The Problem of Myth in the Hebrew Bible

[Music] welcome professor peter machinist received his bachelor's degree from harvard university his master of philosophy and PhD degrees from Yale University the Department of Near Eastern Studies where he wrote his PhD thesis on that page-turner the epic of tackle Tina northa the first professor machinist then came to Harvard University in 1991 where he is now the Hancock professor of Hebrew and other oriental languages in the Department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations he's also on the faculty of divinity at the Harvard Divinity School earlier he taught in the department's of religion or Near Eastern Studies at Case Western Reserve University the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan he also served as a visiting lecturer and then later again as the lady David's visiting professor in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2009 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich in Switzerland professor machinist primary interest is in the cultural intellectual and social history of the ancient Near East focusing particularly on ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible and and ancient Mesopotamia within this framework his research and teaching topics include the ideology of imperialism and other forms of group identification ancient historiography mythology prophecy Assyrian history and the history of modern biblical and other Near Eastern scholarship among his numerous publications are a monograph on the provincial governance in middle of Syria a paper entitled Assyria and its image in the first Isaiah outsiders and insiders the biblical view of emergent Israel and its contexts a paper on the book of Ecclesiastes called fate McClay and Reason reflections on qohelet and Biblical thoughts the fall of Assyria in comparative ancient perspective and quite recently a paper called how God's died biblically and otherwise and the road not taken' Julius Wellhausen and Assyria G among his current projects is a volume of commentary on the prophetic book not home merely to delineate his interests and publications in this way however is to do an injustice to the breadth and scope of his learning he is truly an intellectual historian a thinker of subtlety and sophistication and one of the most learned scholars in our field so on behalf of the Kitts family and of father Clifford it gives me very great pleasure to introduce to you my teacher my doctoral Fattah and my friend Peter machinist [Applause] thank you very much professor Vanderhoof in my tradition we usually say something like kavod tell meat kavod Mulva which from hebrew into english is that the honour of the pupil is the honour of the teacher and i can certainly say that for david Vanderhoof who's learning i have appreciated now for more than 20 years and even when he was a student and i was officially one of his teachers it was always a two-way street i'm also very honored to be here tonight at this distinguished lectureship at boston college to see a number of old friends including father clifford who published my first serious article in the catholic biblical quarterly now many moons ago and gave me a start in the field that I otherwise would not have had and I appreciate the kids family for supporting and establishing this lectureship the topic this evening the problem of myth in the Hebrew Bible continues to be exactly that a problem even though some of the heat of this problem has passed nonetheless for many the notion that the Bible whether old testament or new sometimes I will use for the Old Testament the term Hebrew Bible for many the notion that one can mix in a single breath the word myth and the word Bible seems to be an oxymoron of the first order my wife being a middle school science teacher once said to one of her pupils you've certainly uttered an oxymoron are you calling me a mrs. machinist no she said the issue goes back to antiquity when we read already for example in the work of Philo of Alexandria one of the great Jewish philosophers and biblical interpreters of the end of the first century BC and the first century AD who writes in his text the confusion of languages he talks about the fact that there's an essential distinction between the Bible and the religions of the Ethne of the groups in that the latter rests largely on myths whereas the Bible contains history Josephus a slightly later historian of jewelry of the first century AD writes in his antiquities quote other legislators ie not Moses in fact follow fables toy smooth toys in Greek follow myths if you will and they have in their writings imported to the gods the disgraceful errors of men and thus furnish the wicked with a powerful excuse and this issue of myth as being somehow fundamentally opposed to both Testaments but for this evening I will concentrate on the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament has continued into the modern era I would like to quote what for some of you is very familiar some of it rather specifically familiar to Father Clifford and myself because it comes from our late revered teacher Gianna stright earnest Wright was part of a major group of Protestant theologians in the middle and later decades of the 20th century who were initiators of a movement called the biblical theology movement in which they tried to figure out what was distinctive about the Bible particularly the Old Testament visa vie the larger world of the ancient Near East in which by that time everybody knew Israel had grown up and in a book called the Old Testament against its environment the title says everything published in 1950 this is what right has to say about myth one further observation alone can be made here that is the remarkable fact that the God of Israel has no mythology since history rather than nature was the primary sphere of his revelation Israel's effort was to tell the story of her past in terms of God's activity there was no necessity for nature myths notice how subtly he has qualified the term myth from a general proposition no myth now he talks about a more specific group of nature myths the God of Israel and he calls him here by his name Yahweh you can call him a number of other things my late colleague Yochanan muffs i think used to have the name Jimmy as a traditional Jew he did not want to use the name Yahweh which seems to be the personal name of this God at the same time as a first rank biblical scholar he had to deal with the issue of the name and the fact that this is his personal name so he said let's call him Jimmy so you can call him Jimmy if you'd like right says Jimmy I mean Yahweh for example was no dying rising godlike ball of Canaan he was the Living God this phrase used again and again so triumphantly was a challenge to Canaanite conceptions and right goes on from there