Early Views of Inspiration
We’ve seen some examples where some ancient scribes could be quite free with the texts, even chopping it up, reordering it, and throwing in extra material. What views were lost when we crossed that great bridge to our own time when the inspired word of God is seen as untouchable and untouched, and that to do so would be not only a grave sin, but ultimately ineffective, for God has and does preserve his word? What other evidence do we have regarding ancients’ beliefs regarding the ability to alter the revealed written word inspired by God, so we can better grasp what mindset change occurred? And just how rampant was the idea that one could create new sacred books or even alter old ones?
This article is taken from my book, When Humans Wrote Scripture.
We’ve already seen that the Qumran community did not seem to be bothered by differing textual traditions for about half of the Hebrew biblical books, and that scribes had been quite free with adding material to and reordering their contents. We’ve also seen how certain apocryphal and pseudepigraphic books felt a freedom to rewrite much of the Bible; and these were not the product of a few isolated heretics, but were quite popular, even till today, and were even viewed as authoritative by some of the New Testament writers. What else do we know? We’ll cover several more examples of such alterations to the actual biblical texts throughout this book, some of which are major changes to the very heart of Jewish and Christian religion, to the Torah itself. But following are a few miscellaneous examples of ancient views on inspired texts, which will better help us understand them, and perhaps not anachronistically apply our modern views of inspiration onto these texts and their authors.
Josephus
We’ve mentioned Josephus’ comments that seem to suggest a closing of the canon, and even a count of its books. But he also speaks of other prophets, down to his own day, like the New Testament writers do. So his view of a closed canon, if that’s what it is, does not preclude further revelation, unlike many moderns’ view on the idea.[1] But there are two other ways that Josephus presents his understanding of divine inspiration that are telling. Firstly, he claims on more than one occasion to receive divine inspiration.[2]
But what is perhaps most telling regarding how Josephus views divine revelation is seen in the way that he summarizes the Bible’s contents. He promises at the beginning of his writings to only tell what’s in the Bible, without adding to or taking away from the account.[3] Then he proceeds to present all sorts of details not found in the Bible, such the military exploits of Moses as a general in Africa while he served Pharaoh. When I first read such accounts, I was baffled, and, from my narrow Western perspective, I wondered what sort of Bible Josephus was reading. Later I would come to discover that it wasn’t his Bible that was different, but his way of “reading” it, not in isolation abut along with other expansive documents; Josephus was in fact interpreting the Bible, but expansively, just as other “extra-biblical” writings had done, such as Jubilees.[4] We see then that the ancients had a different way of viewing Scripture, not from just what it said, but what had been written about it in separate works, as “traditions”.[5]
And despite this type of “reading” of Scripture being utterly foreign to the modern mind, a sort of combination of Scripture and tradition has not died out, for Catholics and Jews espouse it freely. And Protestants, even while touting the doctrine of sola scriptura, do in fact have their own traditions that are added to the Bible, not as much in details of its stories[6] like the ancients, but in their interpretation of Scripture’s theological teachings, which, in the Western Christian mind at least since the 4th century, is at the very heart of the very nature of Christianity.[7] Some of these will be highlighted in the chapters that follow, but the development of the nature of the Trinity was one of the earliest collections of “extra-biblical” doctrines, in the Christian era, with which to “read” the Bible. Many of them would be written and studied, and many would be very influential “-isms”, some of which would be named after one of the main leaders who taught them, such as John Calvin, or, to cite one fellow whose teaching lost popularity in later years, Arius.
I would also like to add a little more perspective that might help believers take Josephus a little more seriously. He witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE, one of the most important events of all world history, if you consider the fact that it was critical to the Bible’s storyline, which remains the single most important and influential collection of literature the world has ever seen. The gospels have even Jesus himself predicting that event as part of the culmination of his message while on Earth, and it marked a major shift in biblical religion, both for Jews and what would become Christianity (see later chapters). Even from a late first century perspective, it is no surprise that Josephus saw his writings as sort of a new Jeremiah, who wrote about the first destruction of the Temple in 587 BCE. Josephus even gives us more detail than Jeremiah, both about the destruction of the Temple as well as other salient historical points about his time, such as information about the major religious parties. Josephus, therefore, is important, especially when his details start corresponding to Luke’s.[8] More on this later.
