Divine Authorship

Reading and praying over Numbers 21 I stumbled across a reference to another 'book', the scroll of the Wars. The reference seems to be to a poetic summary of Israel's victories. More "conservative" commentators argue that this book was also written by Moses and is a collection of poetic instruction for Joshua as he carries on  the fight into the promised land. While there is probably no reason to dismiss this idea without giving it a thought; there is less reason to embrace it (from the text). Like the Book of Jasher (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18) or the oft mentioned chronicles of the Kings of Judah and Israel (in canonical 1&2 Kings), the plain sense of this reference seems to be to another resource. Why would such a thing trouble us?

When Luke says that he wrote an "orderly account" based on the "eyewitnesses and servants of the word" which he had "investigated carefully for a long time" (Luke 1:1-4) we feel safe to assume that he means, the Gospel of Mark, which he appears to have used as his primary source and either a common source with Matthew, or Matthew's Gospel itself, which served to provide the parallel teachings and assorted other shared features which they (Mt&Lk) share independent of Mark. Just reading the three Gospels side-by-side (which we are doing in our Bible study at St. Andrews) provides a constant reminder of this.

In the early church, there was a point in time when it became widely understood that Jesus was divine. The process of reflection and deepening understanding was not smooth and effortless. Wrapping their head around the concept of "God-become-Man" was difficult and challenging. It also appears that for some, once the idea of incarnation became accepted, the trajectory continued until the only thing people believed was "Jesus is God." His humanity was rejected as an appearance (the meaning of the term Doscetism, which identified this heresy). In a nutshell, they claimed that Jesus appeared to be human, but was not. He was only God. For many centuries the church argued and debated how best to affirm that Jesus is both, human and divine. To this day the struggle continues.

In like manner, for contemporary Christians, the struggle with the Bible follows a similar path. The divinely inspired Scriptures are authoritative. The Spirit leads the composition. Those who believe this sometimes err on the side of reducing the human authorship to mere transcription. "Yes," they affirm human authors wrote the Bible, but they mean "wrote" literally and limited to the physical act of scratching words on parchment as the Spirit guided their hands (like automatic writing) or whispered in their ears the words He had perfectly chosen. Such an approach to the Sacred Writ is in reaction to the Secular view of the Bible, which reduces it to men's religious sentiments and inspiration to the watered down concept of "emotionally moved" to write because of their religious inclinations. Like all good fights, the two sides grow further apart over time and positions solidify. And any listening to one another is condemned as "compromising the truth." The (false) alternatives are "The Bible is Divine" (with divine then defined by a serious of terms, some of which focus on errorless) or "the Bible is 'just' a book by people" (whereby the reader is free to toss out whatever does not meet his/her own standards).

But when I see a reference to another book (Book of War) it lends creedance to the idea that the person(s) writing about Moses. As I said in an earlier post, when the word of the Lord came to the prophets they said "came to me." They spoke in first person. And when an editor (Jeremiah mentions his scribes often) gathered up the prophetic words and added narrative about the prophet, it would switch from first person to third person. That is how we do things on planet earth (although Bob Dole did tend to speak of himself in third person...). Numbers does not read like an autobiography from Moses, but as about Moses. The odd geographic reference to the Wadi Arnon (a boundary of Moab and the Amorites) coupled with the odder citation of a source do not read like a first hand account at all. It sounds like a composer of history drawing attention (for whatever reason) to another source. When I read the Torah (and what follows ) I see conssitency in style. The Book of Joshua (which no one claims Joshua wrote) sounds like what goes before. It sounds like someone wrote the first five and continued with the next six (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings). It sounds like that. And I see no reason to deny that.

God communicates in and through the text. We do well to read it as a human-divine literary work. And we know how human literature is composed (we are human) so that gives us valuable tools from reading and understanding. Does this endanger the authority of the text? Does a process of human authorship mean we cannot read and trust what we read? No, no more than the fetal development of Jesus and His (slow) growth in knowledge and understanding (see Luke again) as a baby to toddler to young child to adolescent to young man to adult make Jesus less an authority. God seems to take His creation more seriously than we do. And the competing options of secular vs. fundamentalist is too limited (and too lacking in reality) for me.

I cannot, will not, read the Bible with an inner "defender of the faith" at work making me twist passages to protect them from some assault. I cannot and will not decide how God "must" do things to ensure He is divine. God made the world and He seems to love this world. A real world, not the ideal world of my wishes and expectations. The sooner we face that, the quicker we will grow in knowledge and understanding of the truth ourselves. And in the end, truth is God's nature.

This sense of sources is intensified by a reference in verse 27. There we read that the conquest of Amorite cities by Israelites has become a mashal (the Hebrew words for parable, puzzle or proverb). What we read is it is now "proverbially" said... Much like Sodom and Gomorah are proverbial cities (for sin and destruction) so the Amorites (and Moab) are proverbial for being destroyed.

I have already said that I believe God inspires the Bible and also that I thought Moses was the human authority behind the text. I do not see why it is needed for us to assume Moses sat down and wrote all five volumes of the Torah. And I think it is clear that in places the Law refers to living conditions (city life) which were not part of the exodus experience. While note taking and oral traditions (memorization is a lost art but widely practiced in non-literary cultures) were no doubt part of the process, it seems most likely that Moses did not sit in the desert for months and months, slowly scratching out the five books which we now possess. And that is why there are such stylistic differences (some of it in theology which can be discerned in English, much of it in vocabulary and phrasing which is locked away in the original Hebrew). It is most likely that the historic core was remembered but later worked, reworked and added to by various schools of scribes.