Death of the Gileadite Girl (eBook)

PREFACE

The Death of the Gileadite Girl

I was in a room full of college students who were talking about sacred and profane stories—about various notions of origins and about how meanings emerge from (or are inserted into) the texts of stories. Is our existence a holy thing or a pointless melodrama played out in the chaos of random events? Roger Shattuck, the author of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, was the guest lecturer that day. One student asked him point blank, “But Doctor Shattuck, what do you believe?” He answered simply, “I believe in the stories.” Maybe that’s a good beginning for us all.

Everyone likes to hear a good story. Soldiers swap stories to pass the time. Convicts in the penitentiary tell one another stories. Children, mothers, teachers, rabbis—everyone tells stories, and everyone likes stories. We hear stories as we sit around Grandma’s table, or when we hang out with friends, or as we stand in line at the supermarket. After all, what is it that makes a good movie? A good story. Isn’t it through our stories that we learn about girls, petty theft, the crooked grocer, the virtues of the honest man—about courage, cowardice, forbidden passageways and the mayor’s secret life? And from all these things we formulate values; we come to prize what is honest and courageous in ourselves and to be ashamed of what is shabby and mean-minded. In fact many of us (all of us?) are inwardly authoring an ongoing story of our own lives—and constantly revising it. We are fitting the things that happen to us into some sort of narrative in which we are likely to appear as our own hero, while at the same time teachers and friends may be weaving entirely different narratives around the behavior they see in us. Is there anyone who doesn’t like a story? Well, our sacred texts contain the most enduring stories of all, and this book is about some of those stories.

In this book I’m going to look at a number of stories found in the Christian Bible, and I’m going to read them as they suggest themselves to me—one reader. Virtually all of the world’s major religions recognize one specific text that they hold in highest esteem; it is their sacred text. It is privileged above all other texts in that it contains “the truth,” which other texts do not. Each sacred text is thought by its own believers to “reveal” its truth in some way that is beyond the ordinary rules of literary criticism. It reveals truths that are otherwise concealed. It explains origins, codes of conduct and cosmologies. It is the answer book for all things spiritual. The Torah, the Koran, the Vedas, the Yoruba legends, the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Book of Mormon, the Tao-te-Ching, the Holy Bible and scores more—all of these enjoy (among their own believers) some special, privileged status.

I have no dispute with these claims, I only ask: What is it that makes a text sacred? We are sometimes told that sacred texts are made holy by virtue of the fact that they report the mind of God, and that the mind of God is the source of all truth. So be it, but believers sometimes forget that the words of a sacred text are the same words we find in an ordinary dictionary, that the ordinary rules of grammar do apply in a sacred text, that the meaning of a sacred text is constructed in the ordinary way. The author(s) organize written representations of language on the page in such a way as to reify their thoughts, and readers who come to these texts construct their own meanings from the text out of the common stock of definitions, grammatical practices, available contexts and personal experience. Could it be that the sanctity of the text is not linked to a necessity for me to find the author’s embedded intention in it, but in the necessity for me to appropriate a possible meaning for the text, to find the sacred searching for itself? The meaning of the sacred text is not “given out” by theologians and scholars and clergymen whose task it is to protect the “correct” reading of the text. The meaning of the sacred is “revealed” in the experience of those who discover the sacred in their on-going encounters with a text that is constantly emerging, changing, adapting, dissolving and re-forming as we read.

Modern readers are often discouraged from reading the Bible by the sense that it is a closed work and that its meanings belong to the exclusive authority of the clergy. These same readers often feel that they dare not challenge the assertive and exclusionary interpretations of seminarians or pulpiteers and that, consequently, there is nothing more to learn about the Bible than those things we already know. Some may be so intimidated by the weight of orthodoxy that they dare not read with fresh and inventive eyes. Perhaps most people just really don’t care anymore. 

Conversely, some readers will assert that “The Bible says this thing, and ‘this thing’ is therefore absolutely and eternally true,” and no options are open to us. But don’t these readers actually mean something quite different from what they say? Perhaps, unwittingly, they mean “I understand the Bible in this way, and my interpretation is absolutely true,” or “I imagine the events of this story in a certain way and my imagined picture of this story is the actual way it happened.” Perhaps the plea for the infallibility of the Biblical text is a sort of short cut to the assertion that what I imagine in my mind’s eye when I read this Biblical story is in fact what the text “means.”  In short, when someone attributes infallibility to a sacred text, it is worth our asking if he actually means, “I myself am the privileged interpreter of a privileged text. The sacred text gives its infallibility to my interpretation.”

On the other hand, does it not open doors of possibility when one can say, “The sacred text is true because it is as diverse and as complex as the truth is”? Isn’t it possible that a Biblical story might be true in a dozen ways for a dozen readers? This is not to say that there is no real truth. Of course there is. There is a given state of affairs, and the state of affairs exists as it is and in no other way. The problem is that no language can reify the state of affairs. No historical account can reproduce a historical event. Consequently, all historical writing produces a multiplicity of imaginary scenes in a multiplicity of readers. The text is true within the limits of language, but it cannot go beyond the limits of language. This is true for sacred texts as well as for histories and biographies that aim at telling the truth. 

Isn’t it important for us to study the text closely and try to find in what way the story is true? One reader will imagine that the serpent actually spoke to Eve in a human language; perhaps one will even say the serpent spoke to her in Hebrew. Others might suppose that the “speech” of the serpent is actually something Eve heard internally in the ears of her imaginative heart, and that a third person standing beside her in the garden would have heard nothing at all. One reader might believe that Noah’s flood covered the “entire earth” (Genesis 7:17-24)—the entire spherical planet, the globe, the Americas and all of China—even so deep as to cover Mount Everest at 28,000 feet. Another reader might believe that the flood covered “the land” (apparently the Hebrew word will support either meaning). That is, it covered everything for miles around, all the world that the writer knew about; it covered all of the mountains that he had heard of. But, after all, if we change the focus of our attention from this interesting and futile question, cannot both readers agree that what we are ultimately interested in is not whether Mount Everest was covered with water, but what is the story of the flood about? What does it mean for me as a seeking person?

Isn’t it possible that you as one reader might read an ancient story from a completely different angle of vision than any you have heard from the pulpit? Perhaps we can teach ourselves something about interpretation merely by the act of reading and thinking about these marvelous sacred texts. This is not to disparage or repudiate the clergy with all of its great learning; it is, rather, to add one more dimension, often a fresh and lively one, to what our clergymen tell us the Bible says. Surely we value the clergy’s powers to read the ancient text in its original languages alongside its modern translations. They do us great service in teaching us thus. But what, after all, is a sacred text? In what sense is it true? Can it be “true” without being “accurate“? Can it be true but not historical? Can it be true to human life without being the re-statement of an actual, real-life episode? Can Adam be a “true” character without being a historical character?

We might also ask, “What do we mean when we say that a sacred text contains no contradictions?” After all, the Bible says in I Samuel 15:29 that God does not change his mind, yet in Genesis 6:6 he does change his mind about the wisdom of his having created humans. Again, the Bible says that no man has seen God (Exodus 33:20), but Jacob, following his night of wrestling with God, called the place where he wrestled “Peniel,” saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Gen. 32:30). So when we say that the Bible contains no contradiction, what can we mean? Perhaps we mean merely that the sacred, like truth itself, cannot contradict or falsify itself—no matter how flawed and indeterminate the languages, no matter how loose the translations and how careless the...