You’ve heard of the “greening” of evangelical Christianity, that is, its awakening to ecological responsibility. You’ve heard of the “graying” of America, that is, a marked increase in the population of senior citizens relative to the entire population. I’d like to propose another color verb: “Browning.” The capital letter is important. With a lower-case b, “browning” is a culinary operation, usually performed on bread and such. “Browning,” with a capital B, I hereby define as “taking a subject about which one knows precious little, infusing it with crackpot conspiracy theories and a little gunfire, and selling the whole thing as historical fiction.” I suppose you can guess which Mr. Brown contributed his name to my neologism.
In January 2007 (the paperback edition is due in November 2007), Ballantine Books published The Alexandria Link, a novel by Steve Berry that attemps to concoct a Da Vinci Code style plot around Genesis 13:14–17. Reviewers were not particularly kind to the book, but I picked up the audiobook version from Audible nonetheless, looking for “ear candy” on my 40-minute commute. Thus far—about halfway through—I have indeed found the plot somewhat entertaining in a mindless sort of way. When my brain kicks in, however, all satisfaction with the book goes out the window.
Much as Dan Brown made a real mess out of the New Testament and Christian history in The Da Vinci Code, Steve Berry makes a real mess out of the actual history of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible. The novel involves a race to find the contents of the lost library of Alexandria, texts and scrolls that were spirited away from the library by a mysterious secret society before the library was destroyed. According to one character early in the story, the library is supposed to contain a copy of the Septuagint, the old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (originally, this term applied only to the translation of the Torah or Pentateuch, but the character doesn’t seem to be aware of the relevant distinction). According to this character—the Attorney General of the United States—all “Old Hebrew” copies of the Old Testament (yes, the characters are resolutely ignorant of the terms “Hebrew Bible” or “Tanakh” or even “Jewish Bible”) were lost before the Christian era, and thus the Old Testament is known to moderns only by means of the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. By now, any reader educated in the actual textual history of the Tanakh knows that the characters’ knowledge is woefully deficient. But maybe we can forgive the Attorney General; he, after all, is no biblical scholar.
Unfortunately, the biblical scholar among the book’s characters isn’t that much better informed than the Attorney General. The title’s “Alexandria Link” is a person, Palestinian biblical scholar George Hadad (raised Muslim, and later a convert to Christianity, but now largely a non-believer), who happens to possess critical information about how to find the location where the Guardians preserve the lost library. At the end of chapter 20, readers are “treated” to a long, pedantic conversation between George Hadad and the story’s hero, ex-spy Cotton Malone. Malone’s ex-wife Pam is also present for this conversation, which I will go through in some detail. (Since I am listening to the audiobook version, what follows will be my own transcription from audio.)
“Christians tend to focus on the New Testament,” Hadad said. “Jews use the Old. …
Really. A Palestinian biblical scholar from the West Bank ought to know better than to call the scriptures used by Jews “the Old Testament.” “Old Testament” is entirely a Christian term. No Jew would use it to describe his or her scriptures, except as an accommodation to a recalcitrant Christian audience or interlocutor.
Hadad continues:
“I daresay most Christians have little understanding of the Old Testament, beyond thinking that the New is a fulfillment of the Old’s prophecies.”
Sad, but true.
“But the Old Testament is important, and there are many contradictions in that text—ones that could readily call its message into question.” [Malone had] heard Hadad speak on the subject before, but this time he sensed a new urgency. “Examples abound. Genesis gives two conflicting versions of creation. Two varying genealogies of Adam’s offspring are laid out. Then, the flood. God tells Noah to bring seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean. In another part of Genesis, it’s just one pair of each. Noah releases a raven to search for land in one verse, but it’s a dove in another. Even the length of the flood is contradicted: forty days and nights, or three hundred seventy. Both are used. Not to mention the dozens of doublets and triplets contained within the narratives …”
Okay, this part of Hadad’s speech is more or less accurate, but the observations are fairly banal. They certainly are not earth-shattering for any but the most rigid a priori fundamentalists or the most ignorant of Bible readers. And these observations certainly wouldn’t come as news to the Bible’s editors and compilers. The lines about the flood are curiously put. The “seven pairs of clean/one pair of unclean” instructions and the “one pair of each kind” instruction appear side-by-side in the Bible; Hadad seems to make it sound like the two sets of instructions are widely scattered. By the way, all of these contradictions are easily explained by reference to source hypothesis, whether the classic Wellhausen formulation or some other version.
