think hard, think well

My review of Josef Forsling’s Composite Artistry in the Book of Numbers: A Study in Biblical Narrative Conventions, has been recently published in the Review of Biblical Literature.

Josef Forsling, Composite Artistry in the Book of Numbers: A Study in Biblical Narrative Conventions (Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi University, 2013). ISBN 978951765706.

(Disclosure statement: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher through RBL, but was not otherwise compensated for this review.)

Our family is experiencing trials and uncertainty at the moment. Partly in response, I recently picked up the Book of Job and began from the beginning. Job had popped up in some class discussions this past semester, and that reminded me that I haven’t given the book a good, careful read in a while–perhaps since undergrad days.

There are many intriguing questions surrounding the authorship, background, and fundamental argument of the Book of Job. I have opinions about those points–or, more precisely, I have opinions left over from back when I last studied the subject in depth. Those are certainly due for reëvaluation. My present approach to the book is that both YHWH and Job are on trial–YHWH’s justice, and Job’s faith–and that the trial is resolved/reconciled when Job experiences a direct word from YHWH in chapters 38-41. Contra Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, Job has not sinned in his conduct; contra Elihu, Job has not sinned by questioning YHWH’s justice–up to Job 37. But once Job has personal knowledge/experience of YHWH, it would have been wrong for him to continue to question YHWH’s justice. Throughout the book, Job never sins–otherwise, YHWH would have lost the bet with the adversary.

Whatever perspective you take on the overall message of the book, Job’s three friends–Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar–usually get consigned to the ash heap (har har–see 2:8, 12) for their philosophical and theological naïveté, and insensitivity. When they are mentioned in sermons or teachings, they are held up as examples of how not to counsel someone going through suffering.

But is this completely fair to these characters? If the only purpose of the three friends in the story is to provide a foil for Job to correct their “bad” theology,” then they would seem to have a disproportionately loud voice in the text. The dialogue between Job and these three is found in Job 3-31, and of these twenty-nine chapters, the friends account for eight speeches in nine chapters–roughly a third of the discourse.

When you start to read what the friends actually say, in many places their perspectives seem to mirror those that we find in the Psalter or the Proverbs. Here are some examples:

If we reduce the friends’ eight speeches to insensitive counseling or bad theology, then not only do we miss the “good” theology that we find there, we also impugn the “good” theology of parallel ideas in the Proverbs and certain psalms.

So, how do we understand the speeches of Job’s friends? In isolation, they seem to contain good wisdom theology, but they are juxtaposed with Job’s valid objections for which we also must account.

I would suggest that two categories proposed by Brueggemann in his Theology of the Old Testament can help us: “core testimony,” and “countertestimony.” The core testimony consists of the Bible’s descriptions, metaphors and record of actions that reveal YHWH’s character. This core testimony reveals YHWH’s purposes for the world, and his sovereign power to accomplish his purposes through Israel, for Israel’s own good and for the good of the world.[1] Brueggemann defines Israel’s “countertestimony” as a necessary cross-examination of Israel’s testimony to YHWH’s mighty acts.[2] Cross-examination is not intended to undermine the core testimony but to strengthen it and to mobilize YHWH to act in accordance with the core testimony to his character.[3]

The Proverbs and certain psalms of praise are examples of core testimony; they reveal God’s greatness, his purposes for the world, and the truths by which he governs it. “Wisdom” as a genre in the Hebrew Bible consists of statements that are generally true: they explain the consequences that will usually result from certain actions.

Conversely, the psalms of lament, the Book of Lamentations, and the Book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) belong to the countertestimony. The laments say to YHWH, “This is what you said should happen to the righteous and the wicked, respectively–but those things aren’t happening as you said they would. Why not?! Do something!” Qohelet reflects on the fleeting character of the temporal blessings for obedience and punishments for disobedience (or the complete inversion of those consequences), thereby undermining the value of “wisdom.”

In Proverbs, we have mostly core testimony. In Lamentations and Qohelet, we have countertestimony. In the Psalter, we have core- and countertestimony alongside one another in each of the five books. I suggest that Job follows the Psalter in this respect, but in an explicitly dialogic fashion: it sets the two testimonies in tension through nine rounds of testimony and cross-examination (if we include Elihu).

When we read what Job’s friends are saying, we don’t have to discredit them or denigrate them for insensitivity. (After all, they do wait seven days in silence, mourning with Job in torn clothes and ashes, before speaking to him.) Rather, we should think of their perspectives in the same way that we consider the psalms of praise or the Proverbs: as representing wisdom about the way that YHWH generally works in the world. Just as we should consider Proverbs first on its own and then second in dialogue with Qohelet, we should be careful not to silence Job’s friends. Otherwise, we’ve effectively excised nine chapters of scripture from the canon.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 306.

[2] Ibid., 317.

