Be Hearers and Doers of the Word: Points of Entry into the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures

By John P. Nichols STL

The twelve essays in this book have grown out of twenty years of work with adults in the ecclesial lay ministry program for the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette, Indiana. I do not see it as mere coincidence that I am writing this on the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, my patron saint (his birth is celebrated the day after mine).

That is why I have called these essays Entry Points into the Scriptures; they treat of things to know and things to appreciate as one prepares to enter serious study of these sacred texts. They do not substitute for the reading of the texts but try to open minds and hearts to respond to God's message sent to us through the mediation of the human words in the Bible. These essays have been tried and tested and revised over twenty years and have met with some success. However, hearing and doing the Word of God is a matter of grace. Therefore, may John the Baptist, who prepared the way of the Lord, intercede for both author and readers as we approach the "holy place" of God's revelation.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639613458

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Be Hearers and Doers of the Word

Points of Entry into the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures

John P. Nichols, STL, PhD

ISBN 978-1-63961-344-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63961-345-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by John P. Nichols, STL, PhD

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

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Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Essays

To The Older Testament—Promise

The Making of the Jewish Bible (And then of the Catholic OT)

First, a Solar clock

Tracking Our Planet's Journeys Around the Sun

Second, a Scribal Clock

Words Sound but Writing Perdures

Third, a Canonical Clock

Canon Formation

Selected Writings Are Elevated To a Sacred Status

Further Reflections

Appendix

Torah—The Law

What Is the Content of the Law and Where Can We Find It?

The Earlier and the Later Covenant Theologies

How to Think Godly Thoughts (Prophetic Consciousness)

The Psalter

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria

Recent Scholarship on the Psalms

Early Christianity and Greek Paideia

Two Wisdom Books: Qoheleth and Job

Qoheleth

Job

To the Newer Testament—Fulfillment

Vatican 2 on Revelation (Focus on Gospels)

Writing the Gospels

Three Sources of Catholic Faith

Saul of Tarsus—Paul the Apostle

Analyses and Reflections

Saint Paul and the Salvation of Israel

To Scripture as the Soul of Theology

A Sketch of Biblical Theology (Images of God in the Bible)

Conclusion/Confession

Creation from Genesis to Vatican 2

Creation as Revealed in the Bible

The Yahwist Creation Story

(Gen 2:4b–3:24)

The Priestly Creation Story

(Gen 1:1–2:4a)

References to Creation in the Newer Testament

Creation as Developed in Christian Traditions (to 1600)

Challenges to Creation in the Modern World

Contemporary Theology of Creation

The Three Dimensions of the Incarnation

The Existential Dimension

κενωσις

The Sacramental Dimension

θεωσις

The Cosmic Dimension

ανακεφαλαιωσις

Conclusion

Parting Suggestions

About the Author

Introduction

The purpose of these essays is announced in the subtitle of the book Points of Entry into the Scriptures. The point, therefore, is not to lay out for the reader the meaning of these sacred texts, much less to relieve readers of the joy of studying the texts for themselves. What I will offer is something more than the short and casual introductions found in most Bibles but less than what can be found in scholarly academic tomes. I'm aiming at helpful but not overwhelming. To finish the metaphor, to open the door so readers can get into these texts with ease and accurate expectations of what to do to find the riches of understanding of God's message to be found therein.

Take the first section of the book for example, the essays that deal with the Older Testament. (I use that specific descriptor to avoid old with its possible implication of obsolete and to imply on the contrary—something still operative.) The first essay there gives readers a grasp of the making of the whole original version of this testament, the Jewish Bible, and how it is converted into the Catholic OT. Each of the three components of the Jewish Bible (Law, Prophets, and Writings) is explored and explained in the other essays in that section.

The section on the Newer Testament is set up in similar fashion with an overall view of the composing of the books in that Testament and then more particular analysis of the main components, the four Gospels and the Letters of Paul. Finally, the third section illustrates the essential role of Sacred Scripture in the writing of theological treatises.

I use the New American Bible (NAB) in its most current edition with revised NT and Psalms. The NAB was produced by an ecumenical group of scholars (Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish), working from the best original language texts available, and communicated to us in excellent (American) English. It also contains helpful and accurate notes that promote understanding of the text.

The expression Word of God needs to be clarified. Every word in the Bible is a human word, subject to all the linguistic, cultural, and worldview limitation and changeability of all things human. Limitation means that every biblical word falls short of fully expressing anything about an infinite being. Even Jesus in the NT speaks as a fully human being, in this case, a first-century Galilean Jew.

