{"id":201986,"date":"2026-09-04T05:26:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201986"},"modified":"2026-09-04T06:44:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T14:44:33","slug":"yale-yt-course-introduction-to-the-old-testament-hebrew-bible-rlst-145-with-christine-hayes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201986","title":{"rendered":"Yale YT Course: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145) with Christine Hayes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mo-YL-lv3RY?si=wt7HWW7C5NuYTzfy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>She teaches the way a good trial lawyer opens. Before the jury hears any evidence, she tells them what to distrust, and the thing she asks them to distrust is everything they walked in with. At 16:02 she says that most of our cherished presuppositions about the Bible rest on claims others have made on its behalf, claims the Bible never makes for itself. That sentence tries to disarm the fundamentalist and the village atheist in the same stroke, since both of them argue with a book she says does not exist.<\/p>\n<p>The five myths (it&#8217;s a book, it&#8217;s pious parables, it&#8217;s for children, it&#8217;s theology, God wrote it) are the standard critical-scholar liturgy. The best of them is the fourth. She points out at 23:11 that biblical Hebrew has no word for religion, and that becoming an Israelite worked like naturalization: you joined the community, kept its law, revered its lore, and died its death. That is a more useful description of how Judaism still functions than most things said about it from pulpits, and it explains why arguments between Jews and Christians about &#8220;belief&#8221; so often talk past each other. The catechism model of religion, she says at 23:45, is alien to the Bible.<\/p>\n<p>The frame she opens with is Yehezkel Kaufmann&#8217;s. At 1:37 she says the Ancient Near Eastern people with the most lasting legacy was a people that had an idea, and at 5:25 that what counted was less the number of gods than that this God stood outside and above nature. <\/p>\n<p>Hayes says: &#8220;This people that had an idea. It was a new idea that broke with the ideas of its neighbors, and those people were the Israelites.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The line comes from <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yehezkel_Kaufmann\">Yehezkel Kaufmann<\/a>. <a href=\"https:\/\/oyc.yale.edu\/religious-studies\/rlst-145\">Hayes<\/a> assigns him for the second week, and her opening is a paraphrase of his opening. Kaufmann was a Ukrainian-born Zionist who taught at the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hebrew_University_of_Jerusalem\">Hebrew University<\/a> and wrote an eight-volume history of Israelite religion between 1937 and 1956, which <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moshe_Greenberg\">Moshe Greenberg<\/a> abridged into English in 1960 as <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=qLURAQAAIAAJ\"><em>The Religion of Israel<\/em><\/a>. His target was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Julius_Wellhausen\">Julius Wellhausen<\/a>. Wellhausen\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Prolegomena_to_the_History_of_Israel.html?id=SYrSLW7327QC\"><em>Prolegomena<\/em><\/a> (1878) told an evolutionary story: Israel began as a tribal polytheist people like its neighbors, the eighth-century prophets invented ethical monotheism, and the priestly law came last, in the exile, as a fossilization of prophetic spirit. Kaufmann inverted almost every piece of that. Monotheism came first, as an original intuition at the founding of the nation; the prophets applied it; the priestly law was old and pre-exilic. The idea did not evolve out of paganism. It broke with paganism at the start.<\/p>\n<p>His argument was less about God\u2019s number than about God\u2019s nature, which is why <a href=\"https:\/\/oyc.yale.edu\/religious-studies\/rlst-145\">Hayes<\/a> says at 5:25 that number counted for less than that this God stood outside nature. Pagan gods, in Kaufmann\u2019s account, are born, have parents, marry, die, eat, and answer to something above themselves, a fate or a primordial realm that magic can manipulate. The biblical God has no biography and no superior. There is no theogony in Genesis. Nobody coerces Him with a spell. Kaufmann\u2019s cleverest piece of evidence was an argument from absence. The Bible\u2019s polemic against idolatry treats idols as wood and stone, fetishes with eyes that do not see. It never engages the mythology that the idols represented. Kaufmann took that as proof that the writers had lost contact with real pagan thought so long before that they no longer understood it. A people still tempted by Baal\u2019s story would have argued with the story. These writers mocked the statue.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Henri_Frankfort\">Henri Frankfort\u2019s<\/a> group at Chicago made a parallel argument in <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/I\/bo25705476.html\"><em>The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man<\/em><\/a> (1946), later republished as <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Before_Philosophy.html?id=5PUpAAAAYAAJ\"><em>Before Philosophy<\/em><\/a>, whose closing chapter describes the Hebrews\u2019 &#8220;emancipation of thought from myth.&#8221; Hayes\u2019s phrase about a god known through history rather than nature comes from that tradition too. Behind both stands the nineteenth-century notion of ethical monotheism as Israel\u2019s gift to the world, which <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reform_Judaism\">Reform Judaism<\/a> used to justify its own existence and which Kaufmann, a secularist, nationalized: the idea as the creation and property of a people. That is why the sentence says a people had an idea. The grammar is Zionist.