The eternally working Creator (part 4)

Galileo and the terrible, horrible, awful, really bad day
So the understanding of Genesis cannot be dependent on a literalistic reading of its early stories. That implies, for its flip side, that its early stories simply need not be taken at face value, their events literally as they seem to be described. Christians often have balked at such a suggestion, supposing that if certain events in Genesis can't be taken at literal face value, then it implies an undermining of the reliability of Scripture in general, an unraveling which would lead to negating the validity of the gospel accounts, and in fact to a wholesale collapse of the Christian faith, a sort of domino effect resulting in atheism. Some creationist proponents have actually maintained that this is the direct, inevitable outcome of starting down what they perceive as a theologically slippery slope: if A, therefore Z. Spiritual catastrophe!

And there is nothing new about that sort of alarm. Galileo ran afoul of it nearly 400 years ago, when he made extensive, careful observations of the skies through the recently invented telescope, and made fascinating discoveries ... among them, that markings on the moon are actually mountains and craters; that the "flawless" sun has irregular, dark spots that come and go over its surface; that Jupiter has its own system of moons; that Venus displays crescent-to-full phases, just as our moon does; that it is Earth that turns on its axis, not the heavens that revolve above it; and that Earth and the other planets orbit the sun, it isn't they that orbit Earth. We learn all that in elementary school, and no creationists (that I know of) even bat an eye at it; but to the church in Galileo's time, every one of those findings flew right in the face of views that had been held for centuries, and which were considered to have solid Scriptural backing in its clear and literal reading.

Nothing new under the sun
But it was nothing new even in Galileo's time. Over the previous couple of centuries, as Europe had been emerging from the long dark of the medieval era toward what became the Renaissance, for the first time (since the classical period) Europeans grew curious about the natural world ... what it was made of, how it worked, what was over the horizon or beyond what we could see with unaided eyes. The church, however ... which had, during the same time, settled into a position of security after having survived early persecutions, fought doctrinal battles to clarify its beliefs, helped shore up society through Rome's collapse into "barbaric" turbulence, and through these victories gained increasing carte blanche to extend its hegemony over European society ... suddenly found its preeminence challenged, this time not by pagan or heretical assaults from without, but by honest curiosity from within its own ranks.

The church's understanding of faith was akin to a 1970s bumper sticker: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" ... except that they had the ability to forcibly exact others' compliance with their beliefs. Wonder about God's creation? Just as well erase parts of the Bible, or try to plant spies in heaven's courts out of mistrust in how God handles the universe. The very notion of asking any questions about the natural world was taken as complete effrontery toward God, a rejection of faith by demanding to know what he does and how he does it. Faith was seen as simply accepting events and phenomena in nature as God's will, and questioning of any sort was to display the impudence of Job ... who spent most of his book carping over how God didn't know what he was doing, only to be shut up when God appeared and silenced him by demonstrating the limitations of Job's understanding. So there! Yet now here were more and more people, honest Christians, who honestly wondered how the universe worked ... and the church grew increasingly powerless to stop them.

How in heaven ...?
So when Galileo had the presumption to point a spyglass at heaven and impudently offer a gossip report on what he voyeuristically saw there, with the crowning gall of contradicting what Scripture plainly taught, it only got church hackles up even more. Earth not at the center of the universe?! The world of humans is presented in Scripture as the center of God's heart and interests; so where else could Earth be positioned, but at the center of the created universe? And since Earth is at the center, where else would anything orbit but around it? Blemishes on Sun and Moon?! Everything created by God is described in Scripture as "good"; so, except for the effects of sin and corruption on Earth, how could anything in the universe display flaws or irregularities? Scripture repeatedly describes Earth as being firmly fixed, that "it shall never be moved" (as see Ps 104.5); how in heaven could it turn?

