1. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 82-83.
…the historical data on the origin of the Samaritan community do not point to an exceptionally early date, and thus do not support the claims of the Samaritans that their texts are very ancient. The colophon—a note by a scribe that gives information on himself and the time of writing—in the Abisha scroll of [the Samaritan text] ascribes the writing of this scroll to Abisha son of Phineas, the priest who lived at the time of Joshua, but scholars believe that this scroll was written in the twelfth or thirteenth century. According to Samaritan tradition, their community originated at the beginning of the Israelite nation, and in their view they preserve the authentic Israelite tradition. The Samaritans believe that the Jews, rather than they, separated from the central stream of Judaism at the time of the priest Eli in the eleventh century BCE…A completely different view is found in 2 Kg 17:24-34 according to which the Samaritans were not related to the Israelites, but were people brought to Samaria by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE, after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. In the Talmud they are indeed named “Kutim,” that is, people from Kutah, a region in Assyria (cf. 2 Kgs 17:24).
This interested me because of the narrative I was fed about the Samaritans for many years. “The Jews of Jesus’ day did not like the Samaritans because they considered them half-breeds. The Samaritans were descended from intermarriages between the native Israelites and the foreigners whom the Assyrians brought to Israel.” Actually, from what I read in II Kings 17:24-34, the Israelite narrative indicated that the Samaritans weren’t even half-breeds! As far as they were concerned, the Samaritans were non-Israelite foreigners, pure and simple (unless I’m overlooking something).
I rarely (if ever) asked if the Samaritans viewed themselves according to that narrative. I had my list of facts about who the Samaritans were and what they believed: they were descended from the foreigners whom the Assyrians imported into Israel, and they believed that Mount Gerizim was the place of God’s sanctuary. And they altered the Pentateuch to highlight the importance of Mount Gerizim. For some reason, I never asked how this stuff fit together, probably because I have enough things on my mind as is! Come to think of it, it doesn’t make sense that the Samaritans would view themselves as non-Israelites, since they valued Israelite culture so much.
But Tov shed a little light on the issue: the Samaritans believed they were part of Israel from the very beginning, but the Israelites left them. Maybe they thought that the Israelites all worshipped atMount Gerizim at some point, but a number of them left for another sanctuary, leaving the Samaritans behind as the die-hards for the old way (which God supported).
There was a time before today when I got a glimpse into a Samaritan perspective. I once attended a Messianic synagogue, and one of the members was returning from Israel. He had in his hands a Samaritan Torah Scroll, with old Hebrew script. I asked him if the Samaritans there believed that their ancestors were the ones who opposed and hindered the attempts by Ezra to rebuild the temple and the Israelite community, and he replied, “No, they say that was another group, not them!” In this case, they appear to agree with the biblical history, which does not appear to be the case with their attitude towards II Kings 17, the mainsteam Israelite story about their origins; for that, they have their own narrative, which makes them out to be native Israelites. But they accept the Book of Ezra’s history, and, even if they thought Ezra’s temple was illegitimate before God, they didn’t believe they were hostiles who picked fights with Ezra’s community. As far as they were concerned, their goal was to live in peace with their neighbors.
2. Gerson Cohen, “The Talmudic Age,” Great Ideas and Ages of the Jewish People, ed. Leo Schwarz (New York: Random House, 1956) 174.
It is idle to ask: What does Judaism have to say about the nature of man, about sin, about the world to come, about God himself? The question is as idle when put to the Rabbinic literature as it is unhistorical when put to its Biblical antecedents. The Bible has incorporated within its canon a number of views of God, a number of conceptions of sin, retribution, love, justice, and so forth. The dogmatic theologian and the religiously committed must somehow try to harmonize contradictions and elicit a unitary point of view. The Rabbis could not avoid either the demand of their own minds or the demand of others for basic consistency. However, the structure of the religious community, with its lack of any formalized hierarchy, prevented the definitive resolution of conflicting views on any but the most crucial questions. For the most part, different teachers expounded different solutions, and as in Scripture itself, they were recorded side by side. All later efforts to reduce Judaism to an integrated system of ideas and values—Maimonides is an excellent case in point—were held in no higher respect than the teachings of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Ishmael, or hundreds of other commentator-teachers.
When I read this, two things came to mind. First of all, the rabbis contradict themselves and, in some cases, the biblical narrative. I can’t think of too many examples right now, but there are times when they are interpreting a biblical passage, and their exegesis contradicts what another passage of the Bible says, or an argument that is made elsewhere in the rabbinic literature. When I asked my midrash professor how they reconciled the disrepancies, he replied, “They weren’t playing that game in this case.” One example that comes to my mind is their treatment of Deuteronomy 23: they upheld the Torah’s exclusion of certain foreigners, mamzerim, and people with crushed testicles from the Israelite community. But didn’t Isaiah 56 say God’s house was to be for all people, including eunuchs? How did they handle that? The answer I often got for a lot of topics was, “They didn’t.” Granted, there were plenty of biblical contradictions that they sought to harmonize, but many of them did not reach their radar.
