At Qumran, a place nearby the caves the dead sea scrolls were discovered in, a collection of texts known as the Jubilees had authority and was popular. This text was originally written in Hebrew, and has been well preserved by the Abyssinian Orthodox Church.  The text was however not adopted in to the canon by Judaism or Christianity. This is odd as the text claims divine authority, and obviously held some scriptural authority in its time.

    Crawford claims that this text is to be considered a rewritten scripture, or a scripture intended to present an interpretation. While arguing against Satlow's claims that scribes altered scripture. If the Jubilee text is to be considered rewritten, than why does it offer more details than the versions of the stories that made it in to the cannon? Why would a text that was meant to be read along with the Pentateuch and Torah with out replacing them, have so many more details than the stories that were preserved and read today in the Bible? I don't know how to understand these differences with out assuming that details were added along the way or (a better explanation) that the Jubilees  are older than the versions of the same stories that made it in to the cannon. If this were true then it would make sense that there are more details such as the specific name of the peak that Noah's ark landed, and the stories of the nine extra sons that Eve gave birth in the Jubilees than in the canonical version.

Tension Between Text and Tradition in the Book of Jubilees

The book of Jubilees is predominantly considered non-canonical in current times, but its strategic rewriting of the Genesis narrative provides insight into the motives and beliefs of the book’s composer. An observation I found particularly striking in Sidnie White Crawford’s Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times discussed Jubilee’s treatment of Israel’s ancestors, especially the Tribe of Levi, to make them appear more authoritative. Crawford’s analysis of this tendency seems to reaffirm Michael Satlow’s assertion in How the Bible Became Holy that the practices of early Jews were based more on tradition than on text and yet to indicate a movement by some toward giving texts greater authority to scriptural texts.

Crawford remarks that “Levi is hardly an important figure in Genesis,” making his appointment as the head of the priestly tribe seem somewhat strange and unprecedented (75). The writer of Jubilees therefore endeavors to explain the significance of Levi and grant him greater authority. Levi only makes a significant appearance in Genesis “with his brother Simeon to avenge the defilement of their sister,” so in Jubilees this story is emphasized, and particular praise is applied to Levi’s actions (76). Furthermore, Jubilees asserts that the priestly line of Levi has been the “keeper of a scribal tradition that emphasizes the study and observance of the law and the preservation of the tradition in written form” (78). These two details given by Crawford appear almost contradictory: the author of the book rewrites the narrative of Genesis to fit his exegetical needs while reaffirming the significance of preserving tradition in written documents. The fact that this writer is able to simply revise the events described in Genesis illustrates Crawford’s point that texts were still being formed and transformed throughout the Second Temple period. This idea seems to correspond with Satlow’s statement that Israelites looked more to tradition than to texts to learn how to practice their faith because where tradition did not match up with the texts, the author of Jubilees revised a text to reflect the practice. Thus, given the author’s willingness to change events, the emphasis Jubilees places on the line of Levi maintaining a “scribal tradition” seems almost contradictory.

While these changes clearly occurred at a time when scriptural texts were still being created and altered, what more could this confusing combination of elements indicate to later readers? Could the Jubilee author’s emphasis on this scribal tradition indicate a tendency by some to begin attributing more authority to texts? If so, how does one reconcile these alterations with the focus on preserving laws and traditions in written form?

Credibility in Jubilees

    One of the main points that Crawford brings up in his writings is that he believes that people shouldn't use the term 'Bible' but instead they should use the term scripture. His reasoning makes a lot of sense to me, but I am having difficulty understanding why some people give authority to texts that can be questioned. I'm talking about if you are using Crawford's spectrum on scriptures, there is 1) recognized authority, 2) New compositions, 3) scribal manipulation, and 4) non-authoritative scriptures. I'm having difficulty understanding why people would give authority to scriptures that have room for doubt.
    For example, chapter 4 focuses on how Jubilees was created and its purpose. Crawford categorizes Jubilees as a new composition because it was rewritten by one scribe. It is based on the books Genesis and Exodus with slight alterations. These alterations are what give me pause. One of the purposes of Jubilees was to elevate their ancestors by making them completely righteous. They believed that it was unacceptable if there was room to question the motives of these important figures. In the case of Abram, they added more information (altering the story) so the people did not doubt why he let the emperor take his wife. It calls to question what in these scriptures are even real.
    Now I'm not that familiar with the bible, but for those who are why would they give authority to scriptures that they know have been altered? Again I recognize that a lot of scripture has been altered over the course of history but some shifts are just too dramatic to overlook.

