The Making of a Reader
In this article, I am picking up an old thread I began in the earliest days of Pietisten’s “second” life, during the summer of 1986. I named it the “making of a reader,” because I came to the awareness that readers are “made”; we are taught to read, by teachers and other readers, and by the text we are reading. A lifetime of reading the biblical text closely, and in company with others has been a source of continued adventure and joy.
The reason for adding to this series now comes from working through the recent writing of Edward Feld, a highly recognized Jewish scholar. Published in 2022, The Book of Revolutions: The Battle of Priests, Prophets, and Kings that Birthed the Torah has been insightful, engaging and is adding to my own reading skills in areas of the biblical text I have only grazed. I will quote from this work often. His insights are valuable and worth sharing.
Feld explores the text and context (often tumultuous) that created the various codes of the Hebrew bible—what we often lump together as Law, or commandments. We may use the more traditional Jewish term; Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew text. Law and narrative are woven together throughout these scrolls, more narrative in some than in others. It can be difficult to pay attention to the codes when reading the stories; the lack of drama and so much of the content seems to have little to do with our lives—especially the lives of gentiles. However, these codes occupy lots of textual real estate and racing on by has left a significant gap in my knowledge, and reading skills which has seriously limited my appreciation for the whole text, and therefore missing a more complete sense of it as a body of work, including the life and faith that flows in and out from the beating heart of the text.
Feld addresses the misapprehension this may create:
“Through the generations, reading the Torah from beginning to end, almost all readers and commentators related to the Pentateuch as a single-minded text telling a unitary story. Primal history and patriarchal narratives in Genesis lead up to the moment at the end of Deuteronomy when the Children of Israel stand ready to cross the River Jordan and fulfill the promises to their ancestors. The logic of the story is inexorable. Exile from the Garden can be redeemed by a people living in its land with God in its midst” (241).
There is certainly plenty of scholarship which challenges this unitary view of the text, but my own experience confirms that most of us, sitting in synagogue or church, hold to this unity. It is important, for me at least, to start anew and set aside this old assumption. To be a good reader, we must first ask the text: “How do you want to be read?” (This is true of all written text) And, a good reader will set aside what we think we already know. And we must be prepared to be surprised by what we are about to learn.
The Law is associated with the narrative of Moses on the mountain of Sinai. But the Law, so to speak, was not written “on the spot,” wherever that spot was. Indeed, close reading by textual archeologists and literary critics suggest that there are at least three codes that were written over considerable time and in relationship to very differing historical contexts. Each has its unique fingerprint. The genius of the Hebrew bible is that they are all present in the text. This may be the most important revelation I have learned. I hope this will become clearer as we go on.
Feld begins by clarifying what we are speaking about:
“A word about what a code of law may have meant in the ancient Near East. Promulgation of a code may not have meant that it then became the law of the land. Instead, it may have simply involved the erection of monuments with inscriptions of the words of the code in public places, so that people could see the announced principles upon which the regime stood” (29).
This is a classic and historical description. Codes were pervasive in the oldest of days. The most famous code I remember was the Code of Hammurabi. Now, I only think of codes when I must wire and plumb in a new bathroom. But back then, these codes provided some common understanding within a diverse and mobile landscape. When Israel began to filter into the land they were to occupy, codes already existed. Other people lived by them. These found their way into the first code as it was shaped and set down, with different accents and emphases as it addressed the unique identity of Israel and their covenant with YHWH—the God of their ancestors and their liberator.
Most agree this first code, called the Covenant Code, is present in the book of Exodus, most likely written in Northern Israel somewhere in the 8th and 9th centuries. It is important to remember that Israel was split into two kingdoms at this time. Judah was in the south and a small vassal territory to the larger and more powerful Israel in the north. The Covenant Code, as Feld describes the process, was the result of dramatic tensions between priest and prophet and ruler. And it reveals the rules that Israel was to follow as it lived among a diverse and dynamic population of other peoples. In the text of this first code, we find the classic 10 Sayings we know as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). But look around—there is much more there to see.
In 722 BCE the massive Assyrian empire conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Those tribes were assimilated into the realm and essentially drop out of the story. It is a profound trauma with consequences that shake everything up, including the Southern Kingdom of Judah, that was trying to understand what happened and how to proceed. During this time the second code, the Deuteronomic Code was written, borrowing from the Covenant Code, but reinterpreted during the reign of King Josiah, 640-609 BCE. This code can be found in the first half of Leviticus (1-18) and the whole of Deuteronomy. A prominent concern in this code is to clarify the differences between Israel and others. Feld describes this as the rise of a kind of religious nationalism—as a response to the question of why YHWH “allowed” or “caused” Assyria to take out the North: it had become too lax; too cozy with foreigners and their gods; and did not enough rigor in following the rules of what some thought it meant to be a faithful Israelite.
