Evolving Ideas about the Old Testament

I have struggled over the past couple of months to figure out what to do with some of the knowledge I have been given in seminary. Seminary busts up a lot of the conventional wisdom when it comes to reading the bible. If you do not like having conventional wisdom busted or think that that bible must be read literally at all times in order to have authority, you may want to quit reading now.

So in Old Testament we are given lots of theories that inevitably lead to the conclusion that… wait for it, “these stories likely did not happen the way they are presented here. This writers of the bible may not have intended for it to be read for literal, historical accuracy.”

I have found these theories profoundly reassuring. I have always had trouble with the massive amount of violence that is carried out in the Old Testament, much of it being attributed to God. It seems God is either smiting somebody over here to telling somebody else to kill another person over there. I was not always cool with that. So, I have learned that maybe, just maybe it did not quite go down exactly like that. However, I have been left thinking, “So what do you do with all this?”

I have come nowhere close to that answer, but I had a small epiphany as I was riding my bike this morning, listening to 2 Samuel. Preface, the theory we have been presented claims this book was likely written or compiled in a time period much later than the events it is describing.

2 Samuel 6:6-7 “Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen shook it. The anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God.; so that place is called Perezuzzah, to this day”

Prior to coming to seminary I might have had this thought on this passage: “Jeez, God, the dude just touched the ark. Also, why is it that God went around striking people down back in the day, but he does not seem to do that today? This story makes no sense and sort of makes me want to believe that this Old Testament stuff is a bunch of made up nonsense.”

To me, saying that this text must only be read literally and historically produces an arbitrary demonstration of God’s strength that is completely disconnected from modern reality.

However, seminary has allowed me to discover a slightly different approach to stories such as this. In Old Testament, we have been trained to hear phrases like “so that place is called Perezuzzah, to this day” as etiologies, stories explaining how things came to be.

 So maybe what we have in 2 Samuel is a group of people using their resources, cultural understandings, and stories of the past to describe their relationship to God.

To me, understanding the cultural context of the story allows me to relate to the authors. They were a people trying to understand and grapple with the Unfathomable. In their attempts to understand how this town “Perezuzzah” received its name, they tell this story.

Their story seems insane to modern ears, but an attempt to describe the Divine will always end in craziness.

Their output may seem crazy to us, but I imagine that when people thousands of years from now look back at the ways in which modern communities attempt to understand and wrestle with the Divine, it will likely seem ridiculous.

God was present and moving then. He is present and moving now. I do believe that God was moving in a unique way in the coalition and authorship of Scripture, and thus I see the Scripture as holding an uncommon authority. However, I am learning to be careful about conflating "authority" with "inerrancy."

This specific story these writers told was meant to give voice to God’s power, a claim I can certainly affirm. The way in which we choose to give voice to God’s power today may sound crazy in a thousand years, but that does not diminish the power and presence of God. God moved then, and He moves now. It may sound absurd, but that does not diminish the power and presence of Yahweh.