Blue Cord

Scott Langston has an interesting article in this month’s SBL Forum entitled “What Makes the Bible Meaningful/Useful: The Ten Commandments and American Ideals.” Langston focuses on the reception history of the Ten Commandments and their use in politics during the Gilded Age of America.

Langston’s essay is well worth a read, particularly for those interested in how the Bible is used in politics. He notes that prior to the Civil War, the Ten Commandments were usually applied individually to address particular issues. In the Gilded Age, however, politicians began to refer to them as a whole as a text that expressed what it meant to be American. It is interesting to note that many of the uses of the Ten Commandments during that era were by progressives, which contrasts with the current situation where the Ten Commandments are more likely to be evoked by conservatives.

One of my favorite uses was by William Jennings Bryant, who accused the Republican’s of wanting to rewrite the Ten Commandments to say, “Thou shalt not steal on a small scale.” This sounds a lot like contemporary Republican rhetoric about revisionist history¹ and Democrats wanting to remove the Ten Commandments from public life.

Langston begins his essay by talking about recent controversies surrounding the use of the Ten Commandments, in particular their placement in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building by Justice Roy Moore. Moore had done this to call America back to its moral foundation.

One of the arguments that is sometimes made by those who are advocating a return to biblical law is that the Ten Commandments are the basis for American law. While I would agree that American morality has traditionally been based in part on the Ten Commandments, the idea that the Ten Commandments underlie American law is demonstrably false. Nevertheless, it continues to be believed by a fidimplicitary portion of the voting public.

When I teach the Ten Commandments in my intro classes, I always have my students put this assertion to the test. We write the Ten Commandments on the board and then mark out the ones that are not American laws. Here is how it comes out:

1. No other Gods before Yahweh - Article I of the U.S. Constitution prohibits this from being an American law.
2. No idols - American law does not ban the making of graven images.
3. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain - The use of God’s name as profanity is not illegal, even on television. The FCC has ruled that while it may be offensive to some, it is not a violation of indecency laws.
4. Observe the Sabbath - We used to have Blue Laws on the books that prohibited some work on Sunday (if we pretend Sunday is the Sabbath for a second), but most of those laws are no longer in effect.
5. Honor your father and mother - There is no requirement in American law that we must honor our parents.
6. Do not murder - This is a part of American law.
7. Do not commit adultery - While not a federal law, some states do have laws against adultery. In Maryland, for instance, adultery is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $10. Such laws are rarely enforced.
8. Do not steal - This is a part of American law.
9. Do not bear false witness - This is a part of American law.
10. Do not covet - American law does not forbid this. If it did, most commercials would suddenly be illegal.

In other words, only the prohibitions against murder, theft, and perjury are unquestionably a part of American law. Of course, you would be hard pressed to find a legal system anywhere in the world that doesn’t include laws against these three things, even in societies that have never heard of the Ten Commandments. And even if we add ##3, 4, and 7 (which were the basis for laws in times past), that still means that only six out of ten of the Commandments are a part of American law.

Those are hardly grounds for claiming that the Ten Commandments are the basis for the U.S. legal system.

1. As if there were such a thing as a non-revisionist history. [back]

The connection between the story of the golden calf episode in Exodus 32 and the setting up of the golden calves by Jeroboam in 1 Kings 12:25-33 is well-known. One of the stories is dependent on the other, although the direction of dependence is still debated. The problem has been discussed in a number of places, but I wanted to draw out some implications of these stories for the history of the priesthood in ancient Israel.

There are three elements of the Exodus 32 story that bear on the priesthood. One is the anti-Aaron story that forms a main element of the story. It is unclear whether there was an original form of this story that did not include Aaron,¹ but in the story as it is currently found he is an inseparable part of the narrative. The second element of the story that bears on the priesthood is the pro-Levite story in Exodus 32:25-29. This story is an etiology for the service of the Levites as priests.² Noth judged this story to be a secondary addition to the original J narrative.³

It seems likely that these two elements came together at a time when there were two priestly factions vying for control. Obviously, that does not narrow the time frame that much. Opposition between the Aaronides and the Levites seems to have begun at least as early in the monarchy, Eli may also have been an Aaronide. The Aaronides, who were probably a sub-set of the Levites, rose to a position of prominence in Jerusalem and soon became the only priests who were allowed to serve in the Jerusalem temple.⁴ The rest of the Levites were left serving in other cities. This would mean that all the priests in the northern kingdom of Israel were Levities, at least originally.

