THE VOICE, THE WORD, THE BOOKS
The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims
By F. E. Peters
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007
Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13112-2
Contents
Introduction. The Voice from Sinai........................................................1
Chapter 1. Sacred Words, Sacred Book......................................................5
"Thus Spake Yahweh": What Is the Bible?...................................................7
"Then the Lord Said": What Is the New Testament?..........................................17
"Recite! in the Name of God": What Is the Quran?..........................................28
Chapter 2. Book Shaping: The Making of a Canon............................................38
From Biblia to Book: The Making of the Bible..............................................41
The Making of a "New" Testament...........................................................51
The "Old" and the "New" in the Covenant...................................................61
The Collection of the Quran...............................................................67
Chapter 3. Reciters, Rhapsodes, and Scribes: How the Bible Reached Us.....................80
The Matter of Authorship..................................................................81
The Higher Criticism of the Bible.........................................................83
Composing and Performing..................................................................85
The Scribes...............................................................................87
From Recitation to Writing................................................................88
Authors behind the Authors................................................................90
Enter J, E, and Company...................................................................92
The Writing Begins........................................................................94
Jeremiah..................................................................................95
Who "Wrote" the Books?....................................................................96
Writing in Scripture......................................................................98
The Levites...............................................................................100
The Masoretes.............................................................................101
Chapter 4. The Reporters: The Good News and How We Got It.................................105
Jesus: The Setting........................................................................105
The Gospels...............................................................................106
Extracting Q..............................................................................107
Dating the Gospels........................................................................108
John......................................................................................109
The Gospels as Documents..................................................................109
From Aramaic to Greek.....................................................................110
New Approaches............................................................................111
Community Authorship......................................................................113
Paul and the Rest.........................................................................114
The Apocryphal Gospels....................................................................115
Thomas and His Twin.......................................................................117
Chapter 5. The Poet in Performance: The Composition of the Quran..........................120
The Revelations...........................................................................120
Biography and the Quran...................................................................122
Approaching the Quran.....................................................................126
The Cultural Environment..................................................................127
Writing and the Quran.....................................................................128
Writing in Arabia.........................................................................130
Oral Poetry and the Quran.................................................................132
Muhammad, Poet and Performer..............................................................133
The Bible in the Quran....................................................................135
The Mantic Seer...........................................................................137
The Oral Performance......................................................................139
A Change in Style.........................................................................140
The Writing Down of the Quran.............................................................141
Other Possibilities.......................................................................143
Uthman or Later?..........................................................................147
In Sum....................................................................................150
Chapter 6. The Book in Mortal Hands.......................................................152
The Word Made Flesh: Books and Bookmaking in the Ancient World............................152
Scrolls and Books.........................................................................153
Searching the Scriptures..................................................................155
From Notebooks to Books...................................................................157
The Christians Adopt the Codex............................................................159
Toward a Standard Edition?................................................................160
The Shape of the Page: Chapter and Verse..................................................164
Dividing the Text.........................................................................164
Marking the Text..........................................................................167
Suras and Ayas............................................................................169
The Sacramental Text......................................................................172
Sefer Torah: Torahs and Their Arks........................................................174
Washing Their Hands of the Christians.....................................................180
A Matter of Etiquette: The Book in Our Hands..............................................182
Chapter 7. In Other Words.................................................................189
The Loss of God's Tongue..................................................................190
Targums and Methurgemans..................................................................192
Scripture for the Hellenized: The Septuagint..............................................195
Origen: Multitasking the Bible............................................................198
From Old Latin to the Vulgate.............................................................200
Hebraica Veritas and the Latin West.......................................................203
The Polyglot..............................................................................208
Enter the Humanists.......................................................................210
Translating the Untranslatable Quran......................................................214
Chapter 8. Picturing the Word.............................................................219
The Rabbis and the Second Commandment.....................................................219
Adorning and Illustrating the Hebrew Bible................................................223
Christian Images..........................................................................228
Icons and Iconoclasm......................................................................229
The Bible with Pictures...................................................................233
Printing with Pictures....................................................................238
The Reformation and Images................................................................240
The Word Unpictured: Islam and Images.....................................................242
Drawing in the Book.......................................................................243
Chapter 9. Giving Voice to the Word.......................................................247
Talking Back to God.......................................................................248
Reading through the Torah.................................................................249
The Scripture in Church...................................................................251
Praying the Quran.........................................................................256
The Scripture as Libretto.................................................................258
The Cantorial Scripture...................................................................259
The Divine Office.........................................................................260
The Art of Qira...........................................................................263
Epilogue. Three Books, Side by Side.......................................................271
Glossary..................................................................................277
List of Illustrations.....................................................................281
Index.....................................................................................283
Chapter One
Sacred Words, Sacred Book
* * *
Before embarking on the perilous how and when of the Holy Writ of the
three monotheistic communities, it is useful to review the contents of
each. The Christians do read-indeed they must read-the Jewish Scripture
they call the Old Testament, but Jews and Muslims do not-in fact,
need not and perhaps must not-reciprocate: both regard the New Testament
from a distance, and Jews and Christians have even less of an idea of
what is in the Quran.
