In any discussion about engaging the Bible, it is important to realize that something has changed in recent decades. Scholars from different religious backgrounds have achieved a common universe of discourse, which now enables us to study both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament together, irrespective of our confessional differences. This was not always possible. As I see it, our common discourse, which I consider a significant achievement, was stimulated by a quest for historical objectivity, and a search for original context; what theorists call “real time,” and what students of literature would refer to as an “unfiltered” approach to classic texts. The test comes whenever I find myself disagreeing with a colleague on the meaning of a biblical text, and try to understand the basis for that disagreement. I find that it is most often traceable to the different methods we employ, to the training each of us has received, and to the questions we ask; not to the identity factor, to the fact that I am Jewish and my colleague is Christian, for example. In fact, most of the issues I have are with fellow Jewish scholars. What this means, simply stated, is that biblical scholarship has been secularized to a degree; that the Bible is being viewed, for purposes of study, as an archive of ancient documents, part of the humanities, and hence subject to the same types of analysis and evaluation as other ancient documents.

Is this new climate of opinion a favorable development, or will it have the effect of diminishing the role that the Bible plays in our lives? For some, secularism is an evil, from which the Bible must be protected, but I don’t agree. Perhaps the best way to explain my position would be to cite the statement in Prov 1:7: yir’at YHWH rē’šît ḥokmāh “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” as this passage is usually translated. The order is reversed in Ps 111:10: “The beginning of knowledge is the fear of the LORD.” In both places, TANAKH (the Jewish Publication Society translation) has a note that records an alternative translation of Hebrew rē’šît, namely: “best part/chief part”

(TANAKH provides the same note in Prov 4:7). On this basis we would translate: “The fear of the LORD is the best part of knowledge.”

Now, if ambiguous rē’šît is positional, and connotes priority, as it does in many biblical passages, the verse would mean that knowledge is to be attained through faith. First one fears the LORD; one trusts and believes, and only then does it become possible to acquire understanding. However, if rē’šît is normative, and means “best,” which is also an attested connotation (see Num 24:20. Jer 49:35, Amos 6:1, Dan 11: 41), then faith is to be regarded as the fulfillment of wisdom; as the enlightenment attainable through knowledge, through the exercise of human intelligence.

This theme is taken up in Job, chapter 28: We wonder where wisdom comes from, and where it is to be found. The answer is that only God knows! “God has set her path, and He knows her place.” And the text continues: “Then He (=God) saw her and gauged her; He set her path and delved into her meaning. And He said to the human being; ‘Behold, the fear of the LORD—that is wisdom; and turning away from evil-understanding.’ “Wisdom leads one to fear the LORD, just as understanding leads one to turn away from evildoing. This interpretation is affirmed in post-biblical Judaism; it informs the words of the Jewish Amidah prayer: “It is you (O LORD) who graciously endows humans with knowledge, and imparts intelligence to people. You are to be blessed, O LORD, who graciously endows knowledge.”

How I First Engaged the Hebrew Bible

Biblical scholars often speak of Sitz-im-Leben “the position in life” of the biblical authors; as we say; ‘where they are coming from.” Here, briefly stated, is my Sitz-im-Leben. My engagement with the Hebrew Bible began as a boy studying Hebrew in Cleveland, Ohio. I viewed the Hebrew Bible as, a Jewish book, written by ancestors, ancient Israelites, later-Jews, and composed for the most part in the Land of Israel. I was taught that the Bible is the foundation of Judaism as a religious way of life, and I came to appreciate it as a treasure of the ancient Hebrew language. I knew nothing at the time about Bible translations, since I would never translate the text into English. My teacher explained the text in modern Hebrew, cibrît becibrît, just as we read modern Hebrew poetry and essays together. I felt that I was participating in the revival of the Hebrew language, and actively sought out people who spoke Hebrew.

I knew then that the Hebrew Bible commands belief in one God, creator of heaven and earth, and rejects idolatry. It expounds great moral teachings, and encourages the pursuit of justice, offering wise counsel. It is the narrative of Jewish peoplehood, directing attention to the ancient history of the Israelites, then Jews; relating how they won sovereignty over large parts of Canaan and settled there, were later exiled in stages on account of their sins, only to return and reconstitute their collective life in the homeland. In my teens, I was captivated by the saga of the Jewish resettlement of Palestine.