Reading what Sidnie White Crawford had to say about the origin of Jubilees in her book Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times reminded me in many ways of what Michael Satlow had said about ancient scribes. Professor Satlow talked about the different theories of authority people had given biblical texts throughout time, and how these different authorities had given different values to the texts in a certain time period. I was not uncommon, back then, for scribes (typically elite scholarly men) to rewrite texts either as scribal practice or for personal enjoyment or even to fit a particular political stance. Therefore the same stories ended up changed and revised, leaving us today with no real knowledge of what the original manuscript of ancient texts contained. Two of these authorities were Scribal Authority and Cultural authority. A text with reference to popular or well-known authors helps the reader relate more to the text (Scribal), as well as having reference to specifics of one’s everyday life (Cultural). This relativity is what gave the texts power. Jubilees is a perfect example of a text written based off of biblical texts given in order capture the reader’s attention of what the author favors in the text. However, as Crawford points out, the text has its downfalls, including dates and years that do not add up, and certain opinions the author has that makes the text biased at points. For example, the scribe (as Crawford points out) likes to emphasize the mistakes and sins of biblical authoritative figures. The fact that Jubilees has a theme of “predictive history” also relates to an authoritative theory talked about by Dr. Satlow; oracular. This states that premeditated information, or basically anything decreed by the divine, gives a text authority to peoples as well. As discussed by Crawford, the author of Jubilees, “believed the end times were rapidly approaching,” an ideal that comes through in his writing. What comes to my attention after all of this analysis is the fact that there is still one of Satlow’s modes of authority that Jubilees does not fit into; normative. There some people who credit this text the same way as many Christians today may read the bible for advice on difficult life questions. However, for some reason, Jubilees did not make it into modern day Jewish or Christian scriptures. 

Solar Calendr and the elevation of Bible figures

 From the reading of Rewriting Scripture in the second Temple, we are analyzing two books, the book of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocrypha. One of the things that stood out for me was that the book of Jubilee the advocating of a solar calendar based on days and months rather than on the Jewish, lunar –based calendar, from an article I read “Can we rely on the Hebrew Calendar” it talks about how the Hebrew calendar is not what was revealed from God, it is the product of long historical development, and that the Jewish calendar differs from the calendar God gave to Moses, and it purely an assumption that God authorized the Hebrew calendar. And so the solar- based calendar better represents the 49 years and a better understanding of the prophecy, thus the book of Jubilees was attempting to show how the solar calendar better fits the biblical account of time and prophecy.

                From my point of view I see that the book of Jubilees has a trend of constant praising some of the characters in the bible and hiding some of the negative attributes of these characters. This could be that the writer was trying to emphasize to the readers, that these characters where righteous, and if they committed anything wrong it was a specific purpose. A couple of example like the one with Levi and his brother taking revenge over the rape of their sister Dinah, and it even goes further than the Genesis to justify his action of taking revenge but stating she was only 12 ,and the writer(Moses) also approves it (even though the bible is against taking revenge). The fact that it mentions Levi’s descendants were chosen to priesthood show that his actions were right and he will not be punished. Another example is the Noah story where he offers a sacrifice after the flooding, in genesis it is written as just a normal sacrifice, however in the book of Jubilee it is written as an atoned sacrifice, the sacrifice is considered to have been provided on behalf of the sins of the people for the need of more redemption. And so Noah’s sacrifice is more glorified in the book of Jubilees than Genesis.

This is all in the essence to prove to the readers that these bible figures lived by the word of God, never did anything against him and did everything to please him. However as the Sidine Crawford states this book was made by using the basis of the Pentateuch books of Genesis and Exodus, and was meant to stand beside the Torah, that could be the reasoning behind the emphasis on how good these people mentioned in the bible were, to insist to the other readers that whatever the Pentateuch says is the truth.

