January 22, 2023 – Third Sunday After Epiphany
I Kings 7.1-7, 18
Matthew 5.21-30
Happily Nuanced: The Myth of Biblical Literalism
Third Sunday after Epiphany
I appreciate all the thoughtful comments you folks offered after last week’s sermon on Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, including the one that said, “I’m impressed that you could say ‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’ as many times as you did without messing it up!” Thank you. I think. But a couple folks mentioned how helpful it was to be reminded that the story is a fable, that we aren’t expected to believe that three flesh and blood human beings walked into a furnace so hot that it incinerated three of the king’s guards standing nearby, but left Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego intact and unharmed. In other words, the Bible doesn’t ask us to believe the impossible, it asks us to understand what that particular story points toward, which is a God who is present with us even when things seem to be at their worst. It is a story that asks to be heard and understood metaphorically, not literally, and the Bible is filled with stories like this.
Speaking of stories, here is one I’m not particularly proud of: when I was in seminary I spent a summer as a student intern at a UCC church in Trumbull, CT. One morning two very kind, gracious women showed up at the church to talk about their faith: they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they were determined to invite me into the fold. But instead of finding the quickest way of dismissing them, as was my habit at the time, I suggested we meet weekly to explore both our understandings of scripture. As you may know, Jehovah’s Witnesses are so literal about the Bible they believe that the 144,000 souls who Revelation says will be saved means that only 144,000 people are going to heaven. Our summer of conversations was very helpful to my understanding their theology, and we parted on mutually respectful terms. However, the last day of that summer I was in Trumbull, I was packing up my things and getting organized to go back to school, when the doorbell rang, and lo and behold, there were two Jehovah’s Witnesses standing at the door, though not the two I had gotten to know. My friends, it was the end of a hot August, I was packing boxes and cleaning the house, I had a hundred things I needed to do, I was dirty and sweaty, and I did not have the time it would take to politely extract myself from a conversation with the Witnesses. So before they could say a word, I launched into my newfound knowledge about them, cited all their favorite Bible verses, answered their every argument before it could even be raised, gave them chapter and verse of their own literature and why it was mistaken, and left them standing there on the front porch, mouths agape, wondering what hit them. It was not one of my proudest moments, but I will say in my defense, biblical literalism has a way of painting itself into a corner without needing much help from anyone else.
The whole idea of trying to read the Bible literally has always seemed a curious one to me. There are verses that appear to speak to the issue: II Timothy 3.16 reads, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness;” Hebrews 13.8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever;” and then there is the bumper sticker that is not scriptural but may as well be, “God said it, I believe it, end of discussion.” Think about this: when you and I are talking about the Bible and its stories, when we are talking about multiple texts, portions of which are thousands of years old, that were transmitted by word of mouth for generations before anything was ever written down, when the version we hold in our hands is a translation of a translation of a translation, when words and even entire phrases have been lost in transmission, what does it mean to read the Bible literally? Is it even possible? Or, as we heard last week, is it more important to understand the main idea of the conversation without getting too deep into the weeds?
For example, did Jesus really mean to be taken literally when he said in the Sermon on the Mount, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away… And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away…?” I seriously doubt that he did, and I have not yet met the biblical literalist who has followed his advice, which I think tells us all we need to know. And I have yet to read the Bible story that suggests anyone in Jesus’ own day walked around with severed hands or disembodied eyes; you and I can easily understand Jesus’ point without getting gruesome about it.