Second, I thought about the issue of biblical diversity, especially in light of my post yesterday, II Samuel 24: Security in Religion, Debt, Faith, Works, Etc.. In the Bible, there is a diversity of viewpoints about sin and atonement. Some voices believe that sin carries an irrevocable penalty. According to one strand of this point of view, a person can repent of his sin and be forgiven by God, but his penalty will be passed down to his children and his children’s children (I Kings 21:29; II Kings 23:26). In another strand, however, God gives Israel a fresh start after he purifies her through punishment (e.g., Deuteronomy 30; Isaiah 40:2). God may even want Israel to be punished so he can purify her and start all over again with holy people, so he hinders her repentance (Isaiah 6:10-13). For these voices, there is a debt that needs to be paid, and God will collect at some point in time.
Other voices portray God forgiving people, as in cancelling their debt so they don’t have to pay it anymore (Matthew 18:27; Luke 7:41-43). Isaiah 53, meanwhile, appears to present a form of vicarious sacrifice, in which a Suffering Servant dies in place of others, thereby clearing them of guilt. Romans 6-7 offers a different view of the atonement, in which Christ doesn’t die in our place, but rather we die with Christ and rise again as new creatures, forgiven and changed. And then there are voices that are emphatically against one person dying in place of another (Exodus 32:33). Some voices believe people can be punished for the sins of their ancestors (Exodus 20:5); others emphatically deny transgenerational punishment, affirming that God only punishes people for their own sins (Ezekiel 18). Some believe in blood atonement (Leviticus 16); others present repentance as the way to receive God’s forgiveness, without even mentioning blood (Ezekiel 18; Jonah).
Is it possible to see these different viewpoints as diverse facets of a larger truth? I’ve gone with this approach, for my belief in penal substitution (Christ pays the penalty for sins by dying in place of sinners) absorbed the biblical beliefs that sin created a debt, that God releases us from having to pay it, that the Suffering Servant died vicariously for sinners, and that blood atones. Moreover, because the Gospels stressed repentance and faith as the means to receive God’s forgiveness (e.g., Acts 2:38), I viewed them as the conduit through which Christ’s death is applied to our lives. Christ died for our sins and paid the penalty, but that “cancelled debt” only comes when we believe in Christ and his work on the cross.
But then I wonder: here things are, conveniently fitting together, or so it seems! There’s that pesky passage that appears to deny penal substitution in its affirmation that people die for their own sins (Exodus 32:33), implying that one person can’t die in place of another. Moreover, am I compromising each motif in my attempt to unite the various ideas into one coherent picture?
And this stuff can have practical implications, too! For example, in my post yesterday about II Samuel 24 and how sin is so serious that God must punish it, was I encouraging people to feel guilty? Sure, God punished David and his people for the census even after David had repented, but there are also plenty of passages in which God graciously forgets the sins of his people and allows them to move on, cleansed and with a fresh start (Jeremiah 31:34; Micah 7:19). These passages have given comfort to numerous people.
As BryanL says in his post, Tension is Overrated, the existence of tension in theology doesn’t necessarily sit well with those in the pew. When John Anderson praised the existence of tension in the Hebrew Bible, Bryan asked him if he prayed to a God with contradictory attributes. That’s a fair question. I listed all these different biblical views on sin and atonement, but what’s that have to do with the God I pray to, the one I carry around in my head on a day-to-day basis? I tend to prioritize God’s love and mercy, for even the harsh passages on the Bible do so. As we saw yesterday in II Samuel 24, David believed that God was fundamentally merciful at his base, and that turned out to be true. As far as punishment is concerned, I tend to see it as corrective rather than merely punitive. But that’s an issue for another day!
3. Gerson Cohen, “The Talmudic Age,” Great Ideas and Ages of the Jewish People, ed. Leo Schwarz (New York: Random House, 1956) 176.
For centuries[,] the Christian Church, which forbade usury among Christians, provided for an uninterrupted source of capital loans by reinterpreting the Deuteronomic law so as to make it apply to Christian creditors, but not to Jews lending money to Christians. Beginning with the Crusades, the Schoolmen argued against this traditional dichotomy and against any form of usury by appealing to other Biblical texts which might prove that Christians and Jews were not “strangers” in the Scriptural sense. When the sixteenth century Calvin undermined the age-old restrictions against usury and thus smoothed the progress of capitalism, he could do so only by reinterpreting the Biblical verses and “proving” that they were no longer applicable. The history of the European economy is thus intimately bound up with the history of the interpretation of two verses in Deuteronomy that were set down in writing in Palestine seven centuries before the Christian era.
I have three points today because I read something else in Cohen that was so interesting I couldn’t pass it up. The above quote interests me because it demonstrates Christian attitudes about the law of Moses along with their practical effects. Some schools asserted that the Torah’s prohibition on usury was authoritative for Christians, whereas John Calvin said that the law against it was no longer applicable (even though he was as pro-Torah a Christian as they come! I’d research that today if I had more time). What’s interesting is that, at some point in time, there ruled a Christian interpretation of the Torah that viewed it as applicable to both Jews and Christians. Deuteronomy 23:21 bans Israelites from charging interest to their fellow Israelites, but they could charge it to a foreigner (nochri). For certain Christian interpreters, this meant Jews could charge interest to Christians. The narrative I always heard was that Christian society forced Jews to violate their own Torah and become usurers, but that may not have been the case. Actually, Christian society wanted to find a way for the Jews to charge usury in a manner that was consistent with their own Torah. And it wasn’t hard to find!
I’m not sure why Christians wanted Jews to charge them interest. It was probably beneficial to the economy in some manner.