Void House Book Club: The Pentateuch

One of my all time favorite philosophers, Mortimer Adler, says that readers should target books “over their head” — that is, books which pose them enough difficulty that they can’t understand them fully. I feel I did an exceptional job picking books of this sort for my reading list. I started reading seriously around the end of college, and shortly before the start of this blog I set a reading list of “intellectual” sorts of books, the sort that reflected the kind of person I want to become. The Holy Bible sat at the top of this list as easily the most important piece of classic literature about which I knew nothing. Actually, I know nothing about an embarrassing volume of classic literature, but I digress.

I did not grow up religious, and although my opinions have shifted away from the sheer misotheism of my upbringing, I remain critical of religion today. My reaction to the Pentateuch may reflect this perspective.

The Pentateuch, also called the Torah, refers to the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Genesis explains the origins of the universe, humanity, and God’s chosen people, whereas the remaining four books focus on the life and teachings of the prophet Moses. Only Genesis and Exodus have strong narrative elements. Numbers meticulously recounts the details of the chosen people’s journey to the promised land, where Leviticus and Deuteronomy have almost entirely densely packed lists of rules and almost no plot.

I wonder if more people read Genesis than any other book of the Bible. I can imagine a great number of starry-eyed readers like myself eagerly taking on the challenge of the most important book in the world, only to get turned off by the pages and pages of nothing but dry lists of irrelevant information. A particular section early in the book lists the name and lifespan of every descendent of Adam and Eve through to Noah and his sons, which takes nowhere near as much space as other lists later in the Bible, but which serves as a portent of the sort of non-stories that readers should come to expect. In other words, I can understand why people would quit after book one. This demonstrates one of the great difficulties in discussing great books in general and the Bible in particular: their complexity betrays such wide variance in authorial intent and interpretation that no one analysis can ever encompass them completely. I planned to read the Bible as literature, but its authors didn’t actually write it that way. They (presumably) wrote it as a combination of literal history and moral instruction, neither of which have any need to entertain. Genesis and Exodus do in fact contain some engaging stories, but law, lineages, meticulous details, and so on constitute the vast majority of the Pentateuch. In order to understand the Old Testament better, I watched a series of lectures by Yale’s Christine Hayes, and I found it funny how much less attention she gave Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Take that, boring books!

I’d hate for the patrons of my fine blog to mistake me for some sort of rube who cannot accept a text that fails to entertain. Although I found parts of this reading a slog, I still feel happy (blessed?) to have read it. Before this, most of my information on this topic came from viral videos by atheists mocking Biblical stories, like those of DarkMatter2525. Some of the things I learned really surprised me. I expected many Biblical stories — notably the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the Tower of Babel — to make up a greater portion of Genesis than they actually did. In reality, these books merely introduce the world in which the important characters (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph) live. In modern times, fundamentalist Christians turn to these stores to explain the actual history of the world, hoping that God may fill in the gaps of questions like “Where did the universe come from?” or “How did life arise on Earth?” At the time of its writing, however, the authors of Genesis clearly cared more about the origins of their people than the origins of the universe. It seems that they started with a preamble of lesser stories as dressing for the main plot, the same way that cinemas used to screen short films ahead of the feature (incidentally, I’ve noticed this same phenomenon in other ancient texts. The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with a less notable story about Enkidu meeting Gilgamesh before transitioning to the more interesting plot about Gilgamesh’s search for immortality, and I recall a lecture I once watched about the way that many chapters in The Odyssey include two such “smaller” stories before the greater one, although I can’t remember who gave the lecture).

It also surprised me the degree of conflict between the chosen people and Moses, and by extension the Lord. The people who theoretically worship and recognize the Lord as not just God, but the only God, constantly defy and even rebel against him. Multiple times throughout Numbers, some of the Hebrews stage a coup against Moses, and the Lord strikes them down (once opening up the Earth to swallow his “chosen people.”) This makes little sense from the perspective of a people who believe there exists an omnipotent deity who will murder them if they step out of line; it makes a lot of sense as a post hoc justification for rebellions that would naturally take place after forcing frustrated people to wander in a desert for forty years. Still, in the continuity of the text itself, the Hebrews obviously did not revere their God so much as they saw him as an obstacle to subvert. It reminded me of the ways that Orthodox Jews in New York City try to circumvent Shabbos, by doing such things as making every elevator stop on every floor to avoid pressing the button, or stringing a fishing line around a neighborhood so all of it technically counts as “their home.” I find this comparison amusing, although I understand modern Jews are a different people from the Hebrews described in the old testament, so I see it as more of a coincidence than anything else.

I don’t hear people talk about Leviticus 19:18 very much, but it easily struck me most on reading out of any verse. “‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.” Most of the Old Testament contradicts the New Testament; the Lord accepts sacrifices, kills people (his own or otherwise), curses them, hardens Pharaoh's heart, and in many other respects demonstrates his similarity to the cruel old Gods of other traditions. This line, however, shows how Christianity naturally grew out of Hebrew values. To put others above oneself confers little benefit to a capable, competent person, but it serves a slave class very well. Abrahamic religions promoted slave morality from their very beginning — something we might look into later when I write about our next book, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.