Reign of Malevolence is making its latest experimental soundscape freely available for your download or streaming pleasure. I borrow from the religious language of death and resurrection to create a dark ambient/atmospheric song that communicates liberation from the evils that oppress and threaten to destroy humanity. Hopefully, you will hear the voice of God commanding you to sleep no more
and arise
from the dust
of dehumanization, injustice, or whatever dark forces you face in your life.
-R-O-M-All Who Sleep In Dust (Shall Arise) (48Hz, 160bit, OGG)
It is inevitable when dealing with biblical texts due to their complete otherness to our time, our culture, our experience, our world-views, our perspectives, our languages, and our thought-forms, that we will resort to anachronistic, incorrect, confusing, or reductionistic terms. Some, however, are more annoying than others. My ire is currently inflamed by the literary phrase final form.
The noun isn’t too shabby in and of itself, but it obviously requires a discerning adjective that can describe it appropriately according to our particular subject-matter. Unfortunately final
just doesn’t cut it. Final
? Where in the world can someone get final
from? The biblical texts have no final
form to speak of. From our current times until as far back as we can trace them, the biblical texts witness pluriform, variegated, and diverse composition.
In former centuries, the modus operandi was to designate the Masoretic Text as representative of the final
form on the assumption that the LXX was a later offshoot and corruption of a base text better represented by the Masoretic (never mind, of course, that there is actually no Masoretic Text but many Masoretic Texts which differ from each other in significant ways, particularly in their vowel usage and systems, and that we have somewhat arbitrarily chosen the Leningrad Codex to stand as THE Masoretic Text). We now know, however, that this is not the case–that both text-types existed side-by-side in the ancient world, both were used by believing Jews, both were considered inspired and authoritative, both have corruptions in them, both have unique or new readings in them, and both preserve readings in different places that are probably more representative of an earlier original than the other. The question today is not which text better represents the original, but whether there is even an original that we can point to and whether it may not be better to speak of competing originals. The Dead Sea Scrolls (despite all the hype promulgated by the almost exact consonantal equivalence of the Masoretic
Isaiah to the Great Isaiah Scroll) show us something we should have known long before–that the biblical texts before and even after Yeshua’s time were not static in form or content, but were very much in flux. We see this even in the forms of the biblical texts themselves that we’ve always been looking at regardless of any other considerations. An intertextual investigation within the pages of a printed edition of a canon anywhere in the world shows one biblical text borrowing from another, changing it, and re-using it in its own way. The classic Christian awareness of this situation is as old as the demonstration of different gospels instead of a single gospel. The Syriac church actually combined them into a single gospel called the Diatesseron in order to deal with this textual diversity. I have put together a short and far from incomplete list of some places where it appears that, at least according to the strictures of Modern times, one Old Testament
biblical text might be said to plagiarize another: Old Testament Plagiarism.
The printing press is to a large extent to blame for this irritating orientation toward the final
form of a text. Unlike ancient Israelites, we think in terms of books
which are static things and usually have an Aristotelian plot and character structure. We (usually) don’t have to worry about going into the store and buying a book which differs in significant detail from the one of the same title we’ve read, borrowed, or heard about. Books even (usually) have the same author or authors who are clearly identified. We’re used to things like this. And when we approach the biblical texts, we bring these understandings, perceptions, and preconditions to those texts and view them as books with final forms when, in fact, they are neither.
Biblical texts are better thought of as repository material. They functioned in no way as Sola Scriptura would have them function–as some authoritative or final structure or system which is absolute, unalterable, or against which all else is measured–but rather like various textual pieces which were put into a box at different times by different people and withdrawn by different people at different times, and which were sometimes changed or altered before being put back in the box. And it cannot be said that this metaphoric box always contained the same general textual material. Some may have put Torah material into it. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put in Enoch material. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put Enoch-like material in it. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put in Torah-like material. Some may have taken it out. The box has looked very different throughout the centuries and has had various or even competing material in it even within the same time periods and geographic areas. We are late coming to this situation and have ourselves participated by putting limits on what goes in or comes out of the box and what that material looks like inside it. And yet what makes our limits final
? Though some people attempt to override the historical situation through reliance upon the idea of canon,
they fail to realize that canon
itself is part of that historic participation. Pray tell which canon you refer to when you say canon
? There is no canon
even today, but many canons,
each of which exists because of the different limits even we have placed upon the textual material. To say canon
is really only to refer to the metaphoric box—it says nothing about the contents within.
What I think does a better job of describing this situation are adjectives like redacted
or composite.
Thus we can talk about the redacted whole
and define exactly what whole we are referring to and why it is a whole. Or we can talk about the composite form
and then specify what form we are looking at and why that form. This way we are also more aware of and honest about our own subjective part in approaching and making sense of biblical texts instead of falling into an anachronism that views the texts in ways outlined above or so that we guard against a retreat into a Positivism (such as that necessary even of Sola Scriptura) which believes the texts themselves have a form that is somehow complete outside of our own influence, interaction, and decision. Of course, it would also be advantageous to stop referring to certain biblical texts as book of…
or the bible
(and using an uppercase B in either case).
Old Testament Theology, for Walther Eichrodt, was an attempt to use historical-critical investigation to:
- locate some kind of underlying, all-encompassing theological unity in the Old Testament
- which could then be shown to have continuance into and throughout the New Testament (being ultimately encompassed by Christ himself).
Vital to this enterprise was not allowing dogmatic theology to impose it’s own commitments, ideas, or principles on the process from outside. Dogmatic theology was thus held apart from (but not necessarily separated from) Old Testament Theology. Eichrodt discusses in one place part of this caution thusly:
One thing, however, must be guarded against [in doing OT Theology] and that is any arrangement of the whole body of material [within the OT that one is sifting through for a unity] which derives not from the laws of its own nature but from some dogmatic scheme. It is impossible to use a system which has been developed on a basis quite different from that of the realm of OT thought to arrive at the OT belief about God. All that results is a grave danger of intruding alien ideas and of barring the way to understanding.
The irony of Eichrodt’s situation is that his search for a theological unity within the body of the Old Testament is a system entirely foreign to the OT (in the canon of your choice) or in the changing and pluriform ancient Israelite religion until the assimilation of Hellenism (which took place after the Hebrew/Aramaic scriptures were already written). It is itself a dogma that can only intrude on the texts and bar the way to their understanding. The OT texts themselves know of no such theological “unity” (see Rejecting Job parts 1 and 2 for an example of an OT text that directly contradicts the concept of God’s justice in other OT texts). Indeed, the Old Testament as a canon is a historically variegated and arbitrary entity. And some texts don’t even have anything to do with theology (Esther). But the basic, foundational problem is that theology itself is actually an anachronism when it comes to the Old Testament. Ancient Israelites did not do “theology” (until they began redefining it according to Hellenism). Theology is what Greek philosophers did.
It seems to me that Eichrodt’s caution quoted above is entirely appropriate, just not the method he believed could accomplish it. If we are going to do an “Old Testament Theology,” we don’t necessarily have to abandon the quest for a “theology,” but we do need to redefine what we are doing under that title. In that case, an Old Testament Theology might look entirely different than what we would normally think of as “theology,” but that also means we are probably closer to our goal than otherwise.
Back in the day, a friend and I got together to form a band and make some joyful noise to the Lord. We called ourselves Squish and The Masticating Chicken. Christian music would never be the same. Lovers of CCM (Crappy Christian Music) flocked to our door. Check out our breakthrough, signature sound: Cacophonous Worship (Squish is on geet and myself, The Masticating Chicken, on vocals).
