Okay, so on the whole, he’s really not. Untrained interpreters who approach the biblical text soberly and openly can come to some genuinely useful insights. The main qualification you need to read the Bible is the ability to pay attention, and the ability to read and follow a storyline really helps in the narrative portions, while aesthetic appreciation really helps in the poetic portions.

But sanity is also pretty helpful when reading the Bible, and this press release is more fodder for Jim’s campaign against “dilettantes” or untrained interpreters messing around with the Bible. The problem is that these folks don’t think of themselves as dilettantes or untrained, but promote themselves as “Bible scholars.”

I’d be quite astonished if any truly qualified and competent Bible scholars really think that the Bible contains an encoded prophecy of a nuclear terrorist attack on New York City between June 29 and July 4.

Besides, these self-labeled “Bible scholars” are idiots for making the prediction public instead of having it sealed inside a notarized envelope. Now all the terrorists—presumably Muslims, right?—have to do to disprove the Bible once and for all is delay their nuclear attack on New York City until August 4. Or maybe all of New York City—including the promiscuous stray cats and dogs—will repent in sackcloth and ashes and forestall the disaster (right, Buddy?).

All of this reminds me of nineteenth-century premillennialism and the shifting target dates for the end of the world. I have a relative who used to insist, on the basis of his reading of Daniel and Revelation, that the second coming would occur sometime in the 1980s. Let’s hope these “Bible scholars” are just as wrong. I’m certainly not going to change my travel plans due to their predictions—though I wasn’t planning to be anywhere near New York anyway.

Earlier, I blogged about the notation לדוד in the psalms superscriptions, and wondered aloud why לדוד (usually “of David” in English versions) is so often taken as an authorship ascription whereas למנצח (usually “to the [music] leader” in English versions) is not. In the course of further reading on treatments of the psalm superscriptions, I came across this statement by A. F. Kirkpatrick, in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges volume on Psalms (1902):

There can be little doubt that the word m’naççēach means the precentor, or conductor of the Temple choir, who trained the choir and led the music, and that it refers to the use of the Psalm in the Temple Services. The preposition prefixed to it is generally rendered for, and is supposed to mean that the Psalm was to be handed over to the precentor for musical setting and performance. This explanation however does not account for the rarity of the term in the later books, where the Psalms are predominantly liturgical in character. It seems more probable that the preposition should be rendered of, and that it indicates that the Psalm belonged to an older collection known as The Precentor’s Collection, in the same way as the titles ‘of David,’ ‘of Asaph,’ ‘of the sons of Korah’ probably indicate the collections from which the Psalms bearing them were taken.

I do not know for sure that Kirkpatrick’s statement is absolutely correct, but it does have the great virtue of being consistent with the treatment of ל in the superscriptions.

Taran commented:

Christopher,

I understand that your point is primarily linguistic, but what do you think of Childs’ contention that the superscriptions may serve a canonical purpose beyond the simple designation of authorship? I think that there is much to his point. For example I do think that the Mosaic attribution of Psalm 90 does provide a shorthand introduction to Book Four of the Psalter.

You are not advocating this view, but I would want to shy away from an understanding of the superscriptions as vestigial remains without purpose or meaning to contemporary interpreters. I think that their placement was intentional, even if not historical.

Thanks for a provocative blog.

Tyler F. Williams commented:

I think you also need to look at the position of the item in the superscription. Batha Bayer has an excellent article on the superscriptions you may want to check out.

Brandon Withrow blogs today on a topic he’s broached before: reviews of Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005). See also his earlier post on the subject, which kindly includes a link to my own comments from last July. I’m glad that the book is getting some attention; I just wish that it were more positive, sustained attention to the argument. It’s interesting that many of the reviews that Brandon cites (and doesn’t much seem to like) complain that Enns’ book is too liberal, while my own response was that it was very good, but still a bit too conservative. If you’re interested in the topics of biblical inspiration and authority, or your curiosity has been stirred up by my posts lately on inerrancy, Enns’ book would be a good one for you to read.

Brandon Withrow commented:

Christopher, thanks for pointing people to this discussion on my blog. I agree that there needs to be more positive and sustained examinations of Enns’ argument. There are a few listed in my “An Inspiring Past-time” post. Unfortunately, the community to which he writes isn’t always so charitable or interested in re-examining this particular subject.

BTW, your blog is a regular read on my bloglines account.

A while back I blogged very briefly in response to an article by Neil Altman in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to which my attention had been drawn by Donna Bowman. Today, Jim Davila corrects what he sees as a bunch of misinformation spread by one Peter Pick (who has made arguments similar to Altman’s) in the Petaluma Argus-Courier (Petaluma, CA). If you’re even slightly flirting with a medieval date for the Dead Sea Scrolls, do read Jim’s brief fisking of Pick’s statements.

A few days ago, I finally got around to posting a lengthy response to “The Ideology of the Society of Biblical Literature and the Demise of an Academic Profession,” an article by Hector Avalos (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University) published in the Spring 2006 SBL Forum. (By the way, the SBL does not seem to have implemented any convenient way to browse back “issues” of the Forum, so it may be up to us bloggers to create and preserve convenient links.)

If you aren’t already familiar with this discussion, I encourage you to first read Avalos’s essay, then my earlier response, before continuing with this one. In a nutshell, in my earlier response, I argued on various grounds that Avalos’s claims of the “irrelevance” of academic biblical studies are actually incorrect because (1) billions of human beings turn to the Bible for religious inspiration, and biblical studies’ relevance for them (I should really say “us,” since I belong in this group) ought not be excluded from the calculus of “relevance,” as per Avalos’s treatment, and (2) for various reasons, although in smaller numbers than believers, nonbelievers take up the academic study of the Bible and make entire distinguished careers thereof. In this post, I would like to examine some of Avalos’s other claims.

