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The Bible: A Biography, by Karen Armstrong. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007. 302 pp. $21.95.
This volume will sound familiar to those who know of Armstrong’s works; in fact, it reads like an abridged version of A History of God, and there are some parts that feel disjointed. But for those who are new to her writing, this little book will be a treat, and they will understand why she is considered one of the most articulate voices on religion today. In this book she wants to clarify what the Bible is and is not by examining how the Bible came to be scripture and how it has been interpreted over the years. She is concern that many modern assumptions about the Bible are incorrect, especially the fundamentalists’ claim that the Bible must be interpreted factually, which, she argues, is contrary to interpretive tradition of Jews and Christians of the past. She opens each chapter with a description of a historical crisis that affected the writing of scripture (Chapters One to Four) and that changed the understanding of the Bible (Chapters Five to Eight). Then she focuses on exegetes whose fresh readings of the Bible have answered the critical issues of their time. Every chapter has a compelling plot she masterfully narrates while informing readers of knowledge and insights she has garnered through much research and reflection.
The first two chapters deal with the formation of the Hebrew Bible. Chapter One (Torah) starts from Babylon where the exiles had brought a number of scrolls with them and where they studied and edited these documents in reaction to their circumstances. Armstrong follows the Documentary Hypothesis in describing the content and the process of composition of these scrolls. (She incorrectly dates Josiah’s death to 622 and places the conquest of Nineveh after Josiah’s death; Josiah died in 609, and Nineveh was conquered by the Medes, not by the Babylonians, in 612.) When some Israelites returned to Jerusalem, they brought with them writings that would serve as the bare bones of the Hebrew Bible. In Chapter Two (Scripture) she credits Ezra for transforming these writings into the Torah by placing them in the contexts of rituals that separated them from ordinary life. She portrays the author of Daniel as an ideal exegete, who interpreted scripture to speak to the present crisis. At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, there existed many sects, including the Pharisees and the Christians, who were interpreting scripture in their own way.
The next two chapters examine two movements that produced their own “additions” to the Hebrew Bible after the destruction of the second temple. In Chapter Three (Gospel) Armstrong describes how the early Christians developed their own interpretive lens to read Hebrew scriptures and produced their own writings, many of which became part of the New Testament, in response to the destruction of the second temple and their subsequent persecution. She notes that Christians, like the Qumran sect, try to find a secret message in the scriptures that referred to their own community and to their traumatic situation. She highlights the importance of Paul’s letters in creating the New Testament and of his hermeneutical practice, which showed future generations of Christians how to interpret the Hebrew Bible and make it their own. Then in Chapter Four (Midrash) she describes how the Pharisees were able to revive Judaism through their innovative study of the Torah and were able to meet the needs of Jews after the destruction of the second temple. The Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud functioned in a similar way to the New Testament in that their writers regarded them as new revelations for a changed world. Armstrong pays a special attention to Hillel’s Golden Rule and argues that it was the exegete’s job to interpret the Bible through the principle of charity.
Then in the following two chapters the story span from the collapse of the Roman empire to the end of the Dark Ages. Chapter Five (Charity) describes innovations in interpreting the Bible during the age of the church fathers, culminating with Augustine. They created the seminal ideas of Christianity and adapted this Jewish faith to the Graeco-Roman world. Christians now made sense of the Hebrew Bible through their own exegetical method in which all the events and characters of the “Old Testament” became types of Christ in the New. Armstrong highlights the importance of Augustine and claims that Augustine had arrived at the same conclusion as Hillel and used charity as the central guiding principle in interpreting the Bible. In Chapter Six (Lectio Divina) Armstrong describes Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire as a dangerous place to live. From the fifth to the ninth centuries, the “sacred study” of the Bible, which focused heavily on the allegorical sense of the text, was confined to the monasteries. It was only in the eleventh century when the West rediscovered Aristotle that Europe started to emerge from the Dark Ages. But there was a rift between those who wanted to continue to concentrate on lectio divina and those who were more interested in the new learning and more objective biblical study. Jews also tried to engage with rationalism, trying to see scripture in harmony with reason, but the Kabbalists opted for mystical interpretation of the Bible.
The last two final chapters take us from the Reformation to the present. In Chapter Seven (Sola Scriptura) Armstrong describes how the early stage of modernization, which made it impossible to be religious in the traditional way, affected the reading of the Bible. The Protestant Reformation made sola scriptura one of its most important principles, democratizing the interpretative process and empowering individuals to make sense of the Bible on their own. But the scientific bias of early modern thought required people to read the Bible more factually than in the past, beginning to demand of the Bible what it was not designed to provide. On the Jewish front Armstrong is brief and focuses on the importance of the Kabbalah after the eviction of Jews from Granada in 1492 and argues that its mythical interpretation helped Jews cope with their hardship and despair. In Chapter Eight (Modernity) Armstrong traces the development of modern biblical scholarship, which tend to analyze the Bible skeptically and critically without offering spirituality. She argues that fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism is a modern phenomenon that emerged as resistance to modernity, which appeared to them as an assault on their way of living and thinking. She challenges modern biblical scholars to come up with a counter-narrative to the fundamentalist distortion of the Bible. She concludes by saying that exegetical methods of the past that sacrificed the integrity of the original intention and context of the text are no longer an option, but biblical scholars need to emulate the great exegetes of the past by following the principle of charity, which she showed to be deeply rooted in both Judaism and Christianity, and to engage with the burning issues of today.
Uriah Y. Kim
Hartford Seminary |
