Inerrancy

You Can’t Go Home Again

Not long ago I received an extremely kind note from someone who had taken my Biblical Hebrew video course “multiple times” and wanted to thank me. He wrote:

I simply want to thank you for making my introduction to Hebrew meaningful and encouraging and “hungering”. I believe in inerrancy in Scripture and that means understanding it in the language it is originally written. One cannot appreciate what G-d has revealed without knowledge of Hebrew.

There must be a lot of people who think the Bible is inerrant. I’m guessing few of them take that belief to its logical conclusion — that you must read it in its original Hebrew (and, since this is a Christian belief, Greek for the New Testament). More power to my correspondent.

What exactly is inerrancy, you ask? Good question. I found this brief answer, excerpted from a much longer discussion, on the website of the C.S. Lewis Institute:

Inerrancy, positively defined, refers to a central and crucial property of the Bible, namely, its utter truthfulness.

A more expansive definition comes from the Moody Bible Institute:

The Bible is verbally inspired. This means that the words of the Bible, not just the ideas, were inspired. What is more, this is true of not just some, but all the words of the Bible. As a result, the Bible is free from error in what it says. Moody Bible Institute believes strongly in the factual, verbal, historical inerrancy of the Bible. That is, the Bible, in its original documents, is free from error in what it says about geography, history and science as well as in what it says about God. Its authority extends to all matters about which the Bible speaks.

I’m a Jew, and inerrancy is just not a thing for us, though of course there are Jews who hold comparable beliefs. Jews who argue about this kind of thing are more likely to be discussing the “inerrancy” of the Talmud, not of the Bible. (You can read more about that from time to time at this Substack.) Nor am I interested in arguing anyone out of their belief in inerrancy. (Anyone who’s interested in that kind of thing can find more of it here.)

It would be ungenerous to repay such a nice note of thanks for my teaching with an argument against his beliefs. Sophisticated people who accept inerrancy all know the verses (like 2 Kgs 25:8 and Jer 52:12) that seem to logically contradict one another and those (like 1 Sam 13:1) that seem to contradict reality; there are responses that explain all the apparent difficulties.

I’d like to come at the question from a different angle, one that is relevant for those who want to follow the close reading of Genesis that I’m doing on this Substack. I’m building on a point that I made last time, thanks to Adele Berlin, who emphasizes that stories are a unique kind of writing. To put it simply, a narrative is not the same thing as a repetition of facts. It is shaped to focus on things that the story-teller wants to emphasize and uses a particular “camera angle” (if I may put it that way) that shows certain things in a particular light and excludes things that might change our perspective about what we’re seeing.

I know a scholar who was excommunicated, very much against his will, for trying to explain that some biblical narratives are “stories” rather than a collection of factual statements. “You mean you think God was lying?” one of the inquisitors asked him.

No, that’s not what he meant at all, not what I mean either. I agree that it’s a serious question. My teacher Stephen Geller once wrote an article asking, “Were the Prophets Poets?”: 

Were Israel's prophet's also poets? This question resolves itself into two others: can they be poets and, if so, may they be? The former is a question of ability, the latter of propriety.

There is a Jewish tradition that the prophets received God’s message in some way that’s incomprehensible to us and turned it into words in language, the Hebrew of their own day. Not everyone accepts this tradition, and perhaps fewer would accept it in the case of Moses, the prophet who is said to have given us the Pentateuch. If one does accept this tradition, the prophets certainly may be poets; in fact, they must express the divine message in words of their own.

All these people (mostly, but not exclusively, men) had different writing abilities and different ways of expressing themselves. Some of them most certainly could have had the kind of ability that a poet or other creative writer in our own day has. Maimonides thinks intellectual power prepares one for prophecy; we might speculate that God (also?) chooses those with literary skill.

Since anything we can do, God can do better, it seems reasonable to accept that God can write a better poem and tell a better story than any human being could, even when constrained by using a human language. Insisting that every statement in the Bible must be a statement of fact amounts to telling God that he is not allowed to write poetry or fiction.

Now for something I wrote more than a year ago, when we were still on Day 1 of creation and Gen 1:5 told us, “There was an evening and there was a morning”:

In today’s world, evening and morning are phenomena that accompany the setting and rising of the sun (really the spinning of the earth on its axis, but let that go for now). Yet the sun will not be created until Day Four of our story, so this “evening” and “morning” must be something qualitatively different from what those words mean in normal language. 

I might have added that ערב érev ‘evening’ in Hebrew implies that the sun is setting in the מערב ma’arav ‘west’.

This tells us, almost before the Bible has begun to get rolling, that “facts” (in the ordinary sense of the word) are not always what the Bible is telling us. It cannot be “factual” that the sun set and rose again three “days” before it came into existence. Some might argue that it could be “true” in some deeper sense; it very certainly could have been God’s intention to begin the Bible with these (Hebrew) words, for a particular reason, for multiple reasons, perhaps even for the purpose of letting us humans come up with reasons — as I have been trying to do.

Rumor has it that a lot of people who believe in inerrancy also eat pork, though Deut 14:8 clearly forbids it. At the very least, I would ask such people to agree that it should be legitimate to read the Bible not (only) for “facts” but also, and especially in those sections that demonstrate high literary quality, for what that literary aspect adds to the surface meaning, since that too is conveyed by the words. That’s what I call “reading for story sense,” and that’s what we’ll do next time, when we continue with Gen 3:23.