Avalos repeatedly criticizes the Society of Biblical Literature for its selective attention to the Bible. For example, he writes:

The idea that the Bible should be studied because of its influence or because “it does matter” overlooks repeated statements, by scholars themselves, that the Bible’s influence and relevance might cease if it were not for the intervention of biblical scholars and translators. Since the intervention, successful or not, is selectively applied to the Bible (rather than to thousands of other non-biblical texts of ancient cultures), such an intervention becomes an ethnocentric and religiocentric mechanism by which biblical scholars preserve their own relevance.

And again:

In archaeology, new inscriptions, even the most fragmentary and the barely comprehensible, are announced with great fanfare when there is a remote connection to the Bible. Meanwhile, thousands of more complete texts of other cultures still lie untranslated. Euroamerican perceptions of what is important still dominate the entire Society, as witnessed by repeated full attendance at sessions on archaeological “artifacts” versus sparser attendance in sessions on more “humane” aspects of biblical studies, such as disability studies or non-Euroamerican understandings of scriptures.

I am not really sure what these “thousands of texts” are to which Avalos keeps referring, but to criticize the SBL for not studying them seems to me quite misguided. The SBL is, after all, the Society of Biblical Literature. It is not the Society of Religious Literature. Surely one would not criticize the United Auto Workers’ Local 310 Bowling Team for not showing up to play cricket on Saturday mornings, nor would one criticize one’s pharmacist for referring one to a dentist to have teeth pulled! Yet somehow Avalos argues that the attention given to the Bible, rather than to “other non-biblical texts of ancient cultures,” by the Society of Biblical literature is a significant indictment.

A few years ago (wow—it was some twelve years ago, to be precise), I read that the second-most-translated book in the world, behind the Bible, was the 道德經 (Tao Te Ching or Daode Jing, depending on your preferred method of Romanizing Chinese words). There are many translations of the Qur’an, the many and varied Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, never mind the Kama Sutra. Okay, so maybe that last one isn’t necessarily considered “religious” by most folks, but you get my point. The religious texts of many cultures have been translated repeatedly and read voraciously—why should the Society of Biblical Literature be scolded for not being the agent of these translations and their study? Surely there is room in the world for multiple groups of scholars to work on indepedent projects.

Moreover, I think that Avalos overstates the case significantly. The interest of biblical scholars and biblically-minded archaeologists actually has historically contributed to the discovery, preservation, and translation of many non-biblical texts. Consider the Ugaritic texts, for example. If it were not for biblical scholars, who—other than perhaps Duane Smith and a handful of others—would really be all that interested in them? I daresay that the vast majority of what we know archaeologically about religion in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant, we owe ultimately to the Bible-and-spade crowd, no matter what the ideological and methodological drawbacks to that approach might have been. How much attention would the texts from Mari or Nuzi have gotten if not for their supposed value in illuminating the “biblical world”? Admittedly, these are rhetorical questions whose straightforward answers are not absolutely clear, but my point is that interest in fostering biblical scholarship has aided, not inhibited, the preservation, translation, and study of non-biblical texts.

If we cast our nets farther than the ancient Near East, it still is not altogether true that biblical scholars focus narrowly on the Bible to the exclusion of other cultures’ texts. There has, of course, been quite a lot of interest in comparative studies of biblical texts with texts from the western Mediterranean cultures, especially Greece. Avalos might object that such studies remain hopelessly Euroamerican, but such an objection could not successfully be leveled against those scholars, both from Euroamerican contexts and Asian contexts, who have worked to bring the Bible into conversation with the texts and traditions of eastern and southern Asian traditions. The wonderful volume Voices from the Margin (ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah; Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995) and similar works are rich with such efforts. My own first article was an attempt to read the 道德經 and the book of Qoheleth in light of each other, published as “The Dao of Qoheleth: An Intertextual Reading of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Daode Jing,” Jian Dao 5 (1996) 65–93. In pursuing this study, I was following up on comments made at the end of Graham Ogden’s commentary on Qoheleth in the ambitious but unfinished Readings series (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987).

The issue of the “Euroamericancentrism” of the SBL is, I think, little more than sour grapes wrapped up in big words. Here I suppose I am drifting dangerously close to mere name-calling, but seriously, consider Avalos’s complaint:

Euroamerican perceptions of what is important still dominate the entire Society, as witnessed by repeated full attendance at sessions on archaeological “artifacts” versus sparser attendance in sessions on more “humane” aspects of biblical studies, such as disability studies or non-Euroamerican understandings of scriptures.

I apologize if this sounds rude, but I can’t help but read this complaint as “More SBL members are interested in sessions that don’t interest me than are interested in sessions that interest me and in which I participate, and therefore something is dreadfully wrong with the Society.” Why shouldn’t Euroamerican scholars attend sessions on topics that interest them? Nobody would dare to criticize a Mexican-American biblical scholar for attending a session on Latino/Latina contextual readings of biblical texts; nobody would dare to criticize an African-American biblical scholar for attending a panel review of the latest new book by Cain Hope Felder. Why then does Avalos feel it right to criticize Euroamerican biblical scholars for attending sessions that happen to coincide with Euroamerican interests—and “interests” I do not here mean “vested interests” but “topics they find interesting.” In the history of the SBL over the last twenty years, various groups of ethnically-keyed interpreters have sought to carve out specific niches for themselves: African-American intepretations, Asian-American intepretations, Latino/Latina interpretations, womanist interpretations, bosadi interpretations, minjung interpretations, and so on. The one thing you don’t have at the SBL is a “White Male Biblical Scholar’s Caucus.” One could argue, and quite rightly so, that such a program unit is quite unnecessary because the overall shape of the Society has historically been formed in the image of male Euroamerican interpreters and the question to which they particularly gave their attention. That is quite true. On the other hand, it is also quite true that male Euroamerican interpreters are the one demographic group within the SBL that has done the most to try to decenter itself, to find ways to interact with and listen to other voices, rather than to carve out additional dedicated space for itself.

