““Some scholars of religion may balk at my integration of personal history in this book, not to mention my explicit religious interest in its argument,” writes Timothy Beal in his long note to chapter one of this somewhat unusual book, which combines memoir relating to the Bible with speculation about the Bible’s place in modern society—including a contemporary look at the “value-added” industry not only of Bible commentary but also “Biblezines” that are aimed at the young and biblically illiterate—with a history of Bible publication both before and after the printing press. Beal, who reads both Greek and Hebrew and sometimes gives his own translations of the texts, also describes the historical development of the Bible, concluding that it is not so much a book as a library: Both ancient synagogues and early Christian churches did not have Bibles so much as they had collections of the separate “books” that now make up the Bible. It was not until rather late that anyone tried to put all of the books of the Bible into one volume.
Beal uses a great deal of humor in this book. For example, “The End of the Word as We Know It” (a parody of both the saying and song title, “End of the World as We Know It”) is not only the title of part one of this book but a recurring gag throughout. In describing the popular use of the Bible for divination, Beal recalls the time in his own adolescence when he asked, “Does Joanne like me?” Then he flipped through the Bible until he stopped and let his finger fall on Deuteronomy 23.1: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.” Chapter and section headings are often puns. A section of chapter eight is entitled “Loose Canon,” a pun that could have many meanings, and Beal just might mean all of them at once.
But all is not pop culture and jests. Beal has some serious points to make. A recurring theme is a critique of the limiting belief that the Bible is a book of answers that is consequently intimidating to anyone who tries to pick it up and read it. Do I understand it, people wonder anxiously, and if not is there something wrong with me?
“The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions,” Beal teaches. That is, each book of the Bible revisits the themes and subject matter of earlier books and does not always arrive at the same understanding. Usually doesn’t, as a matter of fact. Beal finds this liberating rather than discomfiting. He rejects as self defeating the views of those (both believers and unbelievers) who insist that the Bible must stand or fall on its inerrancy. No, he demurs; rather, to expect the Bible to speak with one voice and to answer all questions with one sure answer is to expect the Bible to be what it was never meant to be. The Bible is polyvocal, not univocal. It is a collection of many voices, often in dispute with each other rather than harmony.
Beal counts four or five different accounts of creation in the Bible. These are often contradictory, and two are both found in the first book, Genesis. Beal points out that the ancient editors of the Genesis were not stupid; they knew they were stitching together two contradictory accounts of creation, one after the other. Obviously that is what they intended to do. More contentiously, the Book of Job provides an argument against Deuteronomy’s declaration that bad things only happen to bad people. Job is sometimes regarded as a contrary point of view that somehow snuck into the Bible when no one was looking, but Beal recognizes that its contrariness is not that unusual in the Bible, where books regularly take different positions on similar issues or explicitly re-reinterpret the meanings of earlier books. “In its hosting of disagreement, the canon of the Bible remains open, inviting us to enter, and add our voices to the ongoing conversation,” he says. Beal carries this conceit to a radical extent. He seems to be saying that everyone in the Bible is reinterpreting each other, so we might as well join in the act.
Beal looks at the present and future and sees the possibility that the Bible could be re-envisioned through the Internet where all texts can be connected hypertextually, collaboratively invested with new contexts and meanings. “To some, this may look like doomsday, the end of the Word set in the context of the end of the world. And yet, ironically, it also looks very like the scriptural culture of early Christianity” where scattered communities shared various books with each other and copied and commented and edited.
Beal takes the Bible as a post-modernist text, arguing that it has already deconstructed itself, but this attitude may go too far in overlooking the fact that the ancient authors and editors had their own meanings in mind—meanings that are neither entirely unknowable nor of lesser value than all readers’ interpretations; understanding as much as we can about the earlier intent of biblical authors and editors is crucial if we are to get something of real value out of the Bible rather than merely mirroring our own (or someone else’s) opinions and prejudices. The meanings intended by the authors and editors should be acknowledged as the starting point for our understanding of the history and thought behind these texts.
Beal is right that there are more questions in the Bible than there are answers, but within reasonable parameters there can be wrong answers, as Beal concedes, for example, in his discussion of how the Matthean proof text for the virgin birth was indeed based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “almah” which means “young woman” but was translated in the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures as “virgin.” When a revised translation of the Bible acknowledged this about a century ago, many conservative clergymen saw red and rejected the new-fangled translation. Throughout their history, Christians have probably been particularly egregious—in comparison to all those who eccentrically reinterpret scriptures—in interpreting the Bible in illegitimate ways in order to justify their doctrines after the fact, the prime case being Matthew’s—and many other Christians’— reinterpretation of Isaiah and some other Jewish texts to make them speak about the Messiah when they clearly do not. This may not have been done with intentional deceit in most cases, but it was a wish fulfillment done with so little respect for the original intent of the earlier authors that it impoverishes Christianity to the extent that some Christians’ faith is thus hanged from a single falsification of the original text. However, Luke does not rely on the same proof texts that Matthew does—another example of polyvocality: if you don’t like Matthew, read Luke, instead. ”
Miles F wrote this review Monday, February 13, 2012.
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