Rethinking the Role of Biblical Criticism in Social Thought: An Introductory Preamble to a book on the Strangeness of the Torah
- What Lay Beneath the World in the 19th Century (Darwin, Marx, de Wette)
Biblical criticism is one of the great 19th-century Western European theories, like Marxism and evolution, that hit their world like a volcanic eruption. They transformed everything, then froze. Each has a radically different scope and subject matter but share a world-changing premise: like society, like life, scripture has a hidden history driven by deep patterns that betray the finished, stable whole, the integrity of things as they are. The recognition that things could have been otherwise suggests the potential threat: one day they will be.
While these theories had their initial impact around the same time period they differ vastly in scope. Yet they each shared a “moral” that ordered the theory but has turned out to be its most difficult and uncertain part: progress. Beneath their conflicting claims, they shared a teleology. Just as “man”–implicitly defined as an industrial society led by upper class white European males–was the successful outcome of millions of years of life’s development, so the dissolution of class would be the successful outcome of thousands of years of society’s development. Similarly with the canonical Christian scriptures, the Bible was the culmination of thousands of years of literary development.
Evolution was ironically (or appropriately) the first to lose its evolutionism: its assumption that things inevitably had to have turned out this way. The classic early fantasy image was of life evolving in one direction: better. In a long but steady process of improvement, organisms developed from tiny microbes and crude fish to amphibians, crawling mammals, apes and humans. The history of life was one of improvement from simple and primitive to complex and advanced forms, culminating in us. But it turned out that evolution did not have any necessary direction: species simply adapted to their environments, whatever they happened to be.
Marxism underwent a similar transformation with the rise of “actually existing Socialism”–large polities claiming the mantle of Marx. Initial claims of inevitable progress–still eloquently expressed in Nikita Kruschev’s famous pronouncement to John F. Kennedy, “We will bury you”– ran up against the dirt and haze of historical contingency. Especially in the form of a ruthless, militant form of US-led anticommunism that fostered authoritarianism around the world, not stopping at mass murder, and inspired these things in its opponents in return. Marx’s theory of capitalism and social structure cut through the self-serving justifications of the ruling classes like an x-ray. Yet while his teleology worked as an ideal, guiding revolutions across half the world, it is not clear when or whether it will turn out to work as description of history’s direction.
Biblical criticism seems to be the narrowest of these three, concepts that shook the Western European universe and by that means the world. Its actual research focuses on a single human artifact. Despite the limitless metaphysical claims Christians and Jews have staked on it, they themselves are on record as having created its canonical form.
But if its scope is smaller there is a way that the historical matter of the bible runs deeper than these other Western European theories. For one thing it helped create them. The notion that the history of life moves in coherent stages, revealing underlying laws, came to European thought largely from reading Genesis, Daniel, and Revelation in that order. Jacob Taubes summed up the resulting apocalyptic paradigm thus:
“The events of the world are written on the face of the divine clock, so the point is to follow the course of world history to determine the hour of the aeon. Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history possible. “
Seen as the template of natural history, it provided a paradigm for the development of earth and animal life. As the template for political history, it gave apocalypticists like Joachim of Fiore and idealists like Hegel the idea that there was a world-spirit manifested in how humanity moved from stage to stage. Parallel ideas could have been drawn from other sources, but Christendom ended up drawing key parts of its universal histories of life, earth, and society from a biblical framework.
But as the thinking behind biblical criticism cooled and hardened, it made its last major impact outside of its own realms of theology and biblical studies just after Darwin and Marx, in the late 19th century. The theories of de Wette and Wellhausen about the history of its composition were hotly discussed because they pried the Bible’s timeless appearance and ordering power apart from its real history. In a heresy trial that made the front pages for six years in the UK, the young Evangelical William Robertson Smith was kicked out of the Church of Scotland and thus his position at the University of Aberdeen for his espousal of these ideas. Since then the most successful exceptions such as Eric Auerbach, Ilana Pardes, or Harold Bloom have taken the Bible into literature departments, treating its form mostly in isolation from its historical development and social context.
Beyond asserting the claims of theology or giving clues to its own history, is there something else the Torah might tell us about the order of human things?
