While historical and critical scholars are clearly right that the Hebrew Bible was compiled out of a variety of materials that were imperfectly combined—in many ways the Bible is really the Norton Anthology of Ancient Hebrew Literature—it is also and equally true that the Bible's original compilers (what scholars call its "redactors") sought, however imperfectly, to unify the Bible, to weave their materials into a seamless garment. Brevard S. Childs calls this its "canonical shaping."2 And this is how the Bible has been treated by historical communities of faith, including rabbinical Judaism and the early Church, the forerunners of our modern religions.

The integrity of scripture is represented by canonization, the impulse to preserve it and pass it on exactly as it has been received. But the honest recognition of discrepancies in the text—gaps, inconsistencies, mysteries, even errors and contradictions—gives rise to the need for interpretation.

Here is a small example. On the sixth day, God said, "Naaseh adam b’tzelmenu—let us make man in our image" (Gen 1.26). "Let us"? "Our image"? What is going on here? Orthodox Christians and Jews are not slow to spirit the problem out of sight. Here, you see, God is addressing either Jesus or the Torah itself. But in terms of the principles upon which my teaching is founded, such a solution to the problem is interpretation without canonization. That is, it grabs fixed and established religious doctrine to plug a hole in the text, but in doing so—in its anxiety to keep the hole from becoming a threat to faith—it ignores and conceals something even more important than the hole: namely, the purer faith of a people who treasured the Bible so highly that they were willing to preserve it intact rather than "correct" it. This faith, this treasuring of the Bible as it is, blemishes and all, might be called the canonical impulse.

What I seek in my classes on the Bible at Texas A&M is to teach an interpretive approach which honors the canonical impulse. My approach is not to make the blemishes disappear by a rapid and thorough application of doctrine, but rather to preserve them and acknowledge them honestly.

About Gen 1.26 historical scholarship is clearly right: this is evidence of an earlier polytheism among the people who became Israel. But though critical scholarship can explain the blemish on the text, it cannot interpret it. Critical scholarship can tell us how the text got to be this way, but it cannot tell us what it means.

Now in my own religious life I am a Jew. And if there is anything that should challenge my faith it is this evidence of polytheism. If a Jew believes anything she believes the cry of monotheism: "Shema Israel hashem elohenu hashem ehad—the Lord our God, the Lord is one!" (Deut. 6.4). What then am I to do when confronted by the evidence of Gen 1.26? If I fall back on the Jewish doctrine of monotheism, I simply deny this evidence of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. It can’t be evidence of polytheism, because after all the Jews are monotheistic! God must be speaking in the "royal we." (The problem is that nowhere else does the Bible resort to this usage. Nor does it even exist in ancient Hebrew.) Well, then—God must be addressing the Torah! (But this is strained and fantastical, an insult to intellectual honesty.)

According to psychoanalytic theory, denial is a primitive defense mechanism which causes a developmental arrest. To deny the evidence of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible is to infantilize my faith. But what is more, it is to betray my ancestors, who were courageous enough—and secure enough in their faith—to include this evidence of polytheism, even though their religious thinking had developed beyond it. They included it because they did not wish to betray their ancestors. And because the Bible was more important to them than the "correct" interpretation of it.

To preserve the Bible as it is—not to "correct" it by means of a strained and ahistorical interpretation, but to honor even those parts which contradict the affirmations of the religion—is itself a religious act. An immature and psychologically unstable faith is renounced, because the Bible’s "maculations" are openly acknowledged; but a jeering atheism is also renounced, because its blemishes, its errors and contradictions, are not considered the final word about the Bible.

In other words, both canonization and interpretation are indispensable to the study of the Bible—canonization because we wish to know the Bible in itself (as Jon D. Levenson has observed, biblical study is almost invariably undertaken out of religious motives),3 interpretation because the Bible in itself is puzzling, mysterious, problematic, apparently contradictory, even troubling to faith. Canonization and interpretation will always exist in a state of tension, because our desire to preserve the Bible comes into conflict with our need to use it.

And because we differ from each other, you and I—because we face different problems in life—we will use the Bible differently. If it sometimes seems that there is a confusion of interpretations in class, this is as it must be; our interpretations are necessarily plural. To reduce the variety to a single-voiced message is to mistake our own partial and limited understanding for the Bible in itself; it is to canonize an interpretation. And this is an error, because canonization and interpretation are separate and distinct impulses—like the desire to marry and the need for love. In my classes on the Bible our goal is not to freeze the Bible into doctrine, but to treasure it by the continual reinterpretation of it. No doctrine, no message, can be as faithful as that activity.

NOTES

1 See David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder: Westview, 1997).

2 Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 57-60.

3 See Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993). The approach outlined above depends heavily upon the scholars named in these three notes.