Completing Noth

I finished Martin Noth's History of Pentateuchal Traditions. It's a very complex book, but what I got out of it was this: There were oral traditions that were associated with localities, and they were deemed to be relevant to the entire nation of Israel after the twelve tribes joined together to form a confederation. There were also oral traditions that were told at cults, and I presume that they had a national consciousness of Israel, even if the stories were glorifying the local cults. Like many other scholars, Noth says that an Exodus group joined up with Israel and contributed its story to the national tradition. Oral traditions were combined, and stories were tied together into a broader narrative through genealogies (as local heroes were tied together into families, and other nations were accounted for genealogically) and itineraries (as local stories were incorporated into a broader journey). Written sources eventually emerged, as J and E drew from a common G source, and P gathered sources and wrote a narrative.

As I said yesterday, Noth believes that there were people from the East Jordan who entered the land of Canaan, but he doesn't appear to believe in the historicity of the wilderness traditions (at least that's my impression). On pages 193-194, he states:

"The entire theme 'guidance in the wilderness' is based upon all sorts of southern Judean narratives about unusual phenomena in the southern wilderness: about the wilderness food of manna which could be found there as a kind of gleaning of the great gift of God once bestowed upon the hungering Israelites; about the quails which could be caught there occasionally; about the springs gushing forth quite suddenly from a rock crevice here and there in the midst of the desert, or about the groundwater wells which one does not suspect until he suddenly stands in amazement before them (Gen, 21:19); about the uncanny and even winged serpents which supposedly were seen there (cf. on Num. 21:4b-9); about peculiar local phenomena about the 'graves of lust' (Num. 11:34) or the 'place of burning' (Num. 11:3)."

Noth's point appears to be that the southern Judeans lived near the wilderness, which they realized was a very strange place. They told stories about it. One of the stories tried to justify the Nehushtan, the metal serpent that they believed had healing powers. The murmuring stories related to quarrels.

Something that was interesting was that Noth wasn't always conventional in his view of the Documentary Hypothesis. For example, on page 230, he says that "no cogent proof can be adduced for the customary 'north Israelite' provenance of E", for "E reproduces the narrative tradition as it was shaped initially in central Palestine and then was further elaborated in the circle of the southern tribes." Noth also notes southern Palestinian traditions in E, such as Genesis 22:1ff and Exodus 18:1ff. Noth attributes Genesis 22:1-19 to E, whereas Richard Elliott Friedman only attributes Genesis 22:1-10, 16b-19 to E, and 22:11-16a to the redactor. Noth may say that its provenance is southern because of its reference to the mountain of the LORD (which probably refers to Zion), or to Beersheba, which is in the South. And both Noth and Friedman attribute Exodus 18 (the story of Jethro's visit) to E, and Noth may consider that southern because of its reference to Midian, which was close to southern Israel.

Richard Elliott Friedman argued that E was northern, in part because it glorifies northern cities, or places its stories in the North. But, as Noth notes, there are times when E sets stories in the South---like Beersheba, as Genesis 22:19 does. And Friedman believes that Genesis 22:19 is from E.

Noth's book could be a burden to read, especially when I plowed through 100 pages a day! But it had cool stuff!

Three Approaches to Feminist Theology

On pages 44-45 of White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus, Jacquelyn Grant refers to three approaches within feminist theology, enumerated by Elizabeth Fiorenza.

The first approach believes that "There are some gifts which are unique to the feminine person and would enhance the quality of leadership in the church."

The second approach "acknowledges and critically analyzes the oppressive sexist structures of the Christian church and tradition while at the same time rediscovers the liberating tradition and elements of Christian faith and community." Elizabeth Fiorenza puts herself in this category, and my understanding of her work is that she hearkens back to a stage at which the Jesus movement was egalitarian, before it became patriarchal.