Rewritten Scripture in the Gospels

When we talk about ancient religious texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, we see exotic, wild texts which some isolated fringe group held dear. Such texts, of course, were dismissed by the larger communities of their time as unauthoritative in or contrary to the slowly forming lists of accepted mainline scripture. Indeed, such texts, like Jubilees, a book only accepted today in the Abyssinian Orthodox Church, are considered pseudepigraphical by scholars, meaning the authorship they claim is most likely false. In the case of Jubilees, the actual author based his writing on the stories of Genesis through the departure of Moses from Egypt, thus giving Jubilees a genre which author Sidnie White Crawford calls Rewritten Scripture in her book Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times. Jubilees and the process of rewriting scripture are seemingly far-removed from most modern audiences, and thus they come across as strange and perhaps even blasphemous to some when compared with the texts on which they were based. However, by using White’s description of the types of rewritten scriptures and motivations for making them, we can bring this process a little closer to home. 

The idea of rewritten scripture probably seems strange in large part because texts like Jubilees are not widely used and were lost to history in most traditions. The New Testament, however, particularly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, provide an application for the idea of rewritten scripture which will be more familiar and relevant to many modern readers. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the three Gospels which are called synoptic due to the fact that they contain many similarities in their content and wording, while John tends to tell different stories in different ways. Scholars believe Matthew and Luke to be based on the shorter Mark as well as other sources and the ideologies of their authors. For example, Matthew’s author portrays Jesus as a good, observant Jew and a fulfillment of Hebrew Bible scripture while Mark is not concerned with such a portrayal. 

To compare these texts with Crawford’s theory, we must look at the typical features which she proposes rewritten scripture has: “addition, omission, re-arrangement, anticipation, changes for clarification, and harmonization (as well as translation)” (126). The non-specific example of Matthew’s observant Jewish Jesus already addresses both addition and harmonization, meaning that its author added content and tried to line the story up with the his own worldview. Other examples from this list include the clarification seen in Matthew and Luke when they describe the birth of Christ as well as omission in that there are pieces of Mark which are included in neither. However, despite some amount of alteration and rewriting before the New Testament entered the form in which we know it today, these texts still hold great authority unlike Jubilees which never gained their widely accepted status. As such, Matthew and Luke seem to fall along Crawford’s spectrum of rewritten texts at the point where manipulation of the original is extensive enough for a new work to be formed, but the base text can still be identified, and the author still claims the same derivation of authority as the base text. Such manipulations demonstrate the relationships which authors had with the texts of their times and the gradual process of coming to understand a text as unalterable and authoritative scripture.

A Modern Day Comparison

While reading about the role of scribes in antiquity, I couldn't help but wonder what a modern day equivalent of such a job would be, if there is one at all. For a while I was stumped, I couldn't think of a profession that requires extensive education in order to transcribe and 'translate' text. Then, I started to read the side-by-side quotations Crawford includes from Jubilees and Exodus, where the first is clearly pulling inspiration from the second, but only in wording or small phrases rather than large chunks of text copied verbatim. I was immediately reminded of what we did in my poetry class yesterday- we took a poem by an acclaimed author, and each wrote our own version borrowing as much from the original as we wanted. Just like the scribes, poetry students are encouraged to deviate from what's already been written, with the understanding that the provided structure and content are strong examples. It isn't strange to have some student work that turn out a lot like the original with some words changed here and there, while other students made more radical choices. While some poetry students admire the greats as if they were gods, most of us don't have the same emotional or spiritual connection to the texts that the scribes probably had. All in all though, in my opinion the actual tasks carried out by both groups are surprisingly similar.

A Plea for Greater Evaluation and Critical Thought on the Texts of Antiquity (and Today)

“What was once old is frequently made new again”. While this idea is commonly linked to ideas of food and fashion, it seems that there are some old ideas specifically during the times of religion in antiquity, that also abide by this pseudo-law. In Crawford’s “Rewriting Scripture in the Second Temple Times”, one specific theme jumped out to me as most applicable to the saying above.

