We’re now a quarter of the way through this series, and we’re still thinking about the history of the Bible, that’s because it’s important to understand the very human processes that went in to the development of the book we have today. We ended last week in about 444 BCE, when Ezra and Nehemiah, a prophet and court official respectively, had returned from exile in Babylon to teach the Judeans the law, and to rebuild the temple. But Ezra was not simply re-reading a set of stone tablets, he was bringing something new to the people of Israel, so new that those hearing it at first wept in fear.
With each new voice that emerges in what we now call the Old Testament, a new perspective gets an airing, such that the books now contain a range of divergent voices, in particular there are the conservative voices, and those that represent the ‘revolutionary’ inclusive ideology of the early Hebrews: these two are not easy bed-fellows. This tension has caused some readers to try some interpretative gymnastics to reconcile ideas and approaches which are at times wildly at odds with each other – trying to create a more ‘cohesive’ narrative. It has also caused others to try and justify the belligerence of those voices which are full of hatred and warlike ferocity, while others contend that we should ‘love our neighbours’.
Not only are ideas in conflict, so are whole approaches to life. The ‘Wisdom literature’ of the Old Testament, for example, is of a different order to the kind of legislative thoughts laid out in parts of the Torah. The writers of this material aligned themselves with the great name symbolic of wisdom, Solomon. Their writings about the subject of Hokhmah (Wisdom of life) form a separate thread in the complex plait of the Old Testament, not law, not history, not prophecy, and not poetry as such, but wisdom. The reason these jarringly different approaches can coexist, is that each of these voices had its own special place in the life and story of the community. What was being built was not a simple book, but a set of ‘scriptures’, each with its own set of voices and concerns, its own context and application.
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