The third approach "views Christianity as essentially patriarchal and therefore unable to be an adequate religious expression for the conscious woman." This approach is post-Christian. On page 47, Dr. Grant says that Mary Daly "rejects any level of Christian 'truth' as authority".

I think that these approaches will come up again in Dr. Grant's book. I appreciated her discussion because I, too, have wondered if Christianity is redeemable. Should I accept the entire Bible as inerrant---including those parts that are not egalitarian, or that portray God as unfair, or as unloving? Should I only accept the parts of the Bible that are consistent with high human ideals---such as love and compassion? Or is Christianity so inherently corrupt that I should completely chuck it?

Where I am right now is that I continue to seek and to find inspiration in the Bible. And I tend to focus on God as unconditionally loving, rather than a God of conditional love---one who expects us to accept him as a monster just because he's bigger than we are.

Noth on Moses' Grave

In page 190 of Making of the Pentateuch, R.N. Whybray states the following about Martin Noth's search for the original oral traditions about Moses:

"For Moses, who was, according to all the Pentateuchal sources, pre-eminently a person who received divine revelations at a number of named places, was presumably on a par with the patriarchs in this respect; yet, dismissing all the accounts of these as secondary, Noth insisted that the statement about Moses's burial and grave site in Deut. 34.6 is 'the most original element of the Moses tradition still preserved' (p. 186; ET p. 169), despite the fact that, like that of Abraham, it occurs only in a very late source (P).

"The arbitrary nature of this conclusion is compounded by the fact that this text states that the precise location of the grave is unknown---a fact which removes all possibility that we have here an authentic tradition based on a custom of visiting the grave which had persisted up to the time when the tradition was recorded. Noth's attempts to overcome these difficulties are extremely forced."

For more on Whybray's discussion of Noth's search for original oral traditions, see my post here. In this post, I want to talk about Noth's discussion about Moses' grave.

In my memory of Whybray's book, I thought that Whybray simply acted as if Noth was unaware of Deuteronomy 34:6's statement that no one knew the location of Moses' grave. I thought that Whybray was doing the same thing that Richard Elliott Friedman did (according to my impression): act like Noth doesn't know his Bible (see my post here). But it turns out that Whybray actually acknowledges that Noth wrestled with that part of Deuteronomy 34:6 that was inconvenient for his (Noth's) position. Whybray just found Noth's conclusions to be wanting!

But are they wanting? I can't say that I understood all of Noth's arguments, but here are some points that I did glean, from pages 172-175:

1. Noth notes that Deuteronomy 34:6 says that Moses was buried in the land of Moab, against Bethpeor, so Noth thinks that the place of Moses' burial is being identified, at least somewhat. But, at some point---and Noth speculates that the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or Mesha may be to blame for this---"the grave site was no longer accessible to Israelites and hence its precise location had come to be forgotten."

But doesn't v 6 say that God buried Moses, which could entail that God put Moses in an undisclosed location, since Moses was special? Noth believes that the text originally said "and they (the Israelites) buried him," or "and he (Moses) was buried," rather than "and he (God) buried him, for why would v 6 present something "as extraordinary and tremendous as this...in such an unemphatic and ambiguous manner"? I'm not sure if I agree with Noth on this point, for, in Deuteronomy 34:1-4, it's just God and Moses on Mount Nebo. Why not conclude from this that Moses died in God's presence, and that God buried him in an undisclosed location? Moreover, v 6 says that no one knows the location "unto this day," not that people at one time knew it, but now nobody knows. Doesn't "unto this day" imply that no one knew the location of the grave from the time that Moses was buried?

2. Noth thinks that the tradition about the location of Moses' burial is authentic. The location was outside of the land of Israel, except for when Gad had it, for a brief time. Why would anyone assert that Moses was buried there---in such a remote location that did not even matter to the Israelites---unless he actually was? If the Israelites wanted to make up a place for Moses to be buried, why not place his fictional grave inside of the land of Israel, preferably in a prominent Israelite location?

