For many fundamentalists, the idea of “plenary”, completeness, does not just mean that we have all the revelation that we need. It also means that all Scripture is inspired. In other words, there is nothing in Scripture that is not inspired. All of Scripture is therefore messages from God. There are some people who would consider themselves fundamentalists who do not subscribe to this view; they’d have no problem saying that when the author of 2 Timothy 4 requested that they bring his cloak and parchments, it was just him speaking, not divine revelation. Such an idea, however, would terrify some fundamentalists as a slippery slope: after all, if some of the Bible was not inspired, how are we to know which is which? Wouldn’t that lead to people picking and choosing whatever they want to believe? Of course, this is not our line of inquiry here, but this is a good place to point out that whether a document contains inspired content is not dependent on anyone’s fears. Such is the nature of specious, dogmatist reasoning. Maybe high horses need slippery slopes.
The funny thing about this debate is that writings of Paul should put it to rest. He explicitly steps out of the authoritative prophetic voice to give his own opinion. In 1 Corinthians 7:26 and 40, he says “I think”, due to the “present distress”, it would be better for people not to marry, but that it was not a command from God. Then he says “I think I too have the Spirit of God” regarding his opinion. You think, Paul? A fundamentalist may say that Paul here is actually showing that God is giving this advice. Okay, let’s look at verse 12 then. He gives an opinion, then explicitly state that it’s not a command from God, and it’s regarding a brother not divorcing an unbelieving wife! (See chapter 3 on the various teachings regarding divorce.) And in one of my favorite diatribes of Paul, he states more than once that he is speaking as a fool; he explicitly says that what he’s saying is not from God! His sarcasm is really quite amusing.[1]
Unfortunately, not all the content of the Bible that is difficult to fit into the rest has explicit comments about whether it is inspired.
Wisdom Literature
There is at least one genre of literature that seems quite odd to include as inspired when compared to other genres found in the Bible. Most books of the Bible, even if they don’t claim inspiration and their contents are quite different, fit quite well into the Yahwistic narratives, patterns, and even styles of revelation. There are stories that fit biblical patterns, such as those found in Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Esther, and many more, which all depict the many beautiful themes of the Bible, such as redemption. There are prophets who exhort the people within that pattern and the Law of Moses, such as Amos, Joel, and Haggai. Even the book of Job, which is not within the context of the Mosaic law, still has the same Yahweh we know from the other books of the Bible, in the same context as the patriarchs of Genesis who also were not under the Mosaic covenant.[2] But there are a few books, and even an entire genre, that can seem to clash with these other books, and the nature of their revelation. It has long been debated whether the Song of Songs, a quite graphically erotic love poem, belongs in the Bible; it does mention Solomon, but there are no references to the covenant or any other major themes, unless one takes it quite allegorically, being about God’s relationship with his people, which seems to be the main argument for its inclusion, along with the tradition that Solomon wrote it.
But the two books that really seem to clash with the “voice” of much of the rest of the Bible, also known as wisdom literature, are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.[3] Wisdom literature was a common genre in the ancient Near East; that’s not what seems so odd about these two works. What’s odd, compared to most of the rest of the Bible, is the way they dispense this wisdom, and the nature of it.
In the Torah and the other the prophets, the law is given by divine authority, often without explanation as to why it is pleasing to God, as discussed above. In Proverbs, on the other hand, we see a bunch of aphorisms, many of which do not seem to be appealing to divine revelation for their authority, but to reason or wisdom, even to a female personification of Wisdom who was with God in the beginning, much like John 1’s divine Logos;[4] they are often like reading the Tao Te Ching and other Eastern wisdom literature. The author of Sirach (c. 175 BCE) and the community at Qumran would probably be uncomfortable with this, and so they explicitly tie wisdom to the Torah, during a period when Greek ideas of laws were greatly influencing the Jews and their concepts of divine law.[5] Although most fundamentalists I’ve encountered believe the tradition that Solomon wrote Proverbs, the two last chapters are blatant additions. More on this below.
