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 Annotation
****A literary history of our most influential book of all time, by an
Oxford scholar and Anglican priest**** In our culture, the Bible is
monolithic: It is a collection of books that has been unchanged and
unchallenged since the earliest days of the Christian church. The idea of
the Bible as "Holy Scripture," a non-negotiable authority straight from
God, has prevailed in Western society for some time. And while it provides
a firm foundation for centuries of Christian teaching, it denies the depth,
variety, and richness of this fascinating text. In *A History of the Bible* ,
John Barton argues that the Bible is not a prescription to a complete,
fixed religious system, but rather a product of a long and intriguing
process, which has inspired Judaism and Christianity, but still does not
describe the whole of either religion. Barton shows how the Bible is
indeed an important source of religious insight for Jews and Christians
alike, yet argues that it must be read in its...

VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2019 by John Barton
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages
diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.
Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying
with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part
of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and
allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin
Random House UK
Illustration credits on this page.
ISBN 9780525428770 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780698191587 (ebook)
Version_2
For Katie
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Bible Today
PART ONE
The Old Testament
1. Ancient Israel: History and Language
2. Hebrew Narrative
3. Law and Wisdom
4. Prophecy
5. Poems and Psalms
PART TWO
The New Testament
6. Christian Beginnings
7. Letters
8. Gospels
PART THREE
The Bible and Its Texts
9. From Books to Scripture
10. Christians and Their Books
11. Official and Unofficial Texts
12. Biblical Manuscripts
PART FOUR
The Meanings of the Bible
13. The Theme of the Bible
14. Rabbis and Church Fathers
15. The Middle Ages
16. The Reformation and Its Readings
17. Since the Enlightenment
18. Translating the Bible
Conclusion: The Bible and Faith
Notes
 Further Reading
Bibliography
Biblical References
Index
About the Author
List of Illustrations
1
: The beginning of the ‘Community Rule’ scroll, found in cave 1 at
Qumran. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1QS.
Bridgeman Images
2
: Fragments of the Gospel of St Matthew from p45, a codex from
third-century Egypt. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, BP I, folios 1–2.
© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library
3
: John 7:52 in
Codex Sinaiticus.
British Library, London, MS 43725, folio 252r.
© British Library Board/Bridgeman Images
4
: Deuteronomy 32 in the Leningrad Codex. National Library of Russia,
St Petersburg, Firkovich B 19 A, folio 118v.
National Library of Russia, St Petersburg
5
: The Annunciation depicted in a thirteenth-century
bible moralisée
. British Library, London, MS Harley 1527, folio 6v.
© British Library Board/Bridgeman Images
6
: The
Glossa Ordinaria
on Genesis 9. Worcester Cathedral, MS 76, folio 31r.
Photograph by Mr Christopher Guy, Cathedral Archaeologist. By
permission of the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral
7
: Genesis 15 in a modern Hebrew Bible.
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
, 5th edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997), p. 22
 8
: Deuteronomy 32 in the Complutensian Polyglot, volume 1 (Alcalá de
Henares: Complutense University, 1514).
Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid
9
: Opening of the Gospel of St John from the Canterbury Gospels. The
Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 286, folio 208r. ©
The Master and Fellows, Corpus Christi College
10
: Opening of the Gospel of St John from
The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New
(London: Robert Barker, 1611). Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Philadelphia, BS185 1611 L65.
SCETI/University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Acknowledgements
 It is a pleasure to thank the many people who have helped me in
writing this book. I am grateful to Stuart Proffitt for the invitation to
undertake the work. He has commented minutely on the original draft, as
has his colleague Ben Sinyor, saving me from many slips and infelicities
and greatly improving the book. Grateful thanks to my copy-editor, Linden
Lawson, for her exceptionally careful and thorough work. I must also
thank Diarmaid MacCulloch and John Collins for reading the whole draft,
and my agent, Felicity Bryan. Many colleagues have helped with advice
and information, among whom I should mention particularly David
Lincicum, Mary Marshall, Mark Edwards and Nicholas King SJ. The Oxford
Faculty of Theology and Religion, and Campion Hall in Oxford, have
provided a most congenial environment to work in. Special thanks are due
to my wife Mary for her support, to my daughter Katie and her family who
