I’ve been enjoying
immensely your online lecture series on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. Hearing you reframe these familiar truths and ancient tropes in the terminology
of psychology and mythology — and occasionally in plain secular language, rather
than religiously and liturgically — has lit up the OT landscape for me in a
new way. As you mentioned in your fourth lecture, a hypothesis that works itself
out in human experience on multiple levels is that much more likely to
represent the real state of things.
So thanks for sharing your many insights
and for the considerable effort involved in putting these lectures on and
getting this content out into the world. The sight of hundreds of people
standing on the sidewalk outside the theatre last week waiting to hear a
psychologist discuss an ancient (and some would incorrectly claim ‘irrelevant’)
book is inspiring in its own way and a surprising testimony to an unexpected appetite
for truth in the general population that our present culture has demonstrated
it is wholly unable to satisfy.
The Sinai Hypothesis
I’m mulling over something you said in (I think) your third lecture. I apologize in advance if I am misstating your
position, but I’m unable to find precisely where you said it. (Searching
transcripts online is so much easier than searching digital video.)
If I recall correctly, you were speaking
about the law associated with Moses and the story of Israel’s experience at
Sinai. In keeping with the rationalistic perspective you are assuming for the
purpose of these lectures, you suggested that what was happening there was that
the law was largely (if not entirely) an encoding of the Israelite nation’s
existing practices rather than something revelatory. I believe the reason you
gave was that no nation could be expected to adopt and live by a set of rules
that was entirely new to them or that did not seem reasonable to them on the
basis of their existing moral frame.
Does that sound more or less in the
ballpark?
Terms of Discussion
I believe there is a certain amount of
truth in what you seem to be suggesting, but I would encourage you to work this
angle a little more and see where it leads.
If you don’t mind, in discussing this I’m
going to take the position that the record of the giving of the law is literal
and historical, partly because that’s what I actually believe, but also because
I can quickly see from the way you speak about the Old Testament that even if
you and I don’t believe precisely the same things, we both agree that these
words have been chewed over and written and rewritten and edited and re-edited
many times over the last 4,000 years, and that nothing remains in these
records by mere happenstance. Everything that is there is present for a reason,
and everything that has been excluded has been excluded for a reason. This
means that even if we are not speaking about literal history, we are at least
speaking of something that is fully internally coherent. If the rules and
regulations that come from Sinai do not immediately make sense to us, we must
at least concede that they made sense to the original audience. If they hadn’t,
they would not be with us today.
So, back to your theory.
Where It Works
Where your hypothesis certainly seems
workable to me is insofar as it relates to commandments like those governing
sexual morality. That commends itself to me as solid fact. For example, long
before the journey to Egypt, Jacob’s family had internalized a moral code that
went back at least to Abraham and maybe even to Adam, if I can put it that way.
The fact that the code may have been largely or entirely orally transmitted
does not make it any less real or less binding or less powerfully relevant to those
who lived by it.
I’m thinking here particularly of the rape
of Dinah found in Genesis 34, where we come across the intriguing
editorial comment in the narrative that “the men were indignant and very
angry, because [Shechem] had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying
with Jacob’s daughter, for such a thing must not be done.”
The words “in Israel” suggest our narrator
is looking back at these events from hundreds of years down the road: surely
nobody in Jacob’s immediate family would have thought of themselves as “in
Israel” at that point in history.
A Shared View of Evil
But regardless of the distance in time and
developing morality from events to narration, the phrase presupposes a shared view of the evil of rape. Dinah’s
brothers were “indignant”. The thing was “outrageous”. There was no doubt about
that. Further, I suspect it was not simply normal tribal resentment over
something that had been done TO the family of Israel (though that was likely
part of it too), but a rejection of rape itself as wrong IN Israel. It was not
an acceptable act under the existing
moral code that Jacob’s family adhered to while sojourning among the
Hivites. It was not how things were done. It reads to me as if this act might
well have been just as repulsive even if it had been performed by another
Israelite. The brothers’ objection was not that Shechem was a foreigner, but
that he had treated their sister “like a prostitute”.
There’s a very strong moral impulse at work
there (along with lots of pettier and baser impulses, of course), and I’m
pretty sure we could find plenty of other examples like this one to advance
your theory that many of the commandments given from Sinai were based on extant
beliefs about right and wrong already cherished by the seed of Abraham.
So I’m with you there, Dr. Peterson.
Where It Really Doesn’t
Where I think your hypothesis gets a bit
dodgier is if we try to apply it to the entire law, including Leviticus and on. I believe rabbinical tradition counts 613
commandments or thereabouts, and it seems impossible to me that none of these
was either new or revelatory. I suspect many of them were quite shocking to
the people who first heard them and went very much against their moral “grain”.
I am convinced they did not develop these laws themselves, but had them handed
to them.
