Contextual Bible Study

Rushkoff's "Nothing Sacred" is a great book.

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Contextual Criticism: Dream On:

"Douglas Rushkoff, in his book, Nothing Sacred, states that Biblical scholars have known for 200 years that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are not to be understood literally; that these are not historical events as we understand history today. The trouble is that this knowledge has not filtered down to the people. He complains that “Today’s Jews are not taught in Hebrew school that many of our holidays are based on those of previous civilizations. Or that the Torah was written and rewritten over a period of centuries by rabbis and even politicians. Or that many events in the Bible are allegorical and not historically accurate.”

Rushkoff’s book contains an insightful section where he describes how the eighteenth century “brought an altogether new set of discoveries that forced [the Jews] to question the divine authority of their most sacred texts and theistic doctrines.” He points out how various forces arose at that time to impact people’s understanding of creation and cosmos, and themselves.

In other words, Biblical scholarship, along with other discoveries, turned traditional understandings of the Bible upside down. Critical analysis showed that the Bible was not a single chronological tale of God and his people but a series of strands or threads and each Biblical thread “was meant to push a different theological, cultural, or political agenda.”

Yet, in Rushkoff’s view, this shouldn’t have been all that disturbing. He points out that “Spinoza and other scholars had already concluded centuries earlier that the final draft of the Torah was spliced together by Ezra, a head scribe, after the return from exile, around 500 B.C.E.”

People living at that time would have known clearly that “many of the Torah’s stories were culled from other Near Eastern traditions and sometimes quoted verbatim. Some passages, taken from Egyptian documents, were never fully translated into Hebrew. The covenant itself borrows its language from well-known war treaties.”

Then Rushkoff makes this very important point which relates directly to fundamentalist “inerrancy”: “Very few in the educated elite should have believed that the Torah represented the unadulterated word of God, since the Talmudists had already clearly identified many of the errors still remaining in the written text due to inaccuracies in its own transmission.”

Some of us have struggled for years with the question as to how to deal with the Bible. How do we understand it? How do we interpret its less than majestic passages? What do we do with the sections that portray a violent and cruel God? Can we pick and choose what to believe and what commandments to follow?

...Rabbi Geller “put the Bible in a context of dreams,” Marilyn said. “When you have a dream, you don’t demand of it that it be linear, logical, literal, sequential—you don’t demand that of it. That is the way the Bible should be read: It is a dream of a people.”"