DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Bible discussion joins 'Imaginative Worlds' series
Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins
Jacob Wright, 2023
This article is the fourth in a series, "Imaginative Worlds," which began with When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, followed by The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists, and most recently, Imagining 'Human': The Epic of Gilgamesh. This article discusses Jacob Wright's book, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins. This discussion is not a political statement. It does not contain veiled references to the war in Gaza or to Israel's claim to Palestine based on ancient history. The article is what it appears to be, i.e., a discussion of the importance of origin stories in the imaginative creation of social identity. Wright's Why the Bible Began contains an extraordinary discourse on this theme applied to the creation of the Old Testament.
At first glance, a person's social identity appears to have a clear factual basis based on gender, place of birth, nationality, language, racial/ethnic group, social class, family history, etc. Upon reflection, most elements of social identity are based on imaginative creations that may have occurred centuries or millennia in the past, and which are reimagined to a greater or lesser extent in every generation. Every element of culture, including law, political institutions, religion, cultural mores, kinship systems, ethical beliefs, child rearing practices, and much else have imaginative elements. The idea that a national identity is based on historical facts, including wars, migration, religious doctrines and other belief systems, ignores the reality that these "facts" were themselves imaginative creations that often required decades or centuries of concerted effort by hundreds, thousands or many millions of persons. Furthermore, whatever has been imagined can be reimagined, based on scientific or historical discoveries, changes in social values, political affiliations or new technologies. History contributes to social identity, it does not determine the meaning people give to past events or prevent the development of new identities. There is no authoritative, final version of constitutional law, religious doctrine, racial/ ethnic identity, national identity or science, based on history. From a scholarly perspective and (periodically) in political debate, it's "game on" in every generation.
According to Jacob Wright's, Why the Bible Began, the Bible, like many natural, social, and psychological phenomena, was developed from a duality with opposed elements: a People's Narrative of a family becoming a nation that originated in the Northern kingdom of Israel and a larger "National Narrative" which brought together competing histories of Israel and Judah (Southern kingdom). Wright maintains: "the Bible as we know it is therefore a work of Northern writers that has been filtered through, and decisively shaped by, the experience of Southern writers. ... North and South had long been divided, and the states had repeatedly come to blows in bloody civil wars. What drove the Bible's formulation was a vision that the population of these two vanquished kingdoms could be one people" (p. 27). A People's Narrative of Abraham, Sarah and their descendants was combined with a Palace Narrative of monarchy in the Davidic line to form a larger National Narrative of a people who did not depend on a geographical kingdom to retain their identity. Rather, Jews became a "People of the Book," in which stories and language became mightier than the sword, a process that took centuries, according to Wright.
Wright states: "The biblical writings articulated a new model of political community, one that we will call "peoplehood." ... I claim that the Hebrew Bible represents the first attempt in world history to construct what we may properly call a national identity" (p.12) based on "shared memories and a will to act in solidarity." And, "It is fundamentally a work of the collective imagination." (p.12) According to Wright, the Old Testament was developed from multiple sources in the wake of military defeat and subjugation of the Northern kingdom, Israel, by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the defeat of the Southern kingdom, Judah, by the Persian empire 135 years later. In Wright's view, the early Bible was sui generis: "no one produced anything like it. Neither small kingdoms or superpowers that conquered those kingdoms devoted their energies to composing a body of literature that asks what it means to be a people without a palace. The existence of the Bible .. cannot be taken for granted. It is a big riddle ..." (p .xvi)
Wright emphasizes the oddity of sacred literature being created by a defeated people in an area of the world where gods of war predominated. Military defeat was widely believed (with little argument) that the deity worshipped by the defeated people, group, kingdom, was subordinate to the God or gods of the victorious kingdom or empire. At no point did Israel reverse its political fortunes and triumph over the Babylonians or Persians, yet these superpowers (at the time) have been largely forgotten, while the Old Testament Bible is the foundational document of two world religions and has been studied and revered by millions of people for more than two thousand years. Wright insists: "Without the relationship of two closely related kingdoms, and without their devastating destruction and downfall, we would not have a Bible." (p. 17) Wright asserts that "visions of national unity have often inspired works of art and writing projects. What energizes these artistic endeavors ...is the will to affirm the existence of one people divided by political borders and factions. Th Bible is not only the earliest, and most elaborate, of these creative endeavors of political imagination, but has also directly inspired many of the projects of peoplehood." ( p. 27)
