The Bible and Plagiarism: Repurposing the Stories of Old

thank you it's it's very much a pleasure to be here uh and to give be able to give a lecture as part of this emory williams memorial lectureship uh it's also a pleasure to visit emory university for the first time even though my sister graduated from here in 1979 and i texted her ahead and said how is it that i've never been here when you were a student you know and it turned out that we were living in japan while she was a student and it was too expensive and so she poor girl just had four years at college without a single visit from family now i understand that many of you have just been through the first year orientation and as part of that orientation have had an introduction to emery's honor code and really whether you're at emory or at oberlin or any other kind of university or college you enter the academic community in part by it by agreeing to adhere to an honor code so i did a little studying ahead of time and read through emory's it's like a multi-page document online about the honor code and values at emory um and so the preamble of your honor code reads upon every individual who is part of emory university follows the responsibility for maintaining in the life of emory a standard of unimpeachable honor in all academic work and then among the six types of misconduct that are mentioned you have plagiarism namely using the work or words of another person and claiming that they are your own uh an honor code in many ways defines a community it's an articulation of shared values and some of the values that are enshrined within an honor code include academic and integrity respect for authorship and respect for for originality or the original idea so adherence to the honor code places emery and even places you in a larger academic community of shared values and this community is actually a global community nonetheless the value that we hear at emory and more broadly in western academia place on authorship on originality on attribution of sources is not really a timeless or universal value it's certainly not timeless or universal in its practice or application so i'm as mentioned i'm a professor of the ancient near east i focus most of my study on the hebrew bible or on ancient israel and judah as those that produced the old testament and so i tend to live a good part of my life in what you might call bc rather than a d uh i look at texts that date to the second and first millenniums before the common era and what i want to do today is take you through some of these texts some biblical some from the broader culture of the ancient near east and look at what are the values the literary academic core values of the writing community of this ancient world and how do they match up or not so closely match up with the values that we have enshrined in an uh honor code okay in many of the texts that i study the ancient world does in fact adhere to the values that we would recognize ancient authors for example had tremendous respect for the written word they knew that it was powerful and this is largely because the vast majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate and so it didn't matter if you could read or understand the written word simply the appearance of writing would be enough to communicate to the viewer power and a sense of reverence you would look it also wouldn't be something like we have where there's scrap paper we're each writing little stuff on scrap paper sending texts it's you wouldn't have that kind of medium for writing often it's going to be some enormous steely stone inscribed writing other times it would be a papyrus scroll you wouldn't have common writing so just the appearance of it communicates power in the bible common people are not depicted writing they're not depicted reading instead the act of writing in the bible is associated with god scribes some kings and a few queens one of the ways that the power of writing is asserted in ancient texts was through attributing the text to a revered figure so you may know possibly from cecil b demille's ten commandments if not from having read the bible itself that we have this image of god presenting the tablets to moses on mount sinai and he has said in exodus to have written the ten commandments with his finger inscribed by the finger of god so here we have an idea of a written text and the author is understood to be divine other places in the bible are the entire pentateuch or torah the first five books of the bible are attributed to moses he's said to have written the entire torah all of the book of psalms is attributed to david when you look closely at these at these books or collections and and you see references to dates there's no way we can actually say all the psalms are actually written by david instead they seem to be attributed to him because he was remembered as a poet he was remembered as a musician who played the liar and so therefore the book of psalms if you wrote a good psalm and it was included it deserved to be called of david and therefore part of this book of psalms the attribution uh of a work of writing to god is not unique to the bible so i thought i'd show you a couple examples this is the the law code of hammurabi written on a basalt steely in cuneiform text and i think actually what what becomes most important is another sort of view is that because again the vast majority people couldn't read the cuneiform text they didn't know what the laws said you have to accompany the text with an image so this is a close-up of the image on the top and here we have the sun god uh shamash he we know him he's seated on the right and throned he has a head piece that is distinct to divinity and he is handing a scroll over to king hammurabi and so we have the same idea of sort of god and moses only here it's shamash