A Crypto-apologetic Old Testament Textbook

This past week I received from Pearson Higher Education the new edition of John H. Tullock and Mark McEntire, The Old Testament Story (9th Edition: Prentice Hall 2012). It was sent unsolicited and was followed up by an email to see if I would be interested in using it for one of my courses.

The original was published some 3 decades ago and from the 7th edition, I believe, Tullock’s original text has been revised by his colleague at the School of Religion at Belmont University a Christian university in Nashville TN.

No, I’m not going to order it for my classes. If any student asks about it, I will warn then away from it.

The volume has absolutely no indication on its front or back cover of the kind of introductory Old Testament/Hebrew Bible class for which it is intended. Is it possible that it might fit a course in secular university such as the one that employs me to teach? The publisher sent me a copy so one might think so.

At first, the book seems intended for a basic course in the OT with a mind to critical scholarship. The preface begins well:

The purpose of this textbook is to introduce students to the collection of literature from ancient Israel that has, for Christian traditions, become the Old Testament. This task necessitates familiarity with the content of the literature  itself, an awareness of the basic framework of the history and culture of the ancient Near East, and insight from the methods of reading ancient texts that have been developed in contemporary scholarship. (p. xv)

Things go totally off the rails quite quickly, though. By page 3 there is a fudging between the Exodus story and the “Exodus event” and on page 4 we learn that there really was an exodus. How is this supported by contemporary scholarship?  Immediately after this, the authors refer to biblical episodes that did not actually occur but they mention only “etiologies” and “fables” such as that told by the character Jotham in Judges 9:7-15, and not any substantial event in the bibles’s story of Israel.

On page 6 the book’s academic perspective is badly compromised. In discussing the process of creating the Old Testament, the authors write:

Some will be quick to point out that it began with God. Even so, God worked through human agents, and it is the work of these human agents that is being discussed. The common belief that God directly dictated the worlds of the Bible is called plenary verbal inspiration. This view is not assumed here. (emphasis original).

From the point of view of a secular class, it might as well have been, even though Tullcok and McIntire quickly concentrate on human actions in recalling and transmitting traditions which eventually formed the Old Testament. A god has no place being inserted into any point in the reconstructed history of a text, or any other causal chain. While it would be natural to do that within confessional circles, it is really anathema to naturalistic social sciences and humanities.

Also on p. 6:

Finally, someone conceived the idea, through what religious people people call inspiration, that the stories of God’s dealing with the people needed to be written down or put into a complete story so that they could preserved.

Here again pietism slips into the discussion. That someone decided that old stories needed to be collected is fine, it happens a lot in religions, but is it the same process that believers would call “inspiration” or are there two different processes, one acknowledged by secular research and another by “inspirationists” (to coin a label)? What purpose can there be to conflate the two perceptions but to unnecessarily legitimize believe in a text that is supposed to teach how to analyze beliefs?

Page 10 discusses why an academic approach is worthwhile as opposed to the alternative “‘Why not just accept it as it is’ and includes “theologians” alongside redaction critics, archaeologists and so forth. Included in this camp are “those who try to look at the message of the Bible as a whole”. Now, I wonder what that “message” might be? That a cobbled together collection of diverse texts as a “whole” message is a product of tradition, and so it that “message” is is not really there to study outside of the study of the early Jewish and Christian thought. How Jews and Christians invented, transmitted, and continue to invent new “messages” for the Bible to convey is the real subject of examination, and not any “message” in and of itself.

The next two pages present the question of the authorship of the Pentateuch. Citing the difficulty in knowing exactly what the ancient label for these five books, “The books of Moses” actually mean, T. and M. write:

Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch thus turns out to be a tradition of unknown origin. Because of this, it is difficult to construct rational arguments for or against this idea.

Really? How about the difficulty in ascertaining the existence of a Moses, the internal contradictions within the Pentateuch, the increasing recognition that much of the biblical material is not nearly as old as once thought, the wholly speculative nature of claims of a long oral transmission before the Pentateuch traditions were recorded in writings? rather than present modern scholarship, the books seems to filter and qualify  it to avoid the worst impact on the faithful students.