2. More Than Law: Torah as Nomos
The legal theorist Robert Cover introduced a review of the 1982 Supreme Court term with the startling title “Nomos and Narrative.” What does “narrative” have to do with such grinding technical matters as the case of “White v. Massachusetts Council of Construction Employers, Inc.,” which kicked off the issue’s first category, Market Participant Immunity? Cover argued that all law–including the constitution the Court was interpreting in this case–implied myth. It is not a society’s ruling powers that provide it with ideals and motivations, but rather people’s shared sets of habits and theories related to its social order–what Cover called a nomos. This nomos, this set of norms and hopes about social order, arise in the form of stories people tell about society’s rules:
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. (1983:4)
It was ancient Judaism, not the American Revolution, that provided Cover with his foundational case of how nomos demands narrative, because Judaism is founded on the interpretation and application of the Torah. Indeed the Hebrew term tôrâ is often translated “law,” though as we will see this misleadingly mistakes a part for the whole. In fact the whole point is that Torah is not just a set of laws but contains a model of law within it. Commandment framed by retold events is inherent in the very form of the Torah, which the literary critic David Damrosch called a “narrative covenant.” The Torah presents its commandments by telling stories about them: how they came to be given to Moses on Mount Sinai and the consequences of Israel having accepted them.
And far from a cookie-cutter example of command and obedience, the Torah’s narratives are not just-so stories about why everybody should obey its laws. Maybe the opposite. Instead, as Cover wrote, the Torah actively embodies and transmits the tensions between laws and narratives about laws that generate nomos. Primogeniture, the eldest son inheriting the best portion, was the norm embodied in the Torah’s law of inheritance (Deuteronomy 21). But already in the Torah’s first meaningful scene of inheritance Abraham makes the younger Isaac and not the firstborn Ishmael his heir; whereupon God demands Abraham sacrifice him. As happens repeatedly in Genesis, it is the younger child–not the expected main inheritor–on whom the fate of Israel hangs, threatened then rescued by God. Cover sums up this piece of biblical nomos as a twist: “divine destiny is not lawful.”
This means that the Torah tells a somewhat different story about law than states do. The standard social theory of law is that it needs to be enforced and must always ultimately be backed by violence. Without a “monopoly of the legitimate means of coercion” over its own territory, Max Weber wrote, a modern state is no state at all. Absent physical or economic threats, theories of obedience tend to rely on superficial imitation or mindless conformity. Cover showed that the Torah embodied a very different yet deep-seated and long-running way that a group may follow law. He called this alternative norm “paedic,” that is, based on teaching or tradition.
Cover’s argument challenges the idea of the independence of law, not just as a genre but as a way of dealing with the world. For some it may be traditions and narratives rather than “objective” institutions that make laws valid. Yet as Steven Fraade points out, “nomos” itself is at the root of the separation between law and narrative in Judaism–for early Jewish translators almost always rendered the Hebrew for Torah as a Greek word for law–nomos. In the Hebrew Bible tôrâ first denotes ritual or legal directions but expands to include “divine teaching, prophetic preaching, moral exhortation, and wise living more broadly. Eventually it becomes synonymous with revelation or Scripture as a whole” and so “might more suitably have been translated with a Greek term closer in meaning to teaching writ large” such as “paideia (cultural instruction and discipline).”
C.H. Dodd explained this split’s negative consequences for both the Bible and Judaism: “over a wide range the rendering of torah by nomos is thoroughly misleading, and it is to be regretted that the English versions followed the Septuagint (via the Vulgate) in so many cases,” thus “giving a misleading legalistic tone to much of the Old Testament.”‘ And, Fraade continues,
Once the Torah and the Hebrew Bible are represented as “The Law,” then the isolation of its narratives from its laws, and the reductionist dichotomization of Old Testament Law (and “legalism”) vs. New Testament Spirit are not far to follow.
Contemporary scholarship has rediscovered the way that Torah is just as much paideia–cultural instruction in a tradition–as it is law. Michael Fishbane presented his magisterial Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel as a drama of transmitting tradition. For him the construction of the Hebrew Bible revealed itself through the early Jewish relationship between ancient cultural inheritance (traditum) and the process of its transmission (traditio).
But there is also a unique power in the type of distortion that reduces Torah to law. If mistranslating tôrâ as nomos distorted the meaning of Torah, it also made it visible and conceivable in a new way. In The Renaissance Bible, Deborah Kuller Shuger discusses the analogous way that Christian theologies of sacrifice were (mis)interpreted through Roman law. By reducing the richness of Paul’s atonement theology to a flat legal concept of compensation that could be applied to any instance of sacrifice across the world, scholars like Hugo Grotius ended up performing the first cross-cultural comparison of religious forms in Western European thought. As Kuller Shuger notes citing Jonathan Culler, the advantage of an inappropriate mapping of one domain onto another is the very possibility of theory–in this case comparative religion. To create a language for identifying and comparing patterns, one takes terms from one domain and applies them “inappropriately” across others. Thus Judaism may be categorized as a “legal civilization” and compared to US Constitutional law, as Cover does. What is crucial to the integrity of these categories is their subsceptibility to reshaping, that their thinkers and subjects remain in a dialogue that allows them to be corrected, reformulated, abolished or reinvented.