and hammurabi it's the understanding is that this law code has its authority in divine authorship now this practice is obviously very different from our own modern western academic norms few of us claim divine authority for any of our college essays and probably attributing some of your better ideas to moses will not go well either but we do have some examples in the bible and the larger ancient near eastern context that are closer to our own practices of citation so for example in the history in the historical books of kings first and second kings these these books basically tell the entire history of kingship in ancient israel and judah and they go back and forth introducing the king of israel then the king of judah the king of israel then the king of judah moving forward in time each king is introduced formulaically with identification of his name the number of years he reigned and his mother's name okay so there's a formula and i have an example let's see okay abegium began to reign over judah he reigned for three years in jerusalem his mother's name was makkah daughter of abi shalom all right so that kind of introduction every king gets then what follows is more of a summary of the highs and lows of that particular king so it's specific to each king and in this case the historians judge him poorly they think he's a horrible sinner a terrible disappointment they do mention that he fought this one war with the ammonites that was successful but in general he gets bad press at the end the close we go back to the formula and the formula cites a source uh let's see the rest of the acts of abigail and all that he did are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of judah here we have something that's very close to our modern sense of a citation now i put it in italics the hebrew text wouldn't have it in italics so i i kind of already clued you in that i'm seeing this as a written source that's available nobody has found the annals of the kings of judah but nonetheless there's no reason for us to suspect they were made up it's likely there was a written source on the monarchy and the writer of this history was drawing from it and he's basically telling his readers if you want to know more about this king i've just selected out a couple things uh you can refer to this it's sort of like the optional reading on a syllabus that we all tend to ignore uh but it's a good idea you know this is a great idea read further um so we have other other books that are mentioned in the bible a complimentary book the book of the annals of the kings of israel and then we have a book of jachar so the ancients did have some written sources and they knew how to cite them and through citing them to give their own work a stamp of authority there's also an acadian text dating to the 15th century bce called the autobiography of idrimi this is one of my favorite examples for how ancient writers asserted authorship in this case rather than simply footnote the author commissioned a sculpture of himself that's rather a a lot of work to go to in order to assert your authorship so you would see this sculpture and you would say now who is the author of this text and the answer would be there because it's the man seated here idrimmy and the reason that you know he's the author is the text is in fact written across his chest and it's hard to see that the cuneiform text is inscribed across his chest but then even more to just really get the point across i idreamy wrote this it starts at the side of his mouth you know the words are literally coming forth from his mouth so it's the ancient equivalent really of our cartoon bubble you know if the little arrow is pointing to this head we know that person said it here the cuneiform is coming out of his mouth we know that this is what idrim said so in the 104 lines of cuneiform text idrimy brags about his tremendous military victories his generosity as a ruler how good life is under his rule and he repeatedly emphasizes his own legitimacy as the king of allah a city in northern syria many scholars suspect that this text was in fact written far later than the time of idrimi and they note that in king lists from this area the name idrimy doesn't even appear so he doesn't seem to be a legitimate known king so it may be that placing you know commissioning a sculpture placing your words across your chest having the words come out of your very mouth is the kind of red flag that some of us our professors see saying you're trying too hard and i think something might be fishy here and that's what scholars basically have concluded that the autobiography of idrimi is in fact a pious biography written centuries later to assert a claim on a land at a later date okay it should also not surprise us that ancient writers knew how to cheat and how to accuse each other of cheating so the prophet jeremiah for example sees the political and religious downfall of his people in judah and he attributes the devastation to what he calls the false pen of scribes and the false pen of scribes has made the law of the lord into a lie for jeremiah there's a whole class of prophets that he accuses of prophesying falsely and he reports that god himself has accused this group of quote prophesying lies in my name false attribution another example comes from queen jezebel now you may know the jezebel from popular culture right well queen jezebel in the bible she's worth reading about she gets horribly unfair coverage from the biblical authors she's accused of all sorts of evil and terrible things but among the evil things that she is said to have done is to have written letters in the name of her husband king ahab and sealed them with his seal so this idea of plagiarizing your husband and especially plagiarizing your husband the king and sending out words in his name is listed as