Cooking the Book. On the Bible and How Not To Do Religious Studies

Ok, I admit it, I may have screwed up slightly in assigning this book for my Religious Studies 3000 “What is Religion?” course in the Autumn 2009 semester, but it was clearly the best of the bunch and a whole lot of it was really quite good. I admit not reading it as carefully as I should have. It looked good overall, the chapters I read closely were very good, and everything else seemed generally in order.  I had a few issues with this volume but no text-book is perfect.  Perhaps I’m just a sloppy previewer, but I find that I can never really assess a text until the class actually starts.

James C. Livingston
Anatomy of the Sacred: An Introduction to Religion
(Prentice Hall, 6th Edition).

In many ways, it is a pretty good introduction to the nature of religion in comparative contexts and how to think about issues like ritual, social organizations in religion and the like. It is fairly fair and objective. A major source of aggravation is its favouring of the standard “religion is sui generis” line but this is almost unavoidable with any introduction I’ve found. In Livingston it is manageable for the class room and one can always get the class to assess the viability of that claim.

I really don’t think it does students any good to assert too strongly that religion cannot be reduced to manifestations of other social or psychological factors, although certainly not to a single factor. Having been raised academically on Eliade and with that lecherous Rudolph Otto skulking in my educational history around too, I sort of adopted the “Sacred” talk, but I’m really trying to kick the habit. Trying to understand what religion is is a thorny enough problem. One cannot make any progress towards solving it by saying it is just the way people and societies act in reference to a mystery. I can see why religious folk want key parts of their beliefs and experiences considered “off limits” to rational exploration and critique. That scholars invent methodologies to create a corresponding taboo to their own thought is counter-productive. Anyway, enough of that.

As I’ve already intimated, this isn’t my main problem with the book.

What is really egregious comes in chapter 8: “Deity: Concepts of the Divine and Ultimate Reality”. Livingston is talking about the rise of monotheism and the whole discussion goes to hell over the space of a couple of short pages. He talks about the “Patriarchal and the Mosaic periods” (p. 172). What freaking patriarchal and mosaic periods?!? He treats these guys as historical figures. Has he not read ANY modern biblical studies? He then writes:

The ancient Israelites did not arrive at a knowledge of Yahweh by examining the order of nature or by rational speculation, as did the Greeks. Rather Yawheh was revealed to Israel through her historical experience and, most notably, through the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant sealed at Mount Sinai, and the Exile in Babylonia” (pp. 172-73).

After providing an abridged rendering of Exodus 3, Livingston provides the answer to Moses question as to the identity of the deity speaking from the burning bush, describing it like this:

“The answer Moses received is a most significant event in the history of religions”

AARGH! How is this an event? It is an episode in a myth! It takes ages to get students not to regard episodes in stories uncritically as real events. It is almost impossible when a textbook makes the same damn mistake! And why are these mistakes so often made when the mythology in question is Jewish/Christian and not Shinto, Buddhist or whatever?

Anyway, I managed to turn this into a passable “Teaching Moment”, getting the class to survey the chapter and pick out lapses in judgment and thought in it.  A number of them picked this up right away (as one student said “It sounds ‘truthy’”), and those that didn’t learned something about human frailty on the part of authors. Still, it is even more egregious that this is the 6th edition of the book, and I checked the fourth and same lapse is there too. This seems to be a longstanding feature of the book. No one has caught this in any of the efforts at revision?

Still, I should admit that I am a bit mad at myself that I didn’t read this chapter as close as I should have before hand. I’m not sure it would have been a deal breaker; like I said, the rest of book had some excellent features, and I couldn’t find anything else to have the students buy.

I’ve  run completely out of patience with the almost impossible to avoid rubbish that Livingston repeats here (he certainly did not invent this idea!). “Yawheh was revealed to Israel through her historical experience” What frikkin’ theistic religion (other than deism) DOESN’T think that their deities show their power in historical events? And didn’t the Israelites think that big storms, famines, locust swarms, etc. were the will of their God? Didn’t Babylonians interpret their military history as being influenced by their deities?

The interesting historical and literary question is why some Judean writers composed a more more or less narratively interconnected corpus offering a long, historical legacy for their readership while the scribal elite in other societies did not.  And in any case that process should properly be placed in the Persian and Hellenistic periods and not 1000 years earlier in a time when the “historical” Moses didn’t bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Other cultures must have had some historical sense and Israel had hardly broken the chains of mythology.

As I’ve said above, this mistake seems very common when scholars treat the Bible and the religions surrounding it, less common with other traditions. Of course, Livingston cannot be blamed entirely. He is merely repeating the gist of a large body of work on the Hebrew Bible that constructs a “history” of the Israelites from a paraphrase of the biblical text and treats their worldview as historically oriented in contradistinction to virtually all other faiths. Certainly, the ancient Israelite and Judean worldviews were NOT identical to that of their neighbours, but then the Babylonians’ were NOT identical to that of the Assyrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Persians and so forth. Too often, scholars construct lump together non-Israelite cultures and religions as one part of a dichotomy with Israel and the Bible on the other. This polarity does not help the cause of understanding any of these ancient people, religions or texts. “All non-biblical religions look the same” and “All god are created equal but Yahweh is more equal than that others” are biases that biblical and world religions scholars must overcome.

The Far Left Side. Pure Brilliance!

Secular biblical scholars and historians of Israel need to do a better job within the larger Religious Studies academy to highlight modern secular work on the Bible and its production. This requires a closer alignment between biblical studies and R.S. and cutting of the confessional apron strings that bind biblical studies to discourses seek to affirm that there is an exceptional nature of the Bible and Israel.