Many religions teach that the Bible is history. But in assuming a historical context, we miss the point. By understanding the Bible as a historical document, we dismiss the intended allegory. To understand the meaning behind the text, we must understand it from the mindset and culture of those who wrote it.

For this discussion, I am going to limit myself to the Torah -- the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that tradition tells us was written down by Moses. The reason I do this is that the remainder cannot stand on its own without these five books. Christianity and Islam cannot exist without Judaism, though members of those groups often disagree.

Who wrote the Bible? Richard Friedman offered a suggestion in his book of the same title. In it, he goes into detail concerning the past century and a half of study regarding the documentary hypothesis. The hypothesis posits that the Torah was actually written by several groups of people in several different regions of Israel. For a synopsis and examples, various sources are available in the bibliography.

I cannot assume that the documentary hypothesis is correct any more that I can consider the legend that the five books were written by Moses. It is, after all, a hypothesis. However, understanding the melding of dissimilar cultures in the ancient world lend the hypothesis some credibility. For example, much of Roman history and theology is borrowed from the Greek. Titus Livius among other ancient Roman historians detail the escape of refugees from the sack of Troy to the Italian peninsula. These exiled Trojans along with their beliefs were the seeds of Roman tradition and beliefs. Their stories became myth. Though these myths can never be proven to be accurate or false, they provide an identity to the culture in which they are formed.

But if the Bible is myth, what are we to truly believe? Doesn’t this discredit the entire basis of who we are and where we came from? No. Behind every myth is a shred of truth. That truth is in the allegory.

Religion fails when it forces the presumption that every word is infallible. We are to have faith simply because we are told to do so. This is how it has been done for centuries. We are not to question. In most institutions we are told what the text means and are told not to consider alternate viewpoints. It is this failing that leads to intolerance and persecution between sects. Most of us hold beliefs because they were those of our parents. We never learned to question for ourselves and search for our own meaning. Abraham Joshua Heschel stated this succinctly and far more eloquently than I ever could in the opening paragraph to his philosophical treatise “God in Search of Man”.

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”

We also have to consider the problems that come with translation. According to Josephus (Antiquties XII:ii passim) the Letter of Aristeas (http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/aristeas.htm) describes how the librarian Demetrius of Phalarum urged the king of Egypt Ptolemy II Philadelphus to have the Torah translated into Greek for the Library of Alexandria. This translation came to be known as the Septuagint. The oldest nearly complete manuscripts of the Septuagint date from the 4th century. The oldest known complete Hebrew text dates from the beginning of the 11th century. A Talmudic story, perhaps referring to an earlier time, relates that three Torah scrolls were found in the Temple court but were at variance with each other. The differences were then resolved by majority decision among the three (p. Taanit 68a, Tractate Soferim 6:4 etc). A third edition known as the Masoretic Text was used in the translation to English at the behest of King James and is what most of us see in the ubiquitous King James Version. There are also numerous translations into other languages that have occurred throughout history.

As anyone who has seriously studied a foreign language can attest, there are idiomatic subtleties that do not always translate properly. While the gist remains, the details get muddled. To further complicate things, Hebrew editions do not contain vowels or punctuation. Therefore, many different meanings might be inferred from the text. An example can be found in the first verse of Genesis.

This is often translated as “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  However, this translation ignores the existence of the implied preposition “of” in the conjugation of the first word in the Hebrew. A more appropriate translation would be “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth...”  This implies that verse one is not the beginning of everything, but rather the beginning point of the story only.

The narrative continues with:

“the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.”  This further supports the position that creation was not a finite point in time. The earth existed albeit without form as did the waters before the first act of creation occurs. This flies in the face of the common dogmatic belief that the world was created from nothing.

Further argument against infallibility can be made in the measurement of time used throughout the creation story. It was not until the fourth day that the sun, the moon and the stars were created. So how do we measure the length of a day before their creation? If man was not created until the sixth day, how could we assume these verses to be accurate if there were no witnesses?

Most lay persons miss the fact that there are actually two distinct creation stories. That which is discussed above is but the first. The second begins at Genesis 2:4. In this second story, man takes a more active role in creation with God. He is actually created before the beasts of the earth and the fowl of the air. His existence was necessary for plant life to exist because he was to till the ground. How can both stories be considered accurate and infallible?

The use of the name of God in each of these stories gives support for the documentary hypothesis. In the first, God is called Elohim. In the second, he is given the name Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh (יְהוָה). The use of these names throughout the Torah in distinct manners gives scholars a means to determine to which author to ascribe the components of our stories.

The purpose of these stories is not to relate that creation happened in a finite amount of time or in a particular order. It is not a historical reality. The point is that God created the universe and everything in it. There is something greater than ourselves. It is a civilization’s way of understanding itself and of relating the story of its heritage to future generations. It is to give us a setting for the lessons to come. It gives us ownership.

Following organized religion’s view that the bible is history and fact requires suspension of disbelief. We must forego our ability to rationalize and assume that what we are told is true regardless of how little logic or common sense the text contains. But we were not created to be automata. We were created with the propensity for intellectual thought and the capacity to question and wonder. That is how we learn.

To learn religion by rote, to assume that some artificial authority has all of the answers and that we are to believe them above all reason, to read the Bible as a text book is shortchanging not only ourselves, but God who gave us the ability to reason. God wants us to question. Only by questioning do we learn. If questioning was a sin, would not Moses be the biggest sinner of all?

1. Falanga, Rosemarie E., Cy H. Silver. 1997. Who Wrote the Torah?. On-line. Available from Internet, http://www.bluethread.com/whowrotetorah.htm, accessed 30 June 2007.
2. Friedman, Richard E. 1997. Who Wrote the Bible?. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
3. Goldwurm, Rabbi Hersh. 1990. Talmud Bavli Tractate Taanis. New York: Mesorah Publications, Ltd.
4. Herczeg, Rabbi Yisrael. 1995. Sapirstein Edition Rashi - Volume 1 - Bereishis. New York: Mesorah Publications, Ltd.
5. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1976. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
6. Josephus, Flavius. 1933. Jewish Antiquities Books XII-XIV VII. Translated by Ralph Marcus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
7. Livius, Titus,. 2002. Livy: The Early History of Rome, Books I-V. Translated by Aubrey De Selincourt. New York: Penguin Classics.
8. Meecham Henry G. 1935. The Letter of Aristeas: A Linguistic Study with Special Reference to the Greek Bible. Manchester: Manchester University Press
9. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. 1964. Genesis. New York: Anchor Bible (Random House).
10. Thackeray, H. St. J. 1914. "Appendix: The Letter of Aristeas," in H. B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (2d ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Wikipedia (Various Authors). Documentary Hypothesis. 2007. On-line. Available from Internet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis, accessed 30 June 2007.