Blue Cord

One of the similarities between my vocation as a biblical scholar and my current job as a web designer is the fact that in both cases I am dealing with texts.  In the former I am interpreting a text, whereas in the latter I am writing texts.  A web page is, after all, a text, albeit a text that uses more than just words to get its message across.

An issue that is common to both fields is the question of how we read texts.  That is, how do people actually read the words that are put down on paper.  As an academic and an author, I like to think that people read every word I write and focus on every nuance.  In reality, I know better.  Even when writing a book, I know people are going to read it in different ways.  Few will do a deep reading, while some will scan it.  The majority lie somewhere in between.

On of the interesting things about the web, however, is that most pages on the web are scanned instead of read.  The majority of people spend about 2-3 seconds looking at the majority of the pages they come to.  The eye jumps to four or five spots on the page, and if those don’t capture the attention or contain the needed information, they move on.

This has major implications for the design of web pages, but more importantly it says something about how we get information.  Reading a book means (usually) reading all of the pages in a sequential order.  The author has a good deal of control over the information the reader receives, though little over what the reader agrees with or even remembers.  That kind of control is lost in web design.  You can lay out a well-balance and nutritious five-course meal on your page, but people will treat it like a buffet where they can take what they like and leave the rest.

The issue of how people read the text in ancient times is one that fortunately has also begun to receive attention in the field.  Because of our post-Gutenburg existence, we often make unwarranted assumptions about how a text was read in ancient Israel.  Texts were usually not wide-spread, which didn’t matter much in a society with perhaps 1-2% literacy.  The original readers, of course, we not readers at all.  They were hearers.

I think when talking about the original audience of the biblical text, we have to be very specific.  Are we talking about the general population?  If so, in what contexts did they encounter the text?  How large were the chunks they heard at any one time?  How often did they hear it?  For the people who were literate, we need to ask how they used the text.  Did they read it silently?  Aloud?  To whom?  Was it important for them to read it word for word, or did it merely serve as a reminder of the general outline of the story?  Were texts like Leviticus and Deuteronomy read at one sitting or used more as a reference work?

It is clear that we need to move beyond our simplistic concepts of what a reader is.

According to Awilum, who got it from the Agade listserv, Mary Douglas passed away yesterday.  Douglas was a social anthropologist who is best know to biblical scholars through her work Purity and Danger, where she argued that purity laws in the OT are best understand as maintaining boundaries.  She also wrote two others books of interest to OT scholars: Leviticus as Literature and In The Wilderness.

Douglas studied under E. Evan-Pritchard.  She taught at University College London and Northwestern University.  She was invested as a Dame of the Order of the British Empire a week before she died.

In theory, Leviticus is Scripture.  But you wouldn’t know it from the way it is treated in many churches.

I bring this up because yesterday was one of the few days that Episcopal churches had the option for a reading from Leviticus.  It was the OT reading from the Book of Common Prayer lectionary.  But of course we are currently in the season of Easter, when we usually replace the OT reading with a reading from Acts.  In practice, therefore, this reading is never used.

The other occasion that Leviticus gets read is on Proper 2.  Unfortunately, Proper two is only used when Easter falls as early as it possibly can.  By my calculations, Proper 2 has not been used since the Episcopal church adopted the new lectionary in 1979.   It is scheduled to be used for the first time in 2008, when Easter is on March 23.  But the Episcopal church will switch to the Revised Common Lectionary at the beginning of Advent 2007, so this reading will not be used either.

I have not checked out the RCL and how it uses Leviticus, but I hear there are only a few readings from it.

I think we need to update the old saying about a tree falling in the forest.  An appropriate question for biblical scholars is, if a book of the Bible is never read in church, is it still Scripture?

On his Town Hall blog this Wednesday, Michael Medved posted an article entitled “Biblical Liberation from Liberalism”. In the article, he echos the claim of Denis Prager that Leviticus 19:15 is “the most crucial conservative verse in the whole Bible” (emphasis his). For those who don’t know Leviticus by heart, that verse states:

You shall not commit a perversion of justice: you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great, with righteousness shall you judge your fellow.

He goes on to say that liberals should note that Leviticus identifies favoring the poor as a perversion of justice. Since Leviticus is one of my favorite books and chapter 19 is a crux chapter, I wanted to address this.

I think Prager and Medved are wrong about this being an important conservative verse for a couple of reasons. First, what they are doing is prooftexting. Conservatives did not arrive at their conservative opinions based on this verse. Instead, they have simply found a verse that agrees with what they already believe. Liberals sometimes do this as well, but it is wrong in both cases.