Philo and the Peshers
And I do not believe that Josephus was an aberration, who alone viewed Scripture as readable in this way. We’ve seen ample evidence that many people even in the first century CE believed in prophets, very active demons possessions, and written works that expounded on the Bible, such as Jubilees, which claims divine inspiration. Philo (1st century CE) is another major historian from the first century, and, like Josephus claimed divine inspiration for himself. He used the Septuagint instead of the Hebrew texts. Interestingly, his interpretations pull things from the text that no modern ever would, even much Hellenistic philosophy, yet he claimed to believe in the “Letter of Aristaeus’” prohibition on adding to the biblical documents. And yet he many times drew from “traditions of the fathers”, which were in fact re-writes. This sort of “finding a loophole” for adding to the writings of Moses, despite “not” adding to it, was something that the rabbinic schools were already working towards (though theirs was a different justification), and would establish a precedent for adding rules that would carry all the way into modern Judaism.
Another interesting rework of the Bible are the pesharim of Qumran (ca. 1st century BCE), which are commentaries on the biblical works. They distinguish clearly between the Bible passages which they copy, along with their commentaries on them, much as modern commentaries, or the slightly later midrash of rabbinic commentary. However, they are different from modern commentaries and even the rabbinic ones in one very important detail: they also claimed divine inspiration for their interpretation.[9] The word pesher is found in Daniel 2, and is the word used for divine interpretation, though it was dreams in Daniel that were being interpreted.
Another interesting example of a tradition that literally altered the text of the Bible was the insertion of Adonai for YHVH, meaning “Lord” or “Master”, since at a certain point it became universal practice not to speak the name of God. We actually have ancient Hebrew texts containing this rewrite, and the Septuagint put the Greek word for “Lord” for YHVH, a practice still followed in modern Bible translations. But the most interesting thing perhaps for believers is that the New Testament authors have no problem placing this alteration in the mouth of Jesus himself, who reads it from Isaiah in Luke 4.
In the following chapters, we’ll not only see examples of how the ancients believed that they were free to alter the text, but to also reinterpret the texts, often in obviously contradictory ways to how they were interpreted in the past.
But let’s review a few important points of what we have covered, which are among the most difficult ancient premises for moderns to grasp.
Firstly, the idea of a single, fixed biblical canon disappears if you go back far enough; in fact, during the time that the Bible was being written, with prophets still running around, the idea that a single collection of books was your only connection to the mind of God would have been laughable. It follows then that to speak of certain books as “extra-biblical”, such as the Deuterocanon and the pseudepigrapha, or even some peshers, would be nonsensical to many people of the 2nd and 1st century BCE, and probably even past the first century CE. Even though they believed in false prophets, and that there were uninspired writings that should be rejected, the revealed words of God, like the prophet, could be anywhere, even if they believed certain books, such as the Hebrew Bible’s contents, were special, or even “more special” than other inspired works. Even if they believed in some type of closed canon, as Josephus tends to suggest, that did not prevent more revelation, and this is probably one of the strangest understandings of Scripture for the modern mind to grasp.
These different conceptions of the nature of written divine law will need to be borne in mind as we consider how the Bible developed over time.
We should make one final observation regarding the ancient proclivity for altering and inventing divine texts: it was not dead by the beginning of the Christian era, not by a longshot. We know of dozens of texts produced by Christians in the first couple of centuries after Christ which are not in the Bible, many of which are bald forgeries, usually claiming to be written by one of Jesus’ apostles. In fact, the vast majority of them were pseudepigrapha, as is so well documented in Bart Ehrman’s book Forged, which is quite accessible to the lay reader. Yes, Christians did quite a bit of lying with the pen during this period, and their doctrines were so varied that, in order to use Christianity as unifying force, Constantine called the first council of Nicaea (325 CE) to help hammer out some orthodoxy that everyone could start to agree on. It didn’t stop Christians from continuing to make up stuff, but it did eventually lead to the loss of quite a variety of “heresies” before that time. This unifying shift after that time gives moderns the false impression that all of Christianity has had certain core doctrines since the beginning, such as the Nicene Creed’s version of the Trinity, which both Catholics and Protestants have broad agreement on, even if they differ on some details. Thus most moderns have never known that such radically different views as Marcionism, Arianism, or Gnosticism were once espoused by fairly significant numbers of those who called themselves Christians. But this is a discussion for later. My main point is that Christians that produced, for example, the addition to John of the woman caught in adultery, or the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, were still carrying on this ancient view that saw divine texts as editable or able to be further developed in other books, much as Jubilees had done a few centuries earlier.
