A couple of months ago I posted Why Bible Authors Wrote Anonymously and with Contradictions. I was setting down in writing my thoughts as informed by my latest reading at the time. But doubts remained. In that post I said that ancient Near Eastern authors corrected details in an existing narrative by adding contradictory statements or narratives next to them. That didn’t answer the question, though: If they wanted to make a correction, why not replace the perceived error entirely?
Another perspective on that question is presented by Isaac Rabinowitz in his posthumous 1993 book A Witness Forever: Ancient Israel’s Perception of Literature and the Resultant Hebrew Bible.
Rabinowitz argues that the ancient Israelites, like other peoples in the region, attributed to words a power beyond their merely symbolic representations of their referents. To some extent I found myself sympathetic to the argument given that we see evidence of some cultures today seeming to have the same view. I am thinking of warnings on tv and radio for the benefit of first nations audiences that the ensuing program will contain images and names of the deceased. Words are considered to be more than mere sounds to be decoded for meaning. However, in the end, I found myself wishing that Rabinowitz had produced more explicit evidence to buttress the main thrust of his argument that for the Israelites words of themselves (apparently independent of social context) consist of magic power. Too much — especially given my lack of wider reading in this area — was left to a single interpretation of the data, and perhaps just a tad overly deductive. Still, the book does raise questions.
But what do we make of the following examples of repetition and redundancy in the biblical text? Continue reading “Understanding Contradictions and Incongruities in the Bible – Or Not…”