Plus, Noth says that the land of Moab, against Bethpeor "could never have been of sufficient importance in the life of the Israelites to warrant the assumption that here Moses, after he had emerged as the great leader in the Pentateuchal tradition, usurped a grave site which originally belonged to someone of less importance." No, for Noth, the tradition said Moses was buried there because he really was buried there.

But why was the area considered so unimportant by Israelites, when Moses was buried there, and (as Noth argued) they knew where the grave was, at least for a while?

3. Noth says that Moses became part of the tradition about the Israelites entering the Promised Land "because his grave site lay on the path of the Israelites who were occupying the land." He acknowledges that there were Israelites who moved from "the southern part of the East Jordan" to central Palestine, and a figure named Moses perhaps played a leading role in "the gradual transition to their later abodes in the arable land of West Jordan..." As a result of this role, Moses got absorbed into the wilderness stories and other Pentateuchal themes, and, because of the prominence of central Palestine, Moses stories spread throughout the land, such that priests in the Danite sanctuary boasted that they were descended from Moses (Judges 18:30), and Kenites in the South "were proud of their family relationship to Moses." And yet, realizing that Moses is so absent from much of the non-Pentateuchal parts of the Hebrew Bible (which, I note, is why some have concluded that the Moses tradition is quite late), Noth says "that Moses did not enter Israel's historical consciousness so universally and deeply that his name could not customarily be completely ignored in summary recitations of Israel's prehistory."

So Moses was prominent in Israelite legend, but not prominent enough?

Alienation

I'm continuing my way through Jacquelyn Grant's White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus. In my reading today, Dr. Grant talks about how white women participated in the struggle for the rights of African-Americans, one reason (among others) being that racism "propped up notions about White women and repression" (Dr. Grant cites Sara Evans for this statement). I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I have a couple of guesses. For one, the southern slave system---and even the white South after slavery---had a patriarchal attitude towards women. Dr. Grant refers to how the term "southern lady" became an "obscene epithet" in the eyes of Southern white women who desired a change in sex roles (again, Sara Evans' words). I think of Olivia De Haviland's character in Roots: The Next Generation, who said that white Southern women are treated like glass vases, set up over the fireplace to collect dust. Second, white racists continually expressed their desire to protect white women from African-American men, and such an attitude was condescending and patronizing towards those white women (in addition to being hateful towards the African-American men).

But white women experienced sexism in the movement for racial equality. They then fought for women's rights. And yet, according to Dr. Grant, African-American women remained in the movement for racial equality, even as there was racism within the women's rights movement. So there's a lot of alienation.

Peter Gomes

I learned today that Peter Gomes has passed on. Gomes was the minister at the Memorial Church at Harvard. He was a African-American Republican, and, in 1991, he came out of the closet as a homosexual. I have read that he chose celibacy, but he still disagreed with the idea that homosexuality was a sin.

I went to Harvard Divinity School for my M.Div., but I never met him, though I knew a few people who had, and I got to learn about some of his insights, life-experiences, and advice from them. I enjoyed listening to him speak. He had an ironic yet soothing style of speaking. I went to his church for two or three weeks, but then I stopped going because (at the time) I felt that I shouldn't attend a church that was pastored by a homosexual. But I still listened to him on the radio, at times. I have wanted to read some of his books, but I have not gotten to them yet.

If I hadn't left Memorial Church, I probably wouldn't have searched for what became my church home: an independent Seventh-Day Adventist church, which had a lot of people from Latin America and the Caribbean. They were loving and hospitable, and their food was fantastic! I shared Thanksgivings with them. I helped them at their annual banquets. It was certainly my home away from home.

But, looking back, I wish that I could have attended the independent Seventh-Day Adventist church, while also going to the Memorial Church. But perhaps I would have felt uncomfortable at Memorial Church at the time: I would have wanted to be inspired by the liturgy and the sermon, but I'd feel that the whole service was a sham, since the pastor sanctioned a way of life that God called an "abomination." I really wanted to experience God at the time, and, in the process, I tended to divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys." By the end of my years at Harvard, I felt empty and distant from God. I guess that my right-wing religious dogmatism didn't get me what I wanted! But, then again, neither did my religious liberalism when I was at DePauw University. I could swing from left to right, and yet never feel like God was real to me.

