An Essay review of "Why the Bible Began," by Jacob L. Wright
The Bible: A Community's Survivor Tale told through the Hebrew Alphabet
According to this author's hypothesis, the Bible emerged as a community survival project initiated by the Judean peoples of the Levant, driven mostly by anonymous warring biblical scribes.
After suffering two devastating wars against Babylon and Assyria, respectively, the people of the Levant were defeated and dispersed into exile. Disillusioned and believing their god had abandoned them, they lost faith in the Kingdom as a means of community organization.
Upon their return from exile, they became increasingly receptive to scribes who advocated for a novel form of community. This community would be based on rebuilding the Temple and establishing a Hebrew community rather than resorting to destruction through war.
Thus, the rebuilding of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem transcended its original sacred purpose and became an act of identity, imbued with newfound dignity and respect. It held equal value to going to war, transforming the Judeans of the Levant into a community of Jews rather than a nation or a kingdom of Judeans.
Professor Wright presents two contrasting narratives: one written by the warring scribes of the Bible and the other written by the stones of archeology. These stories often corroborate each other, but even when they diverge, they enrich the overall understanding of the subject matter.
Professor Wright's hypothesis directly confronts the theories of competing religious scholars. As a professor of religion in addition to his renowned status as a biblical scholar and archaeologist, he firmly believed from the outset that the Bible was an integral part of a Jewish cultural survival project.
The Bible served as both an intra-Levant community recovery project from two centuries of defeat and trauma and a mid-course correction and reassessment in the wake of repeated defeats of their respective Kings and Kingdoms, collectively perceived as abandoned by their god Yawah.
As the biblical texts and archaeological records are scrutinized, we witness a fascinating interplay.
Surprisingly, only one archaeological discovery, found on the stone tablet of Babylonian King Merneptah, provides concrete evidence of the existence of a nation called Israel. This solitary reference proclaims, "Israel is now extinct."
In contrast, the biblical texts, particularly Lamentations and Isaiah I-II, delve into profound emotional turmoil. They grapple with the profound sense of abandonment experienced by the Israelites during the devastating defeat and ruin inflicted by the Babylonian empire of the Bronze Age. A century later, they face another existential crisis at the hands of the Assyrian empire of the Iron Age.
However, amidst these cataclysmic events, the biblical texts make a remarkable turnabout. They celebrate the imminent recovery of Israel with the assistance of the very god who had abandoned them to catastrophic and collective defeat.
These two cataclysmic events had a profound and lasting impact on the Jews of the Levant. They not only left the individuals psychologically traumatized but also disarmed, scattered, and in and out of exile. Dispossessed of their land and riches, they found themselves unprotected and replaced by communities of conquerors. Fear loomed large in their future.
Consequently, the Jews no longer felt compelled to rely on or defend a system that had repeatedly failed them. Driven by a sense of self-determination, they embarked on an extraordinary journey to create an entirely new system of survival.
At the heart of this transformative system lay a new and elevated version of Yahweh, a deity transcending all worldly kings and leaders of earthly empires.
Likeminded scribes from both sides of the Levant, armed with their pens as swords, engaged in a fierce competition to rewrite their respective versions of the new book, the Bible.
The fundamental principles of these revised texts shared a fresh perspective on society. Instead of focusing on survival after repeated defeats, they embraced a narrative centered around community survival in the face of challenges. This new perspective emphasized faith in a community capable of thriving and even flourishing despite the downfalls of worldly kingdoms.
The scribes, dogmatic theocratic scholars, instinctively understood the delicate nature of their sacred calling. The previous Bible, which recounted the story of the "losers of history," underwent a radical transformation. It was amended and elevated to a new narrative of the "losers who formed a united community of heroic survivors of history."
This radical revision of their survival orientation led to a piecemeal reorganization and rewriting of the new Jewish origin story. The scribes skillfully edited the Old Testament, interspersing known truths with wishful post-destruction thinking. They meticulously filled in the gaps of the pre-destruction era, creating an illusion of nonexistent tribal unity. Building upon this foundation, they creatively amended the longstanding biblical narrative, sometimes subtly and often forcefully.
Yahweh, now transformed into the first transcendental unitary god, became the central figure of a newly constructed social, political, and philosophical framework. This framework was socially engineered by the pens of learned, likeminded, but dogmatic, and anonymous theocratic scribes of Jewish history.
As modern forms of writing emerged, particularly the Hebrew alphabet, it also played a crucial role in the actual social engineering of a society.
Beyond their faith in survival under the new Yahweh, another unifying concept among the scribes was the notion that what could not be achieved militarily in the past could be achieved spiritually in the future through creative storytelling about that past and envisioning a different future. As the author aptly put it on page 91, "they could become part of an updated imagined-past, revised as a mental benchmark for the future."
The mental gymnastics required to reconcile the pre-destruction and post-destruction discrepancies was akin to the "lost cause" of the American Civil War. Even after military defeat, the Confederacy persisted in claiming victory in the spiritual battle through cultural means.
Quentin Tarantino exemplified this in two recent movies: "Inglorious Basterds" and "Django Unchained." In "Inglorious Basterds," a Jewish heiress of a Paris movie house sacrifices herself and her lover to decapitate the Nazi Party attending a premiere at her theater.
Similarly, in "Django Unchained," a black slave is miraculously freed and becomes a bounty hunter, seeking retribution by burning and killing those who had enslaved him and his wife.
However, Dr. Wright's cultural redemption story concludes abruptly. Despite archaeological evidence, the newly invented stories about the Bible's origins, regardless of their rationale, are unlikely to withstand academic scrutiny.
Notably, none of the familiar biblical heroes, except for a brief mention of King David's defeat, appear on any of the stone tablets left by the conquering empires.
The infamous wall of Jericho is mentioned in the book of Joshua a millennium after its supposed destruction in the archaeological record.
Furthermore, the word "Israel" is the only archaeological attestation to the existence of a nation, the united community known as Israel. This solitary reference, found on a single carbon-dated Bronze Age stone tablet by the Egyptian King Merneptah, simply informs readers of Israel's extinction.
As if to salvage the project with his own wish-fulfilling words, the author concludes from this solitary archaeological reference that Israel must have been significant enough to be included in the text of the tablet.
Although I'm not a biblical scholar, I suspect I've only touched the surface of a much deeper discussion among biblical scholars who are knowledgeable. Nevertheless, the book still strikes me as important. I say this after listening to Jordan Peterson's lectures on the deeper mythical interpretation of biblical texts and reconsidering Nietzsche's negative critique of religious morality. Three stars.