one of her many sins the ancient world did not have an honor council to deal with suspected cases of plagiarism or false attribution or the false pen there's no detailed set of procedures for a first or second offense but it had something that in my view is likely far better as a deterrent cursing describing in detail what would happen to you your children and your as yet unborn descendants should you cheat and they describe it in often horrific and terror inducing detail so let's turn again back to uh idreamy because his inscription ends um he who removes this my statue may his seed be ended may his seed be closed to the underworld may the gods of the sky and the earth divide his kingdom and his country he who changes it in any way whatever i think this is what's referring to the text don't change my text don't change my view of history may tashab the lord of the sky and the earth among the great gods in his land destroy his name and his descendants now i have one other example it's not as good as a as a photo op i'm afraid but you know when you're dealing with things coming from the ancient world some are beautiful and others are a little bit rough this one's a little bit rough this is a steely of an ancient king of goubal or biblos in present-day lebanon and his name is yeja milk this king also commissioned a limestone steely inscription commemorating an altar that he had made to honor his goddess the goddess of biblos so the steely depicts the goddess and i did do a close-up we'll see how good it shows can you kind of see it depicts the goddess uh seated on a throne with a winged sun above her head and she's holding a scepter in her hand and with her free hand she's blessing the king milk the steely dates to the fifth or the fourth century bce and it's written in phoenician and it's currently housed in the louvre the content of the of the inscription describes an or an ornate altar that this king had fashioned for his goddess and at the end of the inscription the king shows an awareness of this historical pattern of altering the words of a previous generation's accomplishments he knows how people sometimes take credit for the written work and the material accomplishment of their forebears and so he closes by saying the king's work has to be protected whoever you are every king and or every ordinary man who will do additional work on this altar and or this open engraving of gold and or on this portico my name that of mine milk king of bibles you must put with yours on that work and if you will not put my name with yours and or if you will remove this work and or shift this with its base upon this place may the lady mistress of biblios putrefy him that man and his seed in the face of all the gods of biblos so clearly i mean at least in these two cases the curses seem to be fairly effective because the statues have endured on the other hand they're clearly not in their original situation they have been moved from their bases they're both in museums and so far as far as i know museum visitors owners purchasers have not had them and their seeds you know disappear in in strange ways um but all of this says that the ancient world in some ways is very different from our own because clearly we're not attributing our most important works to god we're no longer claiming you know this one's really good and i think i'm just going to say god wrote it which i don't think the ancients did either i think the ancients weren't speaking falsely they were speaking out of a different world view we don't attribute it to some famous revered figure in order to put ourselves in the line of that figure or put an author that we appreciate in the line of a figure that we think he or she belongs with on the other hand it's clear uh that the use of written sources in history was something they knew how to do they knew how to attribute it we also find that the ancients shared our animosity toward those who would alter the words of an earlier writer or write in the name of another in order to lay claim to that person's accomplishments but now i want to turn to a messier example these are kind of clear examples and you know clear examples are great and quite honestly i had to cut a bunch there's a whole bunch of curses there's a whole bunch of places where it's like i myself wrote this you know there's plenty of bragging going on in the ancient world and and attributing your own words to others i had to cut things but i wanted to turn to a messier example because i think it's more emblematic of what we actually find in the bible as a whole so i'm going to turn to the book of isaiah and i'm not going to assume any of you have read it but i think it helps us get into the complexity of the issue of authorship and originality so let me first start with our modern setting and what our modern expectations are when i say that i'm turning or turning to a messier example with isaiah i have to admit that when we talk about the bible and plagiarism we're already navigating a messy topic so to speak about authorship attribution and plagiarism as it relates to the bible is to tread on sensitive ground both religiously and politically in the united states today a sizable proportion of our population sees the bible as a static unchanging and therefore authoritative text our presidents are sworn into office with their hand on a bible now significantly i think the bible that they sw that they're sworn in on is closed it's a revered object it's not read from so in this situation i think the bible is acting as an object that stands for integrity honesty the shared values of good governance in the country i might also note that the bible has already made several notable appearances in the 2016 presidential race again often as a closed book rather than one that's opened in red it's not uncommon to hear people