In my last post we saw a few things James Kugel had to say about the importance of the Sefarim Chitzonim (The Outside Books) for how later rabbis came to interpret the Bible. I have become more and more interested in the Apocrypha and Pseudopigrapha, and the little I have read has been incredibly helpful. A friend of mine who recently took a course at Gordon-Conwell in early Judaism had to read quite a bit of Second Temple writings, specially the ones from Qumran. He seems to be a bit disappointed because of the lack of coherence that he found in them. One of my projects for this year is to start reading more of these books and draw my own conclusions. I might even blog some thoughts about them.

In the book Exploring the Origins of the Bible (ed. Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov), there is a good essay by James H. Charlesworth called “Writings Ostensibly Outside the Canon.” The title was chosen since the word “ostensible” can carry the meaning of “apparent” and “professed,” as Charlesworth explains,

“On the one hand, the Jews who wrote and found God’s word in the allegedly apocryphal compositions did not consider these writings “outside the canon.” On the other hand, since about 200 CE many Jews and Christians have judged the writings in central focus to be on the fringes of canon or ‘outside the canon’” (p. 59-60).

This quote represents the overall opinion in the essays that I have read so far that to talk about a canon (i. e. Hebrew Bible) in Second Temple period is anachronistic (a position I tend to agree with). But what really caught my attention in this essay was something Charlesworth said about the “role” that a canon should play which I had never thought of before, and I wonder how many of you would agree with him. Here is the quote in full for you to ponder:

“The danger of the canon is the tendency to imagine, even think, that God has spoken only in and through a closed book. The beauty of the canon is the guideline, the rule, for how, and in what ways, the One who has spoken in the past may be heard in other writings and persons, whether prophet, priest, or perplexed. The word canon should have been, and hopefully will now be, used as the measuring standard by which to discern God’s word in many other words” (p. 84).

Someone from the audience asked James Kugel after his lecture entitled Midrash Before Hazal: Why It’s Important For Orthodox Jews what Julius Wellhausen would have thought about it. Kugel’s answer was “I’m sure he would say ‘This is interesting
nonsense.’” I thought that was a clever answer not only because Wellhausen would have probably agreed with him, but also because sometimes this is exactly what I am thinking when I read what the early interpreters had to say about some biblical passages. While I want show respect and humility towards the deposit of wisdom given to us by our early (some would say pre-critical) interpreters, every once in a while I want to shout out “this is brilliant nonsense!”

However Jame Kugel thinks that listening to these interpreters shouldn’t be divorced from current biblical scholarship. He says,

“It’s kind of surprising but often people who teach modern biblical scholarship are really uninformed about- now I am speaking again of Christian scholars mostly – what the bible looked like from the standpoint of – even just 100 years ago, not to speak of 1000 – and I think that once you are aware of that context everything looks rather different.”

Unfortunately Kugel does not elaborate on how exactly things look different when you are aware of Bible’s history of interpretation. I am still reading his book How to Read the Bible (which I highly recommend) and it could be that he talks more there about the interplay between how the bible was understood by ancient interpreters and how that bears on modern scholarship. I also wonder if his assessment that Christian scholars are particularly uniformed about ancient (Jewish?) interpretation is correct. If it is, it would be interesting to investigate why.
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