How to Read the/a Bible

In 2005, I published How to Read the Bible, where I made the sustained argument for the historical-critical method is the way to understand the Hebrew Bible. Soon after it came out, an acquaintance of mine said to me: “I enjoyed your book, but its title shows real chutzpah, even arrogance. It is claiming that your way, following a specific set of academic ‘rules,’ is the way, the only way to read the Bible.”

I still think about this comment from twenty years ago. And in these two intervening decades I have changed my mind, even on the level of title.

What Is “The Bible”?

In the years since, I have developed much greater sensitivity to the problematic nature of the term “the Bible”: Whose Bible? Which version of the text? Including or excluding the New Testament? What about the differing list of deutero-canonical (“apocryphal”) works included in various traditions?

As I became much more involved in studying, teaching, and writing about the New Testament, I came to understand that calling the Jewish canonical collection of books by the authoritative “the Bible”—just because it is my Bible—is wrong, and now I use terms such as “the Tanakh,” “the Hebrew Bible,” and “the Old Testament.” This newer sensitivity would also motivate me, when the book was reissued by Oxford in 2007, to rename it How to Read the Jewish Bible, since it focuses exclusively on the Tanakh.

Over time, I have become more comfortable with the claim that “the Bible” has many meanings and may legitimately be interpreted in different ways. I learned a tremendous amount from the great Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar Krister Stendahl (1921–2008), a former Harvard faculty member and dean, and former head of Church of Sweden, who taught at Brandeis for several years, and whose office was down the hall from mine.^[1] In his significantly titled book, Meanings, he wrote:

The longer I have lived, the more I have come to like plurals. I have grown increasingly suspicious of singulars.^[2]

I now appreciate better both the pluralities that are found both within the Bible (uncovered as the result of historical-critical interpretation) as well as the plurality of methods that scholars use to interpret the Bible. To be clear, I remain a passionate champion for biblical criticism, which I learned in college,^[3] and continue to advocate strongly for this method, yet I no longer view it as the only method valid for studying the Bible.

Human or Divine Authorship

My belief in the composite nature of the Torah, a fundamental result of the historical-critical method, is connected to my belief that the Torah is composed in normal language, and thus, what seems to be a contradiction (e.g. the differing accounts of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 1 and 2) is a real contradiction, and implies different human authors for these accounts.

I choose to use my critical tools rather than rabbinic methods to resolve perceived inconsistencies because I find it hard to believe in a God who would reveal a Torah full of contradictions that are to be resolved by applying a special set of (rabbinic) rules. To me, this is like believing that God created dinosaurs that only look like they are millions of years old but were really created six-thousand years ago.

Yet, I have also come to appreciate why some people can believe that the Torah is a unified text. In their view, the Torah as a divine work could be understood as fundamentally different from a text written by humans, in human language, since divine language could have its own rules for reading. Following rabbinic principles, an inconsistency in human language need not be so in a mysterious divine work, written in divine language, that needs a special key for its interpretation. At the same time, as I wrote above, to me, this is an unsatisfying explanation, and I hope that those who hold this belief can respect why I interpret and teach the Bible in the manner that I do.

Reception History

I have also come to appreciate that the history of biblical interpretation and reception history of the Bible are legitimate and generative methods for the academic study of the Bible. My work editing articles for TheTorah.com, writing on “the Bible in Judaism” for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, co-editing two editions of The Jewish Study Bible and three editions of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and my current project, on the Jewish reception of historical-critical biblical scholarship, have engendered in me a greater appreciation for the diverse and interesting meanings the Bible has taken on throughout the ages.

For some people, studying reception history is a cop-out, a way of avoiding the difficult questions of what the Bible meant in its original context, and how it was composed over time by people. (The same is true for some people who study the Bible as literature.) When I was younger, I may have had little sympathy toward those who emphasized only reception history, but now I am interested in both the original meaning of the text when it was composed, and also how it was interpreted in later traditions.