We are told in 1 Kings 12:31 that Jeroboam appointed non-Levitical priests to serve at his shrines in Dan and Bethel. This pulls in the third element of the Exodus 32 story that bears on the history of the priesthood: the critique of the golden calf.  If we are looking for pro-Levite / anti-Aaronide authors who would have reason to critique golden calves, then the Levites in the north are the obvious choice. From their point of view, the story scores points against multiple adversaries: it critiques the religious practices of Jeroboam while painting the Aaronides in a negative light.

This means this story in its present form must have originated between 930-722 BCE. Some of the traditions are probably older, and this phase of the development of Exodus 32 may have been oral instead of textual. But to me these three elements indicate that the story in Exodus 32 is of northern origin and is based at least in part on the reforms of Jeroboam. It provides a brief but tantalizing glimpse into the development of the priesthood in the 9th-8th centuries BCE.

1. Aaron is barely mentioned in the parallel account in Deuteronomy 9:8-21. He shows up only in v.20 and his sin is unclear. [back]
2. Why Durham says that this story does not justify the Levites ordination as priests is unclear. John I. Durham, Exodus, Word Biblical Commentary 3 (Dallas: Word, 2002), 432. [back]
3. Martin Noth, Exodus, trans. J.S. Bowden, Westminster Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 245. [back]
4. Zadok and Abiathar were both Aaronides, although Abiathar and his descendants were banished from Jerusalem for supporting Adonijah against Solomon in 1 Kings 2:26-27. [back]

The final day of the SBL began with me at the Pentateuch section. This was the second Pentateuch section that was held together with the Deuteronomistic History session. Although four presenters were scheduled, Mark Zvi Brettler and Albert De Pury were not able to attend.  So, we only heard two papers, but fortunately they were both very good.

Thomas B. Dozeman’s paper “The Golden Calf in the Enneateuch” was first.  The is probably the best paper I heard at the conference, mostly because he combined excellent scholarship and new interpretive approaches in a paper that was logically organized and easy to follow. He discussed the passages that discuss the Golden Calf: Exodus 32, Deuteronomy 9-10, and 1 Kings 12.  He argues that Exodus 32 is the latest of these and is engaged in innerbiblical exegesis on the other two texts.

This has implications for some of the work I am doing.  Obviously, Exodus 32, which is non-P, is pro-Levite and anti-Aaronid.  This would suggest that it was composed around the same time as texts such as Ezekiel 44 and the reworking of Numbers 16-18 by HS. It seems a part of a larger dialog taking place in the post-exilic period about the place of the Levites.

The second paper was “The Envisioning of the Land in the Priestly Material: Fulfilled Promise or Future Hope?” by Suzanne Boorer.  She argued that Priestly material does not continue into the book of Joshua, which leaves the promise of the land unfulfilled in the Priestly document. Although it was a good paper, I disagree with her. As I argued in a paper last year at the EABS, I think there is a good deal of P in Joshua 13-21. But I do agree with Boorer that at some point the promise of land was broken off when Joshua was removed in the process that created the Pentateuch out of the Hexateuch.

Some of the discussion surrounding the papers was helpful for my own thought process.  One idea that came to me is that the Priestly layers in Joshua might have been added by HS in the post-exilic period in order to encourage people to return to Judah/Yehud from Babylon. A focus on the land would make sense at that point.

After a quick run through the book sale, I headed to the Kansas City Barbecue place across from the Hyatt.  Some scenes from the movie Top Gun were filmed there, and being an aficionado of  barbecue I thought I should give it a try.  The barbecue was OK, but not quite up to the standards of North Carolina, although the sweet potato pie I had for desert was excellent.

I will be heading to the airport this afternoon.  I have a red-eye flight back tonight at 11:00 pm.

Next year in Jerusalem Boston!

One of the interesting problems in source criticism is the fact that the P material as it now stands in Exodus has so little to say about Sinai and no mention of a covenant there. This troubles scholars, since the covenant at Sinai is supposed to be such a central idea in Israelite religion.

In their book Sources of the Pentateuch (p.43, n.55), Campbell and O’Brien list the three ways scholars have tried to explain this:

• Scholars who see P as the final redaction of the Pentateuch say that P didn’t need to have a section covering the covenant, since it was provided by JE.
• Some who see P as an independent source say P’s version of the covenant was suppressed in favor of the one from JE.
• Others who see P as an independent source argue that P focused more on the unconditional covenant with Abraham instead of the conditional covenant with Moses in order to provide comfort in the troubling times of the exile.