Social theory’s illuminatingly “inappropriate” acts of repurposing have been drawn from theological and religious areas, as well as mapped onto them. Indeed, it was none other than one of the founders of sociology, Max Weber, who took “charisma,” a term from Christian theology meaning “a gift from God” (such as healing, prophecy, or speaking in tongues) to help furnish social theory with explanatory categories for why people obey commands. Weber suggested three primary types of social power: traditional (do this because we have always been taught so), rational-bureaucratic (do this because an appropriate official points to a written rule–ratio–that says so), and charismatic (do it because of my gift, my kharisma, that can make you believe in me despite traditions and rules, and I say so).
If Weber’s categories of social order were appropriated from other realms including religious ones, they may be productively reshaped in dialogue with their sources. For as Weber was well aware, his appropriated categories bore the limits of their creator’s own intellectual origins, his Western European Protestant background and assumptions. Among them was the implicitly evolutionist image of how human politics and social order developed, from ancient and “traditional” to modern and “rational” (though Weber himself was always open to dialectically blurring the lines). Cultural historians such as Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty have shown the destructive shaping power of this image. The idea of a rational and Christian Western Europe at the center of history is typical of Protestant-based thinkers like Hegel. It implies a relationship of master and slave, of unequal power but doomed mutual dependence. The historical master-slave paradigm of colonialism places the West at the center, destined to subordinate the traditional non-western world which makes up its outlying provinces even as it needs to parasitically feed on the material and human richness of those provinces to be the West, to be the smart, rich center. This is why it has seemed so urgent to think beyond the paradigms of evolutionism and colonialism in our social theory.
Cover’s framing of Torah as a “jurisgenerative” set of rules in a productive tension with the narratives that frame them suggests a broader potential for social theory. Picking ancient Judaism as an example suggests an alternative way to categorize a “traditional” social order without the evolutionist prejudice. For as a written document the Torah intertwines laws with ancient accounts about them, thus putting a Weberian “rational” (Latin ratio a mode of “reckoning, numbering, procedure”) order itself in the form of a tradition.
For Judaism was Christianity’s original example of the “primitive” and past, in contrast to which St. Paul and St. Augustine defined the Church as the present and future. This led to a productive binary opposition that has been intertwined with an evolutionist worldview in Western European thought between a static world that must be left behind, versus what is current and developing. Applied to Jews, pagans, Muslims, and the various natives others, it represents a morally coded antinomy between the premodern and what the anthropologist Webb Keane called the Christian Modern. There is a whole history to the challenges and alternatives that have arisen to this narrow opposition. Most relevant for us, as Susannah Heschel showed, already in the 19th century Abraham Geiger led an academic movement within Jewish thought that challenged the Protestant evolutionist view of Christianity itself, framing Jesus as simply a particularly influential teacher of Judaism.
In Chakrabarty’s analysis, the enlightening inversion Heschel identified might count as “provincializing” Jesus, reversing the view of Christianity as the pinnacle and center and instead placing it on the margins of Judaism. Yet might we go further and question the very dominating and subordinating language of capital vs. province and center vs. periphery–terms themselves taken from European empires? As Hegel himself argued, the very move of simply reversing a hierarchy rather than doing a way with it can be a way of recreating it–what he called the master/slave dialectic.
But we may also consider adopting a pattern visible in Torah as an alternative model for a typology of modes of social order along Cover’s lines. Rather than provincializing Christian thought, such a model can be generative of useful concepts but without the implied subordination or evolutionism, the old master/slave dialectic of traditional vs rational.
3. Conclusion
A model of tradition as a form of unsettling can invite new theorization from areas like the critical study of race, where we may see the concept of Peoplehood and the practical means of constituting it through the lens of Barbara and Karen Fields’ concept of Racecraft.
The anthropologist John Kelly has argued that through its very need to gain acceptance of legitimacy, the state’s “monopoly of legitimate force” is always shadowed by a contest for the monopoly of legitimate communication. Outside the state model itself we can argue that Judaism is an example of developing a kind of “monopoly of legitimate tradition” as a people-constituting mechanism.
Can we find concrete cases of this attempted socially ordering “monopoly of legitimate tradition?” Our refreshing of theory can return us to textual and material data with useful new questions, to a new dialogue with ancient evidence and cultural history. In the context of ancient Near Eastern writing, the Torah’s founding document (“Grundschrift“) attributed to the Priestly tradition may be an example. In the concrete perspective of textual production during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, it is most distinctive in how it encoded the actions of ritual law as culture, while contemporary and earlier ancient Near Eastern scribal cultures instead encoded the mainly verbal texts of divination or incantation or prayer. It was this new foundational process that permitted turning religious directives–tôrâ or ritual “law”–into the tradition that generates Judaism through its transmission.
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