When discussing the transition that the texts in antiquity went through as they started to become the authoritative texts that we know today, Crawford references another scholar, Ulrich, saying that, “in Second Temple Judaism, it was the book, rather than its specific textual form, that was considered scared” (6). This seems incredibly similar to the way that the Bible is viewed in modern religions. While the texts have changed somewhat, and the culture absolutely has changed, this seems to be one of the aspects of religion that has remained: people focus more on the culture, and the physical book itself, rather than work to develop a deeper analytical understanding of what the text says and means.

Looking back to Beal’s “The Rise and Fall of the Bible”, although nearly 66% of adults belief that the Bible answers at least most of the basic questions of life, “28 percent of them admit that they rarely or never read it” (33). Modern religions clearly place a higher importance on the culture (going to a mega church, wearing your Sunday best, etc.), rather than the specific biblical texts. If this was not the case, more people would reportedly read the Bible, not just talk about how great it is. Mention of the bible – Donald Trump’s classic “I love the Bible”, followed by his reference to One Corinthians, along with the common biblical references that stop short after simply calling a situation a "classic David and Goliath" – shows that merely talking about the Bible is enough; anything followed is just an addition. Modern society seems to be stimulated by the physical bible itself, not by the potentially deep evaluation that these texts support.

This focus on overall culture makes perfect sense for those in antiquity. The texts of antiquity could act as a symbol of religious coercion throughout the village, town, etc., while the emphasis on culture norms maintains that everyone falls in their respective ranks, and keeps the communal wheel rolling. The texts were not open to interpretation or a critical discussion simply because nearly no one was there to do the reading necessary to even begin this discussion. By using symbols, and pushing culture norms, the religious group is more likely to be united under one God, making it easier to move forward, together.  

However, I’m not entirely sure this is one of those old world things that is good for the world we live in today. With the promotion of education, the “average Joe” now possesses the cognitive ability to critical examine these religious texts, in one-way or another. However this is not the case, people are not reading the Bible on their own, they are just using the physical book as a symbol for something much larger. Is it simply laziness? It certainly is easier to have someone talk to you about their interpretation, rather than ponder a text thousands of years old. Perhaps this lack of critical thought is just because people don’t want to push against their respective religious organization? If a specific verse means one thing to me, yet my religious leaders say something else, it may be easier to just follow the group. Regardless of the reason, it seems that the benefits of ignoring analytical discussions to better follow the communal culture, and an emphasis on only the physical texts, is a waste of the cognitive ability that humans now possess and only works to hinder the way that people think about these greatly important texts.

The importance of religious evaluation is important regardless of if one believes in a religion that uses these texts. If you’re not religious, or are religious but do not use the texts now found in the Hebrew Bible, a deep understanding of these incredibly influential texts can help shine a light on why some cultures are the way they are. A majority of the world is religious in one way or another, and two of the world’s largest religions both use the Hebrew Bible. Critical evaluation of these texts can only help solve why the world is the way it is, and can create a greater understanding between those who are religious, and those who are not. If you are religious and you do use the texts found in the Hebrew Bible, then these texts are the word of God; need I say more? Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it is hard to build a case against critically engaging these influential texts.

Determining Authority

The two texts that we have examined in this class thus far have been concerned with the authority of texts.  They have each looked at the role of scribes and scribal changes in the development of texts, and how the alteration and invention of texts effects the authority of both those texts and the texts adjacent to them. In Sidnie Crawford’s Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times, Crawford names Jubilees an authoritative book for the Jews at Qumran, though it is not usually seen as an authoritative text today. She names it thus for a number of reasons, but, significantly, it is authoritative because it is referred to in two other Qumran texts. 

  This method of determining authority seems to me to be an accurate one, combined with the other reasons that Crawford gives; if a text is important enough to be noted in other texts, it clearly has high standing in that group of people.  However, this aspect of determining authority makes me wonder how accurate it is; there does not seem to be any of determining how authoritative the texts that refer to Jubilees are.  These texts could easily be on the fringes of writing, and may not be indicative of the majority or the respected writers or thinkers of the day. 

  If this specific aspect of determining authority was used today, there would be many a text granted much more authority than its due, what with millions of texts written by millions of people.  While modern society is full of writing and opinion, far removed from the specialized world of ancient scribes and rewriting, the possibility of miss-assigning authority to any number of texts seems like a real issue.

Is Authority Based on Location?