helped me to take time off from the project occasionally, and to numerous
friends who have reminded me that life is more than writing.
The book is dedicated with much love to my daughter, Katie Walker.
John Barton
Campion Hall, Oxford
October 2018
Introduction: The Bible Today
The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912–91) wrote of the
Bible: ‘this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit[s] there inscrutably in the
middle of our cultural heritage . . . frustrating all our efforts to walk
around it’.1 In a secular age, some might think it surprising how much
interest there still is in the Bible, as the celebrations for the fourth
centenary of the King James Version (KJV), sometimes known as the
Authorized Version (AV), in 2011 showed clearly; even those who do not
believe in Christianity continue to be fascinated by its presence. For
believers, the Bible is often seen as inspired by God and having a high
level of authority in matters of belief and practice. For non-believers, it is
a central document of western culture: it continues to interest many
readers as a collection of major literary works. The history of these works,
and of how they have been disseminated and interpreted, is a central part
of the history of western literature.
This book tells the story of the Bible from its remote beginnings in
folklore and myth to its reception and interpretation in the present day. It
describes the Bible’s genesis, transmission and dissemination, and shows
how it has been read and used from antiquity to the present, both in its
original languages and in translation. Among other things, this will, I
hope, dispel the image of the Bible as a sacred monolith between two
black-leather covers, recapture the sense of it as the product of a long
and intriguing process, and illustrate the extraordinary variety of ways in
which it has been read over the centuries. Centrally, it also illustrates the
difficulty in moving from the Bible to religious faith: neither of the two
religions, Judaism and Christianity, that claim biblical books as their
foundation can be read off from the Bible. Indeed, the Bible contains
many elements that are problematic for Jewish and Christian belief. These
include not only widely known morally objectionable features, such as
God’s destruction of innocent people in the stories of the Israelite
conquest of the Promised Land, but also the variety of genres (narrative,
prophecy, poetry), many of them not conducive to doctrinal definitions,
and the setting in ancient cultures many of whose features we do not
share. At the same time I aim to show that the Bible is an important
source of religious insight, provided it is read in its original context and
against the conditions prevailing when it was written.
The history will necessarily include a great deal of pre-history, as I
explain how biblical books were composed, since few if any are the result
of simple composition by one author: most are highly composite, and
some even depend on others, so that there is a process of reception of
older books going on in younger ones. The Bible is thus in itself already
the record of a dialogue among authors and transmitters of tradition, and
contains commentary in many of its books on many others. On the
grandest scale, the New Testament frequently comments on the Old,
nearly all of which was already regarded as ‘Holy Scripture’ (I will explain
the meanings of that deceptively familiar term) in the world into which
the New Testament came. The extent to which the Old Testament remains
authoritative for Christians – and, if it does, how then it is to be read
alongside the new ideas introduced by Jesus, Paul and others – is one of
the main issues in Christian theology, and always has been. The New
Testament speaks of the Old Testament as ‘inspired by God’ (literally ‘God-
breathed’) in 2 Timothy 3:16, and Christians have extended that idea to
the books of the New Testament too. It is not clear, however, how this
affects the way the Bible actually functions, or the kind of authority it
exercises over believers. To call the Bible inspired implies that God had a
hand in its production, but exactly how that worked in practice is seldom
defined.
 A further purpose is to distil the current state of biblical scholarship.
The Bible has been subject to the most minute scrutiny in modern times,
and there is an ocean of theories about its origins, meaning and status, in
which the general reader can drown. My intention is to describe the
present consensus, where there is one, to discuss reasonable options in
areas of dispute, and to indicate those where we might try harder.
Alongside these descriptive tasks, the book also makes an argument:
that the Bible does not ‘map’ directly onto religious faith and practice,
whether Jewish or Christian. I will propose that though the Bible – seen
as a collection of religious texts – is irreplaceable for many reasons,
Christianity is not in essence a scriptural religion, focused on a book seen
as a single, holy work. Judaism, similarly, though it greatly reveres the