In New York City, I searched for churches, and I ended up at a liberal Seventh-Day Adventist church, which had practicing homosexuals who were in prominent positions. I felt guilty about going there, like I did about going to the Memorial Church. But it was a good community. And I appreciated that it allowed people to ask questions and to be on their own spiritual journey. It had an openness that helped me when I was beginning to feel alienated by organized religion. I wasn't as anti-evangelical then as I am now, but I was moving in that direction, and I appreciated having an accepting community. I had to make a choice between being in a community that I valued and that valued me, and finding a more conservative group where I wouldn't feel comfortable socially, and yet I could pat myself on the back for being in a church that upheld "God's" stance on homosexuality.

Nowadays, I think that pro-gay interpretations of Scripture are a stretch, but I notice that even conservative Christians don't obey all of the Bible. Moreover, nowadays, I don't assume that God can't be in the lives of homosexuals, for I hear testimonies from them about what they believe is God's activity in their lives. Why should I consider their testimony to be less valid than that of evangelical Christians? Doesn't God love everyone? Do I feel God nowadays? Not really. I don't have that gush of inspiration that I always craved. But I'm honest with God about where I am, and I try to believe that God loves me, not the artificial "good Christian" me that I wanted to be, but could never attain.

At Harvard, when I initially went to the Memorial Church, I figured that I was just listening to an inspirational message, so there was no harm in my going. But a conservative friend of mine told me that I shouldn't go because God's church is sacred, and I should not honor a place where a homosexual is a pastor, for that disrespects God's church. Nowadays, I'll listen to inspirational messages, wherever they're from! And, as for those who want to tell me what to do, I suggest that they mind their own business!

East Jordanian Jacob

I started Martin Noth's History of Pentateuchal Traditions. Noth talks about his views that the redactor of the Pentateuch (or, actually, the Tetrateuch) used P as a framework for organizing his story, that E was utilized to supplement and fill out J, and that J and E have similar stories because they both draw from a common G source. For Noth, J and E are too different for E to have drawn from J, or vice versa!

Noth is a tradition-critic, which means that he seeks ancient oral traditions behind the stories of the Pentateuch. But how do we know that such traditions existed? Noth appears to address this question on page 43. He says that "most of the tradition materials in the Pentateuch were quite limited in their reference, indeed limited more to locality than to tribal history", and yet, in the Pentateuch, the stories apply to all Israel. We can see that they only talk about certain locations, and yet they are integrated into the history of the entire nation of Israel. Noth does not believe that the Pentateuch came into being by these different local narratives being combined into a national history---for the fact that the Pentateuch is being put together in the first place shows that there's already a nation of Israel, and the Pentateuch would only draw from traditions that relate to Israel as a whole. In short, these local stories are already part of a national history by the time that they reach the writers and redactors of the Pentateuch. Therefore, these traditions have a pre-history---before they became a part of Pentateuchal tradition, they were local oral traditions. There were oral traditions before there came to be J, E, and P sources---for the J, E, and P sources are telling the history of national Israel. But we can tell from the stories themselves that they were more local than that, at some point, and this was at the oral stage.

That's my impression of what Noth is saying, but I wouldn't risk my life on it. This isn't the easiest book to read! I actually missed reading about Robert Alter's literary approach to the Bible, after seeing Noth break the text up into so many pieces!

