Blue Cord

Biblioblogs.com, a site dedicated to keeping track of Bible related blogs, has just updated its list of blogs. One of the new ones is a blog called Biblical Foundations, a blog that is not directly related to biblical studies but is more of a cultural critique.

One of the recent posts on Biblical Foundations is concerned with the idea of polygamy and argues against the practice of polygamy in the United States. Although I am not interested in engaging the cultural issue, since it seems to be arguing against something that very few are arguing for, I did want to address his use of the Bible in his argument.

Kostenberger’s argument is that monogamy is the norm in the Bible and polygamy is a result of the fall. He states,

Scripture is unequivocal that having multiple wives constituted a departure from God’s plan for marriage. This is conveyed not only in Scripture verses that seem univocally to prohibit polygamy (cf. Deut. 17:17; Lev. 18:18), but also from the sin and general disorder that polygamy produced in the lives of those who engaged in the practice.

There are two parts to his argument: (1) the Bible condemns polygamy, and (2) the practice of polygamy produces sin and disorder. I wanted to address both of these assertions.

First, it is hardly the cases that the Old Testament prohibits polygamy. Leviticus 18:18, which Kostenberger quotes as being against polygamy, actually assumes that polygamy is the norm. It forbids a man from taking two sisters as wives at the same time. But this assumes that polygamy is acceptible when the two wives are not sisters. If this verse had wanted to prohibit polygamy, it would have said that taking two women as wives at the same time was forbidden. But it doesn’t say that.

The other passage, Deuteronomy 17:17, forbids the king from having many wives. But that does not mean that it limits him to only one wife. And the reason it gives is not that polygamy is wrong but that having many wives would turn the kings heart away from God. In fact, when Nathan confronted David about having taken Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, he says that David is wrong for committing adultery, not because he is committing polygamy. And if Leviticus 18:18 had already prohibited polygamy as Kostenberger asserts, there would be no reason for a second law forbidding many wives for the king, since he would have been covered under Leviticus 18:18.

As for Kostenberger’s second argument, that polygamy leads to sin and general disorder, such could also be said for cases of monogamy. On the whole, polygamous families do not seem to have any more or less family strife in the Bible than monogomous ones. In addition, God used polygamy to fulfill his promise to Abraham. The promise of numerous offspring comes about when Jacob takes two wives (and two concubines!), who bear him the twelve ancestors of the tribes of Israel. Kostenberger’s statement that

Scripture everywhere insists that individuals who abandoned God’s design of monogamy and participated in polygamy did so contrary to the Creator’s plan and ultimately to their own detriment.

is simply not accurate. Scripture nowhere insists that Jacob was wrong when he engaged in polygamy. Monogamy may have been the norm in the Old Testament, but polygamy was certainly not prohibited.

Of course, none of this should be taken to mean that I endorse polygamy. I don’t. The only thing this post is meant to endorse is sound exegesis.

On Awilum today, Charles Halton notes that two Kevins, myself and Kevin Edgecomb, have been blogging about higher criticism. He notes that Kevin Edgecome is critical of the higher criticism, and wonders how I might respond. So, I thought I would respond.

Edgecomb laments the fact that originally, the historical critical method arose before texts from other ancient Near Eastern cultures had been deciphered (Akkadian and Egyptian) or discovered (Ugaritic). In particular, he points out that the Documentary Hypothesis arose in a textual vacuum without use of the comparative data from the ancient world. He laments the fact that these critical theories have not been reevaluated in light of these discoveries.

I would have to disagree with this last sentence. Obviously work in the 19th century did not have all the texts we have today, so it is no surprise they did not work with them. But a great deal of reassessment of these theories has in fact been done since the early 20th century. The Documentary Hypothesis as understood today is rather different than the Documentary Hypothesis as Wellhausen understood it. Some, such as myself, have abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis (for different reasons than Edgecomb), while others have modified it significantly. And to say that no attention has been payed to the comparative material while doing this is simply wrong. Take, for example, the work of Carr, who point to parallels between the growth of the Pentateuch and the way that the Epic of Gilgamesh developed over time.¹. In this, he is working from the studies of Tigay, who has published several works on empirical evidence for documentary development in other ancient Near Eastern texts.²

Edgecomb notes that texts from Ugarit in particular have provided us with more information about ways in which ancient texts do not follow Western literary practices. With this I agree. But he goes on to state,

Repetition has many uses, and was in particular a now well-recognized ancient Eastern literary device, at both the level of sentence (as in the case of double- or triple-stich proverbs) and also at the level of narratives (as in Assyrian royal inscriptions, Ugaritic narrative poetry, and Hebrew “historical” narrative). That means no Wellhausen/Documentary Hypothesis, no J, no E, no P, no D.

This is quite a jump from repitition to no J, E, P, or D. The Documentary Hypothesis never rested solely or even primarily on repetition. For example, both Genesis 12 and Genesis 26, which repeat the wife-sister story, are both considered to originate in J. Any hypothesis that rested only on repetition would be problematic, which is why it is only one of many clues that scholars seek when trying to sort out layers in the Pentateuch.