We may roll our eyes today at the simplistic views that they dug in to defend; but church representatives at that time were utterly, and very sincerely, convinced that an admission of any of their doctrinal views as not literally true would lead, directly and inevitably, to a complete breakdown of the Christian faith, precisely as some creationists do today with respect to their views ... and in both cases, these Christians defended, and today defend, their positions with very seriously (though very literally) interpreted passages of Scripture. (It's worth considering that Galileo, for his part, was in no way attempting to undermine anything about Christianity; there is no evidence that he was anything but a very devout and genuine Christian.) And of course it was no joke for Galileo, who, at the tender mercies of the Inquisition, was forced to recant his findings, was confined to house arrest for his remaining years, and narrowly escaped losing his life. It is said that the scientist, at his hearing before the Inquisitors ... where, by then an old man, he was humiliated by being forced to kneel before them as he "confessed" that his views were "wrong" ... was heard to mutter, as he rose and left the room: "Eppur si muove ["And yet it does move"]!"

And yet it does move
Yet, while we consider the dogmatic views of the church in Galileo's day as the product of their ignorance (it still took the Vatican until the last half of the 20th century to formally admit: "Oops! We were wrong after all, and Galileo was right!"), the sector of the church today that holds to a literalistic view of Genesis actually gets just as dug in on their views, as just mentioned, as the church in Galileo's time did on theirs; the main difference (if not a saving grace about it) is that Christians today do not have recourse to an armed militia as the Inquisition did. It isn't worth thinking about what some Christians would do, if they could get their hands on that kind of force.

And yet human understanding of God's universe does continue to move on. Almost every significant advance in the sciences, both before Galileo and since, has met with some measure of opposition, if not alarm, from very sincere Christians ... who, greatly unsettled, were convinced that observations and rational conclusions of science implied a direct contradiction to (what they saw as) clear teachings of Scripture. The concept of gravity itself, as a force in nature, was at first seen as a fiction that had no mention in Scripture, and which in fact denied biblical truth by proposing a natural power apparently separate from God's own acts. Descriptions of other forces and processes in nature (such as electricity; the identification and nature of physical elements; blood circulation and other internal workings of the body; causes of disease) likewise were deeply disturbing to many Christians, and stirred objections from the church on very sincere grounds that important principles of the faith were being thrown into question, that humankind was prying into affairs of God that we ought not to stick our noses into. The concern, as always, was not that people might find more reason to trust or glorify God, but that we might find less ... which, if you think about it, really implies a faith that must not be too confident in itself (or its God) to begin with.

Scandals galore! God's Word thrown into question! News at eleven!
And it didn't stop there! The very notion that species of life could (and had) become extinct was scandalous to Christians when it was first suggested, because nowhere does Scripture even hint that God would ever destroy his creation (that is, after the great flood, and not until the new earth is created at the end of time). The recognition that some islands are of volcanic origin, and that their building and erosion processes can actually be traced, shocked religious convictions and appeared to refute Scriptural texts indicating that creation, once completed (and recovered from the flood), would not change.

Observations of geological formations that clearly show vast and repeated deposits (and often of a variety of materials, from sedimentary muds and sands to ash, lava, and other igneous rocks), their subsequent folding or distortion, erosion of parts of their folds, and the deposition of many later layers above those ... processes that, in their complex series of forces, would simply have been physically impossible without requiring vast spans of time (as opposed to having all been accomplished in the year's length of the biblical flood) ... completely overturned the traditionally accepted view (derived from attempts to calculate biblical dates, as mentioned in an earlier section of this series) that Earth is only a few thousand years old.

Suggestions that parts of coastlines or islands had at various times risen or sunk raised Scriptural objections, once again, that Earth was immovable, and that the oceans' bounds had been fixed since the flood. In 1915, Alfred Wegner proposed that the close fit between Old and New World landmasses indicated the long–ago drift of those continents to their present positions; his idea was met with disbelief from the rest of the scientific world itself, and the church again presented its now–familiar objection that the earth was permanently fixed. (Today, of course, radar and laser measurements by means of satellites directly measure tectonic plate movement as it happens.)

Eppur si muove. Ongoing observations and rational explanations of nature, meanwhile, brought other findings that, while not necessarily objected to by the church, would in Galileo's time have aroused the same severe reaction to "questioning God's creation" that he faced. Following the second World War, studies of weather led to the detailed understanding of weather and climate that we have today ... although any daily report on the Weather Channel would have been denounced by the Inquisition as defaming God, by ascribing meteorological phenomena to natural processes, rather than to the direct agency of God. And curiously, you never hear of even the most diehard creationists admonishing their children not to watch that "secular science", nor for that matter homeschooling them against the errors of Galileo.