God uses finite means to communicate with us creatures, the only way our minds can grasp even an aspect or two of divine infinity. Our minds are wondrous, but they work through the senses. Material things are the primary things we know, step by step and little by little. Changeable means that words today do not mean what they (or their equivalents) meant three thousand or just two thousand years ago. Try this experiment: extend one arm straight out in front of you with fingers fully extended too. Now close your hand into a fist. You do not reach as far, right? The poet Robert Browning has a line that changes this physical fact into an expression of the human condition: A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? In the same way, our human words reach out for knowledge that we do not quite grasp with them. (The great lesson that Job learned was that what his intellect could not grasp, his will could embrace.)

But that's not the full story. Biblical words remain words of God. As the human nature of Jesus somehow still revealed the Son of God, the Incarnation makes human words revelatory of God. Jesus did say that he who sees me sees the Father. God has inspired certain humans to speak or write in ways which God uses to reveal to us Godself. Partially and perhaps also ambiguously but with some success. The trouble is that due to our own insecurity about heavenly things, we equate inspiration with inerrancy. We want the news about salvation to be absolutely and transparently true.

What is certain about this is that God indeed wills the salvation of all people, but how any particular text (human words, remember) manages to communicate knowledge about such salvation has to be determined. (Vatican 2 did not use the term inerrancy at all in its document on revelation.) In truth, there are errors in biblical texts—scientific, historical, and even religious. The first two kinds have been recognized for many years. Religious errors, such as Job's claim that there is no afterlife, are corrected and clarified by other texts in the Bible. Every inspired scriptural writer has seen but a piece of the total picture. We are certain of God's universal salvific will, but we are not given all the details.

Coming back to earth, Fr. Ray Brown composes his own aphorism that can replace all four of my previous paragraphs (to keep good perspective here). There's a French book on this topic entitled Parole humaine et message de Dieu. Brown freely translates it as this: All the words in the Bible are human words, but the message is God's.

Each of us, all through many years of studying the Scriptures, has been aided by fellow voyagers to deepen our understanding of texts. I wish to recognize people who have been of great help to me.

My innermost circle: Connie, Jonathan, and Michael

Teachers: Ceslas Spicq and Dominic Barthelemy (at Fribourg)

Jean Ladriere and Albert Dondeyne (at Louvain)

Raymond Brown and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (by their books)

Students: Thousands of them in the Core Curriculum at Saint Joseph's College

Hundreds in the Ecclesial Lay Ministry program of the Lafayette Diocese (IN)

Three ELMers who became colleagues: Jeff Newell, Anne Roat, and Art Taylor

These essays worked very well for ELM students, so the audience I have in mind for this book would be adult Christians, highly motivated to deepen their faith through Word and Sacrament.

The Essays

Points of Entry

To The Older Testament—Promise

The Hebrew refugees from Egypt reached Mount Sinai only three months after the events at the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, so the memories of the mighty acts of God in freeing, defending, and feeding them were fresh in their minds. God called Moses up the mountain and made an offer to the Israelites.

Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob. Tell the Israelites: You have seen for yourselves how I have treated the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people. The people responded immediately (without knowing the commandments) and unanimously: Everything the Lord has said, we will do. (Ex 19:3–5, 7–8)

Chapters 20 to 23 in Exodus communicate to the people precisely what some of the covenant obligations will be, so their next unanimous acceptance is more meaningful: We will do everything the Lord has told us. So Moses prepares the sacrifices that will seal the covenant and conserves the blood from the holocaust of some young bulls. Half of the blood was splashed on the altar built for the occasion, the other half Moses sprinkled on the people. The Sinai Covenant was sealed in blood (Ex 24:3).

I will be your God, and you shall be my people.

1

The Making of the Jewish Bible (And then of the Catholic OT)

A more accurate title for this essay would be The Making of the Tanak, but it is not good practice to have a title that is more mysterious than the content that follows. Tanak is the Jewish acronym for the three parts of their scripture: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nebi'im) and the Writings (Ketubim). The prologue to John's Gospel speaks about the revelation through Jesus as a gift upon a gift, in the sense that the NT is a second gift of God, the OT being the first. I am doing this essay in an attempt to make God's Older revelation more accessible to Christians. Having done that, it is rather easy to understand how the OT in the Christian Bible came to be, and perhaps one can then even understand the Newer revelation better.

That statement doesn't get to the real point. I am a firm believer in embracing the OT on its own terms without approaching it with a ready-made Christian interpretation of the meaning of its books. That is important—gift upon gift—but that approach makes it difficult, if not impossible, to hear what the inspired Israelite or Jewish writer has grasped of the Word of God in his own time and place.