Edgecomb admires the comparative approach of William Hallo (who was one of my Akkadian professors) and wishes that scholars would follow it more. I like it too. It was the main approach employed by my professors, even those who followed higher criticism. The two are complimentary approaches, not mutually exclusive ones.

Edgecomb ends by saying that he would not be averse to throwing out all scholarship from before 1980 because of its “hidebound inheiritance of ‘critical scholarship’.” If he does so, he will miss out on a lot of good scholarship. While there are always some things that need to be updated and reexamined, this does not mean that everything prior to 1980 was wrong. I would hate to think where we would be in biblical scholarship today if we were to ignore Gunkel, von Rad, and Noth. He is wrong in thinking that all comparative studies are recent. In reality, it has been the hallmark of scholarship since the late 19th century.

1. David M. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 16-17 [back]
2. Jeffrey Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia Press, 2002); Jeffrey Tigay, “An Epirical Basis for the Documentary Hypothesis,” JBL 94 (1975): 229-242. [back]

In the past few days, I have added two plug-ins to my site, one which lists recent comments in the left sidebar and one that lists my current reading in the right.  To get these to fit in with the theme, I have had to do some re-coding of some php files.  Everything is now working properly, except for one page in the library section.  Perfectly, that is, if you are using Firefox.

If you are using Internet Explorer, you have a couple of problems.  This first is that for some unknown reason, you are still using Internet Explorer.  I don’t understand your aversion to new technology that works better, but of course it is your choice.  I still wear bow ties.  We all have our quirks.

The second problem, and one more directly related to this blog, is that some of the formatting that works perfectly on Firefox is not displaying well on Internet Explorer.  I have yet to figure out why that is.  Web coding is not my strong suit, so it may take me a while to fix it.  In the meantime, you have the choice to either bear with me or to click on the Firefox button at the bottom of the left sidebar and join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Both Chris Heard and Claude Mariottini have taken issue with an article by Tim Gorringe in the Expository Times.  I have already commented on Chris’s post, but I wanted to make some remarks about what Claude had to say.

Claude notes that there are two classes of foreigners in ancient Israel: the nokri and the ger.  He says that the distinction between the two is that the ger accepted the laws of Israel while the nokri did not.

I would have to disagree with this distinction.  The two words do not seem to refer to two different classes.  Rather, nokri is an adjective that refers to all foreigners, whereas a ger is a foreigner that has taken up long-term residence in a foreign country.  As can be seen from verses like Deut. 18:6, ger has an element of residence with it, even when it does not refer to foreigners.  In other words, a ger is a nokri that has come to stay for a long time.  Although the ger may follow the laws of Israel, this is not necessarily the case.  They were expected to do so, but that does not mean they did.  There were even some laws the did not apply to the ger, such as the prohibition against eating that which had died naturally (Deut.14:21).  The ger and nokri could both eat of such meat, while the Israelite could not.

As for the political side of the article by Gorringe, I cannot comment on it because I have not read it.  But it does seem to me that the Torah makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.  Such terms would have made no sense in ancient Israel. The Israelites were slaves and gerim in Egypt.  Were they legal or illegal?

Instead, the Pentateuch enjoins the Israelites to take care of all foreigners who have come to live in their country.  The reason for this, as Claude points out, is that foreigners in Israel were economically disadvantaged, as well as being cut off from family ties that provided a social net.  It seems to me that if we were to apply these laws to immingrants, it would mean we have to take care of them regardless of whether they are legal or illegal.

That is why I am glad that the Executive Council of the Episcopal church — the denomination to which I belong and through whom I serve as a missionary — has declared its opposition to legislation which would make it illegal for faith-based organizations to help undocummented immigrants.  It has “advised Episcopalians to follow the call of the baptismal covenant in ministering to illegal immigrants, despite any laws that could criminalize such assistance.”¹

What does this mean for laws regarding immigration?  I don’t know.  It is a complex issue and I don’t pretend to have any answers.  But I think the Bible makes very clear that as long as immigrants are here (legally or otherwise), we as Christians have a responsibility to care for them.

1. Episcopal Life, April 2006, p.6. [back]

On Daily Hebrew, H.H. Hardy has a post that asks whether the divine name was first revealed to the Israelites in Exodus (as Exod. 6:2-3 suggests) or whether the name was known to the patriarchs. Although he says that this is a debate among scholars, this is actually a debate among different layers of the Pentateuch. As the students in my Pentateuch class could tell you (having just taking a final that included this question), the problem is one between the J source and the P source.

The J sources uses the divine name from the very beginning of the story in Genesis. According to J, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all knew the divine name. What was revealed at Sinai in Exodus 3 was not the divine name, but the meaning of the divine name. When Moses asks God who to say has sent him, God responds that Yahweh has sent him. If this name were unknown to the Israelites prior to Exodus 3, God’s response would make no sense.

The story in Exodus 6, on the other hand, comes from P. P says that the patriarchs did not know the divine name. Instead, they knew God as El Shaddai. In the P theology, the divine name is first revealed to Moses at Mt. Sinai. But this contradicts the J material in Genesis, which already has the divine name known.

When J and P are edited together by the H redactor, the combination leads to tension between the two ideas. In other words, the problem is not a modern one; it is an ancient one.