Similar considerations apply to Avalos’s critique of “religionism” at the end of his essay (the second subtitled section). Avalos critizes the SBL for fostering an environment in which religion is considered a good thing; for strengthening its ties to the Association of Theological Schools and, more generally, to ministerial education; for giving so much attention to the needs of the synagogues and churches; and for having religious presidents. To me, this seems to be a very strange critique. I cannot imagine any other “industry” whose own practitioners would criticize it for attending to the needs of its primary constituency. I cannot imagine an American Academy of Accounting trying to distance itself from MBA programs and ignoring the needs of CPAs. Yet Avalos—because he is so dismissive of religious believers and so narrowly focused on immediate, practical, physical benefits to disadvantaged individuals—actually proposes that the SBL should steer students away from theological education:

Instead of helping channel more students to theological education, it is better to encourage students to enter a profession more practical for humanity (e.g., food economists or lawyers for the poor).

As admirable as these goals all, quite frankly, humanity as a whole would be much the poorer if all of our college graduates were food economists or lawyers for the poor, and none were artists, musicians, poets, novelists, chemists, biologists, astronomers, literary critics—or theologicals and biblical scholars.

In sum, then, I am arguing that the SBL membership is not quite as provincial as Avalos makes us out to be. It must surely be admitted that most SBL members spend most of their time narrowly focused on the Bible, but quite a few have endeavored to reach beyond the ancient Near East or even the ancient Mediterranean world and to engage in serious conversation with the texts of religious traditions other than those that produced and transmitted the Bible. But even to the extent that the Society of Biblical Literature is somewhat narrowly focused on biblical studies, that narrow focus is quite appropriate to a scholarly society gathered around a common discipline. That the SBL’s focal discipline is biblical studies and not some other discipline can be criticized coherently if one has somehow already decided that biblical studies is, on the whole, pretty much worthless.

On Wednesday, June 7, 2006, Amy-Jill Levine, a leading New Testament scholar and an Orthodox Jewish feminist (yes, you can be all those things at once), visited Otter Creek Church of Christ in Brentwood (just south of Nashville) to give a lecture on Jesus and his relationship to women within first-century Judaism. Actually, the lecture was billed as “Beyond The Da Vinci Code: The Real Story of Jesus and Women,” but AJ didn’t really spend much time on The Da Vinci Code. As usual, her lecture was insightful, informative, and funny. You can download an MP3 recording of her lecture from Phil Wilson’s Teaching the Kingdom podcast site. I encourage you to download and listen to the whole thing; it’s about an hour long. To whet your appetite, I’ll quote one snippet, at the end of a section in which AJ tries to explain why The Da Vinci Code has such appeal:

… and finally, he’s tapped into a certain form of American cultural stupidity. These days, if we want to know something, what do we do? Well, we go to the Internet and we Google, and we read the first article that we’ve come across, or we look something up on Wikipedia, which is a public encyclopedia which is not terribly well vetted by people who actually know anything. It used to be at least we went to the library. Now we don’t, and we accept anything, and we will say something like “Well that could be right,” “Well that might be right.” Well, some things are just plain wrong—like Dan Brown’s book.

In an earlier post, I went on at some length about what I see as a couple of serious problems with the evangelical-fundamentalist doctrine of biblical inerrancy as formulated in the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” (1978). While I encourage you to take note of Michael Pahl’s comment on that post, and to follow up by reading his own post on inerrancy, from back in April. Michael makes the important point that a number of evangelicals were uncomfortable with the Chicago Statement when it was issued, and quite a few still are today, and that discussion of the appropriateness and utility of the “inerrancy” concept is ongoing within evangelicalism.

Even so, the attitude represented in the Chicago Statement is one that I run into time and time again among evangelicals and fundamentalists (I include in these categories people who would not so classify themselves, but who fit better into these categories than any other; please realize that these labels are just convenient umbrella terms and nothing more), so I want to explore another dimension or two of the Chicago Statement a little more fully. In particular, I am struck by item 4 of the summary section of the Chicago Statement:

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

Please note carefully what item 4 affirms: scripture is “wholly and verbally God-given,” and is therefore “without error or fault” in everything it says about everything, including “its own literary origins under God.”

I assume that the framers of the Chicago Statement had in mind, when they wrote the line about “literary origins,” such matters as Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (which, strictly speaking, the Pentateuch doesn’t actually claim of itself), Davidic authorship of the psalms, and such matters. Yet it seems to me that it is precisely in the matter of biblical testimony to the origins of the biblical writings that one can show pretty decisively that scripture is not “wholly and verbally God-given.”