(As may be seen by all these examples, if the medieval view of "not questioning God's works" had prevailed, not one of our modern scientific, technological, or medical advances would likely have been possible ... in other words, almost every single thing that developed society uses, wears, eats, treats disease with, communicates with, or travels in would not have been able to be developed. The very fact that you are reading this on a scientifically–developed machine ... even the very fact that you are able to read at all, which is a direct result of the invention of the printing press and its impact on the spread of literacy to ordinary people ... is testament to this "assault" on faith. A defense of the "literal" interpretation of the Bible usually does not take into consideration what the actual stakes would be, if society were to revert sincerely and authentically to that position. At least we could rest secure, knowing that we were at the center of the universe again!)

You never heard such whining
And then in the midst of all this commotion, about midway through the 19th century, came a rather boring, almost unreadable (sort of like this series) book which reported on painstaking observations of nature, made over decades. It really rather humbly and calmly presented the findings and most reasonable conclusions from those observations, and made a sincere attempt to anticipate and critically examine any possible problems with its ideas ... but its conclusions rocked the religious world like it had never been rocked. It was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (even the title would about put you to sleep), by a naturalist named Charles Darwin. You never heard such complaining after that.

©2007 Roger S. Smith

Part 5: Don't monkey around with my faith!

The eternally working Creator (part 3)

Understanding what God means
So we can gain some "understanding" on ways that the ancient records could have been compiled; but next we need to try to understand how "accurate" (at least, in our information-driven, Western sense) the records were, especially the earlier ones. Even a cursory reading of Genesis will make it obvious that the earlier accounts tend to get shorter and shorter (the account of Noah and the flood is a notable exception), even though they record lifespans said to reach hundreds of years. Obviously, a lot of information about events, and people's lives, dropped out of the records over time. And in contrast with what was said in part 2 of this series, about the genuine reliability of oral records, still given enough time it's inevitable that mistakes or omissions will creep in; it's like the game of Telephone, where a group of kids whispers a sentence from ear to ear around the room, till its weirdly morphed final version is the cause for fits of giggles and laughter.

So the mere fact that the earlier records in Genesis are usually so abbreviated is strong evidence that a lot of information had dropped out before they were compiled in a single book. The fact that many events, and even names, make a consistent thread of spiritual or prophetic insights that continues right on not only through Genesis, but through all the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures (written over the next 1,500 or more years), is startling evidence that their design and authorship were orchestrated far beyond what any human authors or editors could collaborate to produce. (You would have to postulate some sort of 1,500-year "conspiracy", somehow maintained across multiple cultures, in various languages; often with some of the writers having no contact with, or even knowledge of, many of the others; and through frequently chaotic and violent episodes in history; yet somehow succeeding in developing, and passing along, a coherent story. Shades of The da Vinci Code!) Still, just as with Job, it's vital to realize that the completely valid truths conveyed in Scripture need not always have been synonymous with the events having been as literal as the records may appear ... at least, not "literal" or "accurate" as we think of it.

Literally murky
That's always the hangup. In the West, we simply cannot conceive of an account, presented as a historical record of people and events, that somehow could be true and valid, yet not necessarily portray specifically accurate facts the way we want it to. Nonfactual true history? To us, that sounds like an absurd contradiction, a complete oxymoron. It is true that, the more recent any account is, the more likely it is to be able to be confirmed against corroborating records or evidence; the life of Jesus is the stellar example of that. The central events of his life, namely his crucifixion and resurrection, are so amply confirmed by internal evidences in the gospel accounts (such as unlikely figures being presented as primary eyewitnesses, which no one would do if they were trying to invent a credible but fake story), and by events in church history (such as the completely unlikely conversion of Paul, from persecutor to the foremost advocate of Christianity; and the fact that most of Jesus' first disciples paid for their faith in a risen Christ with their lives, which none would have done if they had even suspected that the resurrection was not true), that it has been said that Jesus' resurrection is more historically confirmed than are such accepted events as the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, or George Washington's crossing of the Delaware.