The former statement is the modus operandi and plea of most OT scholars. I want to put an additional and Christian motivation to it. Studying the OT on its own terms puts one in contact with the Scriptures, the Word of God, as known to the Apostles, Paul, and the other disciples as they encountered Jesus of Nazareth. Knowing the first gift well, I argue, enhances appreciation and understanding of the second gift.

This may or may not work, but I have used a metaphor of three clocks running throughout the centuries it took to put together the Tanak. The first clock is an astronomical clock that keeps track of the passage of years and the events that occur in the lives of the OT People of God. The second clock tracks their putting their experiences into writing, and the third clock deals with the very special action of transforming selected writings into sacred texts or a canon of sacred scripture. I think it will work, but the readers of this essay will certainly be the judges of that.

Works Cited

Bernhard Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 1975 (3rd ed.), Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-936153-7. A true classic, scholarly and readable.

Richard Friedmann, Who Wrote the Bible?, 1997 (2nd ed.), HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 0-06-063035-3. All you'd ever want to know about JEDP-R.

John Miller, How the Bible Came to Be, 2004, Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-4183-3. The when and what of canon formation.

The Bible I used for scripture citations is the NAB.

First, a Solar clock

Tracking Our Planet's Journeys Around the Sun

The Older Testament establishes the concept of Revelation coming through events (acts of God) as well as through speech (words of God) to such an extent that many scholars emphasize that Judaism is a religion based primarily on history. So as our planet rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun in its annual trek, things happened by which God manifested Godself and God's ways with humanity. This is but the first clock that we have to read to understand how the Older Testament came into being. The key events can be listed on this one page with additional understanding to come from two other clocks.

Reflections on the Solar Clock

There are four giants of OT history to be found among the data on the previous page. All three great monotheistic faiths of the present age refer to "our Father Abraham." He responded with faith to whatever God asked of him. In return, God promised him innumerable descendants, all the land around him in Canaan, and that he himself would be a blessing to all nations.

Moses led Israelites from Egypt to the plains of Moab, the very threshold of the Land promised to Abraham. Moses suffered greatly from the stiff necks of these people, yet he succeeded in brokering God's covenant and will to them, speaking face-to-face with God like no other prophet. As a result, the entire Torah is called the Law of Moses by Jews.

The most successful king in Jewish history is David, the apple of God's eye. David knew how to win battles and how to keep friends through wise political decisions. For two key examples, David picked a neutral city for his capital and appointed two high priests, one from the north and one from the south.

Ezra merits the title of the second Moses for his work in bringing the whole Torah to its final content and shape. During the years of the Exile, priests and Levites (the teaching priests and scribes) worked and reworked the accumulated texts of the previous six hundred years into the OT: Law, Prophets, and Writings. The final editor was Ezra, and he also led the covenant renewal ceremony that committed Jews to observance of this OT…forever.

Two mountains stand out as special places: Sinai or Horeb (the place of the covenant of the Law) and Zion (the City of David and of the Messianic banquet). All Jews think they were present at the enactment of the covenant at the Mountain of Moses (Jebel Musa), in the sense that their present commitment is part of the we shall do that enacted the covenant back at Sinai. Mount Zion is also part of the resume of every Jew, as Psalm 87 says: But of Zion it shall be said, ‘Each one was born in her.' These two mountains interact with great fertility in Jewish theology: the heavily conditional Covenant of Sinai and the unconditional covenant with David.

At the time of the entry into the Land, there were twelve tribes named after the sons of Jacob (Israel). Eleven of them had portions of the land assigned to them, and the tribe of Levi performed religious rituals for the other tribes and was supported by them. Ten tribes, the whole Northern Kingdom after the split that followed immediately after the death of Solomon, were defeated, destroyed, and carried off to be distributed among nations in Mesopotamia (722 BC). They disappeared entirely from all history, except for some refugees who fled to Judah before the destruction. Since the Levites were spread among all the tribes, the result was that one tribe, Judah, equaled all of Israel from that time on.

From the point of view of Jewish theology, then and now, everything that happened prior to Sinai was preparation for the making of the Sinai Covenant. All of it was a prologue, in that the covenant was the goal and purpose of it all. The complementary statement is equally sweeping. All that follows after Sinai is commitment to being faithful to the Law given at Sinai, for that Law is the meaning of you shall be my people.

Second, a Scribal Clock

Words Sound but Writing Perdures

Humans love to talk, and given the early dates of OT stories and the relatively late dates of the invention of systems of writing, the OT began with oral records of events and messages from God. The descendants of Abraham would tell and retell the stories of what their ancestors did. Later, songs and proverbs would enter into the traditions. The best case for the first OT song comes in the time of the Exodus, namely Miriam's Song of the Sea. The refrain that we have for it now is, The Lord is a mighty warrior; horse and chariot he cast in the sea. The reference, of course, is to the drowning of the Egyptian army at the crossing of the Sea of Reeds (c. 1250).