And the New Testament is the easy part. We have a pretty good grip on New Testament Greek. Old Testament Hebrew is much more difficult to understand. To give an example, let’s turn back to our lesson from I Kings today. I’ve reproduced it in the bulletin, but if you want to check up on me, you can find it on page 306 in our pew Bibles. Like much of the Old Testament, this passage is heavy with footnotes. I’ve italicized some examples Verse 5, for instance, is marked with my favorite Old Testament footnote of them all; it reads, Hebrew meaning uncertain. It is a footnote that is literally ubiquitous in the Old Testament. It appears once on page 306, twice on the preceding page, and hundreds of times throughout the entire Old Testament. Hebrew meaning uncertain. How is it possible to be literal when the Hebrew scribes don’t even know what the words mean? I’ve also italicized the words pillars and pomegranates, because they are so similar in the Hebrew language that they are sometimes confused with one another. Now I admit the uncertainty about these words doesn’t makes that much of a difference, unless you’re a general contractor, in which case, I’d rather my house be supported by pillars than pomegranates. But still, it leads you to wonder how it is possible to be literal about words that the Bible itself admits are so indeterminate.
A lot of this has to do with the way Hebrew was written. For one thing, nouns are scarce; the Hebrews dealt mainly with verbs and gerunds, nouns made from verbs, most of which were formed by the arrangement of three consonants. Which raises another issue: none of the earliest Hebrew writings had vowels. For example, let’s say we find the letters STR in a sentence with no vowels: are we reading a about a star or a stair, or an aster or a sitar, or an austere Easter, or something that has gone astir or astray, or a story about a suture, or a satire about a satyr in stereo? It was largely up to the Hebrew scribes to figure it out. Except it was hard to know where one word ended and another began, because there were no spaces between the words, nor any punctuation, so the beginnings and endings of sentences were indeterminate as well. Has anyone figured out the collection of letters at the bottom of this morning’s bulletin (hpplnncdthmthfbblclltrlsm)? It is what this morning’s sermon title might look like if we followed the rules of biblical Hebrew: no vowels, no spaces, no punctuation.
Now, I recognize that what we’ve been talking about so far may be an interesting rhetorical exercise, but talking about pillars and pomegranates isn’t really central to what is truly important about our faith, and while we might quibble about obscure biblical words, what is essential is clear. To which the Bible says, “Well, maybe…” Let’s look at something that is both simple and central, the Ten Commandments. The sixth commandment could not be plainer: “Thou shalt not kill.” And the commandment is even simpler in Hebrew, only two words – we think – with a total of four consonants, רצח ל (lo ratzach). Literally, it means “No kill,” or “No slay,” or “No murder,” and already you see we’ve run into a problem, because in English there is a difference between killing and slaying and murdering. Murder implies intent; slaying can refer to animals and to humans, and killing is a very broad term. Hebrew scholars are of no help, because this particular word is so ancient that there is no true equivalent in any contemporary language. So how can this verse, so familiar, so simple, be understood literally? There is a good chance that, later this year, the Connecticut legislature will take up the issue of what is called aid-in-dying, or in the vernacular, physician assisted suicide. Does the sixth commandment apply here? Or is it simply a stricture against murder? Does it refer to capital punishment? To war? To abortion? To the withdrawal or withholding of life support? One of the ironic aspects of both contemporary society and contemporary religion, is the number of folks who understand this commandment as a constraint against abortion yet are nonetheless willing to countenance capital punishment; and by the same token many who oppose capital punishment are relatively relaxed about abortion. It is a nuanced, and I would add it is a mature spirituality that is able to struggle with these issues and confess that there are no easy answers, even with a commandment that is only four letters long. While we can claim this commandment as one source of our morality, we cannot even reconcile within ourselves what it is, exactly, this commandment is saying. This is why I said at the outset that a literal translation of the Bible more often than not paints itself into a corner.
And the reason that it does is actually rather elementary: God is always and ever greater than the sum of human words. Asking the Bible to be a perfectly verbatim account of God’s actions in human history is to make it something the Bible itself never claims to be. I would suggest the scriptures can be a witness to the reality of God in the world without insisting every word and every letter – every jot and tittle, which, by the way are Hebrew letters – be faultless since the day they were inscribed. I think God is much more creative than this, and certainly smarter than to have to depend on fallible human writing and reading and memory. Maybe we can adjust that bumper sticker to read, God said it, I believe it – let’s have a discussion.