But the early events of Genesis take us back into murky depths of time, with the records coming through at times like partly-heard whispers or half-seen pictures. They also come from a time when cultures often drew no sharp distinction between what we would precisely define as "fact" or "legend", or even "allegory". None of this calls into question the spiritual truths conveyed there; and none of this at all challenges the understanding of God that he so consistently urges us to gain about him, throughout his Word. In fact, our understanding of him is anchored squarely in Christ himself; not in Genesis, any more than it might be anchored in the Psalms or any other part of Scripture. And nowhere in the New Testament is it even implied that genuine faith in Christ, or a genuine relationship with him, is contingent on also holding to a strictly literalistic view of Genesis, as our society would view "literal": salvation is presented as dependent simply on faith in him alone, as Son of God and Lord risen from the dead (as detailed, for example, in Rom 10.9). Believers in him, after all, are called Christians, not "Genesisians", "Adam-and-Eveians", or any such thing.

Early thinkers in both the church and Israel, in fact, cautioned that literal-appearing parts of Scripture ought not to be declared as having to be taken so literally: Jewish theologians of at least the second century before Christ had suggested that the creation "days" of Genesis might represent indefinite lengths of time, not necessarily literal twenty-four-hour periods; and the respected Christian thinker Augustine, in the fifth century, concluded that it isn't really certain what actual events the early Genesis stories were meant to describe, and that we should be cautious about drawing conclusions about nature or the physical universe based on what those passages appear to say.

©2007 Roger S. Smith

Part 4: Starstruck, and other scientific scandals

The eternally working Creator (part 2)

Growing in wisdom and understanding
The poetic literary forms in Job, then, provide another challenge to Western ideas of accuracy. But taken in light of what those cultures, at that time, viewed as "valid" or meaningful records (especially when compared with what many other cultures around the world view as valid history), it's not so hard to see how ancient Israel could have recognized the completely valid principles and lessons portrayed in Job, without splitting hairs about how (or whether) Job and friends could have put all their thoughts and emotions instantly into great poetry. As we would understand it, what is likely to have happened is this: Job the person existed; those events of his life actually took place; the insights that he and his friends gained from their arguments (and from Job's encounter with God) were as we have them; but their expression in the poetic form we have on record was set down later, through the obvious careful thought, practiced skill, and great effort that would have to have gone into creating such elegant poetry.

No more split ends!
God simply does not owe it to us to be hair-splitting about "accuracy" in the way we define it; in Scripture he regularly paraphrases himself without explanation or clarification ... since the cultures through whom he was speaking and working did that all the time themselves, and would have understood immediately what he meant, with no problem about it.

(For example, the reiteration of the Ten Commandments in Deut 5, on the eve of Israel's entry into their new land, is not identical to its original version given at Sinai, in Ex 20. In Jn 3, as Jesus is dialoguing with Nicodemus on how to enter eternal life, he paraphrases himself within moments: in v 7 he quotes what he had just said to Nicodemus in v 3 ... but not the way he had just worded it! This is because a paraphrase that accurately conveys the gist or intent of something is fully as valid, or "accurate", as were the original words, even if it is very different in detail or specifics.)

At any rate, God's consistent emphasis throughout the Bible, far beyond merely acquiring accurate information (as we like to put an emphasis on), is for us to understand what he means, and together with that to know him as a Person ... and so to keep understanding him and his ways better:

"... teach me your ways so I may know you ...." (Ex 33.13)

"... where can wisdom be found?
Where does understanding dwell? ....
God understands the way to it
and he alone knows where it dwells ...." (Job 28.12, 23)

Show me your ways, O Yahweh,
teach me your paths. (Ps 25.4)

The unfolding of your words gives light .... (Ps 119.130)

... if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding ....
... Yahweh gives wisdom,
and from his mouth come
knowledge and understanding. (Prov 2.3-6)

No longer will someone teach his neighbor ... saying, "Know Yahweh," because they will all know me .... (Jer 31.34)

Who is wise? He will realize these things [God's works and ways].
Who is discerning? He will understand them. (Hos 14.9)

"Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (Jn 17.3)

I keep asking that [God] ... may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. (Eph 1.17)

... the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord .... I want to know Christ .... (Phil 3.8, 10)

... asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. (Col 1.9)

... I know whom I have believed .... (2 Tim 1.12)

Capisce? Savvy? Get it?
The passages emphasizing wisdom, understanding, and knowing God personally (there are, of course, many more than these) constitute one of the most persistent and universal themes in Scripture. Our Western emphasis on accurate information, then, ought to take a back seat to genuine understanding of Scripture ... that is, our efforts to understand what was actually meant ought to take priority over simply acquiring accurate information ... because, depending on what God meant in a given place, what appears to be plain, clear information might not be what he intended for us to understand at all.