<\/p>\n<p>The last fifty years have gone hard against him on the history. In 1975 and 1976 excavators at Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai found eighth-century inscriptions with blessings &#8220;by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah,&#8221; and a tomb at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Khirbet_el-Qom\">Khirbet el-Qom<\/a> near Hebron gave a similar line. Hundreds of small clay pillar figurines of a woman holding her breasts turn up in Judahite houses from the same period. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mark_S._Smith\">Mark S. Smith\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Early_History_of_God\"><em>The Early History of God<\/em><\/a> (1990) and <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/book\/12858\"><em>The Origins of Biblical Monotheism<\/em><\/a> (2001) laid out the case that now dominates the field: Israel\u2019s God started as a member of the Canaanite pantheon, absorbed the high god <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/El_%28deity%29\">El\u2019s<\/a> traits, then displaced Baal and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Asherah\">Asherah<\/a> over centuries, and the flat statement that no other god exists first appears in the exilic chapters of Isaiah. The Bible keeps fossils of the older picture. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Psalm_82\">Psalm 82<\/a> has God standing in a council of gods and sentencing them to death. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Song_of_Moses\">Deuteronomy 32:8<\/a>, in the reading preserved at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dead_Sea_Scrolls\">Qumran<\/a> and in the Greek, has the Most High dividing the nations among the sons of God, with Israel as Yahweh\u2019s share. Kaufmann read those as dead metaphors. Smith reads them as memory.<\/p>\n<p>Morton Smith gave the sociology in <a href=\"https:\/\/openlibrary.org\/books\/OL5706498M\/Palestinian_parties_and_politics_that_shaped_the_Old_Testament.\"><em>Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament<\/em><\/a> (1971). A &#8220;Yahweh-alone party&#8221; existed for centuries as a minority faction, sometimes in power under kings like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hezekiah\">Hezekiah<\/a> and Josiah and often not, and it won for good in the exile because its members were the ones who wrote and edited the surviving texts. On that account the idea did not save the people. A party that held the idea captured the archive, and the archive then told the people that the idea had saved them. <a href=\"https:\/\/oyc.yale.edu\/religious-studies\/rlst-145\">Hayes<\/a> concedes the substance of this at 5:10 when she says the Israelites shared the pagan worldview early and that &#8220;some Israelites, not all at once and not unanimously,&#8221; broke with it. That sentence and Kaufmann\u2019s cannot both be the story. She teaches the first in the body of the course and uses the second for her opening.<\/p>\n<p>Kaufmann\u2019s argument from absence has also been turned around. Ezekiel describes women weeping for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dumuzid\">Tammuz<\/a> at the Temple gate. Jeremiah\u2019s opponents tell him things went well when they baked cakes for the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Queen_of_Heaven_%28antiquity%29\">Queen of Heaven<\/a>. Psalm 29 is a Baal hymn with the name changed, and the sea monster Leviathan and the sea itself as an enemy appear throughout the poetry in ways that match the Ugaritic tablets found at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ugarit\">Ras Shamra<\/a> after 1929. The writers knew the myths. Calling idols wood and stone was polemic, and polemic is a sign of contact, since nobody argues with a corpse. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jtsa.edu\/team\/benjamin-d-sommer\/\">Benjamin Sommer\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/books\/bodies-of-god-and-the-world-of-ancient-israel\/72E589D9BD86AEDF5DBF5043453C203F\"><em>The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel<\/em><\/a> (2009) went after the transcendence claim from another side, showing that in the older strands God has a body, appears in several places at once, and walks in gardens and eats with Abraham. The God outside nature is the priestly and Deuteronomic God, and the Torah\u2019s editors let the other one stand beside Him.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Akhenaten\">Akhenaten<\/a> worshipped the sun disk alone in the fourteenth century, a generation or two before any plausible Moses, and Freud built <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moses_and_Monotheism\"><em>Moses and Monotheism<\/em><\/a> on the coincidence. Babylonian scribes wrote hymns that made <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marduk\">Marduk<\/a> the sum of all the other gods. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Xenophanes\">Xenophanes<\/a> in sixth-century Greece mocked gods with human bodies and posited one god unlike mortals in form or thought. None of those became a surviving religion, which is Kaufmann\u2019s real point and Hayes\u2019s: the idea alone counts for little, and the Israelites made a people out of it. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jan_Assmann\">Jan Assmann<\/a>, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/j.ctv26071t7\"><em>Moses the Egyptian<\/em><\/a> (1997) and <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/The_Price_of_Monotheism.html?id=TnDw6GQVv10C\"><em>The Price of Monotheism<\/em><\/a> (2003), accepts that something new happened but locates it elsewhere. The novelty is what he calls the Mosaic distinction, the split between true religion and false, which pagan religions did not have since their gods were translatable across borders. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zeus\">Zeus<\/a> was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jupiter_%28god%29\">Jupiter<\/a> was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Amun\">Amun<\/a>. Yahweh had no translation. Assmann thinks that distinction gave the West its notion of religious truth and also its habit of religious violence, and that Kaufmann\u2019s admiring account skips the bill.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is the causal claim, that the idea ensured survival. The Bible&#8217;s own answer to why Judah outlived Babylon has more to do with practice than doctrine, which fits what Hayes says later in the same hour about religion as naturalization. Circumcision, Sabbath, food laws, and endogamy are boundary markers that work in a foreign city without a temple, and Deuteronomy&#8217;s centralization of sacrifice in Jerusalem had already made worship a matter of one place rather than every hilltop, so losing the one place hurt without dissolving the pattern of daily life. The deportees went as an elite in a body and were resettled together on the Chebar canal, where they could keep a scribal class alive. Fifty years later Cyrus let them go home and Persia funded the rebuilding. Ezra then imported the book. Every one of those factors could have happened to a people with a different idea, and the northern tribes with the same God and the Samaritans with the same Torah show that the idea by itself guaranteed nothing. And the survival that matters to Hayes&#8217;s students is the survival past 70 CE, which the rabbis engineered by turning a temple religion into a text religion, an invention the Bible does not contain.<\/p>\n<p>By the exile, a group of Judahites held a picture of God with no rivals, no biography, and no dependence on nature, and they wrote it into a text and a legal code that a small people could carry through the loss of its state. Nobody else did that, and the results are still with us. The strong version, that the idea appeared whole at the beginning and explains the nation, is the thing Hayes calls overstated at 42:09. She opens with it anyway because it is a better first sentence than the truth, and because it lets the students feel they are studying a revolution instead of a slow argument among Iron Age priests.<\/p>\n<p>This rhetoric reminds of the &#8220;America is an idea&#8221; crowd. They are the same move made by different parties for different purposes. Both claims take a people whose existence has ordinary causes, land, kin, war, luck, law, a scribal class, and say the decisive thing about them was a proposition. Both come from writers. Kaufmann was a scholar. The American version runs from Lincoln, a lawyer who read all night, through <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/G._K._Chesterton\">G.K. Chesterton\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chesterton.org\/store\/america\/\">line that America is a nation with the soul of a church<\/a>, through <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gunnar_Myrdal\">Gunnar Myrdal\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/runeberg.org\/adilemma\/0172.html\">&#8220;American Creed&#8221;<\/a> in 1944, through <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Richard_Hofstadter\">Richard Hofstadter\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1080\/00396338.2016.1231526\">remark that it has been America\u2019s fate to have no ideologies but to be one<\/a>, down to every speechwriter since. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Max_Weber\">Max Weber<\/a> said it a century ago: intellectuals are the bearers of ideas by trade, and the history they write assigns the causal role to the thing they produce. A blacksmith would tell you the plow made the nation. The man who writes for a living tells you the idea did.<\/p>\n<p>Ideas can be taught, and a people defined by an idea can be handed to the people who teach. Ideas can be violated, which means the people who hold them can indict the nation in its own name. The prophets did that to Israel and Lincoln did it to the Union. The idea is a standard held over reality, and a standard has to be somewhat at war with reality or it is useless. <\/p>\n<p>Now the contrasts. Kaufmann&#8217;s idea belongs to a people. His whole point was that the Israelite folk possessed monotheism as a national intuition, present from the start, and the Bible agrees with him in this at least: Israel is Abraham&#8217;s seed before it is anything, and the covenant binds a family. Blood and idea come together. The idea does not travel; you join the people by naturalization, as Hayes put it, and the people keep the idea. Assmann&#8217;s Mosaic distinction between true and false religion is a wall, and the wall is the point.<\/p>\n<p>The American version runs the other way. The idea owns the people. Anyone who assents can belong, which is why the claim has always been most useful to immigrants and their children and to the coalitions that want more of them. Myrdal was a Swede. Many of the loudest twentieth-century voices for the creed were Jews, Catholics, and their descendants, for whom the alternative account, Samuel Huntington&#8217;s Anglo-Protestant settler culture with a creed as its by-product, meant standing outside. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Samuel_P._Huntington\">Huntington\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Who_Are_We%3F_The_Challenges_to_America%27s_National_Identity\"><em>Who Are We?<\/em><\/a> (2004) is the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mark_S._Smith\">Mark Smith<\/a> of this argument: the idea came late, from a specific people with a specific religion and language, and it survived because that people\u2019s institutions carried it. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Jay\">John Jay<\/a> in <a href=\"https:\/\/avalon.law.yale.edu\/18th_century\/fed02.asp\"><em>Federalist No. 2<\/em><\/a>described the Americans as one people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion. That is a Kaufmann sentence about America. It is now unsayable in the same rooms where &#8220;America is an idea&#8221; is applause.