In the next line, Hadad trips up, and makes a statement that is truly stupid, at least for a biblical scholar—and also for the author of The Alexandria Link to have put in the mouth of any of his characters. Let’s rewind to the beginning of the sentence:
“Not to mention the dozens of doublets and triplets contained within the narratives, like the differing names used to describe God. One portion cites ‘YHWH,’ ‘Yahweh’; another, ‘Elohim.’ Wouldn’t you think at least God’s name could be consistent?”
Well, no. I mean, The Alexandria Link was presumably written by a single person, Steve Berry, who uses the names, titles, and epithets “George,” “Hadad,” “the Alexandria Link,” “the Palestinian,” “the older man,” and so on to refer to the character making the statements quoted above. No, there is absolutely no reason to think that the Bible would use only one term to refer to Israel’s God. If George Hadad had really been raised as a Muslim, he should surely know the many names and titles of God used in that faith, and if were really a biblical scholar, he should know that a varied vocabulary for divinities would be normal in the ancient Near East. Why, his own namesake, the Canaanite god Hadad, could also be known as “Ba’al,” “the Cloud-Rider,” “El’s son,” and so on. The big surprise would be if there were only one term used to refer to God in the Bible.
After a sentence hawking the author’s prior Cotton Malone novel, Hadad continues:
“Most now agree,” Hadad said, “that the Old Testament was composed by a host of writers over an extremely long period of time. A skillful combination of varied sources by scribal compilers. This conclusion is absolutely clear, and not new. A twelfth-century Spanish philosopher was one of the first to note that Genesis 12:6, ‘At that time the Canaanites were in the land,’ could not have been written by Moses. And how could Moses be the author of the Five Books, when the last book describes in detail the precise time and circumstances of his death? And the many literary asides, like when ancient place names are used, then the text notes that those places are still visible ‘to this day.’ This absolutely points to later influences shaping, expanding, and embellishing the text.”
Again, this is more or less accurate, but banal. The phrase “Most now agree” implies that the composite nature of the Tanakh was recognized only recently, but the rabbinic tractate Baba Bathra already stated that “the [Bible] was composed by a host of writers over an extremely long period of time” (not in those exact words, of course). And right after that, Hadad admits that these observations are “not new.”
Feeling a need to get in on the conversation, spy-turned-bookseller Malone chimes in:
Malone said, “And each time one of these redactions occurred, more of the original meaning was lost.”
Although Hadad answers “No doubt,” the conclusion actually does not follow from the evidence. In fact, Hadad’s own observations of the phenomena belie Malone’s conclusion. The transmission of traditions lying back of the Bible, and the various redactional processes that do indeed seem necessary to have produced the canonical forms of the biblical books, tended to add meaning, so to speak, rather than subtract it—and it’s those very doublets and triplets of which Hadad spoke earlier, those very contradictions, that demonstrate this. If the redactional process had eliminated a lot of “meaning,” then one would expect that some of that “meaning loss” would include the smoothing out of contradictions. But that is demonstrably not what happened, and Hadad’s own evidence belies Malone’s conclusion, which Hadad endorses.
Hadad ties up this part of his speech with the following conclusion:
“The best estimate is that the Old Testament was composed between 1,000 and 586 BCE. Later compositions came around 500 to 400 BCE. Then the text may have been tinkered with as late as 300 BCE. Nobody knows for sure. All we know is that the Old Testament is a patchwork, each segment written under different historical and political circumstances, expressing differing religious views.”
