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(More customer reviews)George E. Mendenhall is one of the "titans" of twentieth-century biblical scholarship. His researches have revolutionized our knowledge of the origins of the ancient historical phenomenon known as Israel. He maintains that Israel was the consequence of two principal historical factors: the first was the widespread self-destruction of the great Near-Eastern empires/civilizations at the end of the Late Bronze Age; the second was a radically new religious vision of how a humanly tolerable society can come into being even in a world wracked by the insanely violent machinations of the crumbling empires that brought about human suffering and death on vast scales. The historical Moses saw the divine as One and not as the plurality of pagan deities (who represented the powers with which man must contend for survival but which he can neither predict nor control); and that the will of this One for mankind lies in the ethical dimension of human life and not at all on the plane of power, sex, and wealth -- that, in other words, this One represents the utter repudiation of the religio-political systems of pagan antiquity and their replacement by devotion and commitment to ethic -- to love -- rather than power and its concomitants.
Mendenhall saw that earliest Israel was brought into existence by Moses' religious vision, expressed through an analogy between an ancient political-legal form and a novel religious-ethical commitment. This form -- the covenant or suzerainty treaty -- was employed to represent the proposed relation, disclosed in the terrifying theophany at Sinai, between the One called Yahweh and the little band of "Hebrews" only recently escaped from corveé labor in Egypt. The analogy replaces political-legal concepts with religious-ethical ones.
Mendenhall elaborated his analysis of the "covenant form" in relation to earliest Israel in a series of scholarly papers and monographs, starting in the mid-twentieth century, which made use of legal, political, cultural and linguistic history and insights from archaeology, sociology and anthropology. A mature, scholarly version of some of his key theses was presented in The Tenth Generation: the Origins of the Biblical Tradition [TG] (1973), which, fortunately, is still in print. He laid out a beautiful conspectus of the entire sweep of Israel's history (with revealing commentary on much of the biblical literature occasioned by that history), intended for general readership, in Ancient Israel's Faith and History: An Introduction to the Bible in Context [AIFH] (2001). Now, in his 90th year, Mendenhall gives us Our Misunderstood Bible [OMB].
Throughout his long career he has concerned himself to engage, not only the scholarly world, but also those who are not scholars specializing in his fields of expertise. He has done this in the settings of classroom and seminar, of course, but also in informal talks and study sessions with small groups of religiously committed folk. Material from these informal sessions was collected, organized, and edited to produce the afore-mentioned AIFH. The emphasis in Mendenhall's presentations has always been the centrality of covenant as a functioning social reality (and not merely a theological-literary-notional one) and its fate from inception at Sinai throughout the subsequent tumultuous history of Israel -- from the Twelve Tribe Federation to the birth of the early Church. The interested reader might consult AIFH, pp. 57ff, for a discussion of the covenant as way-of-life in ancient Israel.
Informing Mendenhall's analyses is a fundamental realization, woefully unappreciated by most biblical scholars: that the most authentic embodiment of Israel's covenant-faith was in the community life of the hundreds of little agricultural villages that formed the indispensable substrate of Israelite society from the earliest times on. The villages preserved the covenant faith of Moses for centuries even in its most archaic features; it was from the villages that many of the prophets hailed; nor can Christians forget tiny Nazareth, their Master's boyhood village. Moreover, the villages' conservatism insulated the representation of their shared religious faith in oral tradition from the incessant flux of linguistic change characteristic of the larger urban units, especially those with concentrations of literate "knowledge elites" such as Jerusalem with its large cohort of bureaucrats and scribes.
Yet the Hebrew Scriptures as they have existed since several centuries before the time of Jesus are necessarily the work of precisely these scribes. The transformation of oral traditions into sacred texts was thus the work of ancient urban scholars to whom -- despite their putative zeal for fidelity to tradition -- the language, ideas, customs, and events of the remote past had to a significant degree become unintelligible. And how much more is this apt to be the case when, in much later times, scholars in quite alien cultural environments translate biblical Hebrew into modern languages!
It was therefore virtually inevitable that the text of the Old Testament as we have it today, whether in Hebrew or in translation, should contain a good many mystifying passages and moreover passages that merely seem clear; and there is a parallel situation with respect to the New Testament. It is surely one of the concerns of the biblical scholar to clarify these passages when it is still possible to do so.
This is what Mendenhall does in OMB. In 20 extremely short chapters he addresses the following:
Why did Noah's ark land on Mount Ararat? (Genesis 8:4)
Why did the sun and moon stand still? (Joshua 10:12)
Who were the "Hebrews?" (I Samuel 28:3)
What did people do when they "worshiped?" (Exodus 12:27)
Why did "a virgin conceive?" (Isaiah 7:14, 16)
Why did God create the earth in seven days? (Genesis 2:2)
Why do "goodness and mercy persecute us?" (Psalm 23:6)
Why do children suffer for the sins of their fathers?
(Exodus 20:5)
Why they are not ten "commandments." (Deuteronomy 4:13)
Why are we asked to "do this in remembrance" of Jesus? (I
Corinthians 11:23-25)
Why are we called "children of God?" (John 1:12)
Why should we hate father and mother? (Luke 14:26, Psalm
139:21-22)
Why should we "walk humbly" with God? (Micah 6:8)
Why not "an eye for an eye?" (Exodus 21:23-24, Matthew 5:3)
Why did 603,550 men of war leave Egypt with Moses? (Numbers
1:46, 2:32)
Why did Moses marry a black African woman? (Numbers 12:1)
Why did Abraham have two names? (Genesis 17:5)
Who were the ancestors of Jerusalem? (Ezekiel 16:3)
Who was "God Almighty?" (Exodus 6:3)
What is bad about worshiping groves? (Judges 3:7)
The little book concludes with a short "summing up."
Although the Mosaic covenant (and its historical background) runs as a "sub-text" through OMB, the book pursues no explicit unifying theological theme; rather, its short chapters constitute an engrossing collection of "scholar's notes" on biblical texts that have puzzled laymen and clergy - or that have not puzzled them but should have.
Each chapter fascinates in its own way. I found the explanation of "do this in remembrance of me" to have the most startling relevance to Christians' understanding of that central element of their worship, the Eucharist. "Remembrance" in Mendenhall's elucidation has a significance quite different from that latterly accorded the word in the conventional theologies of all branches of Christianity: namely it is an oath of loyalty (a sacramentum) to the Master and His Way. This significance partakes of the nature of the ancient Mosaic covenant, in which the believer conditionally curses himself, and explains why participation in the Eucharist was both central to the life of the earliest Christians and treated by them as a matter of utmost -- even potentially lethal -- seriousness.
Neither the much-reviled "fundamentalists" nor the somewhat less notorious "minimalists" will find Mendenhall's clarifications particularly congenial, I fear. This is for two reasons, both of them summarized in the word history. The minimalists will be put off by his insistence that the biblical texts are products of the actual historical experience of Israel, a religious-social (and only later, ethnic-political) phenomenon that arose in the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age -- not merely propagandistic scribal fictions from the Hellenistic-Roman periods. The fundamentalists will perhaps resent his treatment of the texts as products of the historical experience of Israel and not merely as a collection of divinely-dictated "proof-texts" for their favorite doctrines.
But for those committed to taking the Bible seriously on its own terms, OMB is welcome assistance from a great scholar, and an invitation to the treasures of TG and AIFH.
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Our Misunderstood Bible is a selection of some of the most interesting and abused passages, and an examination of how they came to be and how they evolved over time.
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