I was surrounded by the Hebrew Bible. To start with, my father had a biblical verse for every situation, it seems. Whenever he read in the newspaper that some racketeer had been caught and exposed, he would quote Ps 7: 16: “He dug a pit and deepened it, but he, himself, fell into the very trap he had fashioned”—for others. I went to synagogue regularly, where the Torah was read Sabbath after Sabbath, along with readings from the prophets, and the Five Megillot on the festivals, and I recited the many Psalms embedded in the liturgy. I sense that my scholarly emphasis on Torah literature was prompted by the experience of reading from the Torah Scroll before the congregation, which I frequently did in my teens, and which I still do on occasion. I was fortunate to pass summers at Hebrew speaking educational camps, in my teens as a camper, and later as a counselor and director. In adulthood, I spent extended periods in Israel for research, which familiarized me with the land, and further enhanced my conversance with the Hebrew language. In fact, my very familiarity with the biblical text became a problem. I often supposed that I understood a verse when I really did not and took pains to assure that I was not oblivious to problems in the text.

What Changed

In recalling my early experience, I realize that nothing I have just said is still true. What has changed is that the Hebrew Bible now means even more to me! Two phenomena, in particular, have expanded my horizon: I was impressed that the Hebrew Bible was incorporated into the Christian canon in its entirety, thereby creating an unbreakable, albeit often hostile bond between Jewry and Christendom, therefore enlarging the Hebrew Bible’s audience and applicability many fold. I realized that I would no longer consider the Hebrew Bible as an exclusively Jewish book; it was now also Judaism’s gift to the daughter religion, Christianity, and from there—a treasure to be shared universally. Within Christendom, the Hebrew Bible was taken to a different “place,” but notwithstanding its new context, its original messages were being announced to peoples worldwide, who now knew about my people’s salvation history. This and more is evident in the texts and teachings of Islam.

In a parallel, but contrasting development, Jewish transmitters in late antiquity began to interpret the Hebrew Bible in ways aimed precisely at preserving its pre-eminence as the Jewish book. This process is noticeable in intertestamental and rabbinic literature, and it has continued through the centuries in many forms. Interestingly, it was Christian scholarship, first engaging the New Testament critically by dealing with the synoptic problem, and by confronting questions of historicity, that ultimately directed critical attention to the Old Testament, as well. It took Jewish scholarship a long time to endorse the critical study of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, and to continue the quest for original context.

To navigate these waters, and to preserve what I treasured in my pre-critical phase, I have adopted the following methods and principles:

1. The Hebrew Bible represents both the beginning and the end of a process. Critical study of the Hebrew Bible views it primarily as the end of a process; it seeks to decode its formation and reconstruct its literary history; to unravel how it came into being in its received form by reaching as far back as possible to its component parts. In this mode, the scholar will avoid eisegesis, reading into Scripture what it came to mean in future generations but may not have meant originally. In contrast, by viewing the Hebrew Bible as a point of departure, we investigate what the Hebrew Bible came to mean over the centuries, assessing its impact and the roles and functions it appropriated in various faith communities. Both approaches are deserving of intensive study; what is to be avoided is their confusion.

2. I have two cardinal principles in interpreting the Hebrew Bible text: Multiple meanings and multiple voices. A strong tradition in Judaism is that words can be variously interpreted, within philological limits, and that we ought not to operate with the notion that words have only one meaning. The principle of multiple meanings does not imply that words may mean whatever we wish, however. Etymology and semantics set the limits of meaning, while philology is aimed at getting at the core meaning. Literary context serves to pinpoint special connotations. The tradition in Judaism is known as Peshat (pešûṭô šel miqrā’) “the direct meaning of the biblical text.” It contrasts with Midrash, the more dominant methodology. Advances in Semitic linguistics, largely made possible by archeological discovery of hordes of documents from the ancient Near East, now provide a wealth of information bearing on biblical interpretation.

The principle of multiple voices is less traditional; it means that more than one voice may be speaking in a given text, even though the text has been presented in a unified form. A traditional scholar, or a structuralist, would be less concerned with multiple voices than with final form, whereas a literary historian would be intrigued by these voices, and unsatisfied by traditional efforts at harmonization. Given that the Hebrew Bible was authored over a long period, one would expect to hear only new voices, reflecting changes that developed over time. What is less obvious is that the Hebrew Bible reveals critical contemporary debates within the Israelite societies on collective life issues.

3. The comparative method has revolutionized biblical scholarship. In Jewish circles it was first feared because it threatened the doctrine of uniqueness. To cite a frequent example: The Code of Hammurabi, which antedated the traditional time of Moses by about 500 hundred years, contains laws whose formulation and substance closely match what we read in the Covenant Code, Exodus, chapters 21 to 23. Inevitably, this means that the Torah code of law can no longer be considered unprecedented. Clearly, uniqueness lost out to the force of realism. Comparative evidence demonstrates that biblical law, in this case, was real, not imagined, and this verification was deemed more important than the claim of originality.