Hebrew Bible, is also not so Bible-centred as is widely thought. Islam
perhaps is the ideal type of book religion, and by comparison with it,
Judaism and Christianity stand at a considerable distance from their
central holy text. The Bible is very unlike a creed or a ‘Confession’, such as
the great Protestant ones – the Confession of Augsburg for Lutherans or
the Westminster Confession for some Calvinists. It is a mêlée of materials,
few of which directly address the question of what is to be believed. The
history of the Bible is thus the story of the interplay between the religion
and the book – neither mapping exactly onto the other.
There are versions of Christianity that claim to be simply ‘biblical’ (no
versions of Judaism do so), but the reality is that the structures and
content of Christian belief, even among Christians who believe their faith
to be wholly grounded in the Bible, are organized and articulated
differently from the contents of the Bible. This can be seen most clearly in
Christian fundamentalism, which idolizes the Bible yet largely
misunderstands it.2 Fundamentalists venerate a Bible that does not really
exist, a perfect text that perfectly reflects what they believe. The
description of the Bible (warts and all) which follows will necessarily make
disconcerting reading for those who idealize it, but I will also show that it
is not and cannot be the whole foundation of either Judaism or
Christianity. I will thus also make the case for the kind of critical study
that modern biblical scholars practise, which addresses the Bible without
an assumption that whatever it says is to be regarded as authoritatively
true.3
In truth, there are no versions of either Christianity or Judaism that
correspond point for point to the contents of the Bible, which is often not
what it has been made into and read as. In Christianity, for example,
there are absolutely central doctrines, such as that of the Trinity, that are
almost entirely absent from the New Testament; conversely, there are
central ideas in the New Testament, such as St Paul’s theory of ‘salvation
by grace through faith’, that at least until the Reformation were never part
of official orthodoxy at all, and even now are not in the creeds. Similarly,
the elaboration of religious custom and tradition in Orthodox Judaism
goes far beyond anything the Hebrew Bible itself implies: for example, the
prohibition of eating meat and dairy at the same meal, with all its
implications for the design of kitchens to avoid the two ever coming into
accidental contact, is linked to Exodus 23:19 (‘You shall not boil a kid in
its mother’s milk’), but exceeds anything that text in itself requires, as is
generally acknowledged in Judaism.*
The Bible is centrally important to both Judaism and Christianity, but
not as a holy text out of which entire religious systems can somehow be
read. Its contents illuminate the origins of Christianity and Judaism, and
provide spiritual classics on which both faiths can draw; but they do not
constrain subsequent generations in the way that a written constitution
would. They are simply not that kind of thing. They are a repository of
writings, both shaping and shaped by the two religions at various stages
in their development, to which later generations of believers are
committed to responding in positive, but also critical, ways. To attribute
religious authority to such a document stretches the word ‘authority’ to its
limits, and can only be sustained by devising special ways of interpreting
this book that differ from those in which others are interpreted.
To have as its holy text a mixture of works of many genres –
predominantly narratives, aphorisms, poems and letters – introduces
great complexity into Christianity. Catholicism has recognized other
sources of authority besides the Bible, but has regarded the Bible as
possessing a certain ultimacy; Protestants have developed theories
according to which everything that matters to the religion is somehow
present in the Bible, and some have even argued that nothing may be
done or believed that the Bible does not explicitly sanction. This, I
believe, is an abuse of these texts, which are deeply important for the
Christian faith but cannot possibly bear the weight that is sometimes
loaded upon them. Judaism has a more subtle approach to the Bible:
while venerating it just as much as many Christians do, it does not claim
that everything in the religion as actually practised is biblically derived,
and recognizes development in new directions. Judaism thus has a holy
book, and a set of religious beliefs and practices, but the two are known
not to correlate exactly, despite being perceived as congruent; and this
may be a better model for understanding Christianity too than the
common Protestant perception of doctrine and practice as
straightforwardly derived from the Bible. Because it allows a space
between the Bible and the religion, this would in principle make it possible
for the Bible to be heard on its own terms, and for religious faith to
develop without being totally constrained by it. The relationship between
the two needs constant negotiation.