refer to biblical values or biblical principles as if there were a static unchanging and agreed upon set of values that the bible again as a whole puts forward so let's face it as human beings we love certainty we love stability and we would love to have a set version of our history and our values that we could agree on if we had that shared history that one that we all agreed on and here i'm talking about american history not biblical history then we might be able to agree on who we are as americans or at least who we should be so it's in the service of this need or desire for a stable version of our past that the bible is introduced as a static and unchanging authoritative text and the bible serves this goal best when its covers are closed when it's not actually read when the bible is an object upon which we swear an oath or an object in the hand of a presidential candidate its closed and unread status allows it to stand for presumed unchanging biblical values certainty and stability come at a cost it's only when we open the book and read it carefully as you might in a course here at emory should you choose to take a course on the bible here at emory uh the once you open it and read it in that kind of setting the actively negotiated sense of truth the changing view of god and the evolving self-understanding of a people the israelites and the judeans becomes apparent and through retelling reshaping and repurposing the stories of their past biblical writers continually brought their own experience into a dynamic conversation with their forebears if a single person had written the bible with one clear message that could be dated to one specific and identifiable time i'm sure we would not be reading it today no one would have bothered to copy that person's singular story to retell it to preserve it canonize it set it to music allude to it in literature paint it preach it and yes hold it aloft on the political stump it's the complexity of the bible's authorship the slow unfolding of its narrative as each generation comments upon and updates the traditions of its forebears it's that unfolding that is the reason that after 2 000 years we're still reading this book we're still finding things in it so let me now turn to the book of isaiah the first thing to to sort of clarify about isaiah is that it's not a book it's a scroll and as a scroll if you were to unroll it it has 65 chapters it's one of the longest prophetic books um the author of this scroll is identified in the first verse i keep thinking i'll do this the prophecies of isaiah son of a motes who prophesied concerning judah in jerusalem in the reigns of uzziah jotham ahaz and hezekiah kings of judah well this is actually a great start from a historical perspective it sounds quite certain and in fact we have extra biblical sources that can attest to some of these kings and so we can very confidently date isaiah's son of ammots to the 8th century bce we rarely have that kind of certainty so this opening verse of isaiah sounds and in fact is close to history if we skip forward a bit to chapter 6 we learned something about isaiah's understanding of his god and his prophetic mission isaiah says in the year that king uzziah died i beheld my lord seated on a high and lofty throne and the hem of his robe filled the temple the vision continues describing the winged seraphim that attend to god on his throne and called to each other saying holy holy holy is the lord of hosts now several of the details in this prophecy vision tell us that where isaiah is standing in the vision is the temple in jerusalem so he sees himself in the innermost sanctum here called the holy of holies and that's where the footstool of the deity the ark of the covenant was understood and it's flanked by the two winged creatures that isaiah is here seeing as seraphim fiery winged creatures and he imagines his god as so enormous that his head extends vertically upwards into the heavens and he can in fact hear the here is god talking to other beings having a conversation in the heavens who shall we send and he answers here i am i can you can send me so he's having this vertical um auditory experience of the divine way up in heaven at the same time the hem of god's garments are filling the entire space of the temple so he has a super-sized image of god in comparison to the immensity of his god isaiah isaiah sees himself as small and unworthy woe is me he says in response to this vision i am lost once he volunteers to take on this mission god gives him his commissioning so to speak and what he's told to do is nearly impossible it is impossible it's purposely impossible this is what god tells him to do he says say to this people the judeans and and those people in jerusalem say keep listening but do not comprehend keep looking but do not understand make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears and shut their eyes so god seems in this text to have already decided that his chosen people the judeans will be destroyed the message is one of certain doom and even deserved punishment later in chapter 10 of isaiah we learn that the enemy that will deliver the punishment is a foreign empire isaiah hears his god calling out ah assyria rod of my anger in whose hand as a staff is my fury i send him out against an ungodly nation i charge him against a people that provokes me so the foreign empire of assyria a known empire for you know for which we have all sorts of documentation and archaeological evidence is presented as a weapon in the hand of the israelite god a weapon that will deliver a military conquest over judah and jerusalem as punishment each of these details a jerusalem temple king hezekiah assyria as a foreign empire fits very well with an eighth century date for isaiah now we're going to jump ahead in the book to chapter 40 to some verses