Two main theories dominate today's discussion on how to study the Bible: the historical-critical method and the historicogrammatical method. The latter says that we should pay close attention to grammar and language of the Bible, including ancient languages in which the Bible was written. The former would agree with that, but with an addition: such study should be done not only for the sake of language and grammar but also for sources of the biblical text. In the historicogrammatical methodology, history means the canonical history of how the Bible came to us. In the historical-critical method, history means the history of biblical events as they have been re created and reconstructed by scholars using this methodology.
How should we, then, look at the biblical text? A number of factors bear upon the answer to this question.
Language
The Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, and no perfect translation is possible. Some Christians believe that we should study and use only the KJV. I honor them for their sincerity, even though it is a bit misguided. At the time the KJV was translated, the translators had less than 20 main manuscripts from which to work. Today, according to the American Bible Society, 5,300 manuscripts, complete or in part, are available for translators. In addition, we have the Dead Sea scrolls. More and more future Bible translations will take into account these scrolls and their fragments. The reason for this is obvious. Before 1947, when these scrolls were discovered, the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible was dated A.D. 895. Some of the Dead Sea scrolls come from the first and second centuries B.C.
Naturally, Bible translators must pay close attention to the language of the text. If one really wants to be accurate about the meaning and significance of the language of the Bible, the best procedure to follow is to go to the original. Lacking the ability to do that, try using one of the more literal translations, such as the NASB, NIV, RSV, or NKJV.
Literary structure
Another factor that bears upon the study of the Bible is its literary form. The historical-critical method uses an approach called form criticism. That is not what we are talking about here. We are referring to a modern approach known as structuralism: a type of philosophical linguistics, the order and way in which biblical thought was expressed.
To illustrate: one third of the Old Testament is poetry, and a basic technique of Hebrew poetry is parallelism. Hebrew parallelism appears in three primary ways. First is direct parallel ism, where the same thought is repeated with slightly different words. Second is antithetic parallelism, which gives the opposite idea in the second line. This is common in Proverbs, such as: "A righteous man is like X, but a wicked man is like Y." Third is synthetic parallelism, which extends the idea with a new idea in the second line.
The poetic technique of parallelism is often used in biblical prose as well. A failure to understand this fact has led to some misinterpretations of scriptures. When critics see the same idea twice in somewhat different ways, they assign these two passages to different literary sources, sometimes centuries apart.
Consider an example in Job. There each of Job's three friends gives his speech three times. This makes a total of nine speeches, not including Job's responses. Then along comes Elihu with his speech. To the modern literary critic, Elihu's speech comes from a different literary source when in actuality it is simply an extension of the principle of parallelism of thought (his speech says the same thing in a different way, making the same point). To the modern reader, piling up this many speeches of the same type may be boring; to the ancient reader it heightened the climax.
Literary sources
Modern literary critics divide up biblical sources. This process has been applied to the Pentateuch. During the past two centuries scholars of the critical method worked out an elaborate system of sources called the documentary hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, there were four main sources---J, E, D, and P---who composed their different narratives or bits and pieces of narratives. These were finally edited together by one editor or a series of editors. According to this approach, the first five books of the Bible were not the work of Moses, nor do they come from his time.
But is this theory correct? Evidence shows it is not. Consider again the book of Job. It begins with prose, continues with long stretches of poetry, and ends with prose. Literary critics hold that the frame story and the prose elements at the beginning and the end were written later than the poetic sections. The theory is that poetry is early and prose is late. Further, it is suggested that the prose narratives came from a different source and did not originally belong with the narrative poems.
One way to check out such a theory is to see whether in contemporary literary sources such a distinction can be found. The code of Hammurabi provides us a good example as it starts with a poetic introduction, continues with prose, and ends with a eulogy of poetry. Here is the pattern of poetry-prose-poetry from a Semitic literary source of the eighteenth century B.C. The same can be said for a number of Egyptian literary sources that have survived since the twentieth century B.C.
Moses, living in Egypt, was no doubt well aware of this literary technique. The testimony of Jacob is given in poetry in Genesis 49, and its context is that of the circumstances upon which his will and testament were given. The Exodus is told in prose in Exodus 14 and in poetry in Exodus 15. The oracles of Balaam in Numbers are told in a series of short poems set in a prose matrix. Without understanding the poetry-prose-poetry structure common in the time of Moses, to divide up the first five books of the Bible between different and widely separated sources seems arbitrary.
Another major way in which the study of literary structure comes out with a very different answer to textual questions than the sources the literary critics use is a technique known as chiasmus. This word is taken from the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X. The technique is really an inverted parallelism. Normal and direct parallelism would follow the order of A:B::A:B. Chiasmus reverses the internal elements in relationship to each other, yielding the order of A:B::B:A. This technique in English literature is called palindrome. The technique was common in ancient Semitic literature.
