Is the Bible History?

 

Nebuchadnezzar, Blake

I have argued that science cannot be used to test the Bible; the Bible is intrinsically more reliable than science.

Does this mean that the story of Noah’s flood is history?

No.

Much of the Bible is history; but it is a compendium. History in itself is of no special value, except inasmuch as it reveals the divine will or serves as warning or illustration. The Bible features many literary genres: proverbs, psalms, poems, lists, codes of law, descriptive passages, philosophical essays, analogies and allegories, even humour. It is a modern prejudice, dating only from about the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that the Bible must be read “literally.” This is part of the scientistic heresy. Jesus obviously did not share this prejudice. He spoke in parables.

A correspondent sent me a video claiming archeological and textual “proof” that the Book of Daniel was history, written in the 6th century BC, and accurately predicting world events up to the 2nd century BC. And this prophecy was then advanced as proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. Praise God!

But anyone familiar with literary genres should recognize immediately that the Book of Daniel is a hero legend. It shows all the features of that genre; like a modern superhero comic. It was not considered history by the ancient rabbis who compiled the Talmud.

A hero legend will include much accurate historical detail; like a modern urban legend, it is supposed to be almost but not quite believable. This is not meant to deceive, but to make it more vivid and compelling. So the Paul Bunyan legend cites specific geographical features: his footprints made the Great Lakes, and so forth. It is no surprise that many things spoken of in the book fit the archeological record. The one thing that will not be historical is the superhuman deeds of the hero—that is, Daniel and his prophecies. They are meant to convey a spiritual message. Nebuchadnezzar is a parable of pride.

The idea that prophets predict the future is a misunderstanding; they are really always speaking of the potentials of the present. “If you do this, this is likely to happen.” We are not meant to know the future, although God does; it subverts our free will, which is the whole point of our being here. And trying to do so implies a lack of trust in God.

The arbitrary focus on history is part of the essential error of scientism: materialism. Scientism assumes that only the physical is real. This is obvious nonsense: love is real, as are the other emotions, yet they are not experienced through the five senses. Ideas and concepts are real, but cannot be seen, touched, or bitten into. The past and the future are real too, but only the present is visible. Indeed, we never know whether the mental images we form from the information of our senses correspond to anything real outside themselves. See Bishop Berkeley.

The Bible is talking about the whole of human experience, not just the stuff visible on the ground.

The story of the flood may have been inspired in part by an actual flood; but the waters are the waters of change that wash all things away. The ark is the ark of memory, in which fertile impressions of each experience endure. In wicked times, the righteous man turns from the world outside, and keeps to God’s council alone.

No More Water, But the Fire Next Time

The notion of ancestral guilt seems central to the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve and the apple and original sin is not the only example. We also have the story of Noah and his sons.

According to a superficial reading of the tale in Genesis, Noah is the one righteous man on Earth. So God preserves him and his three sons, and their wives, in the ark, as the rest of the world dies. Kind of like the coronavirus.

When the flood abates, Noah emerges, plants vines, grows grapes, and makes wine. He gets blind drunk. While he is drunk, his son Ham comes into his tent and sees him naked. As a result, Noah curses him and all his descendants.

Noah began to be a farmer, and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and got drunk. He was uncovered within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it on both their shoulders, went in backwards, and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were backwards, and they didn’t see their father’s nakedness. Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done to him. He said,

“Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.”

But a superficial reading does not seem possible. Noah is the one righteous man on earth, and here he does not seem to be acting righteously. Is it clear Ham has done anything wrong? Doesn’t Noah bear more responsibility, for getting drunk? What is so terrible about seeing your father naked? And even if Ham looked deliberately, why should his children or grandchildren be punished for it?

The key, I suggest, is that “seeing a man’s nakedness” is a euphemism for having sex with his wife. The Bible uses this euphemism repeatedly elsewhere. Genesis itself says that man and wife are “one flesh.” See Leviticus 18: “‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife. It is your father’s nakedness.”

So what actually happened is that Noah and Mrs. Noah got blind drunk, and Ham took advantage of this to have sex with his mother.

Noah presumably indeed bears some responsibility for getting drunk. As the first to plant a vine, he might not have known wine’s effects. Nevertheless, to get so drunk, he must have overindulged. It would have been overindulgence of a natural appetite at this point even had it been non-alcoholic grape juice. He liked what was happening, and kept going. The sin is eerily similar to that of Eve in eating the apple because it “looked good to eat.”

The more serious sin of the son echoes again the subsequent sin of Cain against Abel. First you overindulge a natural appetite, which seems harmless. But over time, by the next generation, the habit of indulging appetites leads to more serious places, like rape, incest, and murder.

In our chosen translation, the World English Bible—chosen only for copyright reasons—Noah does not actually curse Ham. He only says he IS cursed. “Canaan is cursed.”

Some other translations make it an act of Noah’s will: King James says “Cursed be Canaan.” But both translations are obviously possible. Young’s literal translation has only “cursed Canaan.” No verb.

So we can legitimately read Noah as only making an observation. Ham has demonstrated moral depravity. Ham has shown no filial piety. He will presumably also show no regard for proper parenting in turn.

We have spoken before of the problem of idolizing parents and ancestors. Unreflective children naturally take their parents as the measure of all things. Noah foresees that Ham is going to pass that moral depravity on to his children, and children’s children, into the indefinite future, so long as individual descendants do not make a conscious and painful effort to exile from their families and seek truth and righteousness on their own. Noah foresees a family tradition of moral depravity.

This, in the minds of those who wrote the Bible, could explain the observed depravity of the contemporary Canaanites, Ham’s descendants, who notoriously practiced child sacrifice.

In this way, the sins of the fathers do visit the sons, unto the third or fourth generation.

Possibly a relevant thought in this time of coronavirus. Not to mention plagues of locusts, and unchecked wildfires in Australia and Thailand.

Immorality in the Bible: The Flood

An atheist friend has challenged me with the suggestion—not unfamiliar—that the Bible promotes immorality.

Let’s grasp that nettle by the prickly bits. Here’s a web essay that tries to cite such passages comprehensively, at religious tolerance.com.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm

Let’s see what they’ve got.

First cited: the familiar story of Noah.

The Flood: 16th century.

Genesis 6:5-9:

"And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."

The Flood: 17th century.

This is described by the site as “genocide.”

The truth is that we are all going to die. Death is part of the natural order. It follows that, while our instincts make us fear and seek to avoid death for as long as possible, death itself is not evil. It serves some necessary function. It is killing that is evil, not dying.

If death is not evil, why is killing evil? Because it assumes a right that belongs properly to God. In the end, God kills all of us. Just as individuals may not wage war or shoot people, but the state can, so God, as governor of the universe, can morally do things that humans cannot.

Now consider: is he objectively doing harm to these people? We do not know what comes after death, but a believing Christian assumes that, for the good man, heaven follows. For the good, dying is not a punishment, but a reward. For the less good, either purgatory or hell—as justice requires. In either case, necessarily, no injustice.

The same logic applies to most reports of killings in the Old Testament. If they are done by God directly, there is no immorality. If they are done by someone else under God’s direct command, again, no immortality. God has that right.

And if they are neither done by God, or at God’s command, how do we know whether the Bible approves of them? Much of the Bible is straight history.

Of course, it is entirely likely that the Noah story is not: that its flood is a metaphor for the fact that we all die in the flood of time.