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1. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, page 453:
In this book, Mike, the man from Mars, starts a new religion. The religion holds that “all living creatures are collectively God”, and he and his disciples are the only “self-aware gods” around. The religion also permits sexual freedom among members, which becomes a topic of discussion in the book. But, according to Jubal, the gods of all sorts of religions had their sexual peccadilloes, so Mike isn’t out-of-line to conclude that being divine grants him sexual freedom!
That reminds me of something I read yesterday, in an essay by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. There are two Sumerian myths about the love affair between the god Enlil, and the goddess Ninlil. In one, Enlil does what he’s supposed to do and asks Ninlil’s mother for Ninlil’s hand. In the other, Enlil has sex with Ninlil, without asking Ninlil’s mother. Ninlil is judged by a large court of gods, who decree (according to the translation Tikva is using) that “the sex offender Enlil will leave the town”. Ninlil follows Enlil into banishment.
So I guess that the Sumerian pantheon had its own Adam Walsh Act!
2. Alberdina Houtmann, Mishnah and Tosefta, page 182:
Houtman says that, according to the Mishnah, an Israelite debtor can pay his cancelled debts if he wants to do so, as long as the creditor has done his part and cancelled the debt.
3. Donald Redford, “Scribe and Speaker”, in Writings and Speech in Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, pages 216-217:
The words of the ancestors [in ancient Egypt] were deemed worthy of inscripturation under the following circumstances: (1) The content displayed foresight and perspicacity. (2) The ancestor in question was not anonymous but known by name; his name continued to be pronounced on account of his works. (3) His words were “good,” that is to say, they met standards of genre expectation, numinosity, style, and aesthetics…Behind these standards lurks a need to ascribe and authenticate authorship, which in any other society might have fostered the growth of a canon…but the notion of an external, graded scale against which a writing was to be measured for spiritual content is not reflected in ancient Egyptian thought. Texts might be copied and embellished, but they were not interpreted and made coherent.
I’m not entirely clear about what Redford is saying. In the next paragraph, he talks about texts that were preserved for religious purposes. For the ancient Egyptians, Redford states, these texts communicated the will of the gods, yet they weren’t considered to be an unalterable and complete tradition—a received text, if you will. And yet, they were used in spells, and so one had to pronounce their contents correctly for the spells to work. There seems to be a liberal treatment of the text—one that doesn’t view the text as received, and which freely embellishes; and then there’s a conservative regard for it, which believes that one has to be faithful to the text for the spells to work.
I suppose that there are biblical parallels to this. As Michael Fishbane has noted, we can see evidence of scribal interpretation going on in the very pages of the Bible. The biblical text was obviously deemed to be authoritative, in some sense, since it was viewed as important enough to be interpreted. And yet it wasn’t considered to be overly rigid and inflexible, for scribes could insert their interpretations.
To confess my ignorance, I wonder how the books of the Bible became so authoritative. Was it because there were influential people who were able to propagate them, especially in the Second Temple Period? Maybe these influential people looked at these books and thought that they did a good job in explaining how Israel got into exile. Perhaps they deemed them to be good encapsulations of official ancient Israelite beliefs.
4. David L. Petersen, “Rethinking the Nature of Prophetic Literature”, in Prophecy and Prophets, pages 33-34:
Petersen appears to have some difficulty arriving at a definition of “prophet”. My impression is that he defines a prophet as someone who foretells the future. Attempts to define a prophet as a preacher of repentance don’t work, for Petersen, because not all prophets preached repentance. Elisha didn’t do so that much, nor did those whom the Hebrew Bible considers “false prophets”.
5. Victor Matthews, “Honor and Shame in Gender-Related Legal Situations in the Hebrew Bible”, in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, pages 110-111:
Deuteronomy 24:1-4 allows a man to divorce his wife if he finds something indecent in her. In Mishnah Gittin 9:10, the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai debated what this indecency was. Shammai viewed it as unchastity, whereas Hillel believed it was something that the wife did that displeased her husband. Hillel gives the example of the wife spoiling a man’s meal. Then Akiba weighs in, concluding from the biblical passage that a man can ditch his wife if he finds someone more attractive.
