Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). (Review in panel at the SBL meeting, November 20, 2005.)

Jacques Berlinerblau’s short and snappy book, The Secular Bible is witty, brash, innovative, and fun. There are few books on hermeneutics of which that can be said. It is thought provoking and right more often than not.

Berlinerblau raises a problem I have never seen treated before. It not a problem so much for the religious as for the secular, and to them this book is addressed. He scolds his fellow secularists for their blithe ignorance of all things religious, the Bible in particular. This, he insists, is not a viable option for today. But how can they approach a text whose care and maintenance has for so long been in the custody of the religious? Berlinerblau proposes a way to do just that, a secular hermeneutics.

The Secular Bible is more of a Prolegomenon to a Secular Hermeneutics than a well- developed interpretive theory and method that might provide exegetical controls and direction. But Berlinerblau does kick up some of the dust that has settled over our field, and that’s a good start. I wholly endorse the need for a secular hermeneutics. It is my own credo. In fact, I think that a secular hermeneutics has religious value. I believe that the Bible doesn’t need defenders, but it does need readers, and it does need interpreters, honest ones who are not tethered to extraneous premises and goals. Until Berlinerblau gives us a fully articulated hermeneutics, we still have Spinoza’s incomparable Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which doesn’t take us all the way, but which does provide a still relevant foundation for the secular study of the Bible.

Writing on the state of Bible studies in the academy, Berlinerblau asserts that Bible study is not held in much esteem by other academicians, and not even by the broader public. He is convinced of the marginalization of the field. He ascribes this to the fact that Bible scholarship it is still largely in the hands of the faithful and is suspect of religious boosterism. (My terms.) And indeed, though a secular, critical approach is the declared norm in academia, and what he calls “believing critics” receive his praise, religious assumptions constantly seep through the leaky levees of secularism.

In my experience, Bible study is not marginalized, at least not more so than other fields, such as Classics and Sankrit studies. (A cross-field comparison of salaries might establish this, since academic tends to put its money where the market is.) If we have indeed lost an importance we may have had in the nineteenth century, that is all to the good, because that importance was due to the Bible’s role in theology, and we are best not harnassed to that horse.

But Berlinerblau is right about the hybrid nature of Bible scholarship, whose teachers almost all have a personal commitment to the book. This type of hybridity is not unique to Bible Studies. In Women’s Studies, professors devoted to the cause of feminism teach others of like mind, mostly women, and openly inculcate a certain ideology. Academic Buddhist studies, for some reason, is often known for a religious agenda. The sentinels of the separation of Church and State are less diligent about Eastern religions. The worst problem is in Islamic studies, where classroom flareups and denunciations are common. Berlinerblau has a chapter on this. My point is that there is an atmosphere abroad in the university that tolerates and sometimes even encourages ideological scholarship and advocacy instruction. Some evangelicals have picked this up. I have heard students, and read authors, who justify their biases by the rhetoric of postmodern self-indulgence. They reason that since no one is viewpoint neutral, and every one has presuppositions, why exclude Christian presuppositions? Why allow the premise of errancy but not of inerrancy? Such sophistry can be picked apart, at least by us pre-post-modernists, but the climate does favor it. Nevertheless, Bible scholars are not the worst offenders. That is because modern Bible studies arose from Western humanism and the European Enlightenment. Most Bible scholars, even in seminaries, profess a secular approach to the Bible, or at least think they do. We are heirs to a secular hermeneutics, articulated above all by Spinoza, and we abandon it at our peril.

Berlinerblau calls for a stance of suspicion, a critique of “all collective representations,” in his words. That sounds right. But he goes further and says that a secular exegete reads the “holy documents” “in heckle mode” (7). Here I disagree. “Heckle mode” is no better than “haleluyah mode.” Both are rooting for one team or the other and are building their conclusions into their premises. In fact, both are anachronistic, judging an ancient oriental document by modern Western standards. What might be heckled are some of the uses of the Bible has been put to.

The essence of Berlinerblau’s hermeneutics, in my rephrasing, is that the Bible’s multiplex nature makes it impossible to understand, and therefore a secular scholar should aim instead to explain why the Bible has been so misunderstood throughout the ages.