The Bible uses this technique in a number of places and is significant for deciding literary sources. The Flood story of Genesis 6-9 is a case in point. When literary critics approach this story, they break down the text into 20 small literary units that are supposed to have come, in alternating order, from J and P sources. This was standard doctrine for the documentary hypothesis of the literary critic for more than a century.
Then came the Jewish scholar U. Cassuto with his commentary on Genesis. Cassuto argued that these units actually come in pairs and they form an ascending and descending sequence, a chiasm. The darkness and clouds of the storm build over the story until it reaches its climax at Genesis 8:1. There the ark lands upon the mountains of Ararat and "God remembered Noah." As is typical of chiastic structures, the climax of the story is emphasized by its literary order. From that point onward there is a decrescendo in the statements of the story, and they match those in the first half of the story, except that they reverse those statements.
I have added a small observation to Cassuto's excellent work to note that the frame of the story is balanced in a similar order. The frame begins with the genealogical statement for Noah in Genesis 5:32. But this is only half of a genealogical statement. The other half is found in Genesis 9:28, 29. Thus what the author has done is to take the whole genealogical statement and split it apart and insert the Flood story between the two halves of this type of statement. Then comes the story of human wickedness before the Flood in Genesis 6:1-8. This is balanced by the story of human wickedness after the Flood, which is found in Genesis 9:20-27, where it involved the family of Noah itself. People have questioned why this story is in the Bible. Actually, there is a balance here showing that there was wickedness both before and after the Flood. The Flood did not eradicate wickedness, and even in the best and most righteous of families it can still be found. Then comes the second genealogical statement. It is found in Genesis 6:9 at the beginning of the story and in Genesis 9:18,19 at the end of the story. In these genealogical statements the emphasis is upon Noah's three sons. Thus the frame of the Flood story is:
A. First half of first genealogical statement, Gen. 5:32
B. Wickedness before the Flood, Gen. 6:1-8
C. First half of second genealogical statement, Gen. 6:9
D. The Flood story proper, Cassuto's outline
C. Second half of the second genealogical statement, Gen. 9:18, 19
B. Wickedness after the Flood, Gen. 9:20-27
A. Second half of the first genealogical statement, Gen. 9:28, 29 Why should this type of literary structure be used? And what effect does it have upon the analysis of the story? What it shows is that form complements function. These elements are laid out in a particular way so that they balance and they talk about very similar elements at the beginning and the end of the story. These elements show a relationship, and thus they serve to explain each other.
Now the two contrasting views. On the one hand there is the literary critic who says that there are 20 separate bits and pieces in the Flood story and that it took half a millennium or more to be edited into this final canonical form. On the other hand there is the neat and integrated literary structure of the story, that of a chiasm. What this literary structure shows is that the whole story of Genesis 6-9 is one whole integrated story from which the building blocks could be removed only at the expense of the overall outline and structure. Thus this story is the work of one hand at one time; it did not come from different literary scribal schools working over centuries to complete it. When literary structure is compared with literary sources here, the former shows that literary critics have handled the latter wrongly because of their lack of appreciation of the former.
Archaeology
In recent years archaeology has opened up new vistas for the understanding of the Bible. Consider the work of Paul-Emile Botta, a French physician working in the court of the Pasha in Mosul in the 1840s. He was intrigued by the large ruin mounds across the river, so he began to excavate there in 1842. Given the size of the ruins that we now know to be Nineveh, he had little success there. So he moved to Khorsabad, 20 miles to the northeast. Even though Botta thought it was Nineveh, it actually was Dur-Sharrukin, or Sargon's-burg. This was the capital city of Sargon II of Assyria (722-705 B.C.). Not only did Botta's excavations open up ancient Mesopotamia to our view; his work also shed light upon one particular verse. Isaiah 20:1 mentions the year that Sargon sent his general to Ashdod and the Assyrian forces with him conquered that Philistine city. Sargon was one of the names of the kings of antiquity that had been lost from later transmitters like the Greek and Roman historians. For that reason, critics of the early nineteenth century held that this was a mistake in the Bible and that some other king was actually to be understood. This misinterpretation was corrected by the findings from Botta's excavation.
A recent sequel to this story is the findings at Ashdod by Israeli excavations conducted in the early 1960s. The excavators found a fragment of a victory stela of Sargon that told of his conquest of the city. Now the puzzle is complete: Isaiah 20:1 is illustrated by findings from Sargon's capital city in Assyria, excavated in the 1840s, and from Ashdod itself, excavated 120 years later.