Writing puts into a text previous experience, whether of actions or words. The judgment of its value is accuracy as a record of said experience, but nothing prevents there being rival and conflicting records and memories of the same experiences. In fact, there is evidence in the Torah that four somewhat differing traditions made what was finally recognized by Jews as the official and sacred text of Torah.

The first actual references to written material are found in Deuteronomy and Joshua and are referenced as recording words spoken at the time of entry into the land (c. 1200). No one believes that there were written parts of the OT at that time, so we need to find out what the meaning of the texts might be. (Something like references to the Sabbath at the end of the first Creation story.)

In Deuteronomy 31, we read about what Moses did with what he had written about his teachings. He entrusted his scroll to the Levites for safekeeping. Then after Moses died, the Lord told Joshua to Keep this book of the law on your lips. Recite it by day and by night… [Then Joshua says after the covenant renewal]: This stone shall be our witness, for it has heard all the words which the Lord spoke to us (Jo 1:8).

What the two citations establish is (1) the Levites will be in charge of the texts of the Law (until the rabbis take over after AD 70), and (2) Joshua did not have anything to read (notice: lips, recite, stone) to those who were to follow him into the Promised Land. The confidence behind this interpretation comes from knowing fairly accurately when these texts were written (not 1200 but 622).

Clear evidence of written documents for the OT comes in 1000 with kings and their court records. This is historical writing, and it is very well done. It's honest, recounting both the good and the bad, and it keeps accurate count of relative dating in terms of the years of reign of the various kings. A bit later (750), prophets started recording what messages they had from the Lord about the behavior of the Israelites (Am, Hos, First Is).

After that auspicious start, the big story is the writing of the earliest two of the four traditions that came to make up the finished Torah, the Yahwist and the Elohist writers. They are so important that we must go into fine detail in telling their story.

It is already obvious that the two clocks we've looked at are not synchronized until we get to the time of the monarchy (and even there, it's spotty). Writing has to follow after the experiences it records, but there is no strict rule about how long afterward, much less about any regularity in the size of the time lapse.

Details on the Two Old Epics (traditional references to J and E)

First of all, why are there two of them? The wise King Solomon did some not-so-wise things such as allowing his foreign wives to worship their gods in Jerusalem and then mistreating the ten northern tribes that they seceded from David's united kingdom, making two separate nations.

David had appointed two high priests to keep peace, a descendant of Aaron in the South (Zadok) and a descendant of Moses (Abiathar) in the North. Abiathar did not support Solomon to be king, so Solomon sent him and his Levites away from his court in a sort of internal exile to the small northern town of Anathoth. Solomon continued to alienate the North by other means, and shortly after his death in 922, the ten northern tribes rebelled and seceded from the union. Thus, there were now rival members of the covenant, and they maintained their independence even in the stories they told.

The Yahwists, the southern priests who habitually called God YHWH, acted strongly to overcome the idolatry that Solomon permitted in his kingdom. In conducting foreign affairs, Solomon had many affairs with foreigners; he ended up with three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines! He allowed them to bring their own gods with them to Jerusalem and even built places for them to do their worship. Around the time of Solomon's death, these priests wrote their epic story of the one God of Israel, the one God Creator of all that exists, the Ruler of history, the Maker of the covenant, the Giver of the Law—the epic that runs from the beginning and ends with the entry into the land. An epic that overwhelms the puny do-nothing gods of the foreigners. Our God YHWH has chosen us to be his people: one God, one people.

Remember that after 922, there are two kingdoms, North and South, Israel and Judah, Mushite and Aaronid Levites (the groups charged with the sacred writings). After the southern Yahwists completed their epic (c. 950–900), the rival northern group had to have its own epic. The Mushite Levites in the North wrote their story (c. 800–750) running from Abraham to the settlement in the land. There, of course, were rival features in the two epics. Because the northerners used the name Elohim for God, their story is called the Elohist tradition. As Mushite Levites, they wrote so as to show Moses in a better light than Aaron (the Yahwists did the reverse since they were Aaronids). Many of the doublets in Abraham stories come from these two differing sources. The Elohist wrote stories in ways that grabbed readers' emotions, for example the story of the Binding of Isaac. The Yahwists wrote with the comprehensive vision of the creation of all humans and all life and a God who guides the history of the whole world.

At the time of the destruction of the North (722), some northern Levites escaped to the South and brought their sacred texts with them. Contrary to all expectations, both northern and