Matthews interprets Deuteronomy 24:1-4 in light of what ancient Near Eastern law say about divorce. In the Code of Hammurapi (LP) 138, a man can divorce his wife if she fails to bear him children, provided that he give her the equivalent of her marriage price and dowry. According to LP 141, a man can divorce his wife if she starts a business and neglects her duties as a wife; in this case, he doesn’t have to pay her. Middle Assyrian Law (MAL) 24 permits a man to divorce his wife if she leaves him to stay with another household. And MAL 37 says that a man can simply divorce his wife anytime he wants, and it’s his option to pay her a settlement.
I wish that the biblical law on divorce had some provision requiring the man to pay his wife a settlement when he put her away, since divorce was placing her in a vulnerable position. But maybe it assumed that she’d find another husband.
Matthews also discusses Deuteronomy 22, and here’s a post that I wrote a few years ago about that chapter: Divorce and Virginity in Deuteronomy 22. This book addresses the questions that I had when I wrote that post.
6. Lee Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, page 20:
The Dead Sea documents reveal a sect whose ideology and practices were heavily influenced by the larger Hellenistic world. Among the sect’s fundamental beliefs and practices—determinism, dualism, the solar calendar, communal property, angelology, celibacy, the desire to create a utopia, and many organizational patterns—most have little, if any, roots in earlier Jewish tradition. However, they are well attested in the Hellenistic and Eastern worlds of the third and second centuries B.C.E. Clearly, despite a conscious effort to isolate itself from both Jewish and non-Jewish societies, this sect was heavily influenced by ideas from the wider Hellenistic world to which it presumably had been exposed in its formative stages.
This makes me wonder to what extent the evangelical Christianity that I encounter in America is shaped by its culture. It may say that it’s shaped by the Bible, and, to a certain extent, it is. But there are things that it believes that I don’t find explicitly stated in the Bible. When I wrote about The Shack, I talked about the theodicy that God permits evil because he doesn’t want to violate people’s free-will, since God desires for people to love him freely, without coercion. But where’s that in the Bible? In God’s speeches to Job—in a book that expressly deals with theodicy—God doesn’t say anything that I can recall about human free will.
In some cases, an evangelical concept can be biblical, but the way that evangelicals express it is not. For example, evangelicals love the mantra that “Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship”. Indeed, the New Testament talks about believers having fellowship with God. The Old Testament is about God loving Israel, and the need for Israel to love God. And so the Bible promotes a love-relationship with God, even if it doesn’t use that term. But does the Bible say that Christianity—or the religion that the Hebrew Bible—is not a religion? Not really. It had rituals, a community, and a set of beliefs, so it was a religion.
Some evangelical concepts may not be explicitly stated in the Bible, but one can infer them. For example, evangelicals (like Tim Keller) like to say that we shouldn’t try to root our sense of self-worth in anything other than God’s love for us, since that can fail us. The Bible doesn’t state this explicitly—unless, perhaps, you want to interpret the passages about the futility of idols in this sense. But we do see times in the Bible when people root their sense of self-worth in things other than God, with disastrous results.
I think that Western concepts of freedom, relationship, and self-esteem shape the beliefs of American evangelicals. Some of those beliefs are reconcilable with the Bible. This was the attitude of Hellenistic Jews towards Greek philosophy: it could fit a biblical worldview, or clarify it somewhat. Then there were conservative sects, like the Qumran community, which unknowingly absorbed Hellenistic ideas. We’re all a part of our culture, whether we like it or not.
7. On Facebook, Felix pointed out that Rue McClanahan on Maude was the wife of the Conrad Baines character, a conservative Republican doctor. I think that Blanche on The Golden Girls was also a Republican. She certainly bragged about her father, “Big Daddy”, being one!