Quick-thinking readers may be way ahead of me, with their Bibles (or Accordance modules) open to 1 Corinthians 7. I know this is an old, tired argument, but I think it’s very important. According to the Chicago Statement, item 4, the Bible is fully trustworthy—100% accurate—in what it says about its literary origins. If this is so, then the Bible cannot be “wholly and verbally God-given,” for Paul writes:

To the rest I say—I and not the Lord … (7:12)

Now concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. (7:25)

Contrast these, of course, with:

To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord … (7:10)

In 7:10, Paul claims a divine source (I take this to be a reference to a saying from Jesus that Paul knows) for his teaching in 7:10–11, but explicitly disclaims such for his teaching in 7:12ff. (I am not entirely sure where to end the paragraph) and 7:25–28. If we are to believe the latter part of the Chicago Statement summary item 4, Paul is telling the truth about where he got his ideas. Frankly, I see no reason to doubt him even if you don’t accept the latter part of item 4; he’s clearly appealing to a tradition of Jesus’ teaching for the teaching about divorce, and applying his own reasoning to related matters later in the chapter. That, at least, is what he is explicitly says he’s doing. However, in order to accept the first part of the Chicago Statement summary item 4—the part about the Bible being “wholly and verbally God-given”—we have to believe that Paul is not exactly telling the truth in 1 Corinthians 7:12, 25 about the source of his teachings in those paragraphs. Note that Paul is fully capable of saying that he received divine revelations, and is not shy about it; compare Galatians 1:11–12 with 1 Corinthians 7:12, 25. The contrast could not be greater. Here is a man who is not at all afraid to say “God told me P” saying exactly the opposite: “God did not tell me P”—or “There’s nothing in the Jesus tradition about P”—”so I’ve had to come up with an answer to your question on my own.”

This is a problem I have with a lot of what I hear coming from some evangelical and fundamentalist circles: while claiming to be conservative, to have a “high” view of scripture, and to be “literalist” (with due allowance for poetic genres and obvious metaphors), I find that in practice that a disturbingly high number of evangelical and fundamentalist affirmations about the Bible do not well represent the explicit textual claims of the Bible itself. 1 Corinthians 7:12, 25 is but one small example; others could be cited, though I haven’t the time to type any more out just now. (I would refer you to my post of September 6, 2005 in which I briefly sketch a simple four-point “spectral” approach to inspiration; you can find a couple of additional examples there.) My point is that in their zeal to affirm and honor scripture, evangelicals and fundamentalists who hold to a Chicago Statement type of inerrancy doctrine, and the verbal model of inspiration that supports it, ride roughshod over the explicit statements of some biblical authors as to how they produced their own writings. Sometimes the literalists are not literal enough.

Two of my summer projects relate to the book of Psalms (one is an essay on Psalm 51, the other relates to Bible translation), so I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the psalms lately. Today I’ve been reading a lot about psalm headings or superscriptions, and just had to comment—well, vent a little—on a charming example of question-begging.

For those among my readers who are not familiar with the issue, a rather large number of the poems in the book of Psalms have “headings” or “superscriptions” attached to them. In the Masoretic text, these constitute the first verse (or two) of the psalm; in English versions, these are often “demoted” to “non-verse” status and are printed in small or italic type between the chapter heading and verse 1 of the psalm in question. Open up a New Revised Standard Version or New International Version Bible to any page of the book of Psalms and you’ll see what I mean. Many of these superscriptions contain the Hebrew preposition ל (l^e–) prefixed to a personal name or (it appears) title. The debate is over what the ל means, particularly in the phrase לדוד, l^edāvid, where דוד is the name of the biblical character David (yes, that David). The לדוד superscriptions have long been interpreted as attributions of authorship. In fact, the preposition ל is very flexible, and while it could mean “belonging to” (which could give it the sense “written by” when attached to a literary work), it could also mean “to” (this is the sense that first-year Hebrew students are taught to memorize), “for,” or a few other things. Therefore, one longstanding question in Psalms studies has been whether the לדוד superscriptions mean “by David,” “to David,” “for David,” “in the Davidic style,” “part of the David collection,” or something else altogether. (Just what “David” means in these contexts—i.e., whether the name always refers to the individual biblical character named David, or to the Davidic dynasty as a unit, or to any given member of the Davidic dynasty, or [metonymically] to the office of kingship, is also a debatable point, but it doesn’t really get as much attention as the sense of the ל.) Most of the time, when לדוד appears in a psalm title, that’s all you see: לדוד. In only fourteen cases—less than 10% of the entire Psalter—do we find any additional “information,” little snippets that place the psalm into a narrative context within David’s life.

You probably also need to be aware of the fact that the superscriptions are unstable. The superscriptions in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) psalms manuscripts, the Greek Septuagint (LXX) tradition, and the ancient Syriac translation do not always agree with those in the standard medieval Hebrew text type, called the Masoretic Text (MT). The LXX has headings on almost every psalm; the MT on only 116. The MT and LXX headings do not always agree in content, either, and there is slightly more variance when you bring in the DSS and the Syriac. There is sufficiently more variance between the psalm superscriptions than the psalm texts to suggest that the early tradents of the canonical book of Psalms did not consider the superscriptions to be fixed or finalized, which is an important text-critical reason that many interpreters consider them later editorial editions to older poems.

In that light, peek over my shoulder at the deftness with which one interpreter loops hermeneutically back upon himself (the superscripted numbers reference my own comments below):

Titles are frequent in the psalter. Indeed psalms which don’t have an authorship title¹ are called² “orphan” psalms (such as Ps 33). Very few psalms, however, have titles which incorporate all of the information just mentioned [author, historical occasion, melody, function, miscellaneous]. Most English translations make it appear as if the titles are only loosely connected to the psalms themselves, but this is not true in the Hebrew, where the titles usually constitute the first verse!³

Our interest here really focuses on two types of titles: authorship and historical occasion. The title of Psalm 3 contains both:

A psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom.

The title implies David wrote Psalm 3 in response to a very definite event in his life recorded in 2 Samuel 15:13–37.⁴ And, indeed, the content of the psalm makes sense in light of that tragic time when his own son challenged him and chased him out of his city, Jerusalem.