THE CULTURAL BIBLE

The Bible has two kinds of presence in the modern world. First, in
western societies, it survives as a trace or ghost at the edges of both
popular and literate culture, known in fragments as the source of
quotations and allusions. Journalists can still assume that their readers
will recognize the meaning of a ‘David and Goliath’ contest, or pick up
references to the love of money as the root of all evil – though they may
not know where the allusions come from, often thinking that some are
from Shakespeare. Many people would recognize, for example, the
following quotations:
Am I my brother’s keeper? (Genesis 4:9)
Man does not live by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:3)
The skin of my teeth (Job 19:20)
Three score years and ten (Psalm 90:10)
There is no peace for the wicked (Isaiah 48:22)
The salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13)
Pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6)
No room in the inn (Luke 2:7)
The powers that be (Romans 13:1)
A labour of love (1 Thessalonians 1:3)
But they would be unlikely to know the exact source, and more
unlikely still to know what part they play in the various books they come
from. Biblical literacy, as it is sometimes called, still exists, and advertisers
(among others) can draw on it. Think, for example, of how ubiquitous the
image of Eve is in advertising of all sorts, and how immediately visual and
verbal allusions to apples, snakes and trees are picked up by consumers.4
 The Bible has not died out of popular culture, as secularists might
have predicted, and (as mentioned) the fourth centenary of the King
James (Authorized) Version did show how widely it is still a cultural
reference point for many literate people, even if often for style rather than
for substance (see also Chapter 18). Oxford University Press alone sells a
quarter of a million Bibles in the King James Version every year.5 It is
striking how often atheists commend it, even as they dissociate
themselves from its religious claims: Richard Dawkins evidently approves
of its cultural status and even exempts biblical scholars from his strictures
on theology,6 and Philip Pullman campaigns to retain the teaching of
biblical stories and parables in schools, albeit alongside folk-tales and
myths.7 Pullman’s own mythological system, in the trilogy His Dark
Materials,8 is at one level a deliberately anti-Christian reworking of the
story of Adam and Eve, treating the acquisition of self-knowledge and
awareness of sexuality as good rather than bad, as has sometimes been
thought by Christian interpreters of the Genesis story.
The Bible still has major cultural importance in the USA, far more now
than in Europe. A strong evangelical tradition in many areas of America
has ensured that it remains highly significant even for people who are not
religious, and for politicians to criticize or ignore the Bible is politically
unwise. This does not necessarily mean that people in general read the
Bible very much: it is an icon rather than an object of study.9 Several
states have declared a ‘year of the Bible’ from time to time – for example,
Pennsylvania in 2012.10 Despite the theoretical separation of Church and
state in the USA, the Bible has a large public presence as a symbol of the
essentially Christian basis of national life. In Britain, where attachment to
the Bible is less strong, it still functions as a holy object – many people
are still content to take oaths in court ‘on the Bible’, for example. And one
can buy special Bibles in white-leather covers, to be carried by brides. The
Bible remains a best-seller in most European countries, even though
detailed study of it has become a minority interest as the appeal of
Christianity wanes.

THE BIBLE IN FAITH COMMUNITIES

The Bible’s second kind of presence in the modern world is within the
faith communities of Christianity and Judaism, and here it retains a central
importance. In recent decades in Judaism there has been an upswing of
interest in the Bible, ushering in a new translation into English, the Jewish
Publication Society’s Tanakh Translation (1985 and 1999), and the large
and impressive Jewish Study Bible.11 (Orthodox Jews had tended to study
the Talmud rather than the Bible, despite the prestige that the Bible of
course enjoys within Judaism.) Within the practice of Christianity the Bible
has also experienced a great resurgence over the last sixty years or so.
Since the Second Vatican Council, inaugurated by Pope John XXIII in 1962
to reform and renew the Church, Roman Catholics have been encouraged
to study it, and this has led to new Catholic translations in most European
languages and a wide use of biblical study materials (commentaries and
Bible-reading guides), on a scale never before seen in Catholicism. The
documents of the Council have this to say about the Bible:
Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers
must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of
Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without
error that truth which God wanted to put into sacred writings for the sake
of salvation. Therefore ‘all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for
teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and
discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be
efficient and equipped for good work of every kind’ (2 Tim. 3:16–17,
Greek text).
However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in
human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly
what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what
meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to
manifest by means of their words.
12