myth but then myth qualified as nature myths this is not the world of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament that world is rather a world of God acting in human history and this was arguably the central proposition of this biblical theology movement on the Jewish side there was also a challenge from a different angle from the great Israeli scholar yet has killed Kaufman who wrote 1/8 plus volume history in Hebrew a history of the faith of Israel told oath i moon is really in Hebrew which was masterfully condensed and translated at least the first seven volumes by the late Moshe Greenberg the last volume was published in English translation in full and again as is now clear to at least my colleagues here Houseman whose background was in the field of philosophical sociology very important to understand Kaufman from this point of view Kaufman argues that the whole concept of the God of Israel as the only God philosophically and otherwise he didn't use this metaphor but if you were to argue that there is a mathematical set called deity then for Kaufman it has only one member which is the God of Israel and therefore for Kaufman mythology has no place in the Hebrew Bible well what to do with various references to which we will come shortly that speak about the God of Israel fighting all kinds of monsters for Kaufman these are just essentially dead cliches again this is my term not his but the notion is and we'll have to come back to this point that when a text in Psalms says that God defeated the sea monster called Rahab this is about the same thing as saying this is bloody awful how many people know that the origin of the English term bloody goes back to the blood of the virgin we don't think about etymologies anymore when we use that term bloody simply is a superlative way to talk about something terrible and Kaufman said Yahweh defeating Rahab is equivalent there was never any question of a battle it was a dead cliche and therefore myth as a living element in the culture of ancient Israel had no place these points of view can be extended well beyond the purview of the Bible both old and new Testament because today we like to think of ourselves in the Western world as being beyond myth myth is something that primitive people's benighted folks folks who don't have computers and don't have even telephones indulge themselves in regularly but those of us who are what raised in a Western post enlightenment post 18th century for ian's tation who are the bearers and heirs of all of the scientific developments of the last five centuries for us myth is just at the most a poor substitution for explaining the world until you get something out of science and yet a moment's thought suggests that perhaps that kind of generalization really doesn't quite apply we think about myths or what we call myths all the time sometimes we refer to it the term negatively this is a piece of myth ie a piece of either primitive nonsense or outnow deception which a more patience analysis will show is historically untrue and scientifically infeasible and yet even in enlightened worlds or worlds that call themselves enlightened myth has a role to play I'd like to read you a passage here from a wonderful book called Lenin lives by professor Nina tamarkan of the Department of History at Wellesley College Lenin lives the Lenin cult in Soviet Russia the book originally published in the early 80s then republished with new material at the end of the 90s and it talks about the of Lenin that had begun already before he died he or she speaking about the later decades of the 20th century when this cult began to wane but yet at the same time there were plenty of indications it was still alive for many folks throughout these those last decades she writes the stale but stable cult of Lenin provided a mythic contour to the continuity of purpose that called itself socialism but wasn't in Eastern Europe not Leninism not Lenin but the external trappings of the Lenin cult the monuments the posters the renamed streets squares and cities composed what today might be called the material culture of the Soviet empire abroad in the USSR itself the Lenin mausoleum continued as the axis mundi the center of the world of Soviet cosmology year after year in the spring and fall on May Day Victory Day in the November seventh anniversary of the revolution aging leaders reviewed parades as they stood over the preserved body of the architect of Soviet socialism in all those years - marking goes on I knew only one person for whom Lenin was truly an object of adoration a colonel of the Soviet Air Force who walked in one day - a sculptors studio to order a bust of Lenin for the officers recreation hall of his nearby base it will look so pretty next to a vase of flowers he told me with animation a handsome sandy haired man in his 30s this Colonel as a child had adalah idolized Felix de schinsky the zealous founder of the Cheka the preceding form of the KGB what about Lenin I asked the colonel would you consider him a hero oh he is beyond the category of hero came the reply he is something sacred - mark and goes on something not someone this verbal distinction rendered Vladimir Ilich Lenin first two names that much more remote and you know we don't have to go to Russia either than Soviet or post-soviet days to find similar kinds of issues the power of myth I suspect stands still with us despite all the disclaimers because it has something to offer and what that is I'd like briefly to explore with you this afternoon but first let's come back to the problem of myth in the Hebrew Bible what exactly is a problem here the biblical text of the Old Testament makes the point at a number of different places most prominently in the book of Deuteronomy that the experience of Israel and the nature of its God are unique in the world around it book of Deuteronomy is a book that very much is in contact in conversation in confrontation with this outside world and at a number of points it says things like what other nation had a God like ours who went into another nation mainly Egypt and took us out from this cauldron of fire or what other nation went through the experiences that we went through subsequently through the Exodus and the wanderings in the wilderness that now we're ready to enter the land that has been promised to us so a book like Deuteronomy and indeed much of the Old Testament is devoted on the one hand to recognizing there's an outside world but on the other hand to finding the distinctive characteristics that separate us from them there's something in other words in the biblical text that that displays a certain intense fascination with who we are all peoples all individuals have to deal with this question finding out what identity is is finding out in part who you are not but in the biblical text this notion of self