In the history of psalm interpretation, however, many have challenged the accuracy of the authorship titles, particularly those connected with David. The titles ascribe the largest portion of the psalms to King David.⁵ Indeed, so many psalms are cited as Davidic that some think that all the psalms were written by him, which is clearly wrong, since psalms are also attributed to the sons of Korah, to the sons of Asaph, to Solomon and even to Moses. Further, many are without inscription.

The argument against Davidic authorship was particularly strong in the early twentieth century when many believed almost all of the psalms were written late in the history of Israel, after the exile. Since David lived half a millennium before the postexilic period, his authorship would be problematical, to say the least.

In spite of this earlier critical consensus, the biblical witness to David’s role in the development of worshipful song-singing is so strong that it is hard today to imagine why so many disupted it.⁶ When David is introduced in 1 Samuel 16 and 17, he appears as a young man with two special gifts which will later characterize his leadership. The second story tells how God used the boy David to defeat a superior enemy, Goliath. The first story tells how the youth used unusual musical gifts to sooth Saul’s tormented mind. This story anticipates the one who later calls himself “Israel’s singer of songs” (2 Sam 23:1).

It is true that the Hebrew phrase translated in many English versions as of David can also be translated to David or for David.⁷ Hebrew prepositions are slippery things without a context! The argument has been forcefully made that these psalms are Davidic, not in the sense that he wrote every one with his name connected with it, but because the majority of psalms were written in the style which he established. For instance, a Miltonic ode is not necessarily an ode written by Milton, but one written in his style.

A title like that found in Psalm 18, however, leaves little doubt as to its authorship, especially when it is remembered that Psalm 18 has as its pair David’s song of praise in 2 Samuel 22. The authorship title is connected with a historical title which reflects the understanding that Of David means “composed by David”:

Of David the servant of the LORD. He sang to the LORDthe words of this song when the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.⁸

In brief, we have little reason in principle to doubt that David wrote those psalms ascribed to him.⁹

1. Notice how this author assumes (at least in terms of the sequence of presentation) that לדוד is in fact an authorship ascription.

2. By whom are such psalms called “orphan” psalms, and what difference does this make? “Orphan psalms” is a term used by later commentators; it is certainly not a term that derives from the canonical book of Psalms itself, or from the ancient versions. I read somewhere that the term originates in the Talmud.

3. See above on the variability and expandability of the superscriptions in the early manuscript tradition.

4. Does the title really imply what this author says it implies? Notice how the author has presupposed that –ל terms in the superscriptions are authorship attributions, without arguing the point. This psalm title doesn’t say that. Here, לדוד could just as easily have the sense “for David, when he fled” or “about David, when he fled” as “by David, when he fled.”

5. See note 1. This author is presupposing that –ל is an authorship marker.

6. This statement is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, while the portrayal of David as a singer and harpist in 2 Samuel no doubt is related traditionally to the idea that he wrote many of the psalms collected in the book of Psalms, this traditional synergy has no demonstrable exegetical merit. Second, the statement is disingenuous; the author makes it sound like the majority of Psalms scholars have swung back to affirming Davidic authorship of the majority of psalms, but this is not the case.

7. At last this author admits that the לדוד notation might have a sense other than “belonging to David” taken in the even narrower sense of “written by David” (as opposed to “property of the Davidic court” or “belonging to the Davidic collection”). This admission should probably have come at the beginning of the treatment, however. At this point, the author has already taken half a dozen opportunities to repeat phrases like “authorship title” without yet acknowledging that such phrases are by no means certain, on merely syntatical grounds (never mind psalm content). By now, the reader is inoculated against the alternatives.

8. The author now invokes a particular psalm that has both a לדוד notation and a reference to a specific occasion in David’s story. Of the fourteen psalms whose superscription mention events from David’s story, only two—those to Psalm 7 and Psalm 18—explicitly say that David sang or spoke the words of the psalm. The others are slightly more coy. This may be a very small matter, but then again, it may not. To use Psalm 18 as the parade example implies that all the other David-narrative superscriptions claim that David prayed, sang, or spoke the words of the psalm to which they are attached, when that is not in fact the case.

9. Finally we come full circle: the author expresses confidence that David wrote the psalms ascribed to him—without every actually establishing that the לדוד notations are in fact authorship ascriptions. Voila!

To be fair, this same author, on the subsequent pages, owns up to some of the problems with the position that seems to be laid out above. On the next page, he acknowledges that the headings are always grammatically in the third person with reference to David, while the attached psalm texts are in first person; he acknowledges that the LXX and Syriac testify to the lateness and editorial source of at least those superscriptions that appear only in the LXX and Syriac, or differ in the LXX and Syriac from the MT. One page later, this same author acknowledges that Psalm 30—”A song at the dedication of the temple; לדוד”—exhibits a striking mismatch between its titular occasion and its content, and that Psalm 3 (see the block quotation above) does not really fit well into the allegedly corresponding narrative in 2 Samuel 15:13–18:6. And yet the author concludes:

After all the evidence has been surveyed, it is best to treat the titles as noncanonical, but reliable early tradition.

So even though Psalm 30 doesn’t make sense as a temple-dedication Psalm (it’s clearly a song of thanksgiving after recovery from illness, or perhaps of vindication after a false accusation), and David was long since dead when the temple (whether that of Solomon, Zerubbabel, Judah Maccabee [so to speak], or Herod) was dedicated, let’s take לדוד as an authorship ascription anyway, and assume that the “historical” note in the psalm title is accurate. This seems to be the remarkable conclusion this author draws.