The twentieth century also saw a rise in Protestant churches focused

explicitly on Scripture, especially Pentecostalism of various types in the
‘old’ west and, above all, in Latin America, South Korea and Africa. Many
of these churches can be described as conservative (even fundamentalist)
in their attitude to the Bible: they insist on its absolute truth, and
maintain that God inspired every word of the text – not necessarily by
verbal dictation, but certainly by influencing the minds of the writers so
that what they produced was exactly the work God wanted the Church to
have. What they call liberal biblical study – that which encourages a
critical attitude to Scripture – strikes them as arid and uninspiring, even
as faithless and essentially unChristian. In Britain and North America the
churches that are growing tend to be those that adopt such a
conservative approach to Scripture. They believe that the whole of the
Christian faith can be derived from the Bible, which is seen as the only
source of truth and inspiration. This produces at least five principles for
reading the Bible, which more liberal Christians often endorse too, though
in a watered-down version.
First, it is claimed, we should read the Bible in the expectation that
what we find there will be true. For some Christians the truth that is
sought is literal and historical, so that whatever the biblical text affirms is
taken to be factually accurate. But even many who do not subscribe to
this would agree that the Bible is to be read as true rather than as false.
The truth it contains may sometimes be poetic or symbolic rather than
factual, and this is particularly the case for more liberal Christians, but it is
not an option to suggest that anything in the Bible is an expression of
error. Even if the author of Genesis 1–2 did not accurately express the
length of time it took God to create the universe, it is still unacceptable to
say that he was therefore simply mistaken about the events he describes:
there is bound to be some level at which what he wrote is true. For some
biblical conservatives, it is important to believe that the chronology of the
Old Testament, in which creation happened only some 6,000 years ago, is
true – they are ‘young earth’ creationists. This has produced, mainly in
the USA, the phenomenon of biblical theme parks, in which Adam and Eve
walk among dinosaurs: the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, is a
good example.13
Secondly, Scripture is to be read as relevant. Even where Paul is
discussing an issue that arose in the early Church but does not arise in
the same form today (e.g. whether Christians are free to eat meat that
has been sacrificed to false gods, as in Romans 14 or 1 Corinthians 8 and
10), this does not mean that the text in question has nothing to say to us.
It is our task, as readers of Scripture, to discern what God is saying to us
through the inclusion of such passages in the Bible. Because the Bible is
canonical, that is, authoritative, it does not have passages that were once
relevant but are so no longer: all that is written is there for our
instruction:
Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction,
so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we
might have hope.
(Romans 15:4)
 These things . . . were written down to instruct us, on whom the
ends of the ages have come.
(1 Corinthians 10:11)
It is therefore not an option, when faced with a puzzling or difficult
text, to conclude that it simply has nothing to say to us today. The fact
that it was included in the Scriptures means that it is eternally relevant to
the Christian believer.
The principle of relevance seems to be built into the idea of Scripture
in most, perhaps all, religions that have a sacred book.14 The early
Christians believed in an even stronger version of the relevance of
Scripture: that everything was relevant in the very direct sense that their
own life and times were actually predicted in the Scriptures of the Old
Testament. It was indeed they ‘on whom the ends of the ages ha[d]
come’. God had inspired the scriptural writers to foretell coming events.
Many conservative Christians still hold that to be true, believing that
scriptural texts refer to the current world order, which its authors (or God
speaking through them) foresaw in detail.
This can be seen particularly in the phenomenon of ‘Christian
Zionism’, in which evangelical Christians support the state of Israel on the
grounds that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is one of the precursors
of the end-time prophesied in the Bible. (At the same time they often try
to convert Jews to Christianity, a combination which Jews who welcome
Christian support for Israel often do not understand.)15 The events will
begin with the ‘rapture’, the snatching from the earth of true believers to
be kept safe with Jesus (along with the righteous dead, who will have
been resurrected) during the tribulations that are to come on the earth,
before Jesus returns to reign. The basis for this is 1 Thessalonians 4:17:
Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds
together with them [the dead] to meet the Lord in the air.
16