identity is raised to a consummate art and it pervades not only the book of Deuteronomy but much else in the Hebrew Bible the problem in modern terms was only exacerbated by the recovery of this outside world to which the biblical authors refer the recovery begins I would argue in the late 18th century goes into increased motion in the first part of the nineteenth and then into hyperdrive at the end of the nineteenth and on into the twentieth the recovery I'm talking about means first of all simply visits to the modern Middle East to find the monuments of the past and then the systematic archaeological discovery of that range of cultures from antiquity and then the decipherment of the languages of the cultures recovered so that we can begin to read as well as see visually what these cultures thought about themselves and not simply do it through the medium of the Hebrew Bible or the medium of classical Greek and Latin authors or to some degree through Islamic tradition through Muslim tradition which were the sources available to Europeans essentially before this archaeological recovery began and it became clear certainly by the latter part of the nineteenth century that all kinds of contacts could be drawn between Mesopotamia Egypt the world of what the Bible calls the Canaanites the Hittites of ancient Turkey all kinds of contacts could be maintained between could be discovered between these cultures and their own writings and art and what was in the Bible such that the issue became in what sense is the Hebrew Bible and you taught us mutandis one can do the same thing for the New Testament in the Jewish and greco-roman worlds later but in what sense is the Hebrew Bible and the Israel from which it comes a part of this broader ancient Near Eastern world it Israel and the Bible are in this world but are they of this world and so you get a fascination corresponding to what's in the book of Deuteronomy or what is in Philo and Josephus a fascination in the modern era with trying to figure out where does Israel belong in this range of cultures is it distinctive well in one sense everybody's distinctive and everybody is the same where do you draw the lines with the biblical text and myth became one of the flash points then a recovery of what Philo and Josephus said in the words of a journaiist right or yokas killed Kaufman or others some would argue that we are beyond that point now but I frankly don't think so and one measure of it is a very simple phrase that one still sees all over the place when one wants to talk about the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel in this world of the ancient Near East do you usually see it phrased as the Bible and the ancient Near East not the Bible in the ancient Near East or the Bible as a part of the ancient Near East but the Bible and the engineers think about that for a moment on the one hand this kind of phrase is historical nonsense the Bible is a part of the ancient Near East it's a text like many others so and here can't be an historical statement it has to be a philosophical one and for those who don't like it one could argue an apologetic one namely yes it's in the ancient Near East but it's not covet well I've been talking in and around the subject of myth without defining it and I've done that purposely because it is such a difficult word to define everybody has his or her own sense of what the word means and on that basis seeks to either argue for or against the concept as it concerns biblical religion it's clear from the text I briefly read from Ernest Wright that he has a very particular concept of MS myth is something that is opposed to history history R is a phenomenon of facts that can be in some way verified in the past of human populations I could think of the past of nature - but ripe doesn't want to talk about the history of nature because that separates and confuses the distinction he's trying to make myth is not about history than for Ernest right myth is about this great cycles of nature the gods who are involved in mythic tales are gods who in some way or another signal the Sun that's to come up in the morning the rains that we hope will get but not too much of the capacity to make love and war at the same time and so forth and so on and these stories and the gods that exemplify these stories these stories which write and others have called myths are then celebrated in periodic enactments performances rituals so that you don't simply hear the story read or or spoken aloud but you see it instantiated performed now that's one definition of myth and if you notice it carries another feature that I haven't singled out yet but within which Wright himself doesn't quite indicate but it comes out in others of of those who would share this point of view that myth is basically about God's not about God a single God can't have a mythology others suggest otherwise if we talk about myths in Soviet Russia or about John Kennedy President John Kennedy being a mythic hero and we are first of all not talking obviously about gods we may be talking about superhuman folks at least people who we think are superhuman but we do so at least in this country presumably through a monotheistic kind of culture a culture that all of us say we subscribe to that they're simply a single God so here's another definition which runs a little counter to what is in giannis right and his associates indeed as I think about the term myth I think about it in terms of a series of opposition's truth versus falsity does miss bring us a certain truth about reality or in some people's usage is it simply an inadequate representation of reality even a deceptive representation a false representation I've already mentioned the issue of history versus myth and another of our teachers Frank cross injury helped to introduce a third element here epic history and myths all of which represent differing although related phenomena myth involved in the opposition between monotheism and polytheism myth versus science is myth primitive science only to be eclipsed when we get the real thing myth and its enactment or performance in ritual and finally one could argue myth as a literary type and as a conceptual orientation myth as a certain way of telling or writing and myth as a way of thinking about reality all of these different kinds of opposition's you will find coming together in the study and use of the term myth by all kinds of people if we go back to the etymology of the term we are helped and not helped at the same time the word is a Greek word as most of you are familiar Muto's but when you read of it in for example the Iliad it's not a myth in the sense that we are talking about it is a story that carries with it a certain truth conviction it can be a story of heroes human heroes it's only when you get to Plato on the one hand and Thucydides on