One last thing on the לדוד notations. Several of the psalms that have לדוד notations in the superscription also have למנצח, often translated “to the leader” or “to the choirmaster,” in the superscription. In Psalm 14:1, the inscription is למנצח לדוד. The NRSV translates this as “To the leader. Of David,” but I can see no syntactic or contextual justification for translating the ל on למנצח as dedicatory and the ל on לדוד as authorial, except for a presupposition of Davidic authorship. Why should למנצח לדוד mean roughly “David wrote this for the music director” rather than “the music director wrote this for David”? Indeed, why should either ל be thought to be an authorship inscription? I can see no clear answer. In quite a few other cases—perhaps a dozen or more, I haven’t actually counted—the inscription is למנצח מזמור לדוד. The NRSV translates this phrase as “To the leader. A psalm of David,” but I am not sure why it couldn’t be translated “To the leader. A psalm. To David,” or why the NRSV rendering would be better than the one just given here. One could, I suppose, make an argument on the basis of the Masoretic accents, although how ancient a tradition these represent cannot be demonstrated. The argument would run something like this: Typically, in the phrase למנצח מזמור לדוד, the word למנצח carries the disjunctive accent r^ebʼi^a‘, מזמור receives the conjunctive accent mêr^ekā, and לדוד has the disjunctive accent sillûq. This accentuation pattern would indicate that למנצח stood alone, with מזמור לדוד as a phrase, hence “ל the leader; a psalm ל David.” However, that this pattern of accentuation seems to be based more on the number of words than on an attempt to group them meaningfully can be seen from the slightly longer heading of Psalm 68: למנצח מזמור לדוד שיר. NRSV translates this as “To the leader. A psalm of David. A song,” even though here the conjunctive mêr^ekā sits under both למנצח and לדוד, with the disjunctive r^ebʼi^a‘ attached to מזמור and the disjunctive sillûq attached to שיר. If the accent-keyed argument laid out just above held water, then the superscription to Psalm 68 should be “A psalm of the leader. A song of David,” but I don’t know of any Bible that translates it that way—so stuck at least are the NRSV translators on rendering the sequence מזמור לדוד “A psalm of David” regardless of the Masoretic accents.

In sum, I’m having a hard time seeing any solid semantic or syntactical reasons to think that ל is intended as an authorial inscription at all in the Psalms. Do any of my Hebraist readers want to suggest any?

The Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday that wisecracks are among Opus Dei’s response to the scrutiny and criticism the organization has received due to the hype surrounding The Da Vinci Code, which features a murderous Opus Dei monk. Among the jokes:

Q: Do members of Opus Dei really use a “discipline”?

A: Beats me.

Read the rest yourself and have a good laugh at Opus Dei … served up by Opus Dei.

Kevin commented:

There is actually a free MP3 download available from beatabillionaire.org called “The Da Vinci Load.” The Vancouver Province explained to the funeral director who recorded it that it was “too intelligent” for them to report on. A newspaper saying something is “too intelligent” for its readers. What a knee-slapper!

and, From the Funnier Still department:

or, ‘Other things Dan Brown didn’t bother to “research” as part of his joint venture with Doubleday’
[note smirking use of double-quotes added to indicate use of a word in a sense other than its actual meaning]:

a) As we know, Opus Dei is not a religious order, it is a personal papal prelature open to all Catholic laity and diocesan priests, and in fact is not open to members of religious orders. Apparently Dan Brown’s ‘research’ didn’t uncover this fact. Maybe he doesn’t know how to Google, either.

b) While it’s apparently true they do have a 13-million dollar (or so) administrative building, Opus Dei is an organization whose membership comes from a population of human beings roughly three times the population of the U.S.A. Anyone at all is perfectly welcome to walk in the door any time at all, as Dan Brown would have discovered if he had actually walked in their door. I bet if Dan Brown walked in today, they’d roll out the red carpet, cancel all their meetings for the rest of the day, book out the boardroom, and order him sushi for lunch. But only if it was a Friday! (ba-dum-dum… Catholic/penance thing… never mind.. I slay me.)

c) Because it is no religious order, Opus Dei has no monks among its membership; murderous, self-flaggelating, albino, or otherwise. But guess what? There is, an actual Opus Dei member named Silas. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and family. He’s a stockbroker. Silas Agbim, American Opus Dei member for 28 years.

Originally a native of Nigeria, so not albino, but maybe that’s just showing one more of Dan’s crossed wires.

Research that, Dan the money man.

Astute readers will note that the title of this post does not end with a question mark. I agree with Buddy Boone and Jim West that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is seriously flawed. Buddy makes this statement in regard to a brief notice about Paul Achtemeier’s book Inspiration and Authority, although I’m a bit disappointed that Buddy didn’t explain his own take on inerrancy, or Achtemeier’s, more thoroughly. Jim makes the very important claim that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy ascribes perfection to that which is not God, and in that sense is a form of idolatry (perhaps you’ve heard the term “bibliolatry,” or “Bible-worship”).

The now-classic evangelical statement affirming biblical inerrancy is the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” (1978). I encourage you to read the entire statement, including the attached “Articles of Affirmation and Denial” and “Exposition.” Here, in full, is the “Short Statement” that summarizes the signatories’ affirmation of inerrancy:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine
authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God’s
command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

Note especially affirmation 4. The Chicago Statement signatories affirmed that the Christian Bible was “wholly and verbally God-given,” and therefore—since God, in their view, cannot possibly make mistakes—every biblical claim, including “what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God,” is “without error or fault.”