There are many ‘prophecy novels’ on the market that deal with these
themes. The most famous and influential are the eighteen or so in the
‘Left Behind’ series.17 The first, called simply Left Behind, envisages the
rapture as happening all over the world at a single moment. Aeroplanes
drop from the sky as their pilots are ‘raptured’, cars crash and there is
immense suffering, but there are also conversions to Christian faith by
those who recognize what is happening. The plot is tied up with other
themes of modern American thought: the threat of Russia, the
undesirability of pan-global organizations such as the United Nations, the
need to keep American culture pure and pristine, safe from demonic
influences such as the European Union. Naturally, by no means all
Christian Americans who support Israel do so because they believe in this
scenario, but a substantial number do. Pre-millennialism, as the system of
thought is known technically, is a widespread evangelical strain in
Anglophone Christianity.
More liberal Christians are more likely to see the relevance of the
Bible as enduring – a matter of its having important things to say in any
age, rather than as predicting the exact circumstances of the present day.
Very many Christians attend Bible-study groups, at which participants
read closely and try to discover what God is teaching them through the
passage in question. ‘Nothing’ is not an acceptable answer.
Thirdly, everything in the Bible is important and profound. There is no
triviality in Scripture, nothing that should be read as superficial or
insignificant – in a way this is close to the previous point, about its
relevance. The Bible is a book of divine wisdom, and it does not contain
any unimportant texts. This can be difficult, because many people are
likely to feel that some parts of Scripture are more important than others.
Most Protestants make much more of the Letter to the Romans than they
do of 2 John or Jude, especially since it was Romans, with its doctrine of
‘justification by faith’, that lay at the root of much of the Reformation in
the sixteenth century (see Chapter 16). But strictly speaking, a
conservative Bible reader will maintain, there is no hierarchy within
Scripture: everything is inspired by God and therefore everything is
important. Lutherans sometimes speak of a ‘canon within the canon’, a
central core of really important texts inside a penumbra of less significant
ones. But the majority of other Protestants, and of Catholics too, have not
adopted this way of thinking.
Fourthly, Scripture is self-consistent. The Christian reader, it is
believed, must not play one part of the Bible off against another. If there
appear to be contradictions between two texts, more careful reading is
required so as to show that they really cohere. A classic case of this would
be the apparent discord in the New Testament between Paul and James
over the question of good works, that is, actions that are meritorious. On
the face of it Paul seems to deny that human beings are made righteous
by good works (see Romans 3:21–4:12), whereas James affirms that
good works are essential – indeed, that ‘faith’ apart from good works is
empty and false (see James 2:14). There have been Christians who
argued that this difference is irreconcilable: Martin Luther (1483–1546)
proposed to exclude James from the core of the Bible because it
contradicts Paul. But for conservative Christians this is not an option. They
work to find ways of showing that Paul and James are not really at odds,
but teach messages which, though different in emphasis, are ultimately
compatible. In a way, the self-consistency of Scripture is already implied
by saying that it is true, since two messages that are incompatible with
each other cannot both be true. Because Scripture thus speaks with a
single voice, obscure passages can always be elucidated from more
transparent ones.
The self-consistency of Scripture seems to be a feature of all religions
that have a holy text.18 Certainly Judaism often works with an assumption
that the Bible will cohere, and there are a number of discussions in
rabbinic literature designed to show that apparent discrepancies are really
reconcilable. In the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 13b), we read of the
exploits of Hananiah the son of Hezekiah, who used up 300 barrels of oil
to keep his lamp burning by night while he reconciled apparent
discrepancies between the book of Ezekiel and the Pentateuch (the first
five books of the Bible, Genesis–Deuteronomy). But Judaism also
recognizes that texts of the Bible may sometimes be in dialogue with each
other and that something positive may emerge from a kind of creative
tension, whereas in Christianity this has not been a common view.
Christians tend to think that all the holy texts must ultimately speak with
the same voice. This belief lies behind harmonies of the Gospels, where a
coherent account is believed to underlie the self-evidently different
accounts in the different Gospels. There is a long tradition of this kind of
work, going back into the earliest Christian centuries. Some Christians
may think, as Augustine did,19 that minor discrepancies among the
Gospels do not really matter, since there is unanimity on the major issues
of the truth of their message;20 but more conservative readers would
regard that as the beginning of a dangerous slippery slope that might end
in general scepticism about the truth of the Bible.
Fifthly, Scripture is meant to be read as congruent with the content of
Christian faith, with what the early Christians called ‘the rule of faith’ (see
Chapter 13). This means something like a basic creed, or summary of
what is to be believed. Some modern proponents of what is called a
theological reading of the Bible thus say that our reading should be ‘ruled’,
which indicates that a people calling itself by that name was already in
Palestine in the thirteenth century, at that time under Egyptian rule. But
we are told nothing more about them, and Israel is never mentioned
again in any ancient Egyptian texts.
In the twentieth century some biblical archaeologists developed the
theory that the stories of the patriarchs reflected customs known from
second-millennium BCE texts – Mesopotamian documents, from the cities
of Mari and Nuzi – rather than those current in later times in Israel.
Hence, they argued, the stories must be genuine, or at least rest on
traditions from that period. For example, there are three stories in Genesis
where one of the patriarchs passes his wife off as his sister, which results
in her being taken into the harem of a foreign ruler, to avoid his being
killed (Genesis 12, 20, and 26):
When he [Abram] was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai,
‘I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the
Egyptians see you, they will say, “This is his wife”; then they will kill me,
but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with
me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.’
(Genesis 12:11–13)
It was argued that in Mari marriage between brother and sister did in
fact occur, whereas in later times in Israel it was regarded as incestuous.
Thus these stories would have to be ‘pre-historic’, and that would mean
that we do have some information about the earliest ancestors of the
Israelites.5 More recently, however, this line of reasoning has been
generally abandoned. In this particular case, the whole point of the story
is that the woman in question is not the patriarch’s sister: describing her
as such is a ruse to protect him rather than a statement of fact, and
hence presupposes that sisters could not also be wives – just as in
historical times. We may still think that the patriarchal stories preserve
some kind of folk-memory of earlier times, and indeed their names are
notably not of a kind found later in Israel, suggesting that they are
genuinely pre-monarchic. But exactly how old they are we cannot tell.6
Similarly, the names associated with the exodus from Egypt are in
several cases unmistakably Egyptian. Moses occurs as an element in well-
known Egyptian names such as Tut-mosis, and Aaron and Phinehas, other
characters in the story, also bear Egyptian names. The exodus tradition
must also preserve some kind of folk-memory that the Israelite ancestors
spent time in Egypt; but these were not necessarily descendants of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
They didn't have to wait long. From the edge of the hole, there
suddenly appeared a moving shape. It was a manlike figure clad in a
brilliant crimson spacesuit. The helmet was a dark purple, and it was
difficult to see the head within.