To begin, the faith of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the identity of
each as a community, and their shared hope for salvation are all inextricably
tied to a book; they are indeed preeminently "People of the Book" as
the Muslims call them. But not the same book, nor, in fact, the same
books, since the Jews and Christians at least have in their possession not a
single Sacred Book but a collection of the same, which they refer to collectively
as The Writing or, more commonly in English, Scripture.
Scripture for the Jews, here called the Bible, is quintessentially "Instruction"
(torah), which becomes, in its "published" form, a "Recitation"
(miqra). For Muslims, the Quran is, from the outset and self-professedly,
likewise a "Recitation" (qur'an), and then, also by self-designation, a "Remembrance"
(dhikr). In both terms the thrust is toward the integration of
God's Word in the mind and heart of the believer. The Christians' New
Testament/Covenant, in contrast, is by its title both assertive and argumentative,
while its core documents, the four Gospels, are markedly different
from both the Torah and the Quran. They are each called the "Good
News" (euangelion), and their kerygmatic purpose was already clear well
before they became the documents of faith. "Go, then, to all nations and
make them my disciples" says Jesus at the end of Matthew's Gospel. "Baptize
them ... and teach them to observe all I have commanded you"
(28:19-20), which is precisely what Paul and the others did, proclaiming
the "Good News" before it became either a text or a book (Acts 8:35; 11:20;
1 Cor. 1:17, etc.).
The earliest chapters or suras of the Quran, not the first chapters in our
copies of that Book but rather what are thought to be Muhammad's earliest
revelations recorded in it, are even more manifestly preaching than the
Gospels: the Gospels proclaim a message embedded in a life; the Quran
straightforwardly announces the message itself; it is the Message Itself. The
Torah professes to explain how all this came about, when and why this
people then called the Israelites and now the Jews came to believe that
there was one God and how that God rewarded them for their beliefs by
singling them out for His special favor and His special reward. In the
Bible's account, the radical assertion of monotheism, that "There is but
One God," is taught early on to the Israelites, even before they were known,,
as Israelites and were simply identified as Hebrews or "wanderers," one
undistinguished family of nomads among many such in the Middle East
of the Bronze Age.
God's special favor, all its claimants agree, was mediated through a
compact or covenant made between the Creator God and one of His creatures.
That creature was, again they all concur, one Abram or Abraham, a
minor tribal shaykh who had migrated from Mesopotamia across the Fertile
Crescent and settled in the land of Canaan, the wedge of territory
caught between Syria and Egypt and later called Palestine. This Abraham
was, somewhat inexplicably in the Bible-the Quran (21:51-71) claims to
know more about it-an early (the earliest?) worshiper of the One True
God, and it was to him the deity had promised His hopefully eternal favor,
to Abraham, that is, and to his descendants.
The worshipers of that One True God are one in affirming that He spoke
to Abraham and that that conversation was recollected and recorded: its
record constitutes the foundation document of what they call the Covenant
and of monotheism itself. And, they further agree, God continued for a
time to speak to His favored creatures, always and necessarily the same One
True God, but in the end, it was to different worshipers. These privileged
conversations-"revelations," as they are almost invariably described-all
proceeded from a single divine source, it is agreed, but they were also occasional
in their occurrence-Paul's "sundry times and divers places"-and
as such they were directed to different human agents, the various "prophets"
and "messengers" who served as the mediums of revelation.
It is to the recollected and recorded utterances and writings, the Scripture,
that issued from those various privileged mediums that we now turn.
What we possess, however, are the words not as they came forth from
God's mouth, nor even from the prophets' mouths or inspired pens, but in
a redacted book form, or rather, in the collections of writings that the
monotheists call their Scripture. There is a great deal to say about how
they became such, but we begin by inspecting their present contents, a
surface worn smooth by public and private repetition and polished to near
perfection by centuries of careful and controlled exegesis.