I am not sure exactly what Buddy means by “absurd,” but perhaps he means something similar to “unsupported by the actual textual phenomena.” The doctrine of inerrancy, as laid out in the “Chicago Statement,” simply doesn’t fit the textual facts. Take the description of the “four rivers of paradise,” for example:

A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Gen 2:10-14, NRSV)

To make a long exegesis short, this description is geographically impossible. The Tigris and the Euphrates do not divide from a common source; they do converge near the Persian Gulf, but this is the opposite of what the passage describes. The Pishon is otherwise unknown in the Bible, but the name “Havilah” is generally associated in the Bible with western or southwestern Arabia. Elsewhere in the Bible, “Gihon” is the name of a spring outside of Jerusalem, which in no way “flows around the whole land of Cush,” whether Cush is understood here to refer (as usual in the Bible) to Ethiopia, or to the land of the Kassites. The whole description is just geographically impossible. By the way, I happen to think that the author of this text knew that the geography was impossible, and was intentionally describing an ideal, not real, “global” (so to speak) geography, precisely in order to tell readers that Eden is a utopia and they shouldn’t start mounting expeditions to find it (or to find Noah’s Ark, but I’ll leave it to Ed, Duane, and others to deal with “Dr.” Cornuke’s latest venture).

Let’s take another example, the opening paragraph of the book of Daniel:

In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into his power, as well as some of the vessels of the house of God. These he brought to the land of Shinar, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his gods.

According to Jeremiah 25:1, Nebuchadnezzar did not even become king of Babylon until the third year of King Jehoiakim’s reign—which would make it impossible for King Nebuchadnezzar to besiege Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim’s reign. Moreover, Nebuchadnezzar was quite busy in the third and fourth years of Jehoiakim’s reign, and his military activities in the west (during which time he was informed of his father’s death and returned to Babylon for his coronation) do not allow enough time for an otherwise unattested siege of Jerusalem during Jehoiakim’s reign. Our other biblical sources, and the Babylonian Chronicles, are silent about any action of Nebuchadnezzar against Judah until 598/597, the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. John Collins’s conclusion that the “statement of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim’s reign cannot be reconciled with any plausible reconstruction of the course of events” (Daniel [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993]) remains solid despite all attempts at harmonization. The chronologies of Kings and Jeremiah on the one hand, and Daniel on the other, can’t both be “without error or fault.” By the way, I happen to think that Daniel’s impossible chronology is also intentional, like the impossible geography of the Eden story; both are genre markers, telling the reader not to try to reconstruct history from the narrative that follows.

One more example will serve to make the point. The chronology in 2 Kings of the reigns of Ahaz and Hezekiah is really quite confused. According to 2 King 16:1, Ahaz began to reign at age twenty, and he reigned for sixteen years, making him thirty-six years old at the time of his death. His son, Hezekiah, began to reign at age twenty-five, according to 2 Kings 18:2. Taking both statements as “without error or fault” requires us to believe that Ahaz’s son, Hezekiah, was born when Ahaz was eleven years old! According to 2 Kings 18:13, Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign; Assyrian sources allow us to peg this as 701 BCE. If so, Ahaz should have died in 715 BCE, and Hezekiah should have ascended the throne at that time. This would mean that Ahaz was king of Judah at the time of the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians, 722/721 BCE. Yet 2 Kings 18:10 says that the fall of Samaria occurred in the sixth year of Hezekiah’s reign, which would require Hezekiah to begin his rule in 728/727 BCE. The chronological data given here is just so convoluted that there is no way to harmonize them without rewriting the text.

Clearly, these texts as we have them are not “without error or fault.” There is something wrong with the geography of Genesis 2. There is something wrong with the chronologies of Daniel 1 and of 2 Kings 16–20. There is just no way around these textual facts. Sometimes, champions of inerrancy try to fall back on the “autographs,” or first copies of the texts. Article X of the Chicago Statement’s Articles of Affirmation and Denial moves in this direction:

WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

The problem is that these “autographs” do not exist, and are not available for our examination. The only way to know what was in the “autographs” is to look at the existing copies and reason backwards. Yet the problems I’ve described above are not soluble on text-critical grounds; we can’t fix the chronology of 2 Kings 16–20 by appealing to any extant textual tradition. The only way the “autographs” could solve these problems is if we imagine that the “autographs” said something completely different from any extant manuscript in the problematic verses—and an a priori theological commitment is a horrible foundation for textual criticism.

I have more to say on this topic, but must turn my attention to other things just now. (There is a large pile of books next to my right hand, waiting for me to plunge into them.) Yet I do want to state here clearly that the value of the Bible is not determined by its “errancy” or “inerrancy.” Fundamentalists and skeptics alike have peddled a bill of goods to the public with the idea that the Bible must be inerrant, or it is worthless. This notion is quite wrong. Even if the chronology of the late eighth-century kings of Judah cannot be reconstructed with precision from 2 Kings 16–20, that does not mean that the Bible has no value, or that those stories have no value. It does, however, mean that interpreters need to be looking for the value the stories actually have, without trying to impose upon them other sorts of benefits that the texts cannot confer. Do not misunderstand this post, or my approach. I do not wish to “bash” the Bible (nor to “thump” it, but that is a different matter). I love the Bible and have devoted my professional life to its study. My personal life is also distinctly colored by the Bible. The biblical writers are my most influential conversation partners and guides as I try to understand what it might mean to live a life of faithfulness to God. But when we make claims for the Bible that its authors did not make, and which its texts cannot sustain, we do not honor the Bible, we dishonor it. We honor the Bible, and the God to whom it testifies, by honest and critical appraisial of the text as it is, not by surrounding it with doctrinal scaffolding to make it into something it’s not.

Hear now my reasoning,
and listen to the pleadings of my lips.
Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one person deceives another?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality.
Will not his majesty terrify you,
and the dread of him fall upon you?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,
your defenses are defenses of clay. (Job 13:6–12)

As the in the days of Job (so to speak, if a literary character has “days”), so today in our doctrine of scripture, honesty is the best policy.