One area where I think I saw Noth's view on tradition-history in action concerned the figure of Jacob---particularly on pages 89-97. There are stories in which Jacob is on the west of the Jordan River---in Shechem and Bethel. But there are other stories in which he's East of the Jordan River---in such places as Mount Gilead, Mahanaim, and Penuel. Noth calls him the "East Jordanian Jacob." And he encompasses many of the stories about Jacob that lead us to ask how God could use such a scoundrel! The story of Esau hunting is a part of the East Jordanian tradition, for Gilead had lots of woods. Jacob tricking Laban is a part of the East Jordanian tradition, one reason being that Jacob makes a covenant with Laban in Gilead. According to Noth, these East Jordanian traditions don't focus on the land promise, for the people there weren't concerned about finding arable land, since all they had to do was expand into their wooded areas; rather, they were concerned about living life and getting along with their neighbors, and they could admire wily, rash Jacob.

(Question: Doesn't the belief in a land promise in the West Jordanian stories presume a national Israelite consciousness, even at the oral stage? I may be misunderstanding Noth in interpreting him to mean that the oral traditions were local, without a national Israelite consciousness. He does emphasize the importance of cultic traditions, after all, and those talked about the nation of Israel---its possession of the land, etc.)

Noth doesn't believe that the East Jordanian traditions were all originally part of one seam, for he holds that the Jacob-Esau stories were combined with the Jacob-Laban stories. Over time, they were weaved together with the Shechem and Bethel traditions about Jacob, in which Jacob is more of a patriarch. But, according to Noth, the stories are so "interwoven" that one cannot separate them literarily---but only "traditio-historically." And I guess that Noth does this by attaching stories to the locations that they mention, and looking at the stories' characteristics: that leads him to the conclusion that there were local oral traditions, which were woven together (for some reason), until they were written down and placed in front of the redactors of the Pentateuch.

Faith and Theological Sources

March is Women's History Month, and the first book that I will be reading for that is Jacquelyn Grant's White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus. In this post, I'd like to feature two quotes. The first quote is from the preface:

"The theology of somebodiness, which [my parents] lived out without pretension, conveyed to their children that inspite of the world's denial of you, Jesus (God) affirms you. So you must go on...Hence, the personal commitment I made to Jesus as a youngster was not one that restricted me as a Black person or as a female, but affirmed me and projected me into areas where, I later learned, 'I was not supposed to go' by virtue of my race and gender."

I like this quote because it highlights that Dr. Grant is a person of faith. She can look at religion academically---and she argues that people have different images of Jesus, based in part on their backgrounds. And yet, she has a personal faith.

Second, on page 16, Dr. Grant quotes a resolution by the Christian apology contingent of the 1885 Annual Convention of the National Women Suffrage Association. It stated:

"WHEREAS, The dogmas incorporated in religious creeds derived from Judaism, teaching that woman was an after-thought in the creation, her sex a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse, are contrary to the law of God (as revealed in nature), and to the precepts of Christ, and WHEREAS, These dogmas are an insidious poison, sapping the vitality of our civilization, blighting woman, and, through her, paralyzing humanity; therefore be it Resolved, That we call on the Christian ministry, as leaders of thought, to teach and enforce the fundamental idea of creation, that man was made in the image of God, male and female, and given equal rights over the earth, but none over each other. And, furthermore, we ask their recognition of the scriptural declaration that, in the Christian religion, there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus."

Dr. Grant characterizes this position to be "that essentially, the problem regarding women is not with Christianity or the Bible, but with distortion of them."

I'm not sure, though. Maybe this resolution takes a Phyllis Trible sort of approach to Genesis 2-3, reading it in a manner that is not sexist. But it could be saying that God's law revealed in nature contradicts the sexism of Genesis 2-3, and we should go with nature, in this case. This overlaps with Dr. Grant's discussion in this chapter on the source of theology: Should it be the Bible, or can the experience of the oppressed be a source of theology? And this reminds me of a post by Elizabeth, whose blog I read fairly regularly. Elizabeth said: "I believe the Bible is inspired by God and that it contains a lot of beneficial insight for understanding God. I also believe that the entire world is inspired by God, which I think means, God-breathed."