Berlinerblau is convinced that the Bible is “complex, paradoxical, ambiguous, and incoherent” (65), as he puts it, to the point of being unreadable. He calls the Bible a “diachronic polyauthored work,” whose text has lived a “long, unstable, and constantly fluctuating existence.” This is, of course, a staple of historical-critical scholarship. But Berlinerblau also raises the neglected and thorny question of how a composite and multiplex book conveys meaning. He thinks it doesn’t.

Authorial meaning, to which Berlinerblau gives credence, is lost in what he calls the “meaning jungle” of the Hebrew Bible. Or if the Bible has meanings, it has so many that they run riot. From this tangle, an “immense number of new and unintended meanings can be drawn” (49). So, he concludes, a secular hermeneut must reject the premise that the text is “meaningful, coherent and true to the words of an ancient Israelite or Jew.” My view is that the Bible does have meanings, lots of them, which is no worse than an art museum having lots of beauties. I do not see any particular religiosity in this viewpoint.

Berlinerblau draws the conclusion that secular hermeneutics should give up and “avoid any interpretive project that aims to ascertain what an original author or editor wanted to say” (77). This seems rather doctrinaire, since it states a possible conclusion as a necessary starting point. Nor does it seem especially secular, since a pietist might be pleased to avoid questions of historical development. It is also rather strange in a book that seeks to encourage secularists to take the Bible seriously. I think the effect will be to convince them that this would be pointless.

Still, locating meaning in a composite text is not a simple matter, and Berlinerblau is right to disturb our comfort in this regard. He argues his point even more effectively in an article in Hebrew Studies 45, 2004 (pp. 9-26) called “The Bible as Literature?” There he illustrates the effort to find literary coherence everywhere by dismantling Robert Alter’s study of the Judah and Tamar story. He shows that Alter’s attempt to integrate Gen 38 tightly and in detail into its present context is forced and just too clever. “No matter how senseless a given passage seems to be,” Berlinerblau observes, Alter “will demonstrate its previously unseen coherence.” Alter, I note, is a secularist. Exegetical acrobatics are not confined to the faithful. There is a sort of fundamentalism common among secularists, a literary fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism insists that everything in the Bible is true and always finds truth. Literary fundamentalism insists that it is all beautiful and always finds beauty.

In my view, the existence of numerous obstacles to understanding composite texts does not mean that we must despair of recovering meaning, or at least some of it. Nor does the fact that a vast number of meanings have been extracted from the Bible prove that the entire enterprise is hopeless. If that were true, the more interpretations a text attracted, the less readable we would have to judge it. I understand that such a judgment has been pronounced on Don Quixote, but I don’t believe it. I believe that the book is very readable, very understandable, even if I understand it very inadequately.

Even if, as Berlinerblau says, the modern literary critic’s tools do not work satisfactorily on ancient texts, they are, like all tools, partially effective in skilled hands and have enriched the study of biblical literature. We must additionally develop tools that let us treat the presence of a diachronic dimension in a composite text. Among the few attempts to do so is David Carr’s The Fractures of Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), which tries to overcome the simple synchronic-diachronic dichotomy. I have tried something similar on a more modest scale in my book, The Redaction of the Books of Esther, subtitled “On Reading Composite Texts” (SBLMS 40; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). We should not give up too quickly.

To help think about the way a “diachronic polyauthored text” can communicate meaning, I propose the analogy of a building that has undergone expansion and remodeling over the centuries. I have already offered this to Professor Berlinerblau’s consideration and now bring it to yours.

Among England’s magnificent Great Houses, I am most familiar with Speke Hall, near Liverpool. Speke Hall was inhabited from 1530 to 1921. It was built in several stages stretching from Tudor to Victorian times. There was an earlier building, materials of which were incorporated in the present one. With a little help from a guide, even an untrained eye can see the differences in architectural style and recognize the joins where new rooms were added to earlier structures. An architectural historian could subject Speke Hall to “source criticism” quite easily, and even to “redaction criticism,” as in observing the way that mid-19^th century restoratorers tried to imitate earlier woodwork. Still, the building works. It doesn’t collapse into chaos as you pass from the Tudor Great Hall to the Victorian Oak Parlor. The building as a whole coheres, and is in fact quite elegant, a pleasure to look at and walk through, and it was livable for four centuries. That is because the building did not spread at random, with haphazard bulldozing and rooms cobbled together over ruined foundations. Rather, it grew organically, with each succeeding architect or designer working from the preceding stage and trying to make his additions compatible with what had been accomplished so far. This is not exactly authorial unity, but it is a sort of intended coherence. In fact, I suggest, the growth of such a building is not just an analogy to the process of multiplex literary formation. It is the thing itself, in a different medium.