Michael Pahl commented:

Chris, just a note to say that there has been much discussion and ongoing debate among evangelicals regarding the appropriateness of the term “inerrancy” and the usefulness of the doctrine’s particular formulation in the Chicago Statement. Many evangelicals were uncomfortable with these things back in the 1970s, and many are uncomfortable with them today. There is also a growing movement among evangelical scholars to describe the truthfulness of Scripture in more positive terms (”inerrancy” being an inherently negative notion). This movement, in large part prompted by Kevin Vanhoozer’s work, is exploring the function of Scripture as divine speech act(s), the nature of Scripture as a sort of “theological drama,” and the significance of genre for these “truth” questions.

For my own part, I live and work within various communities that hold to inerrancy, yet I sympathize with your objections to it. I recently rambled a few thoughts of my own on the subject here.

Ken commented:

Chris: I do not hold to inerrancy but your examples, especially the first one, are not ones that inerrantists are likely to accept. Most inerrantists today allow for genre and theology considerations in any determination of what is in fact an error. If an inerrantist reads the story of the Garden of Eden ahistorically there is no problem for they would, in fact, share your position that the author has a reason for representing the geography has s/he does; there is, in fact, no error per se. For those inerrantists who read the story historically, they already mess with geography and climatology to such a degree that I am sure that they could explain the discrepancy within their theories, probably with an argument that the Bible describes an antediluvian geographical reality.

As for the other two, they are chronological issues and so, if a suitable/plausible harmonization is not forthcoming, most inerrantists would simply fall back on the autographa as you point out (no matter how much this “out” contradicts the further principle of most inerrantists that we have a biblical text that faithfully represents the original to 99.999999%).

I commented:

Michael: Thank you for the comment, and the link. It will be interesting to see how such conversations develop.

Ken: I imagine that you are probably correct on all counts.

Kevin P. Edgecomb commented:

Chris, I don’t know about the other stuff, but the Ahaz/Hezekiah bit is possible to understood without recourse to emmendation. I think it’s one of Na’aman’s articles that deals with it (in one of the Eisenbraun volumes). A co-regency for Ahaz/Hezekiah and for Manasseh/Hezekiah takes care of the oddities, with some of the counting according to the Ahaz coregency and some according to sole reign, with Hezekiah dying in 686 (give or take a year). I’ll look up the title later.

Kevin P. Edgecomb commented:

The Nadav Na’aman article is “Hezekiah and the Kings of Assyria,” originally published in Tel Aviv 21 (1994), 235-254, available in Ancient Israel and Its Neighbors: Interaction and Counteraction. Collected Essays, Volume 1 (Eisenbrauns,2005).

The gist, as I recall, is that Hezekiah wouldn’t have died until 686 because Sennacherib wasn’t crowing about his death in inscriptions mentioning him (the birdcage one, for instance) dated to around/after 697, which are one set of end dates for Hez’s death in many chron. schemes. He does do such crowing in other cases, for other enemies, seeing their deaths as punishment for rebelling or whatever.

Looney commented:

Chris,

I did not know about the formal innerancy statement until a few weeks ago. It would be helpful, however, to point out that the innerancy statement was in response to a century + of liberal theologians.

Dr. Harry Emmerson Fosdick provides the best characterization of the era with his statement, “I do not believe in the virgin birth, or in that old fashioned substitutionary doctrine of the atonement; and I do not know any intelligent minister who does.”

His songs are in the hymnal and his sermons were examples in the seminaries. It is always fun to nitpick over Bible dates, but I think that you should try to keep the context: The innerancy concept was in response to a trained intelligentsia that had gone stark raving mad!

Buddy Boone commented:

Chris,

My reasons for being unable to accept the inerrancy dogma are both mentioned in your excellent post:

1) “unsupported by the actual textual phenomena.” I could not have said it better.

2) What is actually supposed to be inerrant is something that does not even exist. IMHO, Warfield’s autographa argument amounts to little more than fideism.

Interestingly, at least one of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy members, Harold Lindsell, believed that to deny inerrancy is to deny the gospel itself, and yet he signed the statement which includes:
“WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs.”
For Lindsell (and probably at least some of the others), inerrancy was, indeed, an essential element of the Christian faith.

C. Stirling Bartholomew commented:

The debate that never ends. The domino theory, i.e., if you don’t hold the line on biblical infallibility then everything else goes to hell, has a certain plausibility when used as a model to explain the pattern of movement from orthodoxy to apostasy. My favorite example is Fuller Seminary. I think it was roughly a dozen years after “Black Saturday” that Paul Jewett published a book stating that Paul the Apostle was wrong about women. There are many other examples.

I have never took much interest in great the bible war of the 1970s. The dispute was a modernist thing and by 1980 modernism was on the way out even though It took the evangelicals a decade or longer to figure this out and as recently as the late 90’s I have seen some brilliant proponents of biblical infallibility who are still functioning as modernists, this is sort of like watching a black and white movie.

The irony in all this is that certain aspects of Van Til’s critique of modernism which is now ancient history could be leveled against the people who are “defending the bible” … having said all this I don’t think Vanhoozer has found a way out of this dillema. I have read him. I am not impressed.

Looney commented:

Actually, I think Stirling is probably right. The great theological tank battles that raged across Europe and America are now a thing of the past. Perhaps someone does need to come in like, er, Rumsfield and clean house among the old time generals. But spiritual wars don’t go away the just change form. Where is the new one? Agile theological warfare anyone?

The fundamentalists changed along with the modernists - although there are a few antique specimens of both around.

Bruce commented:

When Christians get rid of this ridiculous notion of biblical inerrancy we’ll all be a lot better off. There’s plenty in the Holy Scriptures which tell us of the dangers of the “dead letter”. What it really amounts to is idolatry of a paper and print idol, rather than the Living God.

God Bless,
Bruce