Does that sound like a hard assignment? Well, the persistent assignment from God here is "wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom" (Pr 4.7), and that just takes thought and effort; there isn't any way around it. We've gotten used to wanting what's easy and fast ... we joke about ourselves being a "drive-through nation"! But you can't just "get wisdom" as if it were an item added to a shopping list: "Hey, on the way home, could you please stop at the market and pick up milk, bread, eggs, and ... oh yeah, get wisdom." On the other hand, it isn't some arcane, mystical understanding, that only an elite few are somehow able to attain: God's Word not only urges everyone to get wisdom, he also promises that he will provide it: "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him" (Jas 1.5).

What's in your wall ... eh, wisdom?
So what would wisdom consist of in this case? Well, at the least, it would include aiming to understand more about the context that something was written in—culturally and historically—and about the literary style that was being used (such as historical chronicles; poetic form; narratives that may be either history or allegory); and, as already mentioned, the context of whether those peoples saw it as necessary for records to be factually precise as we do, before they could be considered true or accurate. A further consideration might be whether the people who recorded something were drawing it from their own experience, or were relating an account that had been handed down to them from somewhere else, or from further back in time.

Moses the editor
This comes into particular significance in the case of Genesis, because, while traditionally Moses is credited as its author, clearly God did not, as it were, just sit him down and dictate it to him from scratch. It records history from creation up to the settling of Jacob and his family in Egypt, where their descendants were later enslaved, leading up to the deliverance recorded in Exodus: in other words, Genesis partly explains how Israel got into the fix it did in Egypt; partly puts their own history in context with the broader history of God's design, going back to creation (and looking forward in his ongoing promise to bless the world through Abraham's descendants); and partly makes clear that the God who delivered them from Egypt isn't just any god, but the only Creator, the Eternal. But it's unlikely that anything in the book was news to the people of Israel in Moses' time; it's not as if, on hearing it read aloud for the first time, they would have said, "Oh really? There's a God? The earth was created? We're descended from some guy named Abraham? Whaddaya know!"

Moses would more likely have been a sort of editor of an anthology, compiling earlier accounts into a coherent story as we have it. And in fact evidence of that is very clear: the Hebrew formula typically opening a record of events, or of some chapter in history revolving around a certain person, family line, or society, is "The book of the generations of ...", or sometimes simply "The generations of ...". Recent English translations of the Bible (such as the New International Version) usually paraphrase that as "The account of ...", or some similar phrase, to make it more understandable to readers in English: that's what the Hebrew expression actually implies; it isn't always strictly a genealogical record, nor even necessarily includes one. And Genesis bears a number of such headings, at significant breaks in the story line: 2.4; 5.1; 6.9; 10.1; 11.10; 11.27; 25.12; 25.19; 36.1; 36.9; 37.2. Eleven "accounts" are compiled there, with the initial account of creation making a twelfth. Each of these probably represents an ancestral record, handed down either orally or (before the development of writing) in some recorded form such as markings on stone, pottery, or wood, as memory aids in the telling of the story.

(Lest it should be supposed that oral tradition represents a shaky and unreliable form of passing along history, many cultures around the world have long maintained, and some still maintain, complex and extensive oral traditions, which are usually kept by someone trained in the rigorous art of memorizing, reciting, and teaching them; sometimes symbolic or pictorial memory aids are also used. Some Native American creation or cultural accounts, for example, can take up to three hours to recite ... others up to twelve or fourteen hours ... and they must be ceremonially recited word for word, without error, or their recital is considered impure and must be started all over again! That's a pretty good incentive to get it right the first time, and every time. For that matter, disciples of rabbis in Jesus' time were expected to pay close enough attention to the rabbis' teachings that they could be recited mostly verbatim, and/or recorded accurately later; this explains how so much of Jesus' teachings were able to be "captured" in the moment by his disciples.)