the other at the end of the fifth century do you begin to get this negative view of myth lucidity x' for example says in the introduction to his polity nation war that I am writing real history here the history essentially that I myself have been able to witness as a member of the events that I'm going to record I'm not writing about the MU toy the myths if you will and here we could perhaps use it which my predecessors had indulged in to profitably and yet again I come back to more positive assessments anthropologists use the term myth regularly to describe tales of the cultures that they investigate not only non-western so-called primitive cultures but a whole range of possibilities myths as tales which say something significant about the cultures from which they come all of which then leads me to the following tentative definition of the term myth is first of all a story it can be an oral or a written story it's a narrative that proceeds from a b2c it's a story that has a public face it's not simply something to be told in the privacy of one's own home but it is something that has a public significance now if the home is that of an extended family fine then public and private begin to merge and it has this public face because miss seeks to narrate stories about public institutions public values public behaviors to lay them out for the audience that will listen or read so that these behaviors institutions and values can be explained can be justified can be brought into connection with the societies from which they come there is a sense in other words in which the myth is a representation of the community to which it belongs and yet at the same time it also many of these myths tend to operate as universals they take the specific details of the community and enlarge them to the universal most societies have myths or tales about how they originated as societies and these merge very quickly with tales about how the earth originated indeed about how the cosmos originated in ancient Mesopotamia there is a famous origin myth called an Ummah Ailish after its first two words went on high it talks about the construction of the cosmos that the Babylonians and Mesopotamians then knew and it's a story of a wicked fight between a primeval goddess and a young vigorous male God who has four ears and four but okay fine is a God when the male God defeats the female and cuts her body up to create the universe in the order that we come to know it the central part of that creation is the establishment of the city of Babylon which just happens to be the site of the principal temple to this male God whose name is Marta Marta is not simply the center of Babylonia in this tale it's depicted as the center of the universe or to use the term that Nena tamarkan referred to the Axis Mundi the center of the axis of the world and this tendency to take a particular local feature in this case Babylon and elevate it to Universal performer proportions is typical of all myths finally I would say myth tend to involve the human the natural and the extra earthly all at one myths do not have to be simply about gods or the celestial or heavenly world but they usually involve some kind of contact between the human world and what's beyond the human world the world of nature and the world of the heavens if you will the world of the extraterrestrials now what I want to suggest is that with a definition like this which elides or passes beyond the number of the opposition's eyerly are sketched out that between for example history and myth we'll find that there is some history and myth and there's a myth in history with this kind of definition the biblical world does not look so strange and here if you happen to have your handouts I'd like to make the point in greater detail the handouts that I've given to you deal with four case studies we may not have time to go through them all this evening the first is number one Genesis 6 verses 1 to 8 the second which deals with creation temple building and ritual comprises numbers 2 3 and 4 Genesis 1 Exodus 20 and then a comparison of the later a section of Exodus with Genesis 1 2 2 the third case study is from the book of Job and I've given two portions of it job 26 and then part of the speeches in which God appears to job at the end in a whirlwind and talks about two creatures behemoth and Leviathan this is numbers 5 and 6 on your handout and the last is what I might call political liturgy political liturgy and that Psalm 29 as number 7 let's see how far we get before I drive you crazy number 1 if you're thinking of myth in terms of what you had in high school or maybe even in college as the Greek myths reading from the Iliad reading from Ovid reading from Easi you name it then the opening lines of Genesis 6 should not surprise you when people began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born to them the sons of God saw that they were fair and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose then the Lord and wherever you see Lord this is Jimmy or Yahweh then Jimmy said my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever for they are flesh there they shall be a hundred and twenty years the Nephilim were on the earth in those days J'son afterwards when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans who bore children to them these were the heroes that were of old warriors of renown now this text has a lot of peculiarities in the Hebrew which I won't get into but what immediately strikes you whether you know the Hebrew or not is that here you have God's and human beings getting married to each other and giving birth to people who are regarded as heroes warriors nepheline this is sort of like the birth of Hercules or Heracles and this text is always fascinated people because it's about the closest thing we have in the Hebrew Bible to what we think of as a Greek myth the immediately following verses seek I would suggest to tame that striking and surprising picture that the first four verses have given us four it tells us that Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth and that every intent in ually when it that's a little bit of the King James which has survived here and Yahweh was sorry that he'd made humankind on the earth and it grieved him to his heart so he said he was going to blot up everybody a number of interpreters again with a very long history here have suggested that verses 5 to 8 quite deliberately follow-on verses 1 to 4 because this marriage of humans and gods was something that was a no-go it shouldn't have happened it violated the boundaries between heaven and earth between gods and humans and the result was the wickedness of humankind be that as it may we have here something may be the peril that jumps immediately to mine is of the church father you say be is's preparación evangelical this is a text