<\/p>\n<p>So the two claims serve opposite coalitions. Kaufmann&#8217;s serves a nation that wants to be a nation, which is why a secular Zionist wrote it. The American creed serves a state that wants to be a church, open to converts. And each has a mirror in the other&#8217;s tradition. Kaufmann&#8217;s frame descends from Reform Judaism&#8217;s ethical monotheism, which German Jews in the nineteenth century used to argue that Judaism was an idea any modern man could respect and therefore its holders could be citizens. That is the American creed in Jewish dress. And the American creed has its own tribalists, who say the idea was English and Protestant and note how many of its proponents are recent arrivals. That is Kaufmann in American dress.<\/p>\n<p>Both claims get contradicted the same way, by digging. Kuntillet Ajrud and the pillar figurines show the Israelites worshipping a goddess two centuries after the supposed intuition. The American equivalent is any county history: the country ran on land, slaves, oceans, coal, and common law, and the idea got quoted at dinners. Both claims also carry the same cost, which Assmann named for monotheism. Once a people is an idea, disagreeing with the idea makes you not part of the people. Israel has its idolaters and America has its un-Americans, and each word does work that &#8220;foreigner&#8221; cannot.<\/p>\n<p>Ideas are part of reality. Deuteronomy&#8217;s demand for one sanctuary, an idea, made the loss of that sanctuary survivable in a way it could not have been for a hill-shrine religion. The Declaration&#8217;s sentence about equality, an idea, gave Frederick Douglass and King a weapon they used to change facts on the ground. Ideas act when a people carries them, and a people gets carried by institutions and kin and land. The intellectuals cut the second half because the second half is where they stop being needed. The realists cut the first half because they distrust the people who make the first half their living. <\/p>\n<p>Hayes then assigns Kaufmann for next week and tells students at 42:09 that his ideas are important but overstated. So she borrows his thesis for her own opening and flags the loan as inflated in the same hour. The thesis that an idea saved Israel is a theologian&#8217;s causal story. A historian might point to the Babylonians deporting the Judahite scribal and priestly elite as a body and settling them together, which preserved the people who could write, and to the Persian policy of return, which gave them somewhere to write from. Ideas need carriers. The northern tribes had the same God and vanished. She half concedes this at 3:16 when she says the north was lost &#8220;to a large degree,&#8221; and the Samaritans, who kept the Torah and are still around, get no mention at all. Her line at 3:30 that the Israelites alone emerged after the death of their state is the kind of sentence one says to open a course, not to close one.<\/p>\n<p>Her flood comparison is the strongest ten minutes. She lists the shared narrative elements of Ziusudra and Noah at 11:31 and then makes the point that the borrowing is less important than the rewriting: the Mesopotamian gods drown mankind because the noise keeps them awake, and the biblical God does it out of moral outrage at creatures He made and loves. &#8220;It&#8217;s saying something different,&#8221; she says at 12:54. That is the method of the course in miniature. Read the parallel, then read the deviation, and the deviation is where the writer&#8217;s values live. It also quietly reframes the whole question of originality. The Israelites did not invent the flood. They invented the reason for it.<\/p>\n<p>In the passage on faith in the room, 27:41 to 29:31, she says no one in the course wishes to undermine religious faith, then says that when a student asks a question driven by an article of faith, she will invite him to consider the article of faith producing the problem, and will not debate its merits. That is a fair rule and it is also an asymmetric one. The critical method gets to be the floor everyone stands on; the believer&#8217;s premise gets treated as a symptom to be examined. She is right that this is the only common ground a Yale lecture hall can have. She is also softer than the truth when she says the course does not undermine faith. The source-critical account of the Pentateuch does undermine some faith positions, the literalist ones, and she knows it, which is why she says at 26:50 that there is no basic incompatibility between believing in inspiration and acknowledging human editing. That sentence is true for many believers and false for others, and she leaves the second group to find that out on their own.<\/p>\n<p>Two things date the lecture to 2006 and to Yale. The first is the sales pitch: at 14:47 she says we tend to think of the Bible as an old fuddy-duddy document, and promises it is instead a revolutionary cultural critique. A professor in a secular elite college has to make the Bible sound like dissent to get the room to lean in, and she does. The second is her taste. Job is &#8220;possibly the greatest book of the Bible&#8221; (18:31), Ecclesiastes &#8220;reads like an existentialist writing from the twentieth century&#8221; (18:13). Those are the two books a modern skeptic with a literary education loves, and they are the two she promotes. Leviticus gets one clause about holiness. That is a preference, and it shapes what a million viewers now think the Bible is about.