"Looks like a man," said Blake.

"Not quite," MacIlheny said. "Look at the joints in the arms and legs.
He's got two knees and two elbows."
"What's that he's holding cradled in his arms?" Blake wondered.
The major grunted. "Weapon of some sort. Look how he's pointing it
straight at us."
For a full minute, the figure stood there, for all the world as though he
were on the surface of a planet instead of on the outer hull of a space
station. Then, slowly, it lowered the thing in its hands. When nothing
happened, the figure put the weapon down on the steel hull at its feet
and held its oddly double-jointed arms out from its body.
"Wild Bill Hickok," breathed Blake softly.
"Huh?" said the major.
"Hickok used to say: 'I'm a peaceable man.' I guess that's what this
guy's trying to say."
"Looks like it," agreed MacIlheny. "I wish there were some way of
signaling him."
"We've got the spotlights," suggested the major.
MacIlheny shook his head. "Leave 'em alone. We couldn't make any
sense with them, and our friend out there might think they were
weapons of some kind. I don't know what that thing he laid down will
do, but I don't want to find out just yet."
The alien, his hands still out from his sides, walked slowly toward the
RJ-37, his legs moving with a strange, loose suppleness. He came
right up to the forward window and peered inside—at least, the
attitude of his head suggested peering; within the dark purple helmet,
the features could not be distinguished clearly.
At last, the figure stepped back and started making wigwag signs with
his arms.
"Smart boy," said MacIlheny. "He recognizes that the ship is remote
controlled. Wonder what he's trying to say."
The alien waved his hands and made gestures, but there was no
recognizable pattern. None of the hand-signals meant anything to the
Earthmen.
Blake leaned over and whispered into MacIlheny's ear. "Hadn't we
better call the President, Mac? He'll want to know."
MacIlheny considered for a moment, then nodded. "Give him a direct
beam on what's coming over this screen. Then give me a pair of
earphones connected to his office. I want to be able to hear what he
says, but I don't want him countermanding my orders to Major
Hamacher."

The alien was still making his meaningless signals when Blake
brought in a pair of earphones and clamped them on MacIlheny's
head. A throat mike around his neck completed the communication
circuit. "Can you hear me, Mr. President?" MacIlheny asked.
"Yes. Your man Blake explained everything to me."
"Got any advice?"
"Not yet. Let's see what happens. By the way, I've given the
impression to the rest of the world that it was through your efforts that
Number Four avoided crashing; I don't think we'd better let this leak
out just yet."
"Right. Meantime, I'm going to try to capture that lad."
"How?" asked the President.
"Invite him into the ship and bring him back with it."
"All right," said the President, "but be careful."
"He's given up," said Blake, gesturing toward the screen.
The alien had given up his incomprehensible gesticulating and stood
with his odd arms folded in an uncomfortable-looking knot.
"Major," said MacIlheny, "open the cargo hold."
The officer looked puzzled, but did as he was told. After all, the
President himself had ordered him to obey MacIlheny. He touched a
button on one side of the control panel. After four or five seconds, a
light came on above it, indicating that the cargo hold of the RJ-37 was
open. The alien evidently saw the door swing inward; he hesitated for
a moment, then went around to the side of the ship, out of range of
the TV camera.
But he didn't go inside immediately. MacIlheny hadn't expected him
to; the alien couldn't be that stupid. After perhaps half a minute, the
alien figure reappeared and strode deliberately back to his own ship.
He opened a port in the side and disappeared within.
Then, quite suddenly, the screen went blank.
"What happened?" snapped MacIlheny.
Blake, who had been watching the beam control instruments, said: "I
don't know how he's done it, but he's managed to jam our radio
beam! We're not getting any signal through!"
The President's voice crackled in MacIlheny's ears.
"Fitz! Detonate that bomb! We can't take any chances!"
MacIlheny half grinned. "Major," he said, "set off the H-bomb."
The major pressed a red button on the control panel.

