blighttown

Confusion for millennia

The old testament makes no sense

For a few years now, I've been interested in trying to understand the old testament. (ie, the Hebrew Bible) This is a post for another time, but I had no church instruction, and when I finally read the Book of Genesis in my 20s I was confused more than anything. None of the stories made any sense, all sorts of unusual things happened that were never explained to the reader. The stories barely fit together; or didn't fit together at all. I've struggled to convey this to people. I explicitly do not mean that I disagreed with the story or its conclusions, and I also don't mean that I found contradictions or anachronisms which proved the stories false. I meant something much more basic: I had barely any idea what sort of ideas the stories were meant to convey to the reader. If I read a book by an author who I disliked, or disagreed with, I would be able to describe what impressions and conclusions the author wanted for his readers. If I read any normal, modern book, I could describe what the book was a bout and what its message was.

But, Genesis just made no sense to me whatsoever. Nothing in the text itself made any attempt to explain itself. For years, I actually thought that all ancient writing was inscrutable. Eventually, I read Herodotus' The Histories and found it to be very clear, grounded, and almost modern. There's even a part of the book where he says something like "the people say that the land north of here is covered in feathers, however this is probably a metaphor for snow, as a land covered in feathers does not make sense." In comparison to Genesis, the Histories is incredibly clearly written and nearly modern in tone and style.

Looking for answers

Eventually, I ran into the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions depicting Yahweh and his consort Asherah as some sort of weird, pagan, human-animal hybrid. This sparked my interested again. I read Mark S. Smith, I read Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Israel Finklestein, Heath Dewrell, Thomas Römer, and more. I don't have a background in near east studies, so a lot of this went over my head, but I started to get a clearer picture of what the text might represent.

A number of really interesting things stuck out here, but I only want to talk about one idea. By all accounts, the ideas in the old testament were misinterpreted, or reinterpreted multiple times in a row:

To take Israel Finklestein's word for it, the likeliest explanation for the Israelite conquest of Canaan goes something like this: the cultural memory of the bronze age collapse served as the core of a reinvented narrative that the Israelites had ever previous conquered Canaan. According to the archaeological record, there is no good evidence that anything like the Israelite conquest of Canaan ever occurred. Instead, the present King Josiah required a political narrative that would unite the Southern Kingdom with the Northern Kingdom (as well as any other scattered tribes) so he could rally against the Assyrians, who presently occupied much of Canaan. The narrative also reinforces the idea that the Southern Kingdom (ie, the one Josiah ruled) was the central and most pious part of the larger Israelite state and of course should rule. Finklestein would likely balk at such a rushed summary, but I think it paints a picture of the purposes of this blog post. Put another way, Josiah likely invented a legendary explanation that was favorable to the geopolitics of his current reign, and did so for political and persuasive reasons.

There are lots, and lots of examples of stuff like this. Some something more digestible, check out The Canaanite Mythology Behind Isaiah 14 . "Isaiah chapter 14, often mistakenly associated with the Devil, contains a fascinating allusion to an ancient Canaanite astral myth as well as references to other elements of Syro-Canaanite mythology. In this video, I explore the oldest known myths that correspond to the fall of Helel, the “Shining One” in Isaiah 14, and how this led to the medieval myth of Lucifer."

Confusion for millennia

This is something that I find partially disheartening and partially comforting. Much of the foundational religious text of western civilization was completely incorrectly interpreted for thousands of years. And I don't mean this as some of conspiracy. I'm not saying "and therefore it's all rotten the core!" I'm saying something else: meaning and interpretation was applied where none existed. People died, wars were fought -- all over a completely incorrect interpretation of an astoundingly vague religious text. Just picture a man in the 1940s studying the bible religiously. (pun intended) He might have been able to quote it, or much of it. But what was he even studying? Effectively, he was studying nothing. He didn't understand what was reading. To the extent that he felt like he understood it, he almost certainly was just leaning on his religious instruction from Church and culture. If he had been like me, and had no religious instruction whatsoever he would have come to radically different conclusions. (and also, just a lot of confusion)

I'm not trying to convince a skeptical audience. I don't think I can do that broadly, and my fairly hasty blog post here is definitely not up to the task. But to the extent that you agree with my general point I think it paints some of our modern misinformation crisis with a different lens. When you take toddlers and put half in red shirts and half in blue shirts, they quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies. Take a completely inscrutable text and you get much the same. If anything, the inscrutability is a feature. If the text had more clear and obvious interpretations, it would not actually serve as an effective identifier of group allegiance. But, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that whatever crazy political ideas you're suffering under currently, you're at least in good company. People do not have a good track record for separating tribalism and facts. There's no reason to think our generation would be any different.