How To Read the Old Testament - Part 4 - Michael Brown
Strangers In A Strange Land
I can still remember the first time I visited India. I was just 11 years old, and the experience was quite overwhelming.
I had been lucky enough to travel quite a bit in my young life up till that point to places like France, Italy and the USA. But, whilst all these countries have their differences from the UK, they are all to a certain extent familiar territory. There is a shared western, European heritage that makes a visit to Florida, Paris and Rome easier. India was not like this.
"My young mind was blown away by the foreign sights, sounds, smells and practices of the place."
My young mind was blown away by the foreign sights, sounds, smells and practices of the place. I found it exhilarating and, on the many trips I have made there since, that pronounced difference in culture has remained so.
Now I was safe in this strange land because I was with my parents, who knew (mostly) what they were doing, and with Indian friends of the family who could guide us through. But I imagine that if my first time there had been on my own then I may have had a very different experience.
I may have found the barrage of sights, sounds and smells overwhelming, I may have accidentally broken all kinds of social rules, I may have misinterpreted or misunderstood the world around me in all kinds of ways.
Being a stranger in a strange land can be exhilarating but it can also be confusing, or scary or just downright hard. Sometime reading the Old Testament can feel a lot like this.
"The culture in which a book is written dictates a lot of how that book is written."
The culture in which a book is written dictates a lot of how that book is written. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is clearly written in 19th century Britain. It carries all the cultural hallmarks of that time and place, in the way the characters speak, the choices they make, the social mores at play. It only really makes sense as a story within that set of cultural expectations.
Oliver Twist is less than 200 hundred years old, and set in London, so whilst some elements are very culturally foreign to us like the realities of the workhouse, it is still culturally close enough to our current experience for us to understand it well.
But the Old Testament is very culturally removed indeed. This is a set of texts written roughly 3000 years ago and written by a people whose whole world operated in very different ways to ours.
Large parts of the text are about people living a nomadic, tent-based lifestyle and then the rest of the time is a stent-based also tribally divided state. Their economy was largely agrarian and their government ranging between theocratic and absolutist monarchy. Their society functioned according to an honour/shame hierarchical system, and their religious life was highly structured around a series of precise and symbolically rich rituals and feasts.
A large amount of their writings draw upon the cultural soup of the nations and empires around them, both as polemic against these other nations but also as a source of familiar and understandable imagery and symbolism.
"The imagery that would seem common in Ancient Egypt or Babylon is not common in 21st century London. And so, sometimes we miss stuff, or we misinterpret stuff."
But the imagery that would seem common in Ancient Egypt or Babylon is not common in 21st century London. And so, sometimes we miss stuff, or we misinterpret stuff.
Here's an example. The accounts of the conquest of Canaan found primarily in the book of Joshua can be some of the most troubling in the Bible for modern readers.
Take Joshua 10:39-36 for example; ‘Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.’
To read of God’s people committing what appears to be a genocide at God’s command is horrifying and can make us question all kinds of things about God and about the Bible. And this is far from the only passage of this kind in Joshua and elsewhere.
However, when we read on we find something puzzling later in Joshua and later in the Biblical text. Take Hebron for instance that was mentioned in that passage. It seems from chapter 10 that it has been completely annihilated, and all its occupants wiped out.
But in chapter 15 we find it once again occupied by Canaanites. And this is not an isolated issue, there are all kinds of cities and tribes that seem to be wiped out in the conquest, but which later appear in Judges or Samuel, still living in the land alongside the Israelites. So, what is happening here?
"To understand this, we need to know the conventions of the time when it came to announcing military victories and conquests."
To understand this, we need to know the conventions of the time when it came to announcing military victories and conquests. And what we find when we look at the other cultures of the time and region is that the common practice was to use hyperbole and language of annihilation that was never intended to be taken literally.
Let’s look at some examples. The Merneptah Stele is an inscribed, Egyptian announcement of military conquest and is also the earliest known reference to Israel, dated to the late 1200’s BC. Here is a section of its text:
‘The princes are prostrate, saying: “Mercy!” Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows. Desolation is for Tehenu; Hatti is pacified; Plundered is the Canaan with every evil; Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer; Yanoam is made as that which does not exist; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not; Hurru is become a widow for Egypt! All lands together, they are pacified; Everyone who was restless, he has been bound by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.’
This seems to indicate to us that Israel was completely and utterly destroyed. But we know that obviously it was not and other Egyptian texts from after show that they know that Israel was not.
From even earlier we have the writings of the Hittite king Mursili the 2nd who wrote: ‘I made Mt. Asharpaya empty (of humanity). I made the mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity).’
Again, more annihilation language, that we know from other Hittite records was not actually an annihilation, simply a military victory. In another example the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses the 3rd talks of turning the entirety of the Philistines to ash and making them non-existent as a people but then just a couple of lines later he talks about how he hired them as mercenaries and settled them in these lands.
"That’s not an embarrassing textual error on his part; he’s just using a common writing convention of the time."
That’s not an embarrassing textual error on his part; he’s just using a common writing convention of the time. And this kind of hyperbole around warfare doesn’t just apply to matters on annihilation.
The Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser the 1st boasts of conquering a huge swathe of the Middle East, from the Euphrates all the way to the border of what is now Syria and Turkey, and he says he did it all in one day. Now the Assyrians did conquer all that territory, but it certainly didn’t happen all in one day. It is hyperbole.
Now armed with this knowledge of the culture of the ancient near east we can make better sense of these seeming inconsistences that we find in books like Joshua. We cannot know for certain of course but the most common-sense interpretation is that the Bible is using this same writing technique that we find across the region at that time.
"If you want to understand an ancient book, arm yourself with knowledge of the world it was written in."
So, try to arm yourself with this kind of information. If you want to understand an ancient book, arm yourself with knowledge of the world it was written in.
1. Perhaps invest in a Bible Dictionary like these: IVP Bible Dictionaries (8 book series)
2. Read the passage using different translations, often they will draw out different cultural ideas.
3. Make use of quality web resources like this: Biblical Historical Context
2. Read the passage using different translations, often they will draw out different cultural ideas.
3. Make use of quality web resources like this: Biblical Historical Context
Next time we will be looking at reading understanding passages within the context of the rest of the Bible.
Read the other blogs in this series here:
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