An article found on Aleteia written by Phillip Jenkins called "The Other Lost Scriptures" compliments many ideas formed in Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times by Sidnie White Crawford. The overall theme of "The Other Lost Scriptures" is to remind the reader that things, even scriptures, can be found in unusual places and still retain a sense of authority. For example, Jenkins refers to the "otherwise unknown pseudo-biblical book 2 (Slavonic) Enoch, or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch" as being found at random, but because they were found, more pieces of the Biblical puzzle fall in place. The significance of said texts is that they were recently rediscovered in unusual places-- old medieval libraries and religious houses in Europe, and should still be held with authority. Because historians believe "2 Enoch was probably written in Greek and was then translated into other languages, the vast majority of what we know comes from these Slavonic texts. It survives in both longer and shorter versions, and the longer has clearly been adapted for Christian purposes. The shorter, older version takes us back to a work written by an Alexandrian Jew somewhere around the 1st century AD—roughly the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls." With that being said, these texts that were just recently rediscovered could have been deemed important and authoritative had they been found all together in a Judaeo cave by archaeologists who were specifically looking for something of the sort, but instead, there is hostility in rendering them significant.  

Similar to the entire theme of Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times, "The Other Lost Scriptures" highlights the inconsistencies between what we have determined as authoritative and important, versus those which we have rendered useless. Even with the evidence that supports the usage of the scriptures referenced in the article, based upon where they were discovered and by whom, they do not receive credibility.

How Authoritative?

Last week, my dad posted on Facebook a link to a blog post titled “10 Things This Christian Doesn’t Believe About the Bible”. I was interested, yet a little bit wary of it as the title seemed meant to attract attention. The author of the blog is John Pavlovitz, a pastor and author who seems to have a fairly large online following. His article came from a place of progressive Christianity, as the gist of the article was that he believes the Bible was created by humans (not God) and is not a very good guide for dealing with contemporary issues. Reading this blog post along with our assigned class reading (Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times by Sidnie White Crawford), I began to think about how different communities have different standards and ideas about the authority of texts.

When studying rewritten texts like Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon, Sidnie White Crawford places them on a spectrum of authority. At one end of the spectrum we have texts that are recognizably authoritative, and at the other end is where a base text is recognizable, but authority is not derived from it. The texts in between the extremes that create new texts based off of older scripture, like Jubilees, are not easy to definitively categorize. Based on the findings at Qumran, one can assume that the community there saw Jubilees as authoritative. This authoritative status could have also been carried on into the early church based on references to it by early Christian leaders, yet it does not appear in our current bibles.

Today, Jubilees is considered canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and pseudepigrapha by other Christian denominations. Another example of differing ideas surrounding authority is how the Catholic bible includes texts that the Protestant bible leaves out. Within the Christian tradition as a whole there is not a consensus regarding what texts are authoritative. Which brings me back to Pavlovitz’s blog post. What kind of authority does the Bible have in his mind? In explaining one of his points he says this: “Rather than a Sola Scriptura perspective, which makes the Bible the ultimate, singular resource for encountering and understanding God, I believe as the ancestors of the faith believed: that all areas of life speak the language of the Divine; nature, prayer, community, reason, and the Holy Spirit’s direct voice to each of us”. In his personal belief system he minimizes the authority of the bible in favor of what he experiences around him.

I find the varying degrees of authority that is given to the bible by different communities and individuals fascinating. From the rewritten scriptures of the second temple time period to the opinions of individuals today, different communities and individuals within the same tradition can disagree on what is considered authoritative. 

The Role of Scribes in Antiquity: An evaluation of our first two readings

This book caught my attention from page three on.  I want to focus on how Crawford challenges what professor Satlow argued last week—which was—that scribes were creative in their rewriting process and were ONLY doing it for their own purpose; I was not entirely convinced of this. Therefore, I was delighted to read what Crawford had to say…