"Thus Spake Yahweh": What Is the Bible?
It is easier to describe the Bible than to discover its original name. The expression
"in the books," where "books" is a rendering of the plural of sefer,
is used in reference to earlier revelations in the Hebrew text of the Biblical
book called Daniel. The oldest Greek version of the Bible, the one used by
both Jews and Christians, translates it as biblia, "books," and that same
word occurs in a similar Scriptural context in the non-Biblical books of
Maccabees. The New Testament refers to Jewish Scripture exactly as such,
hai graphai, "the Writings," but among the Greek-speaking Christians and
Jews biblia eventually won out and the Jewish Scripture came to be called
the Bible by Jews and Christians alike.
Formally the Bible begins "in the beginning," the very beginning, with
the story of Creation-the first book is called Genesis-and its opening
chapters (1-3) provide the common template for the Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim understanding of the creation of the universe and of the primal
couple, Adam and Eve, the garden or paradise (a loanword from Persian)
in which they were placed, and their sin and consequent expulsion.
Jews and Christians read the same text-the Bible is Bible for both-and
the story is not repeated but retold in the Quran, though in bits and
pieces, not as a consecutive narrative. Each group puts different emphases
in the story-the Christians' explosive explanation of the fall of Adam and
Eve into the Original Sin of humankind is probably the best-known
example-and each has later added details, like the parallel fall from grace
of another set of God's creatures, the angels, and the rise to prominence of
one of them, Satan, all of which go unmentioned in Genesis itself.
The literary critic looking at Genesis recognizes in its narrative of Creation
a myth, a transcendental account that is neither history nor science.
Myths are not "true" in themselves; rather, they reflect truths. The Jews
who told the creation story, and the Christians and Muslims who repeated
and enriched it, knew no such distinction. Scripture was not only "true,"
each and every word of it; it was also inerrant, incapable of being false. All
three communities have been more than able to treat Genesis as "myth," to
unpack from it the moral and spiritual "truths" found within the narrative.
But they have also treated it as what we would call "science." Once exposed
to the ancient rationalist tradition in its most invasive Hellenic
form, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all made strenuous and obviously
well-intentioned efforts to reconcile what their scientific cosmology instructed
them about the Creation and the present form of the universe
and what their Scripture asserted on the same subject.
That process of reconciliation and assimilation began in Jewish circles
in Alexandria in the third century BCE. It continued down to the days of
Galileo and Copernicus, when a radical change in the scientific model of
the universe left the Jews, and more particularly the Christians, who were
far more committed to harmonizing Genesis with contemporary science,
with a grave-and still unresolved-problem. The Jews generally preferred
a more mystical reading of the text, and there is a rich store of Jewish esoterica
called "The Work of Creation" and clearly labeled with a warning
against general consumption. Christians, from the hexaemeron or "Six
Days" literature of the Christian Fathers down to the summas of Albert the
Great and Thomas Aquinas, had possessed themselves of a prodigiously
wrought model of the universe. But after the scientific revolutions of the
sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was a universe that no longer worked,
and a scientific interpretation of Genesis that no longer convinced.
Galileo and Copernicus arrived late in Islam, but Muslims were less affected
by the paradigm shift when it did arrive since they had been far less
ardent to in linking Scriptural creation to science. And since the Quran
adverted to Creation rather than describing or explaining it, there was abundant
space within which Muslim commentators could and did construct
their explanations of how the world began. What lingers, however, in
Muslim no less than in Christian and Jewish minds, is the absolute conviction
of the "truthfulness" of Scripture, and nowhere has that truth gauntlet
been more daringly cast down than in the first three chapters of the
book of Genesis.
Genesis 4-11 tells the story of humankind from Adam's own children
down to Abraham, who dominate the narrative thereafter. The task is not
an easy one. Genesis 6:1-5, for example, is constrained to have the "sons of
God" mingle with the "daughters of man" to produce a very mixed breed
of "giants" (nephilim) to confound believers forever after. Even more puzzling
is the somewhat later information that "the Lord," that is, the Creator
God of Genesis who had begun to be worshiped by humans in the generation
of Adam's grandchildren (4:26), now "repented that He had made humankind"
(6:6), and resolved to destroy it, all, that is, save Noah and his
family and two breeding specimens of all animal life. There follows the
story of the building of Noah's ark and of the flood that destroys the rest
of the human race (6:14-7:19).