<\/p>\n<p>She also gets a few things loose in a way that live lecturing produces. The Dead Sea Scrolls site as maybe &#8220;a pottery factory or something&#8221; (39:06) is a hedge on a scholarly dispute she does not want to spend time on, and she is right that Esther is the one book missing from Qumran. The claim at 21:34 that she will not let her twelve-year-old and eight-year-old read the Bible is a good laugh line and also a serious claim about the text: incest, rape, murder, and characters who deceive and repent. Her point that the Bible rarely moralizes and leaves the reader to draw conclusions (22:24) is correct and is the strongest argument for reading it as literature rather than as instruction.<\/p>\n<p>What the lecture is, in the end, is an argument that the Bible is a human anthology of dissenting voices that later Jews chose to bind together without reconciling, and that the reader should not reconcile them either (19:04). That is the modern academic consensus, delivered with charm. What it is not is neutral. It is a tradition of its own, going back through Kaufmann and Wellhausen, and it has its own articles of faith, the chief one being that a text with many authors and many voices is more alive than a text with one. She does not invite the students to consider that premise. Nobody teaching from inside a tradition ever does.<\/p>\n<p>Her stated thesis is Kaufmann&#8217;s: an idea saved a people. Her best ten minutes, 23:11 to 24:37, say the opposite. Biblical Hebrew has no word for religion; nobody joined Israel by assenting to doctrines; you joined by living an Israelite life and dying an Israelite death; the process was naturalization. <A HREF=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=184359\">That is Mearsheimer&#8217;s anthropology<\/a> stated by a Bible scholar. People are born into groups that form them before they can reason, and the group&#8217;s code is imposed before the child can weigh it. If he is right, then the second passage describes the engine and the first passage describes the paint. The idea did not save Judah. A group with hard boundaries and a long apprenticeship saved Judah, and the idea was the group&#8217;s flag.<\/p>\n<p>Deuteronomy reads like his theory written as law. Chapter 6 tells the father to teach these words to his children when he sits at home and walks on the road and lies down and rises, to bind them on his hand and write them on his doorposts. Chapter 11 repeats it. Passover is built around a child asking a question and receiving a scripted answer. None of that is an argument for monotheism. It is a schedule for socialization, and it targets the years Mearsheimer says count, the long childhood before the critical faculties arrive. Kaufmann&#8217;s own strongest evidence points the same way. He argued that the biblical writers no longer understood paganism, which he took as proof the idea was ancient. On Mearsheimer&#8217;s account it proves the idea was inherited rather than reasoned. The writers mocked idols as wood and stone because they had been raised to, and a taught contempt does not need to understand its object.<\/p>\n<p>This also settles the question of what the idea was. Hayes stresses content, a God above nature, known through history. Mearsheimer would stress function. A God who has no translation into Marduk or Baal, who forbids marrying the neighbors&#8217; daughters and eating their food and resting on their days, is a boundary. The content could have been almost anything so long as it was exclusive. That is why the northern tribes, who had the same God, vanished. They lacked the priestly and Deuteronomic apparatus that turned the God into a fence, and they were scattered by the Assyrians in ways that broke the fence anyway. And it is why the Samaritans, who kept the Torah and the fence, are still on Mount Gerizim.<\/p>\n<p>Hayes tells students at 29:05 that when a question comes from a prior commitment to an article of faith, she will invite them to consider the article of faith producing the problem and leave them to think about it. The premise is that faith is socialization and criticism is reason. Mearsheimer denies the distinction. Reason is the least of the three sources of our preferences, and the critical method is a value infusion too, administered by an institution to eighteen-year-olds who arrived with one set of loyalties and will leave with another. The teaching fellows, the sections, the exegesis paper worth a large share of the grade, the warning at 45:22 that missed sections will be punished: that is a naturalization process. Hayes gives the students an Israelite account of how one joins a people and then runs one on them without naming it. Her own description fits her own lecture hall.<\/p>\n<p>He adds something to her reading of the text as well. At 22:24 she says the Bible rarely moralizes, puts people in situations, and leaves conclusions to the reader. At 8:01 she calls its picture of man as a moral agent revolutionary. That is a liberal reader&#8217;s Bible, the individual before the page drawing his own conclusions, and it describes how a Yale seminar reads the book. It does not describe how the people the book made encountered it, which was by chant, on a fixed cycle, in a community, under law, with the conclusions supplied by the sages. The moral agent of the Hebrew Bible is corporate more often than individual. Achan sins and his household dies. The nation goes into exile for the sins of the kings. The prophets address Israel in the second person singular because Israel is one body. Hayes says at 24:37 that the narrative is the odyssey of a people, which is the Mearsheimer sentence, and then at 18:25 praises the Psalms for their individual piety, which is the liberal one.<\/p>\n<p>The link back to &#8220;America is an idea&#8221; tightens. Mearsheimer&#8217;s book argues that nationalism beats liberalism whenever the two collide because nationalism fits how people are built and liberalism does not. The Hebrew Bible on his reading is the earliest surviving record of that outcome. A universal God, above nature, the same for everyone, chooses one people and gives them a land and a law, and the particular half of that arrangement is what survived. Hayes&#8217;s students hear the universal half called revolutionary. The tribal half is what they are being asked to buy the Jewish Study Bible to read.