Twenty minutes later, the screen came on again, showing the same
scene as before. No one was surprised. By then, reports had come in
that the satellite was still visible, still in its orbit. The H-bomb had
failed to go off; the signal had never reached the detonation device.
The alien was standing in front of the camera, holding a large piece of
mechanism in his hands. On Earth, the thing would have been almost
too heavy to lift, but the gravitational pull of Satellite Number Four
was almost negligible.
"He's got the H-bomb!"
MacIlheny recognized the President's voice in his ears.
The alien bowed toward the camera, then straightened and went
back to his own ship. He clambered up the side of it with magnetic
soles as easily as he had walked on the hull of the space station.
Near the end of his ship, he opened a small door in the hull. Within
was utter blackness.

Working slowly and deliberately, he pushed the H-bomb into the

blackness. It wasn't just ordinary darkness; it seemed to be an actual,
solid wall, painted deep black. As the bomb went in, it looked as
though it were cut off abruptly at the black wall. Finally, there was
nothing outside except the two detonating wires, which had been
clipped off from inside the Earth ship. The alien took the wires in his
hands.
"My God!" said the major. "He's going to blow up his own ship! Is he
crazy?"
"I don't think so," said MacIlheny slowly. "Let's see what happens."
As the two wires came in contact, the black wall inside the small door
became lighter, a pearly gray in color. There was no other result.
"Well I'll be damned," said Blake in a low, shocked voice.
The alien closed the door in the side of his ship and came back down
to the camera. He bowed again. Then he pointed to the weapon that
he had been carrying and waved his hands. He picked it up and
brought it around the RJ-37. From the microphones inside the ship
came a faint scraping sound. Then the alien reappeared in front of
the ship. His arms were empty; he had put the weapon inside the
open cargo hold.
"A fair trade is no robbery," Blake said softly.
The alien bowed once more, then turned on his heel and walked back
to his ship. This time, he got inside and closed the door. Then the
blue ship moved.
Slowly, like a car backing out of a garage, it pulled out of the hole in
the satellite. Nowhere on its surface was there a mark or a scratch.
When it was finally free of the satellite, it turned a little, its nose
pointing off into space. A pale, rose-colored glow appeared at the tail
of the ship, and the cigar of blue metal leaped forward. To all intents
and purposes, it simply vanished.
"That," said the major in awe, "is what I call acceleration."

"Here's the way I see it, Mr. President," said MacIlheny several hours
later. "When he cracked up by accidentally plowing into Number Four,
something happened to his energy supply. Maybe he was already
low, I don't know. Anyway, he was out of fuel."
"What do you think he used for fuel?"
"The most efficient there is," said MacIlheny. "Pure energy. Imagine
some sort of force field that will let energy in, but won't let it out. It
would be dead black on the outside, just like that whatever-it-was in
the alien's ship. He just set off the H-bomb inside that field; what little
radiation did get out made the field look gray—and that's a damned
small loss in comparison with the total energy of that bomb."
"You know, Fitz, I'm going to have a hell of a job explaining where that
bomb went," said the President.
"Yeah, but we've got his gun or whatever in exchange."
"But how do you know our technicians will be able to figure it out?"
"I think they will," MacIlheny said. "Their technology must be similar to
ours or he wouldn't have been able to figure out how to fire the jets on
the satellite or how to set off that bomb. He wouldn't have even
known what the bomb was unless he was familiar with something
similar. And he wouldn't have been able to blank out our controls
unless he had a good idea of how they operated. They may be a little
ahead of us, but not too much, and I'll bet we have some things they
haven't."
"The trouble is," the President said worriedly, "that we don't know
where he came from. He knows where we are, but we don't have any
idea where his home planet is."
"That's true. On the other hand, we know something about his
physical characteristics, while he doesn't know anything about ours.
For instance, I doubt if he'd be happy here on Earth; judging by the
helmet he wore, he can't stand too much light. He had it polarized
almost black. Probably comes from a planet with a dim, red sun."
"Well, Fitz, when they do come, I hope it's for trade and not for war."
MacIlheny grinned. "It won't be war. Don't you remember? We've
started trading already!"
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