After the waters recede, Noah builds an altar and offers animal sacrifice
on it. God is pleased with the odor of the burnt offerings and pledges not
to destroy humankind again. More, the Lord makes a covenant with Noah
and his descendants (9:1-17), the prototype of the later one with Abraham
and his. Circumcision will be the sign of Abraham's covenant, but the
symbol of Noah's is God's "bow in the clouds," the divine weapon hung up
and harmless. By the terms of the new covenant Noah and his heirs are
given permission to eat the flesh of all animals-humans were apparently
vegetarian up to this point-except they were not to eat flesh with its own
blood still in it.
Genesis next hurries through the generations of Noah's descendants
(9:18-11:32), pausing only to tell the engaging tale of the builders of the
"tower of Babylonia" the ill-advised architectural project that caused the
Lord to turn his human creation into confused polyglots (11:1-9) and
would lead, many centuries later, to the ticklish problem of how to bring
God's Word to babblers who no longer speak God's Sacred Tongue.
The story of Abraham that follows (12:1-25:11) unfolds episodically
but in circumstantial detail. The family of sheepherding nomads was originally
from Mesopotamia ("Ur of the Chaldees") but had chosen to migrate
to the land of Canaan. It had reached as far as Harran, in what is now
southern Turkey, when Abraham's father died, and it was there that God
spoke-we are not told why-almost abruptly, but grandly and with an
emphatic optimism, to the seventy-five-year-old Abraham, now the family
shaykh: "I will make you a great nation ... and in you all nations will be
blessed" (12:3-4). This is a promise perhaps and not yet a covenant, but
the terms of a blessing and a land are repeated and expanded and refined
in the following chapters of Genesis and other details added to it.
The family history of Abraham continues to unfold through Genesis,
with secondary speaking roles assigned to Lot, Abraham's nephew, and to
his own wife, Sarah. There is an encounter with a strange personage who
appears to be an unrelated worshiper of the Lord, Melchizedek, king of
Salem and "priest of the Most High" to whom Abraham gives a tithe
(14:18-20). The aged and childless Abraham has doubts, however, about
the many offspring and the spacious lands that have been promised him,
and this provokes a great oracular confirmation and a very formal encounter
with the Divine Will (15:1-20). "That day the Lord made a covenant
with Abram" Genesis says, and the land of the promise is grandiosely described
as "this land from the river of Egypt to the Great River, the river
Euphrates" (15:18).
In chapter 16 of Genesis a solution to the heir problem comes not from
the Lord but from Abraham's wife, Sarah, who suggests that he father a
child on her Egyptian slave girl Hagar. Abraham is agreeable and a son,
Ishmael, is born to them. This does not please Sarah, or at least Hagar does
not, and there is an uneasy peace in Abraham's tents. The Covenant meanwhile
grows more formal: Abraham is commanded, as a "sign of the
Covenant," to have himself, all the male members of his family, and even
his male slaves circumcised (17). The Lord later recalls that Sarah had
laughed when they had been promised a son. "No, I didn't," she says. "Yes,
you did," the Lord insists (18:1-15). The Lord is right, of course, and for
all her laughter the elderly Sarah becomes pregnant by the even more elderly
Abraham. A son is born, Isaac, and the vengeful Sarah has her way:
Hagar and Ishmael are cast forth from the camp to what would have been
certain death in the wilderness had not God intervened (21:1-20). The
Lord confirms that the promise will descend through the line of Isaac, but
Abraham is consoled by the Lord regarding Ishmael: he, the firstborn, will
also father a great nation.
The final piece in the great Abrahamic mosaic is the Lord's unexpected
and heart-chilling command to Abraham to "take your son, your only son
Isaac, whom you love," to a mountaintop and to make of him a burnt sacrifice
to God (22:2). It is a test, we are told, of Abraham's obedience, which
he passes in quite extraordinary fashion. He is ready to plunge the knife
into the heart of his only son when God restrains him, and then rewards
him: "By My own Self I swear it because you have done this and have not
withheld your son, your only son, I shall bless you abundantly and make
your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand
on the seashore. Your descendants will possess the cities of their enemies.
All nations on earth will wish to be blessed as your descendants are
blessed, because you have been obedient to Me" (22:16-18).
Abraham's death occurs in Genesis 25:7, aged 175 years. He is buried by
his sons-Ishmael reappears for the event-at Hebron, where his grave is
still shown.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE VOICE, THE WORD, THE BOOKS
by F. E. Peters
Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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