<\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.everythingisbullshit.blog\/p\/a-big-misunderstanding\">David Pinsof&#8217;s target<\/a> is the intellectual who believes the world&#8217;s problems are misunderstandings and that his job is to correct them. Hayes&#8217;s second chapter is titled &#8220;<A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY&#038;list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyuvTEbD-Ei0JdMUujXfyWi&#038;index=1&#038;t=970s\">Common Myths about the Bible<\/a>.&#8221; She spends thirteen minutes crossing items off a list, and at 15:54 she says what we have are popular misconceptions that come from how the Bible has been used or misused. That is the genre he is describing. The lecture presents itself as a cure for error, and on his account the first question to ask about any such cure is who profits from the error and who profits from the cure.<\/p>\n<p>Take the myths one at a time. The belief that God wrote the Bible, which Hayes dates at 25:54 to a religious doctrine of a much later age, is held by people whose institutions run on it. A text with one divine author cannot be edited by a professor; a text with many human authors can. The pious-parable reading she mocks at 19:49, the Sunday school version where Jacob is a role model, is a socialization tool that churches use because it works on eight-year-olds. The fuddy-duddy view she names at 14:47, where the Bible is an outdated document, serves the secular student who wants a license to skip it. On Pinsof&#8217;s reading none of these are misunderstandings. Each is a belief its holder has an incentive to hold, and the people who hold them are not waiting to be corrected. They are defending an asset.<\/p>\n<p>Hayes says at 27:24 that the course concerns culture, history, literature, and thought rather than faith, and at 28:08 that no one wishes to undermine belief. Those are stated motives. Pinsof&#8217;s method is to ask what the enterprise does regardless of what it says. What a university Bible course does is move authority over the text from clergy to professors. The student who finishes it cites Kaufmann and the Jewish Study Bible where he used to cite his pastor or rabbi, and the people who wrote the Jewish Study Bible&#8217;s articles are Hayes&#8217;s colleagues. The exegesis paper and the sections that carry a quarter of the grade train the student in the academy&#8217;s method and no other. That is coalition work, and it is savvy. It does not require anyone to have lied.<\/p>\n<p>Her rule for faith questions at 29:05 fits his template. When a student asks something driven by a prior commitment, she will point out the article of faith producing the problem and decline to debate it. She treats the question as a misunderstanding the student has not noticed in himself. Pinsof would say the student knows what he is doing. He is displaying loyalty to a group whose good opinion he needs more than hers, and the question is a flag, not a confusion. And her refusal to argue the merits is savvy in turn, since an argument on the merits would put the academy&#8217;s own premises on the table, and those premises are no more the product of pure reason than the student&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>Hayes describes the biblical writers at 14:31 as voicing discontent with their culture and at 15:01 as authors of a revolutionary critique. That is the misunderstanding story applied to the Iron Age: Israel&#8217;s neighbors and most Israelites held wrong beliefs about God, and a few writers set them straight. Pinsof&#8217;s question is what the writers were competing for. The answer in the text is the state and the sanctuary. Josiah&#8217;s reform in 2 Kings 23 tears down the rural shrines, slaughters their priests, and routes every sacrifice and its revenue through Jerusalem. Deuteronomy&#8217;s one-sanctuary law is the charter for that seizure. The prophets&#8217; denunciations of idolatry are attacks on a rival priesthood&#8217;s clientele, and the polemic that calls idols wood and stone, which Kaufmann took as innocent ignorance, is the kind of strategic stupidity Pinsof means. The Yahweh-alone party understood Baal fine. Misdescribing him was a weapon. So the idea that saved Israel was a faction&#8217;s flag in a zero-sum fight over the coercive apparatus of a small kingdom, and it survived because the faction that held it also held the archive.<\/p>\n<p>The Bible&#8217;s own anthropology is on his side, not hers. Hayes says at 22:24 that the text rarely moralizes and leaves conclusions to the reader, as if the book trusted men to reason their way to the good. The book does not trust them. Jeremiah 17:9 calls the heart deceitful above all things. Deuteronomy&#8217;s answer to wrong belief is a law backed by stoning, and its answer to the next generation is drilling, not persuasion. The prophets diagnose a stiff neck and a hard heart, which are motives, and they rarely diagnose a bad argument. The Hebrew Bible reads like a document written by people who had reached Pinsof&#8217;s conclusion that the problem is bad motives and had decided the only remedy was force and ritual. The misunderstanding model is later, Greek, and academic, and Hayes imports it into a text that argues against it.<\/p>\n<p>Her favorite books tell the same story. At 18:31 she names Job as possibly the greatest, and at 18:13 she says Ecclesiastes reads like twentieth-century existentialism. Those are the two books that say the world cannot be fixed and the wise man should stop pretending. Pinsof ends his essay with a hole that cannot be climbed out of. He has written a gloss on Ecclesiastes, and the professor who thrills to Ecclesiastes and Pinsof are sharing a taste that a lecture hall full of undergraduates does not, which is one reason Hayes calls the book a fun surprise and one reason his blog is called depressing.