Second, it seems that this verse also condemns showing preferential treatment in court for the rich, but I rarely hear conservatives arguing that this should be changed. Instead, they go along with a system where the rich can afford better lawyers and are acquitted even when guilty, while the poor cannot afford adequate legal representation.

Third, this verse is only talking about what happens in a court case. It does not mean that government should not help the poor in other cases. Medved states:

As I argued in my recent townhall column about the essence of liberalism (posted on March 21st), the outlook of the left insists upon favoring the poor and the unfortunate—and thereby injecting unfairness and discrimination into the very core of politics and government.

This has nothing to do with Leviticus 19:15. Favoring the poor out of court is not condemned by this verse. In fact, favoring the poor is illustrated in other instances in the Bible, including Jesus’ words that the kingdom of God belongs to the poor (Luke 6:20). Does Medved think that Jesus was going against Leviticus 19:15 in saying that the poor will inherit the kingdom? What about when Jesus told people not to invite rich neighbors to their parties but instead invite the poor (Luke 14:12-14)? Isn’t that giving the poor preferential treatment?¹

In short, Leviticus 19:15 does not support the burden that Medved and Prager want it to hold. Conservative positions may or may not be correct, but they have little to do with Leviticus 19:15.

1. For those who would point out that Medved is Jewish and doesn’t follow the New Testament, I agree. But at the same time, Prager — whom Medved is quoting — felt free to write a column explaining to Christians that Jesus would not support Democratic policies. [back]

Having divided Numbers 1-10 into PT and HS according to content, I now want to go back and check my results with reference to language use. Knohl provides a list of vocabulary that is used by PT verses that used by HS.¹

Before doing that, I want to address Knohl’s idea that all of the material in Numbers dealing with the Levites belongs to an originally separate document that he calls “The Levite Treatise.” Knohl does not provide a strong argument that these were a separate document, but suggests it on the basis of the fact that they deal with the same subject matter. I see little evidence, however, for these chapters circulating independantly prior to being incorporated into Numbers. It would have been a rather odd document. It would be a strange mixture of law and narrative, with the narrative material coming mostly at the end. There are no passages that could have served as an introduction or conclusion. I think it is better to view these chapters as having been written at the time of their inclusion in Numbers.

Turning to the question of language, my assignment of passages agrees in large part with that of Knohl. We do disagree in several passage however.

First are those passages I assign to PT that Knohl views as HS:

• I see 9:15-23 as part of PT, due to its continuation of the chronology of PT. Knohl argues that it should be HS on the basis of the phrase mishkan le’ohel ha’edhuth, which does not occur in PT. This particular phrase is unique to this verse, however, so it does not constitute strong evidence for assigning the passage to HS. ‘ohel ha’edhuth occurs in Number 17:7 in a passage I would assign to PT, so I see no reason to change the assignment of 9:15-23.
• 10:11-12 is assigned by Knohl to HS. It contains the phrase mishkan ha’eduth, which occurs only in HS passages (Exod 38:21; Num 1:50, 53). Although four occurrances of the phrase is hardly conclusive, it does mean that this section should be reconsidered. Perhaps a study of the idea of setting out when the cloud lifts from over the tabernacle would be useful. If such passages are all HS, this would mean that 10:11-12 as well as 9:15-23 should be assigned to HS.

There are no passages that I see as HS that Knohl assigns to PT. We therefore move on to passages that were unclear.

• I marked 2:1-34 as unclear in the previous post. Knohl sees it as HS. The word degel (’standard, flag’) that is used repeatedly in this passage is almost universally recognized as being a loanword from Aramaic. It is used in two other passages in Numbers that are clearly HS (Num 1:52; 10:14, 18, 22, 25). This would imply a postexilic date for these passages, which points clearly to HS.
• 3:40-51 must be assigned to the HS layer. Knohl points out that God only speaks in the first person in HS after the revelation of the divine name in Exodus 6. The expression “I am the LORD” also echos the same expression found throughout Leviticus 17-26.
• Knohl views the repetitions of 7:1-89 as characteristic of HS. The fact that it breaks the narrative chronology of PT also leads him to assign this to HS. I also overlooked in my previous post the fact that the Levites are divided into subgroups, a definite sign of HS.

The linguistic data therefore confirms most of the assignments, although some needed to be rethought. Neither vocabulary nor content can be definitive on its own. Both must work in conjunction in the final analysis.

1. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence, 108-110. [back]