Errors in the Bible
One assertion that I have made on various occasions is that the Bible contains several hundred errors of different kinds. Some of these mistakes are essentially inconsequential, like misidentification of historical King A when an author should have said that it was King B and the issue in question isn't momentous anyway. Other mistakes mean more but do not effect questions of faith in major ways. For example, the Book of Daniel garbles the historical record Re: the rulers of Persia at a time when -if the book was written at the time it claims- should have been second nature to the writer. This calls into question much more than this, of course, it casts a shadow on the whole book since it purports to be prophecy written from the perspective of the ca 500 BC era when, it seems all-too-clear, the "forecasts" were actually retrospectives composed in the Hasmonean era about 300 years later. Still, there are all kinds of contributions to religion that are made in Daniel not least as forerunner of the Book of Revelation, and the entire apocalyptic tradition, and the Gospels quote Daniel in several places. But other mistakes are even more important, like the reconstructed empirical history of the Exodus vs. the inflated account in the OT. This may not mean terribly much to most Protestant Christians but this has great significance for Jews. However, when you think deeply about this matter it also has serious implications for Christians. However, rather than explain this myself let me recommend a major part of a review-essay which follows. The point being that if someone is going to assert that there are errors in the Bible then he should be prepared to explain what these mistakes mean for the life of faith. These are not simple spelling flubs or grammar boo-boos. This subject goes in a number of different directions and can get very complicated but to give you an idea to get you started on the theme if you have an interest........ Billy ---------------------------- Reference is to Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 best seller "Who Wrote the Bible?" Jewish Review of Books Spring 2018 Exodus and Consciousness By: Benjamin D, Sommer Friedman poses a straightforward historical question: Did the exodus from Egypt really happen? He notes that many scholars regard scripture’s narrative concerning Moses, Pharaoh, and the Israelites as a fiction concocted by authors who lived in the first millennium B.C.E., long after the events were supposed to have happened. After all, no archaeological evidence of the presence of Israelite slaves in Egypt has ever been found, much less evidence of their sudden liberation one early spring night in the Late Bronze Age. This line of reasoning doesn’t impress Friedman. To be sure, some details of the exodus story cannot be historically accurate. For instance, the book of Numbers tells us that the liberated slaves included 603,550 adult males. If we extrapolate conservatively from this number, we would conclude that at least two million Israelites left Egypt, which would be a lot of missing slaves to go unnoticed by ancient Egyptian historians. But ancient historians did not use numbers the way we do, so getting bogged down over what were probably intended as typological figures is hardly necessary. (Furthermore, some parts of the Bible suggest that the number of escaped slaves was far smaller.) The absence of specific references to Israelite slaves in Egypt is hardly surprising, since Egyptian texts do not indicate the precise ethnicity of slaves. Israelites would simply have been considered “Asiatic,” and references to Asiatic slaves abound in the relevant time period. [Illustration of Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea]<https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Sommer1.jpg> Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, from the Nuremberg Bible. (Biblia Sacra Germanaica, The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images.) But Friedman goes beyond doubting the doubters. He brings together several converging lines of evidence that point toward a smaller exodus in the latter part of the second millennium. He focuses especially on an odd pattern: Though the Bible tells us that all 12 tribes of Israel were enslaved in Egypt, every named character in the story comes from the tribe of Levi. Further, the Bible mentions Levites who have Egyptian names (for example, Moses, Phinehas, and Pashhur), but members of other tribes never bear them. It might be suggested that some characters were given Egyptian names to provide an authentic flavor to the narrative, but, if so, why isn’t the occasional man from Ephraim or woman from Manasseh given an Egyptian name? There is, in short, a disconnect between the way the Bible wants to portray the exodus and the data the Bible uses to do so, and this suggests that the data was not made up. A pure fiction would hold together better; historical reports based on real evidence tend to have rougher edges. Consequently, Friedman believes that there really was an exodus, but only of the Levites. In