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stanley_Fish\">Stanley Fish\u2019s<\/a> claim in <a href=\"https:\/\/openlibrary.org\/books\/OL4104797M\/Is_there_a_text_in_this_class\"><em>Is There a Text in This Class?<\/em><\/a> (1980) is that a text has no meaning apart from the interpretive strategies readers bring to it, and that those strategies belong to communities, which is why readings are stable within a group and vary between groups. Meaning is what a community trained a certain way sees. Put that beside Hayes&#8217;s sentence at 29:21 about helping students read &#8220;what the text is actually and not ideally saying,&#8221; and the lecture turns into an example of the thing Fish spent a career denying: that under the readings there is a text that says something on its own.<\/p>\n<p>Her list of myths becomes, on his account, a list of other communities&#8217; reading conventions. Churches and synagogues read the Bible as one book because they read with rules that make it one: harmonize the contradictions, read Genesis in light of Exodus, read the Old in light of the New. Fish&#8217;s own example in the book is Augustine&#8217;s rule in On Christian Doctrine that any passage which does not teach charity must be read figuratively until it does, a rule under which the text can only ever mean charity and the reader never meets a counterexample. Source critics read with a different rule: treat contradictions as seams, assign them to authors, refuse to harmonize. Under that rule the text can only ever be a library. Hayes states her community&#8217;s rule at 19:04. The editors &#8220;didn&#8217;t strive to reconcile the conflicts, nor should we.&#8221; The cacophony of voices she promises at 14:25 is what that rule produces. A community that reconciles hears a chorus. Neither sound is in the text. Both are in the ear.<\/p>\n<p>The same holds for the question of what the Bible is. Hayes says at 33:20 that any course runs into the problem of defining its object because different Bibles served different communities, which is Fish&#8217;s thesis in her own mouth. Then she resolves it by taking the twenty-four books common to all Bibles as a neutral floor, and at 38:00 concedes that the floor is the Jewish Tanakh. She prefers &#8220;Hebrew Bible&#8221; to &#8220;Old Testament&#8221; as &#8220;more accurate&#8221; (35:47), assigns the Jewish Study Bible, and asks the students to get used to BCE and CE. Fish would not call any of that wrong. He would say &#8220;accurate&#8221; means &#8220;what my community calls it,&#8221; that the choice of the Tanakh as the shared core is a Judaica scholar&#8217;s choice, and that presenting a community&#8217;s conventions as the neutral ground is exactly how interpretive communities reproduce. Her own field&#8217;s canon is the one that gets to look like no canon.<\/p>\n<p>Her handling of believers follows. At 29:05 she says a faith commitment can make it hard to read what the text says and that she will point the article of faith out and leave the student to think. Fish&#8217;s anti-foundationalism denies there is anywhere to stand that is not an article of faith. The student who reads Genesis as Mosaic and the professor who reads it as J, E, and P are both reading inside communities with rules about what counts as evidence, what a contradiction is, and what a text is. Hayes&#8217;s community happens to be the one with tenure. Her invitation to consider the belief behind the question could be returned to sender with no loss of force, and Fish, who enjoys this kind of thing, would say the honest version of her rule is: in this room we read by these conventions, and if you want the grade you will read by them too. He thought that version was fine. He wrote a book, Professional Correctness (1995), arguing that disciplines should teach their practices without pretending to neutrality or world-saving. What he would object to is the sentence at 28:08 that nobody wishes to undermine faith. Teaching a student to see seams changes the Bible he has. You cannot induct someone into an interpretive community and leave his old one intact.<\/p>\n<p>There is a stretch of the lecture Fish would claim as his own. At 22:24 Hayes says the Bible rarely moralizes, puts people in situations, and makes the reader do the work. That is reader-response criticism, the tradition Fish belonged to before he pushed it to its end, and in biblical studies it runs through <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Alter\">Robert Alter\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Art_of_Biblical_Narrative\"><em>The Art of Biblical Narrative<\/em><\/a> (1981) and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Meir_Sternberg\">Meir Sternberg\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/j.ctt16gz7zr\"><em>The Poetics of Biblical Narrative<\/em><\/a> (1985), whose puns and gaps and ironies are what Hayes promises the sections will surface. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stanley_Fish\">Fish\u2019s<\/a> early book on Milton, <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=nwFbAAAAMAAJ\"><em>Surprised by Sin<\/em><\/a> (1967),argued that Paradise Lost works by trapping the reader into Satan&#8217;s rhetoric and then rebuking him, so that the reader&#8217;s experience is the poem&#8217;s meaning. Hayes&#8217;s Bible does the same to the reader who arrives wanting Jacob to be a saint. But Fish&#8217;s later move undoes the comfort. The reader who does the work is a reader trained to do that work. Sunday school readers also work, and their work produces a Jacob who is a model. The seminar&#8217;s work produces a deceiver who grows. The text supports whichever reader it is given.