How much of the Tanakh originated between 1,000–586 BCE, as opposed to the later Persian and Hellenistic eras, is a matter of considerable debate. But note the incoherence of Hadad’s timeline: the Old Testament was composed between 1,000–586 BCE, and this was followed by “later compositions.” What are these “later compositions”? Hadad doesn’t say; I’d think of Chronicles, Ruth, Esther, Trito-Isaiah, and Ezra-Nehemiah, for example, but these are part of the Old Testament. Hadad’s terminology is just confused. And his assertion that the text may have been “tinkered with as late as 300 BCE” is really a bit silly, in light of the fact that the book of Daniel certainly was not written, much less added to the biblical canon, before about 165 BCE, and the divergences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text show that small (but not necessarily insignificant) changes to the text continued to be made (accidentally or intentionally) into the Common Era.
After a short interruption from Cotton Malone, Hadad goes on:
“But what if the words have been altered to the point that the original message is no longer there? What if the Old Testament as we know is not, and never was, the Old Testament from its original time? Now that could change many things. … The Old Testament is fundamentally different from the New. Christians take the text of the New literally, even to the point of it being history. But the stories of the patriarchs, exodus, and the conquest of Canaan are not history. They are a creative expression of religious reform that happened in a place called Judah long ago. Granted, there are kernels of truth to the accounts, but they’re far more story than fact. Cain and Abel is a good example. At the time of that tale there were only four people on earth: Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. Yet Genesis 4:17 says, ‘Cain lay with his wife and she became pregnant.’ Where did the wife come from? Was it Eve? His mother? Wouldn’t that be eye-opening? Then, in recounting Adam’s bloodline, Genesis 5 says that Mehaelel lived 895 years, Jared 800 years, and Enoch 365 years. And Abraham? He was supposedly a hundred years old when Sarah gave birth to Isaac, and she was ninety.”
You’ll notice that, around the ellipses (which snip out a brief exchange about whether Cotton is a good listener), Hadad’s train of thought shifts to a completely different track. He starts out asking about the degree to which the text has changed from “the original message,” and then he goes off on some incongruities in scripture that resist taking the primeval narratives as accurate historiography—which almost no scholars do anyway, but which in any event has nothing to do with the accuracy of textual transmission. Then Hadad shifts back to the transmission issue, and in so doing, exposes his—and presumably the author’s—ignorance:
“The Old Testament as we currently know it is a result of translations. The Hebrew language of the original text passed out of usage around 500 BCE. So in order to understand the Old Testament, we must either accept the traditional Jewish interpretations, or seek guidance from modern dialects that are descendants of that lost Hebrew language. We can’t use the former method because the Jewish scholars who originally interpreted the text between 500 and 900 CE—a thousand or more years after they were first written—didn’t even know Old Hebrew, so they based their reconstructions on guesswork. The Old Testament, which many revere as the word of God, is nothing more than a haphazard translation.”
In the novel, Hadad is portrayed as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Bible, world-renowned for his novel ideas (even though he’s supposed to be in hiding after an Israeli attempt on his life). Yet he garbles basic facts. The Hebrew language did not pass out of use around 500 BCE. It’s true, of course, that the Hebrew language changed over time, from Biblical Hebrew through Late Biblical Hebrew through Rabbinic Hebrew and so on, but it didn’t pass out of use. It may have passed out of use as the daily, default spoken language for Diaspora Jews—hence the need for the Targums or the Septuagint. And the other implication—that the Hebrew texts of the Tanakh disappeared around 500 BCE—is just silly; the canonical process was barely starting around 500 BCE, and significant portions of the Tanakh hadn’t even been written yet. Somehow, Jerome—he of Vulgate fame, who figures elsewhere in the book—was able to learn Hebrew and translate the Vulgate from Hebrew texts. Hadad knows this, and thus we can be sure that the author does too—and yet Berry has Hadad spin this fairy tale about the disappearance of the Hebrew language and Hebrew texts before many of those texts were even written.
“George, you and I have discussed this before. Scholars have debated the point for centuries. It’s nothing new.
Hadad threw him a sly smile. “But I haven’t finished explaining.”
And I haven’t finished fisking.
Admittedly, this may seem like a real waste of time, arguing with a fictional scholar. The danger, though, is that ignorant folk may pick up The Alexandria Link and—as happened with The Da Vinci Code—think that the characters actually know what they’re talking about.