fact, he proposes, it is possible that the Levites were not originally part of the nation Israel; alternatively, they were separated from their Israelite brethren precisely by the fact of their sojourn in Egypt, a sojourn that the other tribes never experienced. Friedman notes that the oldest parts of the Bible depicting Israelites in the Land of Canaan, such as the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, don’t include Levites in their list of Israelite tribes. Conversely, another very old poem, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, talks about the exodus but doesn’t specify that Israelites left Egypt. That poem’s closing verses identify arrival at a temple (“the sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands established”) as the ultimate goal of the exodus; thus, this poem reflects specifically priestly, Levitical concerns. All this leads Friedman to conclude that the Levites united—or perhaps reunited—with the Israelites only after they had left Egypt. When these Levites merged with the Israelites they brought memories of bondage in Egypt, liberation, and the creation of a covenant with the desert deity whom they credited as their savior. Those historical memories were eventually adopted by all the Israelites, and the Levites then came to serve as Israel’s priestly caste. In support of this theory, Friedman notes similarities between the priestly Tabernacle described in the book of Exodus and second-millennium Egyptian ritual and military structures. He agrees with the scholarly consensus that the biblical story as we have it was composed in the first millennium, but he argues persuasively that this story contains historical memories that go back much further. [Photo of Richard Elliott Friedman.]<https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Sommer2.jpg> Richard Elliott Friedman. (Photo by Jade.) To this Friedman adds what he sees as another clue. For close to two centuries, many biblical critics have upheld what is known as Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that the five books of the Torah combine four originally separate documents, which biblical scholars famously named J, E, P, and D. Three of these documents, in Friedman’s view, were composed by Levites: E, P, and D. The authentic second-millennium Egyptian elements of the story, Friedman claims, show up specifically and only in those three documents. Further, those three documents, unlike the non-Levitical J document, use the exodus experience as the underpinning of Israelite identity, law, and morality. For example, E, P, and D—but not J—repeatedly tell us to treat aliens with compassion, because we were once aliens in Egypt; all three of these sources—but not J—require Hebrew slaves to be freed after a term of service rather than forcing them to remain slaves forever. In short, at some point after the Levites escaped from Egypt and joined the Israelites who were already established in Canaan, what was originally a Levite story came to be remembered as a story about all Israelites. And, most crucially for Friedman, that ethnic merger was accompanied by a theological merger. The desert deity of the Levites, known by the Tetragrammaton, was identified with the high god of the Israelites, known as El. One might have imagined, in the polytheistic world of the ancient Near East, that the newly unified Israelite nation would simply have two main gods. After all, the Egyptians managed perfectly well with a divine menagerie. But the newly merged Israelites did not create a mythology that told the story of the relationship between two distinct gods; instead, they came to believe that these were merely two distinct names for one unique god. For Friedman, then, the most important result of the exodus and the consequent fusion of Levitical and Israelite identity was the creation of monotheism itself. And that fusion involved not only a theology but an ethics, for at the heart of Levitical religion was the view that aliens and even slaves had to be treated with compassion and dignity. “[T]he birth of monotheism,” Friedman writes, “was paralleled with the birth of love of neighbors, even alien neighbors. The exodus led both to monotheism and to the exceptional attitude toward others.” Thus, a significant part of Friedman’s project in this book is a defense of biblical religion. Not only is the Bible’s central historical narrative based on a real event, but the essence of its teaching is the opposite of what some cultured despisers of monotheism have claimed. Monotheism is not essentially exclusivist or intolerant, for the event that led to Israel’s acceptance of a single deity also demanded a compassionate attitude toward others. Friedman does not deny the presence of ethically problematic texts in the Bible, such as those calling for the wholesale slaughter of Amalekites. But he shows that those laws sit alongside others that call for humane treatment of other nations, and it is those verses that predominate and remain in force in the postbiblical era. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