Tacking On Material
There is one other evidence regarding additions to ancient writings that should be mentioned here: the way that they would add to scrolls. We’ve already noted how many alterations to Biblical books takes the forms of additions, and rarely removal of material.[10] In later chapters, we’ll consider important internal evidences in the books of the Bible that show that they underwent editing, but here we will look at one very particular, and common, method for adding to the texts of the Bible. As one might imagine, one of the most convenient ways to add to any scroll in the ancient world was simply to write more at the end where there was space, what David Carr calls “revision by extension”.[11]
Several books of the Bible, which moderns don’t typically think of as composite works like the psalms or the longer histories, exhibit obvious additions to them after they come to a sensible conclusion. The sheer number of such additions is interesting. Some of them are a little uncertain, but others are quite blatant.
Proverbs is a particularly interesting case of a book that shows ample evidence that it was added to. The very beginning of the book claims that it is the work of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel, which is still widely believed to be the author of all of Proverbs. But if you look at the beginning of the last chapter, you see that it is attributed to King Lemuel. Back up one more chapter, and you see that it is ascribed to Agur son of Jakeh. Back up all the way to chapter 25, and you see that it too begins another section, this time ascribed to Solomon, but copied by Hezekiah’s scribes. In this section, you can find repeated proverbs from the first section of the book, as we’ll consider in the next chapter. However, I would suggest going back one more chapter to finally find the beginning of evidence of material that was added to the book.[12] In 24:23, there is perhaps one of the earliest signs of a seam in the material, which simply states “these also are sayings of the wise.”
The last chapter of Jeremiah is likewise an obvious addition, coming straight from I Kings, 24:18-25:30. The chapter before, 51, was a perfectly sensible conclusion to the end of the oracles against the nations, and actually concludes with the quite explicit statement “thus far are the words of Jeremiah.”
As noted in footnote 158, there are major seems in Isaiah that suggest that massive amounts of material were added to it, not just a final chapter.
Judges ends its narrative of the judges of Israel in chapter 16. However, there are two additional stories after this, each marked off by the expressions “in those days there was no king in Israel.” I used to think that this was the theme of the whole book, but scholars have long noted an anti-monarchical vein throughout the first part of the book, and a looking forward to the monarch in the latter portion. This tension continues into Samuel. But the transition point, to the careful reader, appears to be here, between chapters 16 and 17 of Judges.
After the largely chronological narrative of 2 Samuel, the story ends with the account of the rebellion of Sheba in chapter 20. Following this are some poetry and lists, along with some accounts that appear to have happened earlier in David’s career, until the last chapter, 24, seems to bring us back to events that 1 Chronicles agrees seems to have occurred near the end of David’s life, except that chapter 23 oddly enough already recorded his last words.
Daniel is a particularly interesting case of a book with a major seam. It is split into two very different sections. The first six chapters are in the third person, and are stories about the experiences of Daniel, with a couple of stories also including his three friends; it is written mostly in Aramaic. The second half of Daniel, chapters 7 through 12, is written in mostly Hebrew and the first person, with details regarding his various visions. The two sections are nearly as different as you could imagine, except that they have a similar overall theme: God is sovereign. Except the first half of Daniel views God’s reign mostly as present: even though his people are in exile: he is still pulling the strings of the emperors that rule over them. The second half of the book, on the other hand, though it still sees God as in control, speaks of cosmic forces that are in play, currently fighting battles on God’s behalf; perhaps even more amazing is the apocalyptic view of the second half, which foresees a day when God’s earthly kingdom will finally overwhelm and rule over all other nations—but not yet. There are two other interesting observations we can make about this break in the middle of Daniel. Firstly, it has been observed that Daniel seems to have a double chiastic[13] structure,[14] with one chiasm in the first half, followed by a second; and those two chiasms seem to parallel each other as well, in some ways. However, the first chiasm bleeds into the second half, into Daniel 7. Similarly, the Aramaic portion of Daniel actually runs from 2:4 to 7:28. In other words, each section’s introduction, sort of, is in the main language of the other section, sort of a linguistic yin and yang, if you will.