A few examples will help illustrate the point. A few of the proverbs seem to go really well with the Torah, such as “fools mock at the guilt offering, but the righteous are favored”;[6] most however do not say anything about following YHVH’s law, nor do they appeal to his revelation for instruction. Many of the Proverbs are simply good advice, like admonitions not be lazy or to chase after wealth, or to not overstay your welcome at your neighbor’s house.[7] Okay, these might arguably fit into the type of people YHVH wants his children to be, even if the law says nothing about them explicitly. Perhaps they would be viewed as logical extensions but not necessarily sinful additions to Moses.[8] But some of the proverbs seem to fit in much less. For example, 27:14 says that whoever greets or blesses his neighbor early in the morning will have it counted as a curse. Now I like my quiet early in the morning probably more than most people, so I agree with this proverb, but how does such good advice fit it in with divine revelation and commands like those found in, say, the Torah? A few more good examples like this should illustrate the point. The author(s) seems to really have an issue with an argumentative wife, who is like a continual dripping of a leaky roof; it would be better to live in the corner on the roof or the dessert than to share a house with her.[9] A few proverbs even seem to contradict the law of Moses and other Proverbs, such as the ones that seem to suggest bribery as a good thing.[10] Some Proverbs speak of depending on the wise for counsel, while others suggest leaning on YHVH.[11]
Ecclesiastes also dispenses wisdom from the perspective of reason, and even seems to directly contradict the rest of Scripture, stating that there is no justice,[12] and that there is no life after this. The reason for its inclusion in the canon, like Song of Solomon, appears to be the tradition that Solomon wrote it. Scholars often observe that the only comment in Ecclesiastes that would even remotely resemble the rest of Scripture comes at the very end, stating that man’s purpose is to serve God, and that there will be justice; they therefore believe it to be an insertion, especially since the rest of the book seems to be saying the opposite. However, there are actually several more comments throughout the book that look to YHVH and his law, despite that most of the book does not.[13] Of course, it’s possible that the apologists are right, and that the author is making the point that human reason fails us, whether we seek purpose in pleasure or work during our short lives, and that justice only comes at the end. But if this is so, you really do only get a clear indication of it at the very end.
Paraphrase
In the next couple of chapters, we’ll look at some possible examples of paraphrases in the Bible. My guess is that most fundamentalists would not have a problem with accepting that certain portions of the Bible were paraphrased (see issues with the dictation theory above), and would not see it as a negation of the idea of plenary inspiration. After all, we use it when delivering messages for people all the time, and no one considers it dishonest. If Bob tells me to “tell Joe I want a coke”, and I tell Joe “Bob says he wants a coke”, I have paraphrased just by switching to the third person. But no one would call that dishonest.
I only bring up paraphrase, once again, to point out that it is counterintuitive when presented with the idea that a god would deliver a message to man. After all, wouldn’t that be a verbatim delivery? Well, no, not in the case of the Bible. There is simply too much evidence that many of its books could not have been delivered in one piece, word for word. For one thing, we would never see the writing styles of various authors coming through if that’s the way revelation was given. Mark has a very concise style, for instance; some scholars have called it unpolished, but I wonder if they are imposing modern views of what constitutes aesthetic writing. Paul loves developing ideas by exploring dichotomies. And speaking of style and paraphrase, has anyone ever argued that Job and his friends literally would have spoken in poetic verses for hours on end?
One of the most obvious examples of paraphrase is when the New Testament quote the Hebrew bible in Greek. Translation is often paraphrase by its very nature; if not, then it often ends up being a horrific and bad translation. I’ve noticed that people who have never learned a second language often do not understand this, and it’s even worse among some fundamentalists, who think the only good translation is always the one that is most “literal”. So here’s a brief illustration of why “literal” does not often equate to good translation.[14]
If I want to translate the Spanish expression me lavo los dientes into English, I would say “I’m brushing my teeth,” which is exactly the way it would be said in English. If I say “me wash the teeth”, I have done a poor job of communicating, which is the purpose of language. You can argue whether so-called functional equivalence, dynamic equivalence, close natural equivalence, or formal equivalence are the best methods of translation, but at the end of the day, the question is, did you express the idea well?