            Crawford disagrees with Professor Satlow by stating, “The purpose of the revision is exegetical, that is, to explain or interpret the original text for a new (presumably later) audience” (3). The books that scholars claim to have been rewritten, like, Exodus and Numbers in Deuteronomy, are called the “inner biblical exegesis”.  Crawford claims that, “Inner biblical exegesis was carried out by scribes, who were not mere copyists but learned professionals whose task was ‘the transmission and reinterpretation of received texts and traditions’ for later generations (3). Scholars argue that Deuteronomy gives more religious explanation compared to Exodus; therefore, we can see that the scribe/s were reworking the text to make it more applicable to the general public. Professor Satlow and Crawford do agree that the scribes first copy books of Scripture as practice but then, Crawford reasons that scribes secondly, “needed to make the text of Scripture adaptable and relevant to the contemporary situation” (3). Crawford uses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch to prove his arguments on scribal activity. It would be ignorant to think that there were no scribes due to the amount of proof that Crawford gives with the book of Jubilee and the Genesis Aprocryphon drawing from past texts. Thus, the question to ask is what was the true purpose of scribes in antiquity?

            Here we have two scholars within the first two weeks disagreeing with each other on a—I think—very important aspect of the developing Bible. I think this will be an ongoing theme of this course because of the uncertainty commonly found in antiquity. I really wonder what Professor Satlow’s response to Crawford’s book, “Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple times”, would be. I am fascinated with this topic and wish to explore it more in my perhaps research paper. This was only one interesting part of Crawford’s book—I was also intrigued in the book I had never heard of, Jubilees, and its blatant comparison to Exodus, Deuteronomy and Psalms.

What brings a country together

Satlow wrote about how the Bible is a story-like historic account of Israel in the ninth century in the first chapter of his book How the Bible Became Holy. Satlow describes the story of Jacob and his twelve sons who were to rule Israel (pg.20). This story was a metaphor to describe the origins of the twelve tribes, giving people cultural background, a reference to their roots. The story of Jacobs and his sons still served to help unite a nation under the myth of a common past. Even though old stories that are told over time again and again loses some of its original details, stand through time to teach us a lesson. When I read how a mythological story of the past served to unite a nation, I began to think of the one I reside in. I thought it was funny how this nation’s foundation is coincidentally also due to the Bible. Pilgrims fled England in hopes for religious freedom in America. Though we are not united under a mythological story, we are however still bound by God and His words. What began this independent country was the Declaration of Independence. What gives pilgrim the right to establish their own land isn’t an agreement that was agreed on with England beforehand, but rather it was a “self-evident” God given right. The way Jews and English pilgrims came to settle upon their land has its similarities, both had an exodus across a barren stretch of the Earth and both believed that journey was to have a space to better worship God.

Importance of the Bible

For the first part of how the Bible became Holy the author Michael Satlow, he talks about the origins of the Old Testament that gave me a good reminder of the information of the historical biblical texts we learnt for the Old Testament class. He argues that Jesus “had very limited knowledge of Scripture” (6). Furthermore its interesting to see that he also struggled reading the whole bible provided he has written a book based on the Bible. The Bible that we know and learn in terms of scope and authority, is not how it was originally used like in the beginning. The Christians and the Jews made the Bible very different than what it was intended to be, and I am guessing that’s how he sets up the title of the book, How the Bible Became Holy.

The bible was not very important during the biblical period. The biblical writings were done by literate people, who were from the educated class. They could have stored most of the writings that made in the Bible, in temple archives and only made them public after the Babylonian captivity thus forming the cannon of the Torah. The story of Ezra reading “the scroll of the Torah of Moses” to the Jerusalem people in pubic (Nehemiah 8) is the Bible’s own illustration of the Torah in the 5^th Century BC. Thus we should not really expect the writings in the bible especially the Torah to have much of an impact before this time.

I feel like we tend to profess a certain belief, and we are usually backed with writings, which are useful to the powerful (a good example is the argument against gay marriage saying it’s not acceptable in the Bible), however Michael Satlow with this book has made me wonder whether we are in a sort of criticism and analysis era of writing about the bible.