I will introduce the third code, The Holiness Code—in the next part of this series. This code was written in the wake of another trauma, the Babylonian exile. This code was probably composed during the reign of Nehemiah, 539-450 BCE and appears in Leviticus 19 and following.
Without further introduction (this will come later) let’s compare the first two codes as they appear in the biblical text and as they address a shared and particular concern: “what should I do if I encounter…”
Consider this passage in the earliest Covenantal code (translated by Everett Fox):
Exodus 23: 4-5 (now) when you encounter your enemy’s ox or his donkey straying, return it, return it to him.
(And) when you see the donkey of one who hates you crouching under its burden, restrain from abandoning it to him—unbind, yes unbind it together with him.
This code follows the design of many civil codes that were used throughout the Mideast at the time. Yet, this code is written to be observed by the people of Israel. The law is phrased in terms of, “if…then…”—typical of most casuistic law. The focus is on the suffering animal; the passerby must give aid to the animal whether it belongs to (your) enemy or even if the owner considers (you) to be (their) enemy.
As written, the code highlights and encourages behavior expected of an Israelite. Code and identity support each other. I do this because this is who I am.
This is Feld’s description:
“The Law asks us to help even our enemies: their goods ought to be restored; and when people we encounter need an extra hand, they ought to be able to call on our sense of obligation to a common community, even if they are strangers or we normally see them as an enemy” (36).
Now, let us turn to a similar rendering in the Deuteronomic Code composed hundreds of years later:
Deuteronomy 22: 1
You are not to see the ox of your brother, or his sheep wondering away and hide yourself from them; you are to return, yes, return them to your brother.
Verse 4: You are not to see the donkey of your brother, or his ox, fallen by the wayside, and hide yourself from them; you are to raise, yes raise it up (together) with him.
Setting them side by side we see the obvious; “your enemy” or, “the one who hates you” is replaced by “your brother.” “Your brother” (in its Hebrew form) is another way of identifying the person as a citizen of Israel. Consider the differences here. The code limits the primary responsible action toward the “brother” and not primarily the aid of the donkey/ox. Certainly, helping the donkey is present in the code but “the law is now about the ethics of neighborliness.” Feldman sees the shift in tone and focus as evidence of how Israel experiences itself in the world during the reformation of Josiah.
The Deuteronomic form represents an “attitude with its strong differentiation between Israelites and foreigners, with Deuteronomy’s insistent nationalism. One of Deuteronomy’s agendas is to reorganize extant laws. It no longer takes as its primary reference the common culture of the Near East, but rather represents a rethinking of Israel’s heritage—and is, therefore, an attempt to reinterpret Judea’s own past in a contemporary light” (98).
Both codes reside in the text. There is no single authority to declare which one is to be preferred. And, even if we have a preference, we cannot follow it without the awareness that the other code occupies the same text. One is not right and the other wrong, though we may think of these differences in that way. But that would only lead to polarization and not dialogue.
As I see it, the presence of both codes becomes a resource for further dialogue, not its end. This is the beauty of the oral tradition as it discourages the code as fixed and encourages a dialogue/debate that keeps the codes relevant to the present day. The challenge is to listen to each (other) as one enters and enjoys the discourse.
The evidence of this lively oral tradition using various codes to address present concerns is found throughout the gospels written hundreds of years later. Jesus often weighs in with his own understanding of what we should do, for example, when a donkey is in distress. Here is the text from Luke 14: 1-6:
“On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. Just then, in front of him, there was a man who had dropsy. And Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees; Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not? But they were silent. So, Jesus took him and healed him and sent him away.
Then he said to them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not pull it out immediately on a sabbath day?” And they could not reply to this.”
What a brilliant text, on so many levels. The setting is a common parlor game of rabbinic play on how to interpret code. Which code? To heal or not to heal? New ethical and moral layers are introduced by setting the dialogue on the Sabbath. How does the Sabbath affect the decision? The text suggests there is no response to the healing of the man (I find that hard to believe, but we can take the report as given by Luke).
Ok, let’s play this out, Jesus seems to say. What if your child falls into a well, or your ox.? Clearly, Jesus references the two codes regarding donkeys et al. What would you do? What is your responsibility? Does it make a difference if it is your child or someone else’s? This is no longer an abstract, hypothetical debate. What happens if this crisis falls on a Sabbath day? Do you act differently if the child is of ‘your’ enemy? (Covenant Code). Or are you only responsible for the child of your fellow Israelite? (Deuteronomic Code)
Jesus does not answer these questions specifically. This is not Moses on the mountain writing code “in stone” with divine lightning. We can imagine he has a position; he heals the man. However, I don’t believe that we should ask: “What would Jesus do?”—before we enter the dialogue ourselves. Before we wrestle with our own preferences. Before we listen to the preferences of others. That makes all the difference and may lead to what the final editors of the Torah had in mind, when they allowed all codes to be present in the text as encouragement for the community to be in living dialogue.