Addendums in the Torah?
Perhaps more of concern to some fundamentalists, even the Torah shows similar signs of revision by extension.
Numbers comes to a sensible conclusion of its narrative in chapter 32, with the settlement of Reuben and Gad in Gilead. It might be argued that chapter 33 was part of the original book, as it covers all the places they camped in their entire wilderness wanderings, although it is definitely a transition in the text. If so, it ends with a fairly logical conclusion, a warning for the children of Israel to be sure they drive out all the inhabitants of the land when they cross over the Jordan into it. Chapter 34 sees another shift in the text, but this time we are receiving instructions regarding how they are to divide the land, which is logical enough. However, the next few chapters become more and more tangential to the theme of the whole book, and more in line with material that will be found in Deuteronomy. Chapter 35 covers the rules concerning the allotment of cities to the Levites, and the appointment of Levitical cities of refuge and their purpose; again, this is still connected to the topics of the book, but more miscellaneous. Finally chapter 36 appears to be the most miscellaneous rules of all, repeating the rules concerning female heirs.
The apparent end of Leviticus seems more certain as an addition. The book comes to a perfectly sensible conclusion in chapter 26, and ends with what appears to be the concluding statement that the preceding laws were revealed to Moses at Sinai. However, chapter 27 then proports to be a speech of Moses outlining laws concerning vows. In order to give them the same legitimacy as the laws that came before the previous and obvious conclusion, the author is forced to repeat the conclusion of chapter 26 in 27:34. To read more, make sure to check out my book When Humans Wrote Scripture.
[1] Of course the Catholic church has a similar idea, but I will focus on Protestant ideas, since they are the most restrictive of the modern views of inspiration.
[2] E.g., Jewish Wars, 3.392-408
[3] Antiquities of the Jews, 1.17
[4] If you’re wondering where Josephus got this particular account of Moses’ generalship, we find a similar account in Eusebius of Caesarea, who quoted from another work, Concerning the Jews, which is no longer extant. Scholars have reasoned, however, that since Josephus’ account contains other details that both these accounts actually came from yet another more ancient source, which has also been lost. (“Evidence of Moses’s ‘Conquest of Ethiopia’?”, by Christopher Eames, Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology.)
[5] Naturally, it’s more complicated than this short explanation. But if you’re curious how such a transition of “reading into” the text could even begin, I recommend the works of James Kugel on ancient biblical interpretation, especially How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.
[6] Protestants do in fact have some traditions that add interpretively to the narratives of the Bible. And they’re not just seemingly minor additions to narratives such as the detail that there were three wise men. The later extensive teachings on the Trinity are a great example of this, as examined in chapter 8 below.
[7] If you’re not familiar with the shift from the ancient Hebrew focus on orthopraxy (i.e., correct actions) to the later Christian focus on orthodoxy (i.e., correct belief), we’ll come back to this later.
[8] It may be argued that Josephus gets things wrong, and therefore cannot be trusted. However, this is an argument that could only be made by someone who does not understand how history works. We would have no written history left if we had to throw out all writings by that standard.
[9] E.g., Pesher Habakkuk, 1 QpHab VII, 1-8. See “Early Nonrabbinic Interpretation”, The Jewish Study Bible.
[10] The Formation of the Hebrew Bible, by David Carr, ch. 3. Rare exceptions of scribal omission typically occur when they are trying to harmonize their sources. Frequent omission of narrative detail when combining accounts, Carr argues, should not be counted as a significant removal of material, for various reasons.
[11] “What Ancient Scrolls Teach Us about the Torah’s Formation,” The Torah.com.
[12] There is actually an earlier seam, when the father’s exhortations to his son to be wise switch to general aphorisms after chapter 9, but I would not dogmatically claim that a single author could not make such a shift.
[13] A Chiasm, also known as ring structure or chiasmus, has successive parallel elements, with the first being parallel to the last, the second being parallel to the penultimate, etc. I plan to go into more depth in later books on this topic, as the Bible has many chiasms. A chiasm can have two parallel inner elements (when there is an even number), or one lone central element, which is often the main theme of that the other elements build/ascend to. Some chiasms are only a few lines long, while others are spread over entire books.
[14] The Key Role of Daniel 7, by Richard Patterson, “Grace Theological Journal 12.2 (1991) pp. 245-261.