that will sound familiar to many of you chapter 40 begins comfort comfort my people says your god speak tenderly to jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term that her penalty is paid that she has received from the lord's hand double for all her sins so who who doesn't know the bible nonetheless knows this from something yes go ahead tell me yeah you know at oberlin i could say anybody want to stand and sing a couple bars because they're all you know at the conservatory and amazing singers but yes often a lot of us know this music second isaiah is all over handel's messiah so is first isaiah but we know this it's become part of our culture but if we read it in light of what i've just told you about uh the first chapters in isaiah we can recognize in the words comfort oh comfort my people says your god speak tenderly to jerusalem something has changed the god who announced doom and conquest who had said that jerusalem was riddled with guilt that our punishment was certain this god is now speaking of comfort tenderness when we move forward from chapter 40 we find additional clues to a changed historical context the named enemy is no longer the 8th century enemy assyria assyria is long gone we've already had babylonia and they're gone and the named enemy is now cyrus of persia and isaiah mentions him multiple times isaiah has the lord call cyrus his anointed one his mashiach he has him call cyrus the lord's shepherd the message of isaiah here is that the lord has aroused cyrus in order that he can rebuild my city and set my exiles free so in the first chapters of isaiah assyria is is a weapon in the hand of god but after chapter 40 the israelite god reaches out and grasps the right hand of cyrus of persia in order to subdue other nations and to rebuild jerusalem so we're in a different historical context and these discrepancies in date tone and style uh caused biblical scholars already in the late 1800s to mark a break in the book of isaiah between chapters 39 and 40. and they argued now for over a century that the 8th century prophet named isaiah who lived in jerusalem under the threat of an assyrian empire his words are in chapters 1 through 39 i'm somewhat oversimplifying but in general this works and a second author a 6th century anonymous writer who lived as an exile in babylonia at a time when cyrus the great king of persia was on the ascent the words of this second author are found in chapters 40 through 55 and possibly through the end of the book what's interesting for our purposes today is that there's nothing that marks the transition from chapter 39 to 40 as oh we're now in a different historical context and there's there's a new writer the attribution in verse one that this is uh isaiah son of emotes seems to apply to the entire scroll and so in order for us to know that something has shifted we have to just pay attention to the details and when you read the details of chapters 40 to 55 whoever wrote them was clearly not trying to hide that what he was doing was something new i'll go ahead and put the blanks i don't have any more pictures unfortunately once we get to the bible we don't have a lot of things that survive in the sands that are artistic so when scholars first began to do this spade work of identifying separate sources dating them there was a drive on the part of biblical scholars to uncover what they what they thought of was the original text or the authentic words of the historical isaiah and this scholarly impulse was most fully developed with regard to the words of jesus in the new testament where scholars sought to use logic and a kind of scientific method to determine which words from each gospels could be traced back to the historical jesus so for each book of the bible later editorial layers were identified peeled back and discarded for their inauthenticity for masquerading as something they were not and at the same time true historical kernels were marked out as the real isaiah or the historical jesus and therefore an authoritative original text now a problem arises because what we discover is that once we've peeled back the editorial layers and discarded them and identified the historical kernels the reconstructed originals we find that they've lost their artistic beauty they have no enduring complexity they're one dimensional and as a result have ceased to be great literature and aren't very profound theologically either so let's return to what we've identified as second isaiah he's an anonymous author we don't know who wrote at this later time period there's no question that if this work 40 through 55 of isaiah were brought before your honor council whoever wrote it and attribute it to isaiah son of a motes would be found guilty of writing under a false name of citing numerous biblical sources without proper citation at the same time there is tremendous originality in the writing of these chapters it's unlikely that second isaiah put forward these words as being in the name of isaiah some later some later scribe who's reading these words somehow associated the words of this writer with the words of isaiah son of a mother in a way when you put them together you see that this second isaiah is a kind of sequel to the first or another way of looking at it is is that second isaiah answers first isaiah it's not as neat as that but there's a reason why some later compiler might have taken the words of this exilic author and put them next to an eighth century author without marking them as a change so when we look at the actual words of this second isaiah we find that he's not hiding newness instead he seems to herald the originality of his work with repeated references to quote new things and new creations more than in any other book in the bible second isaiah refers to begetting conceiving forming in the womb laboring