where you say biasts went back to all the pagan mythology to see if he could find any premonition in these Greek and Roman myths of the coming of Christ and of the Christian message and as a result he provided a treasure house for us of Mythology that otherwise would have disappeared at times it looks reading the text as if the sabia s-- was really quite interested positively in these old tales at other points he makes invidious comparisons between these tales and the Christian message of which he is Bishop obviously of holes but here we have a text that could convince I suspect even G earnest right and Yokosuka Kauffman that something is lurking in the biblical text that you can't completely dismiss Genesis two three and four complicate the picture or I should say number two Genesis one number two three and four complicate the picture here I have drawn a selection from the first section of the book of Genesis the first account of creation the account of six days of creation and the seventh day rest and that's in number two and then two echoes of this creation account in the book of Exodus let's take a look at the number two for a moment I've only given you a portion of it clearly here again you could spend a whole lifetime on this first chapter and people have done so and the every once in a while I go to the library to find material on this and I come out dizzy it's just too much of it and there's no end to it here I'd like to concentrate on one feature of it which emerges really from a text number four and from the article that I refer to you two there of the late Israeli scholar Moshe Weinfeld what kind of text is Genesis 1 through chapter 2 verse is for be in other words it ends for a excuse me this first unit doesn't end with the end of the first chapter it goes on into the second chapter and I'm one who reads the first part of four as part of it notice how that ending is given to us in chapter two verse one thus the heavens and the earth were finished in all their multitude and on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done so God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation now the next line is where the debate has come does it belong with what follows or is it the final line of what precedes I'm inclined to think it's the final line of what precedes these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created looking back what kind of text is this I submit to you and this is in part what motion vinesauce says although he doesn't want to use the word myths for this he comes awful close but I think lurking in his body is somehow the notion that myth still let's call it by another name but this is an origin myth very much like the myth that I referred to a few moments ago from Mesopotamia called an Ummah Ailish where the god Marduk defeats this sea God goddess Tiamat and creates the world and Babylon out of it we don't have a combat like that here we may have an intimation of it at the beginning but I'll leave that aside but the two texts this one and the Babylonian texts or Mesopotamian texts I submit are alike in that they both want to tell you how the world began in terms of specific institutions within the culture of Israel that is telling that and that's where vine Fells Point comes into play number three begins to make this connection for us here in the third of the two versions of the ten commandments we're told to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy to labor for six days and do all your work but to rest on the seventh why for in verse 11 in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth the sea and all that is in them but rested on the seventh day therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it in other words why do we observe the Sabbath not because some body of Israelite elders decided well be good to rest periodically I mean you can't work constantly so let's go by seven and yeah this has a rough correlation with the way the moon appears the lunar calendar and it'll be fine our text has nothing of that for our text the Sabbath was a gift of God to the world it was set up with the very creation of the world it's not an arbitrary phenomenon that human beings decided on we know for example from the ancient Near East that one group of one culture the so called culture of Syria in its old phase operated on the basis of a five or fifty year 50-day period seven was not automatic for this text however this is built into the very fabric of the universe in the same way that Babylon in the Mesopotamian creation story of an Ummah Ailish is part of what the Gods design it wasn't simply built by humans but we can go further and this is number four that vine Feld brings to bear as he points out this correlation under number four was seen by several of his predecessors Martin Buber for example and Umberto or Moshe David Kazuto but they didn't make quite the connection that I think vine cell has correctly made namely that if you look at the way the story of creation is narrated in Genesis 1 through the first part of 2 and vine felt here quotes several lines in the right-hand column from Genesis 1 to 2 you say that it is the same kind of language on a seven-day period that describes an exodus chapters 39 and 40 the way that Moses had the first portable sanctuary the portable Tabernacle in the wilderness built for Israel in other words the tabernacle this portable temple if you will that followed the Israelites after they left Egypt through the wilderness before they got to the land of Israel is modeled on the story of creation or the story of creation is modeled on the tabernacle in any case there is an indelible connection between them and for vine fell this suggests and I think he's quite correct here that this story of creation in Genesis 1 through 2 was meant actually to be recited probably in some kind of liturgical ceremony within the sanctuary and the sanctuary ultimately meaning here the Temple of Jerusalem to this day in fact the last portion of this text chapter 2 verses 1 through 3 sometimes for two is recited on Friday night at the beginning of the Sabbath observance of Jews replicating what vine Feld feels was the ancient temple setting of this text what am I saying here I'm suggesting that we have here functionally and in basic content a myth a text that tells us about a fundamental institution of ancient Israel it's sad when no work or at least most kinds of work cannot be performed it tells us the origin of that institution and it explains why it's necessary to have it and it connects it with another institution namely the sanctuary or more specifically the Temple in Jerusalem exactly as the so called pagan myths of the ancient Near East to do all over the place and knowing this doesn't cheapen the tale doesn't suggest our it's a piece of junk oriented to us by individuals who you