And sometimes, horror of horrors, there is no one best way. In some cases, if you translate an expression one way, you get some meaning of the original, but not all; by translating another way to get some other meaning contained in the original, you might give up some other meaning. This happens when, for instance, a word has and is used for more than one meaning in the original language, but there is no equivalent word that carries both meanings in the language to which it is being translated. There are often wordplays in the Bible which are difficult or impossible to capture in translation because of this language barrier; for instance, tiskah[15] means “to forget” or “to be paralyzed”, and it is used both ways in Psalm 137:5; some translations try to keep the same word by adding the words “its skill”, which are not present in the Hebrew: “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget [its skill]!” In Song of Songs 2:12, the first line is about flowers, the third line is about birds singing; the consonantal middle word in the middle line can mean both pruning (the flowers) and singing (birds);[16] translators typically pick “singing”. Some loss of meaning is inevitable in any translation of significant length.
Sometimes, there is no word you can translate something to, as we saw with urim and thumim, Azazel, and Nephilim.
Sometimes translating a word literally can give an exactly wrong impression, and sometimes this cannot even be avoided. Translations call Isaac Abraham’s “only” son,[17] yet if you read the Hebrew Bible, you find out that Abraham had many other sons, and Isaac was not even the first. I have literally seen people who have been fundamentalist Christians for decades puzzle over this “apparent contradiction” because they did not possess the “literary literacy” to see beyond the mere dictionary definition of words. The concept of monogene (in Greek) or peter or bekor[18] (in Hebrew) cannot be expressed by a single word in English, unless it’s only referring to the firstborn, but the ancients would have understood exactly what it meant, when they read such passages as “the firstborn of death devours his limbs” or “I will make him my firstborn”.[19] And if you think that the prepositional phrase “him of the primogeniture” would work as a translation, not only have you butchered the translation, but almost no one today would even know what that means. The Virginia assembly abolished the law of primogeniture in 1785, and British Parliament did so in 1925, well outside of the present generation’s memory; and if you think that monogene is only or even secondarily about inheritance rights, you’ve totally missed the point of narratives from Abraham to Jesus.
If you don’t understand why I keep harping on the seemingly obvious point that the purpose of language is communication, then you’ve probably never read modern Christian apologetic literature and its often strange hermeneutics. For the next section on corruptions in biblical manuscripts, make sure to check out my book here: When Humans Wrote Scripture.
[1] 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:11
[2] See chapter 3 for a more thorough examination of whether and how much there was a transition when the Mosaic law came along.
[3] Job is also wisdom literature, but, as we’ve seen, it fits in better with the rest of the canon, although it certainly has its differences, sometimes even agreeing with Ecclesiastes.
[4] See footnote 28 in chapter 1.
[5] Find a fascinating as well as extremely detailed discussion of this in What’s So Divine About Divine Law, by Christine Hayes, ch. 3.
[6] 14:9
[7] E.g., 13:4; 14:23; 25:17.
[8] See chapter 4 and 5.
[9] 27:15-16; 21:9, 19.
[10] 17:8; 21:14. Compare Deuteronomy 16:18-20; Proverbs 17:23, the same chapter as verse 8.
[11] 15:22 vs. 19:21.
[12] To be fair to fundamentalism, some of the Psalms say the exact same thing, yet in the context of the Yahwistic tradition. My favorite is psalm 43, which cries for a justice that has even been denied without cause.
[13] E.g., 2:26; 3:9-15
[14] I believe one of the thesaurus entries for “monolingual” should be “American.”
[15] Strong’s 7911
[16] Compare Strong’s 2168 and 2158. Recall that originally Hebrew was written without any indication of vowel sounds.
[17] Hebrews 11:17
[18] Strong’s 3439, 6363 and 1060
[19] Job 18:13; Psalm 89:27.