Wright argues that the Old Testament is not a faithful history of Israel and Judah from 1200 BCE through the first century BCE. Wright asserts that many of the stories in the Old Testament have not been confirmed by other sources, and in some instances the chronology of kingdoms has been altered to fit the narrative of a People becoming a unified kingdom. For example, the Song of Deborah "does not reflect the structure of Israel's society before the rise of its monarchy." Wright maintains the Song of Deborah "presupposes the monarchy, both its achievements and its demise. The national spirit it breathes was originally awakened by the efforts of Israel's kings to build a centralized state ... (yet) its authors consciously removed the monarchy from their memory of the nation's early years. (pp. 55-56). Several years ago, I heard an author who had written a memoir of his early life filled with trauma and suffering reply to an interviewer's question: "such a powerful story, but I have to ask, is it all true?" To which the author replied: "Well let me put it this way, I never let facts get in the way of a good story." Origin stories are often told for a purpose, which is to show a larger truth about a person's or nation's earliest experiences. The Old Testament is a story about the social identity of a people. It is not a reliable guide to the history of ancient Israel's relationship with the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians or Romans, though some of the Old Testament's stories must be true, or contains elements of truth, to have developed a plausible story.
Wright, for all his exceptional discernment does not do justice to the importance of war and other types of collective violence in strengthening social identity. Nothing makes social identity more real than organized violence against an Other which threatens a nation's existence, or the loss of a war that leads to subjugation and persecution. One of the surprising lessons of the Bible is that military defeat and/ or enslavement and persecution can lead to a flowering of solidarity and pride in the survival of a people or nation. As Wright makes clear, the Old Testament is not a glorification of martial values; rather many books of the Bible show the importance of practices and values that allowed a defeated People to survive and creatively develop their culture while living in close proximity to shark- like empires. Arguably, all empires -- without exception -- are evil empires. Nevertheless, spiritualty and a commitment to the Good must endure in the midst of empires competing for world dominance. Regardless of one's religious faith, or lack of it, the Bible has much to say on this subject. Wright asserts: "Most political communities have had to deal with defeat, yet few have responded by reorienting their collective identities around bodies of texts, and none have done so on the scale that we witness in ancient Judah." One idea that follows from this analysis is that wars are as common, or more common in the modern era as for the past few thousand years (despite some claims to the contrary) because of the dynamics of social identity, not because of humans' innate aggression.
Wright maintains that "Fictions are often what unite us as communities ... What makes us human includes not only our ability to tell each other fables and imagine new futures but also, and especially, our proficiencies in reflecting together on our histories, even if these histories are more fabricated than factual." Wright believes that "Myths are crucial parts of healthy identities (both individual and collective), and the National Narrative achieves a successful balance between truth-telling and myth-making." ( pp. 314-15) And: The entire National Narrative, stretching from Genesis to Kings, is an extraordinary sophisticated exemplar of the survival-literature genre." (p. 329)
When considering social identity or personal identity, the opposite of "imaginative" or "imagined" is not "real" or "true;" the opposite of "imaginative" and "imagined" is "given" or "unalterable." Social identity is not given; it is imagined in origin stories and reimagined in every generation. In "The Lies That Bind," (2018) one of the most insightful books about social identity I've read, argues against what he terms "essentialism," about identities. Appiah asserts: " So its worth insisting from the start that essentialism about identities is usually wrong in general, there isn't some inner essence that explains why people of a certain social identity are the way they are." (p. 29) Appiah maintains that "an avowal of faith is as much a performance as it is a proposition." (p. 37), and acts are chosen rather than determined by belief, ancestry or the history of a nation.
-- Dee Wilson