know basically were primitives in their thinking and couldn't realize that the week was actually an astronomically correlated institution set up by human beings no it suggests that this institution is so fundamental to the culture is so much an emblem of what ancient Israel ought to be that it has to have been divinely ordained yes human beings may have had a share in implementing the divine directive but something so fundamental can't be simply a whimsical human decision let me turn I have to leave mr. Joe Bell for a moment and if you'd like you can ask me a question about it and I'll do my best to respond but let me turn to number 7 Psalm 29 I grew up knowing this um again from Jewish liturgy because on the Sabbath particularly on the eve of the Sabbath on Friday nights Jewish holidays always beginning the night before this is one of the Psalms that are recited as a part of the shield a Shabbat the songs of the Sabbath then I learned when I got to college that this is actually composed by Canaanites and I did a double-take and got kind of shaken up and decided that if anybody could make such an outlandish statement like this maybe this was a field worth exploring Here I am what's going on here in the 1930s the scholar HL Ginsberg Harold Lewis Ginsberg presented a paper at the Orientalist Congress in Rome 1935 so it was a wonderful time to have it I don't know whether Mussolini and company were there to greet them or not but in any case it was Ginsburg raised as a traditional Jew who said if you look at this carefully in the light of new discoveries that were just coming out at the time of an ancient Canaanite city Canaanite in culture not politically called you Garrett you have stuff here that just echoes what I'm reading in the Ugaritic texts ascribe to the Lord again it's Jimmy or Yahweh ascribed to Yahweh Bonet aileen sons of gods heavenly beings as a slight dodge here ascribed to Yahoo a glory and strength ascribed to Yahweh the glory of his name worship Yahweh and holy splendor I'm sorry if it's a little unclear there I almost broke the back of my Bible to the Xerox fist but I didn't want to go that far the voice of Yahweh is over the waters the god of glory thunders Yahweh over mighty waters the voice of Yahweh is powerful is full of majesty the voice of Yahweh breaks the cedars the Cedars of Lebanon he makes Lebanon skip lichen a calf and Syrian which is another name for in this region in the Lebanon at the southern end of it it makes Syrian like a young wild ox or like a bull the voice of Yahweh flashes forth flames of fire the voice of Yahweh shakes the mid bar the wilderness it shakes the wilderness of Kadesh the voice of Yahweh causes the Oaks two world strips the forest bear and his temple all say hello glory glory glory hey hello who lo o male kavod and Hebrew finally Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood an archaic word here apparently Mabul Yahweh sits enthroned his king forever may Yahweh give strength to his people may he bless his people and Yahweh bless his people with peace what Ginsburg pointed out was several things first of all the geography of the text it does not seem to be the geography of the land of israel or of palestine it seems to be the geography of the area immediately north the Lebanon and maybe even part of Syria hence the reference to Lebanon and Syrian the problem was Kadesh because everybody immediately thought of a place in the Sinai desert Kadesh Barnea but as Ginsburg pointed out that term is never used Bible is called something else and there is a northern Kadesh where a famous battle took place in antiquity and if this Cod Asia is to agree with Lebanon and Syrian maybe it's the northern Syrian Kadesh that's being referred to we have God in other words coming in from the waters and then wreaking havoc on the Cedars the Cedars of Lebanon and Syrian and Kadesh he comes in in other words across the Mediterranean he's sort of you know coming in for a landing it is really what's happening here and he sort of circles around and he comes in and he ends up at Ben Gurion Airport otherwise known as his throne where everybody says kavod glory he's here and then he sits enthroned it says on the flood which is this ancient word Mabul enthroned as a king forever where he gives strength to his people and now presumably although the people aren't named if we read this in an Israelite setting it has to be Israel now what Ginsburg suggested was if you take out the word Yahweh what you have here is a description that we now know in his day in the 1930s already were beginning to know from these texts from you Garrett of the god Baal or Haddad the quintessential God of the storm of the rains and one of the principal gods of the Canaanite Pantheon and all these descriptions here and much of the language could be paralleled or assumed for bow and the fact that the text starts in the geography where bowel is primarily located only confirms this to particular points brought the matter home the first is the first two lines which are described here translated here as ascribed to Yahweh hvala Donovan a Aileen Ginsburg already identified this as a special kind of parallelism everybody had recognized for some time that biblical hebrew poetry tends to work in lines that are parallel to each other sometimes antithetic sometimes one completes the other where you say either the same thing or it's opposite in the second line following the first but here said gimbert's Ginsburg is a special kind of parallelism which he called I think climactic parallelism because it builds an intensity by leaving the line unfinished and forcing you to go to the next line to finish it so the first line scribe to Yahweh o sons of gods ascribe what there's no object given here you have to go to the next line to find it ascribed to Yahweh glory and strength ascribed to Yahweh then you changed the object the glory of his name and finally the last line changes the verb from a scribe to worship but Yahweh in holy splendor and that sort of brings the whole thing to a conclusion a rhythmic conclusion now sub Ginsburg if you look into the Ugaritic text the text from ancient you got it you find this kind of climactic or sometimes it's been described as staircase parallelism as you ascend the staircase you find that this is a feature of of Ugaritic poetry but for me the payoff came many years after Ginsberg wrote in an article by the late Aloysius Fitzgerald taught brother Aloysius who taught for many years at the Catholic University of America in a short article in 1974 he showed that if you take out all the times all the places where the word Yahweh is mentioned and put back the word bow you get alliteration and assonance that disappears once you put Yahweh in so let me read this just two lines bear with my Hebrew in the text that we now have have ooh-la do not