G. Price, who happens to think that this argument proves that Jesus Christ was nothing but a fiction.

And the other gospels based their own stories on this fictional work of Mark. Bam! Case closed! They made it all up! 

Or did they?

Now, I will say that this argument about Mark is actually a major blow to the face-value assumptions that the gospels can be readily gleaned for details about Jesus the man as he lived and preached in Judea. The fact is, the details of a real human Jesus are mostly lost in the fog of historical obscurity, at least based on the evidence available.

This is something that biblical scholars rarely seem to own up to. One scholar (Charles Freeman) once soberly admitted that attempting to describe the historical Jesus is really like peering at one’s own reflection down a well; every description will end up being different, for a reason. I agree, and I happen to be much more interested in the Jesus that is in fact quite prominently described in the Bible: the theological one.

But to Price, and to similarly-minded skeptic types, I would point to Richard Elliott Friedman’s work on the Exodus as a lesson to consider with respect to evidence and storytelling.

Scholars who looked only at archeological evidence concluded that the Israelites simply made up everything about Egypt and the crossing of the desert. Very imaginative, those crazy superstitious tribesman! 

But within those stories, which are undoubtedly creative and sometimes fantastical, there are details embedded that actually reflect real history; it’s just not the face-value history as it’s told in the story. We need to really be humble about how we encounter data and available evidence; maybe more information will come later, and maybe we’re not as clever as we think we are.

As for the historical Jesus, I’ll simply say that not all of the details of the gospel of Mark have been unpacked in terms of where they came from and what they mean.

And some of the details do have a discernible meaning, but they aren’t tied to the political polemic (I won’t go into those weeds here). Given that it’s not all a simple allegory, it could be that some of those other obscure details in the story reflect real historical details about Jesus and the early movement, similar to how the Levites captured their own history in their origin stories for Israel.

It’s not absurd to accept that we might be missing something. Maybe we’ll learn more later, and maybe not. That’s just how it goes.

Okay, the last and most important lesson.

Lesson Three…

Liven Up Every Gathering With Discussions of Politics and Religion!

I hope you enjoyed this series. Let me know what you think!

…end of series…

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