©2007 Roger S. Smith

Part 3: understanding what God means

The eternally working Creator (part 1)

To create, or not to create ...
"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day .... he rested from all his work of creating that he had done" (Gen 2.2-3). A lot later on, however, "Jesus said to them, 'My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working'" (Jn 5.17) ... which, incidentally, took place on the seventh day of that week, which is why he was being questioned.

It's often supposed, by people who hold to a very literalistic view of parts of Scripture, that this passage in Genesis implies that God got completely done with his creative work at that point; that's certainly what the plain reading of it would seem to mean. But all through Scripture, Yahweh is portrayed as still in his creative workshop, both making and maintaining creation:

Let this be written for a future generation,
that a people not yet created may
praise Yahweh. (Ps 102.18)

When you send your Spirit,
they [all living things] are created,
and you renew the face of the earth. (Ps 104.30)

... you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my
mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully
and wonderfully made .... (Ps 139.13-14)

I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys ....
I will set pines in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know ...
that the Holy One of Israel has
created it. (Isa 41.18-20)

... this is what Yahweh says—
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel ....
I will bring your children ...,
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made. (Isa 43.1, 5, 7)

I am Yahweh, and there is no other;
I form the light and create darkness .... (Isa 45.6-7)

"Before I formed you in the womb
I knew you ...." (Jer 1.5)

"This is what the Lord Yahweh says about the Ammonites ...:
In the place where you were created,
in the land of your ancestry ...." (Ezk 21.28, 30)

He who forms the mountains,
creates the wind ...,
he who turns dawn to darkness ...
Yahweh God Almighty is his name. (Am 4.13)

... in him [Christ] all things hold together. (Col 1.17)

So did he get done with creating, or not? The clear and simple answer seems to be, again, that Genesis depicts God's initial creation of everything, while other passages describe various ways that he has ongoing interaction with what he's already made; that is, this view attempts to say that God sort of keeps creating, but isn't really doing anything new in terms of the created universe. On closer inspection, though, it's a little awkward as an explanation ... not least because the same Hebrew verbs for creating, making, forming, and so on, are used throughout the rest of the Old Testament as are used in Genesis. So how is there supposed to be any difference in what he's doing?

On the other hand, Genesis does say that God gets done with his work of creating, and rests from that. How could that be, when he keeps creating people and things through the rest of Scripture?

... for different folks
One drastically important thing to keep in mind, when trying to understand any written text (whether the Bible or anything else), is to recognize differences in how various peoples, in various cultures and at various times in history, expressed themselves. We take Scripture as God's own Word; but of course he composed it through a wide variety of human agencies, over a great spread of time, and representing multiple cultures.

Here, 1,900 years after the Bible was completed, we as heirs of the traditions of Western (mostly Greek- and Roman-influenced) civilization have our own complex ways in how we express ourselves in speech or writing, just as any other culture would; but, since our European-American cultures have mostly dominated this entire half of the world, it's been easy for us to forget that there are plenty of other ways that cultures can express themselves, and easy to assume that "our" ways are somehow the "best" or "right" ways. Who could be as logical as we are! Right?

But the writers of the Old Testament didn't even give us the time of day, as far as caring how we do things. How rude! They went about, expressing themselves however their own cultures of the day were used to doing it; and since they were writing for their own peoples, naturally it wouldn't even have occurred to them to attempt that any other cultures would understand what they meant. One classic example of a style that would have been clear to its contemporaries, but is pretty obscure to us, is the book of Ezra, whose narrative jumps back and forth between events happening about eighty years apart ... which his readers would have been completely familiar with, but which we have to scramble to check footnotes and other references to make sense of.

Tragedy as poetry
Another example, this one very much of literary style, is the book of Job: ostensibly, it records the literal words of the dialog (arguments and counter-accusations, really) among Job and his friends. However, the Hebrew text is mostly in carefully and beautifully crafted poetic form. I have never heard of even the most gifted poet being able to speak extemporaneously in perfectly crafted, complex poetic form; let alone a group of them speaking in live-action response and counterpoint to each other, in the same expert caliber of poetry; let alone managing (or even wanting) to maintain that creative, collaborative focus in the immediate aftermath of horrific tragedies that have befallen one of them (and the agonizing, complex emotions that would have erupted from that, and which of course we see in everything those men said to each other).