For all Scripture’s inconcinnities and fissures and rough spots, most of the Bible, including the composite texts, is not as opaque as Berlinerblau has it. The Joseph story, whatever its composition history, is quite readable and meaningful. Joseph himself interprets it in Gen 50:20, “God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Even chapter 38 works well as a digression. It builds suspense and is suggestive of a span of time in which Joseph’s fate could unwind in parallel with his brothers’ lives, moving along toward goals they cannot fathom. I think that the editor had something like that in mind when he chose to insert the episode here and not elsewhere in the Jacob cycle.

Berlinerblau is wrong, or at least ambiguous, when he says, in his delightfully raucous rhetoric, that “nobody willed the meaning jungle that is the Hebrew Bible into existence—nobody possibly could. Rather, it is something that is coughed up or sneezed out by a very peculiar, lengthy, and convoluted process of textual assemblage” (48). First of all, the word “nobody”—a singular—is misleading. A plurality of people, working with only one-directional communication, can produce meaning—a “meaning garden,” we might say. Also, Berlinerblau is unclear as to what text he is talking about—Ruth? The Pentateuch? The whole Bible? They were all formed in different ways and require different modes of reading. Intention and meaningfulness can reside in a multiplicity of authors and contributors, as it can in a series of architects and designers. There is

intentionality in this, a sequential intentionality that is not beyond the reach of hermeneutics.

But after giving up on the recovery of meaning, what are secular exegetes to do? They are to employ a “sociohermeneutics” to explain “how Scripture has been understood and why it is so difficult to understand” (79), or even to “chart how it all went wrong, that is, how the Bible’s tangled history of assemblage has created unintended meaning, meanings, and meaningless for its readership” (79). I wonder, parenthetically, how the exegete can know that “it all went wrong” unless he has some idea of what was right. If he does, I’d like his hermeneutics to tell us how. I’d also like to know how he can make the history of interpretation the object of secular study when the texts of early Jewish interpretation are no less diachronic and polyauthored than the Bible itself.

Berlinerblau studies two examples of the Bible’s excessive openness to interpretation. Rabbinical Judaism has a blanket prohibition on intermarriage. But, Berlinerblau shows, nothing in the Bible supports this. He is absolutely right, but so what? It is Jews he is speaking about, not Karaites. Jewish law—as Berlinerblau acknowledges—is not biblical. It is an extrapolation and redirection of some biblical laws in an entirely different legal matrix, called the Oral Law.

Berlinerblau also deals with “conflicts of interests” in modern readings of the Bible’s treatment of homosexuality. He keenly notes that “Most biblical scholars who write about homosexuality—whether they are conservatives imploring gays to repent or radicals who are ‘queering’ Nehemiah write explicitly as believers, usually of the Christian variety” (109). In other words, they want the Bible to be right, to agree with them. Berlinerblau hopes for the day when “exegetes will routinely publish conclusions that directly contradict their personal beliefs about homosexuality.” I will do just that: Lev 18:22 stipulates the death penalty for homosexual anal intercourse, at least for the penetrater, and I think that this stipulation is quite repugnant. The Bible often fails to live up to modern Western standards, as some modern Westerners do. The Bible can be rather primitive, like Homer and the Ramayana. But like those two, it’s still great stuff, even if you don’t believe in Athena or Rama or Yahweh. A more effective way of luring secularists into serious reading of the Bible would be to show them how rich and powerful and intriguing and demanding it is. Even jungles can be lush and beautiful.

The Secular Bible puts us on alert against both secular ignorance disguised as cleverness and religious pieties disguised as scholarship. It underscores the severe obstacles an honest interpreter of the Bible must face and the tentative nature of the interpretive task. This tentativeness should imbue the critic not with despair but with humility. Humility, the awareness of the mortal frailty of both the text and its students, the sense of striving for knowledge without any superior input yet with hope, is, I think, a profoundly secular virtue, but it can be a religious one as well.