[3] Ibid., 321.

It’s been quite a busy couple of weeks for the Giffones. After our trip to Scotland last week, we finished our packing on Saturday, had a lovely send-off on Sunday, and then traveled back to PA from Lithuania (via Palanga, Copenhagen, and Newark) in the longest Monday of our lives (literally, because it was 31 hours long for us).

I will write more on the Scotland trip in a travelogue post at some point. But today I’d like to share some undigested thoughts in response to the conference at the University of Edinburgh entitled, “Power, Authority and Canon.”

I have been thinking about canon quite a bit lately because my teaching context includes Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who have different canons than that of my community. The EO also recognize a different base text for their canonical biblical texts: the Septuagint, or an eclectic mix of the Septuagint and Masoretic Text.

My general impression on the scholarly presentations at the conference was about the first word in the title: power. “Power” in relation to a canon could mean the intrinsic power that the canonical books possess as the product of divine inspiration. But that is not what was meant, and what it cannot mean in such an academic context. In a room full of scholars who disagree personally about the nature and extent of inspiration of the biblical texts (Catholic, Anglican, Jewish, Evangelical, etc.), the only topic of discussion can be the historical: what authority certain communities in the ancient world ascribed to certain books. Thus, the “power” is that exercised by religious authorities over their communities through the idea of canon. This is a perfectly legitimate enterprise; I did not go to the conference expecting to hear debates about the merits of Judith as inspired scripture. Shaye Cohen (a Jewish scholar himself) pointed out that for every theological objection to Judith that could be raised by Jews and Protestants, he could propose ten ways that the objection could have been overcome if the communities had wanted it included. What were the community interests and goals that resulted in Esther (a similar sort of book) being included and Judith being excluded?

Another impression is that our conceptions of canon as moderns have been irreversibly shaped by a technological invention: the codex. At the times that the books of the Hebrew Bible and the NT were written, revered scriptures were written on scrolls, which do not naturally facilitate two important modern uses of Bibles: the delineation of a canon (binding in a single physical book the writings that are “in” and excluding the works that are “out”), and use of a “Bible” as a reference document (try flipping through a scroll sometime looking for a prooftext!). Once the codex was invented, the inspired writings could be collected and bound together in a single book that communities could say, “These–and not others–are the inspired works that should be used to establish doctrine and practice.”

But the pre-codex ancient Jewish and Christian communities do not appear to have thought about canon this way. There were certainly writings that communities and individuals considered to be inspired prophecy/revelation. But the boundaries of the canon were fuzzier than they are for us, as evidenced by the quotations of numerous works referenced in the New Testament and Rabbinical writings that ended up outside the canons of Christianity and Judaism.

Canon as an idea is inextricably linked to the question of textual tradition. The OT canon of earliest Christianity seems to have included the Apocrypha because of their inclusion in the Greek Bible (LXX). Communities that came to prefer the Hebrew canon (Jews, Protestants) did so because those books (non-Apocrypha) are represented in the Masoretic textual tradition. So, if a tradition tends toward the Greek text, it will prefer the LXX canon; if it prefers the Hebrew text, it will prefer the Masoretic canon.

But did the earliest Jewish and Christian communities have firm or unanimous preferences on these questions? In his conference presentation, Craig Evans suggested that the Gospels, though written in Greek, seem to adopt readings of OT texts that are represented in different text traditions: the LXX (or its Vorlage), the proto-Masoretic tradition, and even the interpretative traditions that became the Targums. He argued that Jesus/the Evangelists/the Evangelists’ sources were aware of and used [what we might think of as] Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Jewish scriptures, depending on which reading suited the point they were making.

The different canons have different textual traditions, which are significantly divergent for some OT books such as Jeremiah and Samuel. John Barton argued that for ancient communities it was the book itself that was considered inspired, not the precise contents of the book (within reasonable limits). Thus, it was “The Book of Jeremiah” that was authoritative scripture, and whether you used the proto-MT Jeremiah (which is later and longer) or the LXX Jeremiah (or its Vorlage) didn’t matter so much. This is deeply unsatisfying for moderns, especially for those who must preach through the text as scripture. But it is probably true to some extent, as evidenced by the fact that we have both Jeremiah traditions attested at Qumran.

For those of us who are taught to pay attention to every word, sentence, verse, paragraph, and section of each book of scripture, these ideas can be unsettling. I think it’s good to have a definite base text for a community’s Bible, and to have vernacular translations in bound books for people to read for themselves. I am proudly Protestant, and I honor Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, and all the others who fought to put the Bible in the hands of regular people, because I believe that God reveals Himself to individuals in scripture. But Protestants need to ask: does the way we conceive of the authority and function of scripture require a level of canonical and textual precision that developments and discoveries in textual criticism (especially post-Qumran) have rendered untenable?