have ooh-la-la Yahweh I'll read it this way hvala Yahweh Bonet I leaned over against avalible Bonet a lean notice more bees hvala Yahweh kavod Varro's have wooed Lobato kavod ver and both are the same sound but in two different forms hvala ba kavod ba ba OS in short by replacing all the Yahweh's with vowels you get a text which in terms of its sound patterns is much tighter much more synthetic much more synchronized than with Yahweh and this suggested to Fitzgerald as it has to others that really what we have here is a text that was originally composed for the Canaanite God bow but now shifted to Yahweh so what does all of this mean big deal you say fine this is what I'm sending my son to college for well there's the love of discovery that's one thing but we have to ask the question why would they why would some Israelite author have taken over a text like this what was the point of it well all cultures do this of course we borrow right and left sometimes we acknowledge the borrowing sometimes we don't the whole notion of a footnote by the way is Anthony Grafton of Princeton has pointed out is it relatively recent phenomenon in human history it did not bother the ancients although the book of Chronicles tries to come close but we all borrow and we all adapt so we shouldn't be surprised here but here's a text that I grew up reciting on the eve of the Sabbath as one of the most dramatic demonstrations of my faith in the God of Israel and I find out it's to bow the end of the text translated for you as may Yahweh give strength or maybe I'll give strength to his people may Yahweh or Baal bless his people with peace brings the text away from nature into a human realm as a number have pointed out thus confusing the argument that the Israelite God is only about nature it is only about history and not about nature and the gods like bow love the Canaanites are only about nature obviously the two realms of history and nature if you will bleed into each other all the more so you think about the fact that you can have a history of nature the problem in trying to figure out what this text is really doing is the devil by the fact that we can't really date it clearly which is a problem with much of the literature of the Hebrew Bible I once wrote an article in fact it was the first that Father Clifford allowed into the Catholic biblical quarterly he was very generous as I think about it now and when I followed a number of other people suggesting that this text may have belonged to the monarchy of David and more likely Solomon who otherwise we know from what's recounted to us in the book of Kings had a great deal to do with Canaanites and Phoenicians around him and in fact Ginsburg suggests that in his first essay on this text that this was a text that used Canaanite language and imagery because perhaps in the reign of Solomon you had a king who was consciously at least as the biblical text present him important qualification as the biblical text presents Solomon he had extended his interests his his at least sphere of influence beyond the realm of the Israelite tribes into some of the realms to the north that historically belonged to Canaan and perhaps you have here a text that is designed to suggest that as I have extended my sphere of influence so Yahweh is a God not just simply of a small group of Israelites but he's a God who can reasonably say he is the God of peoples outside of Israel like the Canaanite world and he does what you call your God Baal doing but Yahweh does it one better and we get that kind of thinking in other parts of the Hebrew Bible but here what I'm talking about is a text that then moves into the realm of a public statement it is a kind of narrative of what this God does it has apparently a ritual or liturgical setting as its last lines make clear again in the temple for all intensive purposes it's not simply a Canaanite myth it has become an Israelite myth so how do we conclude them from all of this material what do we say then about the problem of myths in the Hebrew Bible I'd like to suggest that myth is both a conceptual and a literary category as a literary category it is a tale it is a story and even in a piece of liturgical poetry like this we have a story of the God coming in off the waters through the hinterland until he comes to his temple where he triumphantly claims his kingship it's conceptual in that it seeks to link various realms of reality the human the natural and the divine myth is also something not peculiar to any one culture or any one time or any one place thus the category myth cannot be used it seems to me as a way of differentiating Israel from its neighbors we would have to say certain kinds of myths are practiced in Israel which are not in the neighboring world and in this regard one issue that I have opened but haven't resolved deliberately is the possibility that when some of the Israel I or biblical text mentioned God with other divine beings against whom God is put into some kind of conflict the question is whether these are dead cliches as Kaufman argued or whether they still carry with it carry with them a sense of yes there is a problem here the God the God of Israel has to reclaim if you will periodically his status as El supremo my colleague Jon Levenson wrote a brilliant book on this subject some years ago creation and the persistence of evil the Jewish drama of divine omnipotence where he argues that these texts where God is shown in conflict with others and I haven't given them to you except the one that's about job could be counted in that regard that there is a sense that yes God is going to win the battle against rocof or any of these other sea monsters but he's got to win it and he has periodically to certify that he is El supremo myth I would suggest puts the quotidian in terms of the cosmic or in Reverse puts the cosmic in terms of the quotidian big fancy words it takes the everyday and reveals a range of dimensions beyond the ordinary that extend to other human groups that extend to nature that extend to the universe and so revealed to us that every phenomenon with which we deal is not simply something literal it has a whole range of aspects that we have to take into account that Lennon to go back to where I began was not just simply a figure of history who died at the end of the Bolshevik Revolution and made a revolution but he's become papa Lenin or you used to see in Soviet days people wearing little labels of the baby Lenin wasn't the baby Jesus it was the baby Lenin of course the official ideology of the communist regime was it was anti religious as you may define the term and so finally I would suggest that while missed in this multi-dimensional orientation human natural cosmic may be something from what that is different from what we in the West called history and science the boundaries here are not