4. The Hebrew Bible is a repository of ancient Near Eastern heritage. It preserves language and law, religious practices and social patterns, political norms and historical memories indicating that its authors, living in a small Levantine country, were open to the world. Amos was a sheepherder and tender of sycamore figs from Tekoa who knew about the Arameans and Philistines, and probably about the Cushite dynasty in Egypt. Isaiah of Jerusalem exposed the fatal flaw in the boastful military claims of Assyria, and formulated a religious response to imperial power, which evolved into universal monotheism. Any notion that the Israelite societies of biblical times were parochial, or cut-off from the larger Near Eastern cultures, would be hard to substantiate.

The Meaning of Holiness

Perhaps the best way to discuss engagement with the Hebrew Bible is to study a sample text together. I decided on Leviticus 19, from the so-called Holiness Code. I have dealt with this important chapter in my Jewish Publication Society’s Torah Commentary on Leviticus (1989), and in other studies. Here I will single out certain of its salient features, as well as problems in its interpretation.

1. The composition of Leviticus 19 has troubled modern scholars. The text shifts repeatedly from aspects of social justice to cultic requirements, from prohibitions of divination and certain funerary rites to marriage obligations, from the blood tabu to gleanings for the poor, and much more. Of course, it is conceivable that a compiler merely listed what was in the archive without concern for coherence; that there is no particular significance to internal sequence. I question this conclusion because we would have to say the same about the Decalogue, wherein ethical and religious duties are intermixed. In fact, Leviticus has been referred to as a “mini-Torah,” rephrasing about six of the Ten Commandments. Furthermore, the refrain: ’anî YHWH ’elōhêkem “I am Yahweh, your God,” and variations of the same, indicate internal structuring, suggesting that the Israelites did not operate with the dichotomies that we tend to impose on human thought, and that regardless of subject, everything that Leviticus 19 enjoins upon us is to be regarded as divine commandment. This is one of the cardinal doctrines of the priestly tradition.

The foremost expression of this doctrine comes in the opening statement of Leviticus 19: “You shall be holy (qedōšîm) for I, Yahweh your God, am holy (qādôš).” One recalls Exod 19:6: “You shall be my kingdom of priests and holy nation.” Hebrew qādôš, and derived forms, elude precise interpretation, but functionally speaking, the message of Leviticus 19 is that obedience to all of its mandates is the way to become holy. Hebrew qādôš exhibits cognates in other Semitic languages, including Akkadian and Ugaritic. Akkadian lexical evidence links this root to “brightness, light,” Sumerian UD. We are familiar with this theme, which depicts holiness as being bright like daylight. Light is as close as we can come to an immaterial presence, and it also portrays truth. I discuss these themes in a study entitled “The Language of Holiness: Perceptions of the Sacred in the Hebrew Bible,” (1987, now republished in In Pursuit of Meaning; Collected Studies of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Andrew D. Gross, Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011:321-333). I learned that holiness is not immanent, but more like an active attribute. It is a state that, if it can be attained by human beings, will be attained through our thoughts and deeds.

2. Remembering that Leviticus 19 is a central text in the priestly stratum of the Pentateuch, assigned to H (= Holiness Code), it is significant that it reflects receptivity to prophetic teachings, belying the notion that the Israelite priesthood and the prophets were continuously in conflict. The holy community projected in Leviticus 19 is a caring community. Such a community participates in the exclusive worship of the God of Israel, and strives to maintain ritual purity, but also configures that purity in social terms. The same Israelite who voluntarily offers šelāmîm sacrifices must leave gleanings for the poor, and is ordered to show love for the gēr “resident alien,” just as he is commanded to love his fellow Israelite. This paradigm reflects the prophetic conception of virtuous purity expressed by Isaiah (1:16-17):

3. Policy affecting the gēr, is too seldom discussed. The gēr was a non-Israelite who was associated with an Israelite family or clan on a more-or-less permanent basis. One could say that the gēr had a “green card.” He bore certain responsibilities, and with some restrictions, he could participate in worship. The status of the gēr is complicated; here I will restrict myself to the parallel commandments affecting Israelites and gērîm.

It is surely significant that the jussive form, we’āhabtā, “You shall love,” and the plural, wa’ahabtem occur in the Hebrew Bible only with reference to (a) God (Deut 6:5, 11:1), (b) one’s fellow Israelite, and (c) the gēr (cf. Deut 10:19).

About the author

Baruch Levine wrote 3 articles for this publication.

Baruch Levine is the Skirball Professor Emeritus of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at New York University. An ordained rabbi, Dr. Levine spent most of his prolific career in the classroom, contributing his scholarship on the Torah to rabbis, clergy and scholars.

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