The Capacity for Holiness: A Deeper Look at the Bible

Three Lessons to Reframe Your Biblical Understanding

In decades of serious study of the Bible, three lessons emerge that I wish most lay folk who read the Bible would understand:

Lesson 1: The Bible is a Library, Not a Book

The Bible is not a book. The Bible is a library of books compiled over centuries from major source traditions, each written from a particular point of view, in a particular cultural and historical context, with their own unique characterizations of Gd. Accordingly, there is not one voice with which the Bible speaks but many. Because of this, we can’t claim, “The Bible says ____ .” Because while some books or some authors say one thing, you’ll find alternative views somewhere else. It cheapens the literature to force cohesion where contradiction exists.

Lesson 2: The Bible is a Collection of Human Documents

People’s theism and atheism should not be based on their reading of the Bible. Should Gd exist, don’t make Gd so small as to fit into this historical collection of documents (theists), and don’t hang the rhetoric of the Bible around Gd’s neck (atheists). If you believe Gd exists, it’s better to find Gd in nature and in each other than in an edited collection of human-authored documents that emerge from one dominant tradition at the omission of other culture’s and ethnicity’s sacred texts. But also, if you reject Gd because, as I’ve heard some atheists say, “I couldn’t believe in a Gd that says/does ____ ,” well, it’s not Gd that said that; it’s the people who scribed the account.

Lesson 3: The Bible is a Call to Justice

Despite its multi-vocality, inconsistencies, and, at times, really terrible rhetoric and condoning of things like enslavement, abuse of women, and capital punishment, if the Bible is “about” anything, it is social justice that is one of the most common themes appearing throughout the literature.

By and large, the literature of the Bible was written by people who did not experience much autonomous rule. From the Neo-Assyrian destruction in the 8th century BCE, to the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE, to Greek Seleucid occupation in the 2nd century BCE, to attempted ethnic cleansing by Rome in the first and second centuries CE, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were composed under conditions of oppression and occupation. The texts of the Bible are less often the literature of the powerful than the literature of the marginalized.

Examining our Beliefs

If you feel uncomfortable with what I’ve said, we may have to do some work to examine these biases. I find the most common discomfort from this line of Biblical criticism stems from two assumptions: The first assumption is that failing to get the Bible “right” condemns you to some afterlife of eternal conscious torment. The second is that if the Bible is not divinely authored (theists) or because it is not divinely authored (atheists), then it isn’t worth studying.

To take on the first concern first, the idea of a place called hell, which is a place of eternal conscious torment, is a relatively late development in Biblical thought. Right around the second and first centuries BCE and especially into the first century CE, apocalyptic ideas about the end times, the desire for a messiah to deliver the people, the personification of the devil from the role of the accuser in the Hebrew Bible to the role of an evil agent, and notions of punishment in the afterlife grow in influence. Still, a morally-guided threat of eternal punishment and the idea of individual salvation are later doctrines that may take Biblical ideas, but they are not indicative of a long tradition of thought from the Hebrew Bible.

If you were under a militarized occupation, living in conditions of wealth disparity and little agency to control the outcome of your life, you might look to divine liberation, individual salvation, and punishment for enemies in the afterlife, too.

As for the second, that the Bible must be divine to be authoritative, my refrain: Oprah isn’t Gd, but the Oprah book club brings many people together in a shared activity that builds community and encourages open discussion. Part of denying divine authorship is affirming human creative capacity. How amazing that we’ve sustained a literary and oral tradition for thousands of years!

Care, Not Control

While my three lessons may strike you as dismantling certain beliefs, and for those with a confessional or devotional attitude, I see how they present challenges, I think they can be understood as very affirming.

Sacred literature is sacred! It is holy! By studying the Bible closely, you join a millennia-long discourse with a thread of connection from the early Iron Age (The Song of Deborah, found in Judges 5) through the Roman Empire (composition of the Christian New Testament).

That scripture is holy and that scripture is human-authored. To claim this is not an assault on Gd. Rather, it is an affirmation of our own capacity for holiness. If you are a theist, then you affirm that each of us has a Divine spark within; if you are an atheist, you can appreciate the history and composition of some of the world’s oldest literature and poetry.

One perspective held by many authors of the literature is that Gd’s people are to be a “nation of priests,” a “holy nation.” That seems to affirm our capacity for holiness, and if a nation of priests exists, the text must exist to guide care and not control. My reading of the Bible is a collection of human-authored source documents that call us to justice. Should Gd exist, it’s hard to think that Gd would be too upset with that characterization, but who am I to tell you what Gd wants? That’s sort of my point.

When asked to distill the core message of Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament), Rabbi Hillel said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” With that direction and guidance from this ancient rabbi, I study the text.