rigid they're porous allowing for juxtaposition blending to the enrichment of all elements in short being able to read the Bible mythically doesn't brand it as something objectionable it opens up worlds and confirms the status of the text as indeed the living icon that it is thank you very much [Applause] dr. she has agreed to take some questions something very questions please always a short could you could you briefly compare and contrast to take on myth to Karen Armstrong and count Armstrong's who talks about repost and logos yeah which book of Karen Armstrong Oh the case for God which is miss name but it's called the case for God that book I'm afraid I haven't read so I can't respond to it directly I mean she's quite an extraordinary author you know who's written about everything and that was one I missed perhaps you could raise the question for me that she raises that you'd like to discuss and I'll do my best to respond that way um okay she talks about Todd EBP she talks about myth is the mythical mythical mystical that which can't be seen and that which can't be say put into words that which she don't get through your head that part of religion rather than the untrue part and she contrasts that to the UM to the logos part of society the practical that Naqada hunt going moving your tribe to a new place and so she talks about modern religion religion various times has dumped me posts she she would say to its detriment uh-huh that clear enough okay I mean if I've heard you correctly she takes company she has a basically positive assessment of Miss well I mean I try to suggest in my own way the same thing as you've defined what she's done the only demur alike have is the notion of this mystical inarticulate Nassif adding and the the texts do try to be as I suggested multi-dimensional so the the range of meaning that it texts can exhibit is one that repays repeated attention I mean the more you read the text the more you may find in it but I would be hesitant to jump immediately to the notion that mystical inarticulate 'no stand primary feature of myths that you encounter because if the myths have a public function and I think that's what continually impress is me about the mythology's I've read from quite a number of cultures not by any means all of them I'm not sure anybody but if the myth has a public function then that function should in some way be transparent if it is to serve to explain and to justify institutions values behaviors of the societies from which the myths come if it's entirely mystical and essentially inarticulate then that function can't really be served thank you other questions you're all in favor of it that's great yes please Oh Oh a mythical figure Abraham the patriarch yep did you comment on that yeah sure I just spoke to him yesterday no I'm sorry this use of Miss then is the use of myth as essentially something that is untrue or non-existent and we that's that's a way we use the term it's obviously not what I've been talking about so there are two issues here one is to explain how the word myth is being used in regard to Abraham and the second is to tell you whether I did talk to it recently in regard to the use of myth here I would I I would not myself wanted to use the term because even if you disagree with what I've said myth has so many different kinds of meaning that by calling Abraham mythical you make it more confusing rather than less given all the meanings attached to the word as to whether Abraham existed well every 20 years we seem to find him I a late colleague of ours got awful close there were some discoveries made by an Italian team working in Syria at a site called abla and abla gave a large number of texts in cuneiform like what you would find in Mesopotamia in modern Iraq that come from the late-2000s BC and supposedly as these texts were initially deciphered there were a number of names personal names and geographical names that seem to correlate with what was the names that were in the book of Genesis both in the text in the chapters before Abraham comes in and in those afterwards so the initial conclusion of the Italian scholar who was deciphering the text was that the names and the geography of Genesis must come from the same time period and maybe the same geographical world as these Ebla text somewhere around 2300 BC this colleague of ours thought that the case as it was presented to him was quite quite suggestive indeed quite reasonable indeed fantastic wonderful and he wrote an article about the correlation here the article was set up in print and he gets a letter from the Decipherer saying I made a mistake that the personal names which I told you were the same as in this case the so called state plane cities Sodom and Gomorrah in Judea form there really and it's not quite clear whether the same names is in the biblical tradition and they're all supposed to be on one tablet well that's not really quite true either - this colleagues great grade I mean he was very upset that the article was set up it was about to be printed and if you go and look at the article you'll see a little box above what he had written which says I just received a letter from the decipher with the following information and invention essentially invalidated the whole article I tell this story because clearly even for the biblical authors Abraham is a figure who was alive who was real I think I don't think he's a to the authors and to the audience he's an invented character a fictional character as we would use the term fiction but at the same time it looks to me as if he is presented in the book of Genesis and he's primarily in Genesis there are references later but it's amazing how modest the references are to Abraham outside of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible he's presented as somebody long ago founder of the community the originator of the covenant between himself and his family and God but nonetheless the stories about him as many have observed are narrated in terms of his being a type a model of X and we don't get a really rounded biography so this is suggested to many and I'm I'm still I guess a conservative in this regard that probably in the depiction of Abraham that we have there are historical features but they may not belong to a single person but to a whole group of people whom Abraham represents

Channel: Boston College School of Theology and Ministry Continuing Education

Views: 12,909

Rating: 4.4685316 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Machinist, hebrew bible, mythology, creation myths, myth, religious ritual, cultic practices, myth stories, mythological stories, examples of myths, history and myth, bible study, job 26, genesis 6, genesis 1, exodus 20, political liturgy, psalm 29

Id: 9Un13LOBDFA

Length: 78min 6sec (4686 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2017