birthing and overcoming barrenness he is all about newness all about a restored creation for this later prophet god is about to do what he calls a new thing and he will cause his people to hear new words and in response to the newness he calls on his people to sing to the lord a new song he deploys the language of creation from genesis one through three so he's reaching back in time and applying it to his own context and the later prophet no longer imagines his god confined within the physical space of the jerusalem temple because as big as isaiah son of a motze's god was he was nonetheless somehow understood to be localized in jerusalem and especially accessible through the jerusalem temple when we get to second isaiah the imagery explodes outward and this is a god who spreads the heavens like a curtain and spreads the earth under it he's a cosmic deity with no boundaries again and again in these chapters we hear also unique to this part of the bible clear articulations where the israelite god is now the only god i am the lord besides me there is no other so he's got a more i should just say a different theology it's no longer a localized israelite god in jerusalem it's a cosmic deity of all creation who is speaking new things to this prophet the writer of second isaiah and this is one of the reasons why i chose him also seems to be a bit conflicted on how to use his sources he refers to his sources as quote the former things or the things of old and what he means by this is the traditions of his ancestors that he's received likely in written form but also orally so he's got some resources from his ancestors some wisdom that's been passed down and he doesn't know what he wants to use and what he wants to discard so we find in isaiah 43 he says do not remember the former things the things of old and the reason is because god's about to do something new so forget all that forget the former things then in isaiah 46 and in several other places he says remember the former things the things of old because god's purposes have remained unchanged and they are coming to pass so for second isaiah the former things are a problem how much do i reach back and take what i received from the ancestors and how much do i discard he does take things there are places where refers for example to abraham your father and sarah who bore you he refers to the exodus and uses the language of the exodus to describe that when his people are allowed to return from exile to judah it will be like a new exodus like god rescuing a people oppressed and delivering them from slavery so he's clearly alluding to the earlier stories on the other hand he's emphasizing something new he's trying to repackage repurpose and sift through the received tradition of his ancestors in order to present a word that means something to a people that's experienced exile the people that this author is talking to is very different from the people that isaiah son of a mother spoke to in the 8th century and he has to tailor it toward a future that they're that they're willing to buy into and one of the reasons why his words have endured is that he succeeded somehow he was able to take the right amount of the former things and leave some others behind and bring in the newer things in order to present a book that is at one time familiar familiar enough that the people could call it their own and yet revolutionary in that it's calling them in new directions and presenting a god who's decidedly bigger more international more cosmic than what the god had been when they had when they all they knew was living in judah the spirit the experience of exile has expanded their view of the world and their view of god has likewise expanded second isaiah does not simply repeat the former things he does not roll up the scroll and swear on an unchanged version of his past he marshals the formal things the former things to speak to his present world he cites the tradition of old but then reshapes them so to speak so that he has a future for his people what we've seen in all of these texts the ancient near eastern texts the biblical texts is that the biblical world's understanding of the literary enterprise seems to be more fluid than ours isaiah struggled with the received tradition of his ancestors he struggled to decide which aspects of a sacred past could be useful for a renewed future he sifted through the former things he produced a mixtape of sorts in order to offer a new song that was familiar and yet wholly different there are clearly some ways that the biblical writers and the writers of the ancient near east are very much like us i'm always relieved to read a text from 2000 years ago and think my how recognizable this person is they like us recognize the power of the written word they know how to use attribution to confer authority in some cases they can cite a source in ways that are very familiar to our own academic standards they also seem to recognize and despise the false pen and the one who would claim credit for the work of another but most of our biblical texts and the bible as a whole is far more like this example from isaiah we have multiple unmarked and unnamed authors and each of them is sifting through the former things of old they're receiving authoritative traditions of their ancestors and reworking them for new contexts and challenges so i want to close with a challenge of my own and encourage you not to limit the bible to its closed book authoritative unchanging status open it read it in it in all of its multi-layered complexity get to know its authors named and unnamed by all means remember the former things but don't be afraid to see and announce something new thank you

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Length: 44min 48sec (2688 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2015