That would be about comparable to friends gathering around a relative of one of the victims of 9/11, only a few days after it happened, and all of them somehow improvising beautifully worked poetry as they tried to express their agonies and frustrations over the tragedies of that day. Obviously, that would be unlikely in the extreme ... and even if that is exactly what happened in the case of Job, that event in itself would have been so remarkable that it would certainly have been noted in the text at some point ("... and one of the most amazing things about all this was that Job and his friends ALL spoke in perfect poetic form, nonstop, through their whole dialog. Amazing! Such a thing has never been heard of before!").

At any rate, it's obvious that Job himself did not write the story as we have it, since it not only refers to him always in the third person, but records his death; someone after his time took the available records (existing probably at least in part as his own family or clan lore, by that point; probably also having passed into legend throughout that region, since the author refers to Job's homeland as somewhere evidently distant from where his reading audience lived) and crafted them into the poetic masterpiece that conveys God's wisdom through those traumatic events.

The gist of the matter
So if Job and his friends didn't speak in perfect, improvised poetry, how do we know which (if any) of their words were accurately recorded? It isn't known that anyone in ancient Israel was worried about any question like this. Nobody lost any sleep over it, because they were well aware that something could be recorded in a highly artistic form while still remaining true to the intent of the author and the gist of what was recorded.

Modern, Western culture (especially in America) has developed a strong instinct, in some cases you might say almost an obsession, with technical and factual accuracy. In many cases, obviously this is not only helpful, but can be vital. (Think, for example, of finances or accounting; you wouldn't want your bank keeping track of only the "gist" of what was in your accounts! Likewise, criminal investigation depends on explicit accuracy, in order to ensure that, ideally, only the actual guilty party is found and charged with only the relevant crime. Electronics, auto maintenance, medical science ... accuracy is vital in almost every area of modern society, for it to work the way we want it to.)

And of course accuracy is nothing new, nor confined only to the West; some of the earliest written records found (from ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq) appear to be inventories of commercial goods. It's easy to see why accuracy would have been important to merchants; their livelihood depended directly on it! There was a direct cause-and-effect relationship there. But in other areas for which we have records, such as historical chronicles and, of course, poetic-style literature, the definition of "accurate" can get a good deal fuzzier, at least from our point of view.

Complexities in figuring out, for example, the chronology of the Old Testament stem in great part from the variety of ways that its writers recorded the number of years (sometimes a part of a year was figured as a whole year, resulting in what looks like overlapping reigns of kings, for instance); this is why about a half dozen early, and very sincere, attempts to work out biblical chronology to find the date of creation resulted in no two agreeing on the same date. (It was only their rough average that has been handed down as the traditional "6,000 years ago" beginning of the world.)

And "accuracy" in events can be defined differently, depending on what the writer was intending to record. Again, in our society today, that statement wouldn't even make sense: for us, accuracy in recording events means just that ... "just the facts". But in other cultures through history, events have been considered accurate if they accurately reflected a people's understanding of themselves and their place in the universe; or how their society came into being; or their perceived relationship to the divine. Native American cultures of many kinds, for example (and of course "Indians" aren't a sort of single, monolithic culture from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: in North America alone, at least 500 peoples are represented, still speaking up to 200 distinct languages, some of which are more unrelated to each other than German is to Chinese), often recorded their own history in what, to us, seems part fact, part legend (which may be based on fact), part absolute myth.

That's only one of the reasons why the study of biblical history has generated so much interest, and has stirred up so much controversy. The Bible's records are true! No, they're not true! No, they're partly true! No, they're true, they just mean something else than what we thought! Debates over that are likely to rage for a long time ... which is a good thing: God's Word tells us explicitly to "test everything; hold on to the good" (1 Thes 5.21). Being reluctant to put anything in that crucible, no matter how dearly held, only highlights our own fears about what we might find out. Putting everything in the crucible, to find out what it really is, helps us to be genuinely sure of what we (think we) know, and it enables us to grow as persons in our maturity of critical thinking ... and in recognition of how much we do not know.

©2007 Roger S. Smith

Part 2: growing in wisdom and understanding