How to Read the Bible III

A Guide for the Perplexed

In the last entry, we charted the general outline of the two main traditions of biblical interpretation. When Jews read it, the Bible is an anthology of texts from Ancient Israel and, especially, Ancient Judah, which were reworked by Judean scribes, codified by Jewish communities and intellectuals, and led to the formation of Judaism as a legal system of ritual, ethical, and judicial life. And so, when Jews read the Bible, they are primarily reading the Torah as an authoritative source of norms, the primary literary and oracular authority for the community, and the Prophets and the Writings as interpretive commentary on the meaning of the Torah, whose authority is in some sense borrowed and subsidiary. Their concerns are overwhelmingly how to live Jewishly in the world, rather than to establish either an authoritative metanarrative of all of human history or a comprehensive, dogmatic metaphysics. This is why Jews can be mapped across such a vast theological and philosophical spectrum, usually without any threat to the authenticity of their Jewishness.

When Christians read it, conversely, the Bible is a sprawling metanarrative that stretches from the beginning to the end of time and eventuates in the consummation of world history through Christ, the Spirit, and the Christian Church at a coming Last Judgment and New Creation. It is a source not only for norms—which Christians, in their reading habits, often overlook, ignore, or reinterpret, whenever they do encounter them in biblical texts, frequently dismissing them in favor of other moral logics—but also of all different kinds of truth, including scientific, historical, and metaphysical truth. Indeed, for most of Christian history, Christians have read the Bible more as a depositum fidei, a “deposit of faith,” than as a halakhic guidebook. The dominant position in Christian history has even been that one cannot and should not take the Bible’s moral advice fully literally and implement it in a real lifestyle, unless one wishes to become a monastic (and even then, monks have been plenty willing to ignore biblical norms when it suits them). When the Bible has been weaponized by Christians to pursue a particular moral vision in wider society, the reading strategy has rarely been consistent, and typically ignores rather than reasoning through diverse perspectives in the scriptural polyphony.

So which of these readings is “right?”