The Covenant of a Vassal State

While reading How the Bible Became Holy, one specific passage caught my attention and so I'd like to focus on it for this post, despite the fact that it isn't central to the overall message of what we read. Starting on page 26, Satlow describes the covenant between Israel and Assyria as loyalty for military protection, terms that sound surprisingly similar to the Covenant Code found in Exodus- a passage that became core to Israelite beliefs.
Satlow's comparison shows, then, that in actuality the Covenant Code would have been a fairly commonplace piece of writing with a format that was meant to be recognizable to any scribe. Originating possibly as a tool for scribes, this snippet's inclusion in the Bible was not foreseen at its inception. With the understanding that a part of the Bible considered crucial today was not so at the time of its origin, it becomes clear that no section of the Bible as we know it was meant to be wholly authoritative, and that many texts' origin stories might not be as glamorous as one might expect.
What I take from this is that the popular idea of reading the Bible as a complete guide was never the intended use for any of the texts originally, but rather an ideal imposed as the Bible became holy.

 
We have learned that peoples understanding of the Bible has changed through time,  but what about peoples understanding of God and gods?  We may not think about it but there are options.   If we imagine perusing a merchant of Gods or perhaps deity figurines, there would be choices. Buy one? or buy one get 10 free.  Of course considering the quality of the products would be very important in such a decision. While polytheist have many gods they might consider one to be bigger better or older than the others, as was the case with the Canaanites. According to our reading from Michael Satlow Israelites and Judahites didn't see any problem with the worship of Yaweh, a god previously apart of a monotheist group, with the private worship of other deities. While many faithful today would consider this blasphemy. I find it curious how many faithful, ( the lay people) while openly monotheistic, might give one day to God while not even mentioning him the other 6 days even in private spaces and give so much more thought time and reverence to other things. I remember being very young and participating in art projects that outlined this very problem of idolatry. Idolatry can be the high reverence for basically anything or the worship of a physical thing that is a representation of a god. At my church the idols were fame, money, drugs, war, basically idols with out personification, only we gave them personification by giving them large scary bodies, furthering the message that these were large scary giants to watch out for and avoid. With the case of the polytheistic Canaanites and the monotheistic Israelite's it doesn’t seem that either system is better at dealing with these giants more than the other.

The Biblical Inconsistencies Missing from Sunday School

As someone who was raised in a religious family and regularly attended church growing up, it has been somewhat jarring to learn about the somewhat dubious origins of the early biblical texts that Michael Satlow discusses in his book How the Bible Became Holy. While Satlow’s arguments may cause some readers to cast doubt on the legitimacy or authority of the Bible, the greater concern that struck me as I read was that these questions of authority and origin had never come up in several years of sermons and Sunday school, and I suggest that ending this silence would ultimately benefit believers and people who set store by the Bible or other religious texts.

In part one of How the Bible Became Holy, Satlow shares the narrative of how the early texts that today make up the Bible gained significance in religious circles. Elements of this process that stood out to me included scribal revisions during the process of copying and questions of historical accuracy and authorship. While issues such as these are practically inevitable in ancient hand-copied texts, it still came as a surprise to me to read arguments that called into question even the existence of well-known biblical figures.

Satlow prefaces his book with the disclaimer that “the Bible is a very poor historical source, but for many of the questions that interest us about Israelite and early Christian history and religion it is also one of our only sources” (7). For instance, beyond the Bible, there is little known about King David’s power and little evidence of Solomon’s existence (16-17). There is also “great scholarly reluctance to date any of the psalms” back to the time of David, to whom many are attributed (49). Satlow even argues that famous stories from the Bible such as the origin story of the tribes of Israel are mythic tales created to unite the diverse conquered peoples of Canaan (20).

While these details are not necessarily the most significant or problematic issues brought up in the book, it is significant that these widely known and accepted stories are brought into question but not mentioned, at least in my experience, in the context of church or Christian education. People may feel that acknowledging the many inconsistencies in the Bible could be off-putting or unsettling for some, but it would only be advantageous to include these difficult truths in religious learning. More complete knowledge of the Bible’s inconsistencies could give believers a better opportunity to develop a more realistic and well-rounded faith. Furthermore, ignoring these issues could later on cause people to feel confusion or disillusionment with the supposedly infallible text with which they were raised.

Although Satlow’s book raises more overarching questions of the authority behind biblical texts, the details he uses to demonstrate the questionable accuracy of elements of the Bible struck me personally. Such inconsistencies and questions are rarely if ever raised in religious settings, but doing so would provide believers with a more complete understanding of the basis of their faith, benefitting religious institutions and their members alike.