Just this brief survey of some issues I have with the first chapter should demonstrate how ill-suited this volume is for the secular classroom. Many more abound thoughout the text:

Joseph could not live forever, nor could one expect the Hyksos rulers to dominate Egypt forever. Joseph died, and the Hyksos were overthrown. As native Egyptians regained control of their government, the circumstances of the Hebrews changed. (p. 64)

This equation of the Hyksos with the Hebrews is horribly simplified. The historicity of Joseph and the “original seventy persons in the family of Jacob” is also strongly implied, something totally exceeds the limits of real scholarship. Such rationalized paraphrase of the biblical text that has learned nothing over the past few decades of methodological self-criticism within biblical scholarship.  Cheap pietism also abounds. On the same page as the above quote, one reads

Moses is the major human character in the Exodus narratives but they are designed not to glorify Moses, but rathe to glorify the LORD, the God of Israel. It was the LORD of history and the master of the created order who brought Israel out of Egypt.

Why the pious rhetoric in the scholarly voice? Tullock and McEntire cannot here be speaking of what the Bible says about the deity in the exodus myth. A close look at the descriptions of God can make this clear.

“The LORD, the God of Israel” is a biblical construction (although “God” might be more accurately rendered with a lowercase g). As any one with  a single serious course in the Hebrew Bible (let alone biblical Hebrew) should know, “LORD” (with uppercase or small caps) is typically the way the divine name YHWH (Yahweh) is represented in English translations that wish to follow the Jewish custom of substituting the word adonai “my lord” to avoid profaning YHWH. The problem is with the second use of LORD. Note the author’s dual references to the deity.

LORD of history / master of the created order.

“LORD of history” is not a biblical epithet at all and one wonders what “Yahweh of history” could possibly mean. Tullock and McEntire’s sentence is hardly an accurate depiction of how the Exodus narratives describe or name the deity. Rather, their epithets refer to the “biblical” deity they believe in. The expression indicates that they subscribe that modern Christian myth that the divine is revealed through the history of the Israelite people and that the Bible reflects this “historical” reality. “LORD of history” must have its origin in such a myth as it makes no sense whatsoever on any kind of academic level. The divine name, regardless of how it is is represented in English as “LORD” is not a real synonym for “master”, but that is how our authors seem to be using it.

That Pearson’s sales rep decided that I would consider a book that maintains that there is a god behind the writing of the Old Testament is a product of the unacknowledged border between scriptural study and secular academic biblical study. Sales reps should know their market and their products and Pearson’s seems to know neither. I won’t blame him except as an accessory to a textbook industry that recognizes no distinction in the makeup of its market for books on the Bible between confessional and secular schools. But this should change.

I checked the online order page for this book from Pearson Higher Education. Its list price is $104.00 and there is no indication there of the Christian perspective of the authors. It is sold for $83.06 at Amazom.com. What is interesting here is that some of the online reviews fault the book for its allegedly “extreme liberal” bias and for buying into the documentary hypothesis! I wonder how many people mislead by these reviews bought the book thinking they were getting a fairly secular introduction the Old Testament! The reviews and the lack of accurate descriptions of the book make this a real possibility.

Pearson is probably not alone in mislabelling, or perhaps better, under-labelling their products. The situations isn’t likely to change until people start speaking out.  So, here is the response to Pearson’s representative I sent just before posting this.

Thanks for thinking about me in sending me the review copy of the 9th edition of Tullock and McEntire’s The Old Testament Story. I’m sorry to report that I find the book entirely unacceptable for my introductory class in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My primary objection is that the presupposes that the readers will accept the existence of a deity at work in the history of ancient Israel. Although the authors are hardly “fundamentalists” or “literalists”, they remain more conservative than liberal in their beliefs and this causes unacceptable compromises of academic standards. As the University of Lethbridge is a fully secular university, I  cannot in good conscious require my students to purchase this volume.
There is no indication on the volume or your online marketing for this book that the author’s take a confessional stance, but it is quite obvious when the book itself is read. I would recommend that your marketing people begin to make a distinction between secular and confessionally oriented books. In teh very least, it would save your company the expense of mailing complementary copies to people who have no use for the volumes.
That being said, I would still be interested in receiving updates on future Pearson titles that are more up my alley.

See my comments on some other introductions to the Hebrew Bible and their treatment of myth.

And my comment on declining an offer of contributing to a book intended for a confessional audience.