While archaeology has shed a lot of light upon the biblical history as we now know it, it has also created some controversies of its own. Consider the case of Jericho.
British archaeologist John Garstang's excavation from 1930 to 1936 produced a biblical profile of Jericho. There were the fallen walls and the burned royal palace on the east side of the city near the gate. There were the scarabs from the Egyptian pharaohs of the fifteenth century, the time of Moses and Joshua, according to the biblical chronology for the destruction of that city at the end of the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. But the matter was not to rest there.
After World War II Kathleen Kenyon, also from the British School of Archaeology, led an expedition to the site intermittently between 1952 and 1958. She came to the conclusion that Garstang was wrong, that he had misdated Jericho's walls, that the scarabs were unimportant for dating the city, etc. According to her interpretation of the archaeological data, she said that Jericho suffered massive destruction in the middle of the sixteenth century and was not occupied again until the middle of the fourteenth century, and even then very scantily. Thus according to her, Jericho was occupied neither in the fifteenth century, according to an early date for Joshua, nor in the thirteenth century, according to a late date for him. Thus her interpretation of the archaeological data contradicted the biblical record. Scholars of the historical-critical method welcomed these findings since they had shown that the Bible was incorrect in this major account of the book of Joshua. But that is not the end of the story.
Another scholar, Bryant Wood, traveled to Liverpool, Paris, and Jerusalem to examine Garstang's old pottery bags that are still stored in those places. Kenyon's assertion that there was no occupation of Jericho in the time of Joshua was based on her reading of pottery. Wood criticized her pottery reading on three counts: (1) she paid too much attention to imported painted pottery; (2) she paid too little attention to unpainted locally made pottery; and (3) she missed what painted pottery there was because she did not examine Garstang's pottery bags in detail and because she did not dig in the palace. Imported painted wares were luxury goods and thus were found by Garstang in the palace. Since Garstang had already excavated the palace, Kenyon could only excavate adjacent to it, and the houses there were more normal, ordinary homes that did not contain luxury goods.
The problem now is this: everybody admits that the final destruction of Jericho was a massive event that fits the character of the Israelite destruction there, if the pottery date is correct. Kenyon says the pottery date is not correct; Garstang and Wood say that the pottery date is correct. Who is correct? This can be determined only by examining the pottery.
I tell this story in part to illustrate the problem with getting conservative, Bible-supporting studies published in the liberal biblical press. Wood sent his detailed study of the pottery of the last stage of Jericho to the literary organ in England for the British School of Archaeology. They rejected the manuscript and would not publish it. Wood thought that would be the most appropriate place to publish it because that was the journal that had published much of Kenyon's work, but they did not see fit to do so. The work has now been accepted for publication by one of the leading American journals of archaeology.
This raises an important point. Scholars who employ the historical-critical methodology often criticize scholars who employ the historicogrammatical methodology as uncritical and subjective, while they characterize themselves as much more objective. My personal point of view is that we should simply put such studies out in the marketplace of ideas. But critical scholars are no more willing to do this than are conservative scholars. This raises the question: Who is objective and who is not?
Summary
Let us return to the two principal methods in which the biblical text has been examined in recent times. Up to a certain point, the two methods run parallel. Both recognize that the original language and text of the Bible must be taken seriously. Both agree that the study of literary structure is important to understanding the Bible. The two methods diverge, however, when it comes to the acceptance of hypothetical sources that are supposed to lie behind the present canonical text. Historical-critical scholars hold that even though much of the work done from that viewpoint in the nineteenth century can now be recognized as mistaken, nevertheless the framework of those studies, the documentary hypothesis, should be maintained intact. Historicogrammatical scholars reply that if the reasons for the construction of the hypothesis have largely disappeared, the method too should be discarded.
Then there is the matter of history. The historical-critical scholar comes to the text with a natural bias against the historicity of the events described therein. The historicogrammatical scholar comes to the text with a natural bias in favor of the historicity of the events described therein. How, then, shall the matter be settled? There should be a neutral ground upon which the matters involved could be examined dispassionately and objectively. Unfortunately, there is not.
That brings us back to the matter of presuppositions. It is something of a surprise to see that the subject of hermeneutics eventually comes back to the matter of presuppositions, but that is indeed the case. As far as the presupposition of the historicogrammatical method, that presupposition is ultimately one of faith. I commend that presupposition to the readers of this journal. When that presupposition is adopted, scholars are freed from their procrustean bed to examine all of the evidence that comes to bear upon the interpretation of God's Word. One is not limited to the use of special sources and forms and an antihistorical bias in order to explore the breadth and depth of God's Word.