I have recently been rereading a forthcoming paper by Steve Cook that deals with the division of P into PT and HS (suggested by Israel Knohl). Steve argues that one of the differences between the theology of PT and HS is that PT focused on the covenant with Abraham while HS focused on Moses.

Knohl (and others such as Jacob Milgrom) argue that both PT and HS are pre-exilic. If I am reading him correctly (and remembering previous conversations accurately), Steve sees both as post-exilic. As I have argued before, I think PT is pre-exilic while HS is post-exilic. If this is the case, then it suggests a different answer to why P has no covenant at Sinai.

We need to find a reason for the lack of a P version of the covenant at Sinai if and only if we assume that PT thought the covenant at Sinai was important. But if PT is pre-exilic and focuses more on the covenant with Abraham than the one at Sinai, this could lead us to conclude that the covenant at Sinai was not very important to priestly circles in Jerusalem prior to the exile.

It is within the Deuteronomistic documents of the pre-exilic period that we have a focus on the covenant at Sinai. J also calls what happened at Sinai a covenant (Exod.19:5), but van Seters has argued that J is influenced by D. Other pre-exilic works from Judah, such as Amos and Isaiah, don’t refer to the covenant or to Sinai. HS could have picked up on the covenant at Sinai in the post-exilic period as the Deuteronomistic literature was becoming accepted in priestly circles. HS would not have needed its own version of Sinai, since it certainly had JE in hand.

While PT does not mention the covenant at Sinai, it does describe some events at Sinai. But instead of a covenant or law, Moses goes up to the mountain to receive the plans for the tabernacle in Exodus 24:15-18 (which introduces Exod.25-31, all from PT). This is exactly what we would expect priests to be interested in. The tabernacle either stands as a cipher for the temple or as a reference to a structure that actually existed inside the temple (as Richard Elliot Friedman has argued). According to PT, what the Israelites received at Sinai was not a covenant, but a cultus.

This would also explain why PT wrote the P narrative in Genesis. If PT was focused on the Abrahamic covenant as Steve argues, it makes perfect sense for it to have written a document that covered creation through Abraham.

James Pate left a comment on my prior post about source criticism and theology. He asked how source criticism determines which layers of the text are authoritative. In other words, is the final form of the text authoritative or does the authority reside in the layers itself?

I wanted to address this by first noting that source criticism does not determine which layer(s) are authoritative. Authority is a theological concept (at least as applied to the Bible) and source criticism is a philological method. It gives us an idea of the date and social location of the text, but by its nature it cannot tell us what to do with the text afterwards.

In my previous post, I noted that the reading the text theologically is best done by paying attention to the various layers, hearing their different voices, and seeing how the text in its final form unites those layers without destroying their distinctiveness. Canonical criticism would suggest that it is this final form that is authoritative, and that is a theological judgment.¹ Such theological judgments are appropriate, but they are not a part of source criticism.

Canonical criticism sees the authority of the text as residing in the final form because this was the form that was canonized by the faith communities. I don’t completely disagree with this, but I think earlier layers are authoritative as well, because they were considered canonical (to an extent) by the communities that produced and transmitted them. The canonical process obviously accepted the authority of those layers or they would not have been included in the final form. The canonical process may have modified some of the layers, but it did not obliterate them. This suggests that the authority of the original layers should be respected to a degree, although it should not be confused with the authority of the text as a whole. That is why it is so important to pay attention to the various voices as well as to the way they have been combined.

This means that ultimately my answer to James’s final question is yes. James asked:

[S]hould we try to balance the difference perspectives against each other, recognizing them all as simultaneously true in some sense

This is opposed to his other options, where he asked whether we should treat P as “a degeneration of Israelite religion from a better, freer form.” This kind of Hegelian understanding of history is inappropriate when applied to biblical theology.² Nor should we prefer Deuteronomy’s supposedly more egalitarian reading of the law to that of Exodus. It is not a question of privileging one over the other. To move from Hegel to a reversal of Kierkegaard, I would say it is not either/or but both/and. We have to listen to both Exodus and Deuteronomy, noticing the differences and tension between the layers, as well as the harmonies (and discordant notes!) they produce in their final form.

1. Brevard Childs was very up front about the fact that he was engaged in a theological endeavor. [back]
2. The tone of James’s comment suggest that he is not too fond of this option either. [back]