We should probably take into consideration
that the children of Israel had just spent hundreds of years as slaves in
Egypt, and that they were far from the only slaves living there. The King James
speaks of a “mixt multitude” (I love that phrase) that had come out of Egypt with Israel after that final,
devastating Passover night. While Israel clearly retained a strong sense of
national identity and some shared memory of the story of God’s covenant with
Abraham and its accompanying moral obligations, it is hard to imagine that the heathen
practices, immorality and religious habits of the foreigners all around them (including
the dominant Egyptian culture) had no influence at all on Israel’s developing
sense of right and wrong.
No Other Gods
In fact, we know this is not the case.
Israel was very much influenced for the worse by their surroundings. For
evidence we need look no further than the golden calf episode (Exodus 32),
which demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that at very least the command
“You shall have no other gods before me” cannot possibly have arisen
organically from consensus Israelite moral impulses. Monotheism, let alone the
worship of YHWH, was not the least bit instinctive to a nation of newly-freed Hebrew
slaves. So at the very first possible opportunity the people blithely hurled
the first and most absolutely fundamental thing God had instructed them right out the window
and carried on with what seem to be learned behaviours from Egyptian slavery.
But there’s more than this. Prior to Moses
going up the mountain to receive the rest of the law and the tablets of stone,
we have recorded a full four chapters of law (Exodus 20-23), which
include not just the Ten Commandments but such apparent miscellany as not
hewing the stones of altars, marital rights of slaves, how to deal justly with
the aftermath of an ox goring, which farmer should be obliged to pay for a
burnt field of grain, the death penalty for sorceresses, what to do with flesh
torn by beasts, the Sabbath, how to treat sojourners and so on.
Some of these new pronouncements about justice
and moral social order we may reasonably put down to hard lessons learned in
Egypt: how to treat foreigners (that is to say, not like Israel had been
treated); what to do with practitioners of witchcraft; and so on.
Other rules found in these four chapters
might reasonably be put down to simple common sense and wisdom acquired over
centuries: taking a break once a week, not murdering people, honoring your
father and mother, not lying, not stealing or coveting. Much of the Ten
Commandments falls into this category and might well have been an encoding of
morality developed much earlier, like the aforementioned proscription
against rape.
A Slave Nation with a Corrupted Culture
But that’s not the full extent of the law
delivered (or if you prefer, “developed”) prior to the ascent up Sinai.
If we accept that Israel was really a slave
nation with a culture corrupted by its fellow slaves and its masters; a people
who had been worked nearly to death by their Egyptian oppressors for at least a
generation with little or no leisure time of their own; a people who for years prior
to their enslavement had been sojourners in someone else’s country; and a
people who prior to the Egyptian sojourn had been sojourners in Canaan, then how
do we explain the mysterious fact that at such an early stage this new nation
seems already to exhibit very defined notions about the rights and wrongs of
property ownership, land disputes, slave rights, altar construction,
kidnapping, social justice, donkeys falling into pits, agriculture management,
borrowing and lending, the conduct of lawsuits, annual feast rituals and
harvest tithing?
Does that seem at all intuitive to you,
Dr. Peterson, especially only sixty days into a wilderness journey?
Because it doesn’t to me. I mean, who came up with all this? Were the
Israelites engaging in philosophical debates and discussions about civic
propriety all those years as they ran around Egypt looking for straw to make bricks
for Pharaoh’s pyramids? Or did they derive their principles of justice from the
Canaanites, Arameans and Egyptians around them? Both options seem highly
unlikely. Rather, it looks to me as if the blueprint for life in the Promised
Land was handed in its totality to a
people who were at the time morally and intellectually ill-equipped to develop
it themselves.
Dropped in out of Nowhere
This does not even begin to take into
account the Levitical law, the rules for the priesthood, for sacrifice and the
design of the tabernacle, which all seem suspiciously like they dropped into
Israelite society out of nowhere (or perhaps out of heaven) rather than arising
organically out of centuries of community life.
Thus it seems to me that a huge portion of
the Mosaic law doesn’t fit all that well into your hypothesis.
Now, there may be a perfectly logical
explanation for this in your way of thinking. Perhaps the Sinai story is
mythical or archetypal rather than literal. Perhaps the civic and religious
laws actually did develop organically after years of life in the Promised Land,
and the various writer(s)/editor(s) of Exodus simply assigned their origins to
a much earlier period for their own reasons, one of which might be to invest
them with greater authority than they’d have if they were merely learned human wisdom.
That one doesn’t work for me, and I have a
sneaking suspicion it may not work for you either given your very clear
rejection of the “pious fraud” hypothesis in your fourth lecture.
Dr. Peterson, I am very much looking forward
to seeing what you do with these chapters when you come to them. I find this
all very exciting.
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