<\/p>\n<p>At 8:19 Hayes describes the enormous body of interpretation and commentary built on the Bible, and she schedules the history of interpretation as a treat after the real reading. Fish would invert the order. The history of interpretation is the Bible&#8217;s meaning, all there is of it, and the critical reading is one more floor on the edifice with a later date. The claim at 25:54 that the Bible itself does not claim divine authorship assumes the text can make or withhold claims apart from readers. A community that reads &#8220;the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah&#8221; and &#8220;Moses wrote this Torah&#8221; in Deuteronomy 31 as covering the whole finds the claim; a community that reads them as covering an oracle and a scroll does not. Fish holds that the finding is all that ever happens.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Julius_Wellhausen\">Wellhausen\u2019s<\/a> Israel, an evolving tribe that grew up into prophetic ethics, is a Protestant German reading. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yehezkel_Kaufmann\">Kaufmann\u2019s<\/a> Israel, a folk born with a national intuition, is a Zionist reading. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mark_S._Smith\">Mark Smith\u2019s<\/a> Israel, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Canaanite_religion\">Canaanite<\/a> branch that pruned its pantheon, is a reading by a community that trusts inscriptions over narrative. Each Israel is what its community&#8217;s rules let the evidence become. Hayes teaches from the third while opening with the second, and Fish would say the switch tells you which community she talks to in print and which she talks to in a lecture hall.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wRPqtGywkCw?si=rsrq0zYNEHVITVUP\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This one is better than the first because she spends the last eleven minutes taking apart the man she spent the first thirty-five building. At 37:43 she says that when you read Kaufmann it is clear he often has to force his evidence, and force it badly. At 44:32 she says biblical religion was less a revolution of Israel against the nations than a civil war of Israel against itself. That second sentence is the thesis of the lecture, and it makes the opening line of Lecture 1 about a people with an idea into something she no longer believes by Wednesday. The idea belonged to a party. The people worshipped what their neighbors worshipped, with an extra god on top.<\/p>\n<p>Her method for presenting Kaufmann is to build him as a deductive system. Posit a realm before and above the gods, and, as she says at 10:14, all of these things follow: limited gods, no sovereign will, mythology, magic, an amoral universe. Remove the realm and, at 23:06, the opposite list follows. That is a good way to teach a thinker and a bad way to describe a religion, and she knows it. At 37:15 she says monotheism and polytheism in the abstract rest on divergent intuitions, then adds that she is not sure either exists anywhere in the world. That aside is the crux. Kaufmann&#8217;s &#8220;pagan religion&#8221; is an ideal type assembled from Greek fate, Babylonian theogony, and Canaanite fertility rites, and no pagan held all of it. Egyptians had Ma&#8217;at, a moral order the gods uphold and the king serves. Hammurabi&#8217;s Shamash is a god of justice. The Babylonian Theodicy and the Egyptian Instruction for Merikare, which says the god knows every name and cares for men as his cattle, do not describe an amoral cosmos of siblings at war. Kaufmann&#8217;s paganism is the Bible&#8217;s polemical picture of paganism written up as sociology, and the comparison he runs is between an edited theology and a caricature. Hayes flags the abstraction. She does not say where the caricature came from.<\/p>\n<p>Several of the strong claims she voices for him are overstated in ways a student in section could catch. At 24:49 she says there is no life after death in the Hebrew Bible, that people live seventy years and that is it. Sheol runs through Psalms and Job as a gray survival, the witch of Endor brings up Samuel, and Daniel 12 promises that many who sleep in the dust will awake, which is in the canon even if it is late. The defensible claim is that most of the corpus offers no reward after death, which is a different and more useful sentence. At 25:06 she says magic is represented as useless. Numbers 5 has a priest write curses on a scroll, wash the ink into water, and make a suspected adulteress drink it so that her belly swells. Elisha&#8217;s bones raise a dead man. His axe head floats. Kaufmann&#8217;s answer, which she gives at 26:19, is that the editors recast every working magic as a witness to God&#8217;s will. That answer cannot lose. Any spell that fails proves magic is empty, and any spell that works proves God willed it. A thesis that absorbs both outcomes is not being tested by the text.<\/p>\n<p>At 32:39 she quotes God&#8217;s warning to Cain that sin couches at the door and its urge is toward you, and offers it as proof that evil has moved from the metaphysical to the moral realm. The Hebrew verb behind &#8220;couches&#8221; is robets, and since Speiser&#8217;s Anchor Bible commentary scholars have linked it to the Akkadian rabisu, a lurking demon that crouches at doorways. Her proof text for the demythologizing of sin has a demon crouching in it. That does not sink her point. It shows how the text does what she says it does, by keeping the old furniture and changing what it means, and it shows the process is visible on the page rather than finished before the page was written.<\/p>\n<p>The same holds for her claim at 31:41 that no one in the Hebrew Bible ever says the devil made me do it. In 2 Samuel 24 the Lord incites David to take the census that brings a plague. In 1 Chronicles 21, retelling the same story a few centuries later, Satan does it. The devil is being invented inside the canon, by a writer who could no longer stand the earlier version, and the two texts side by side are the strongest evidence anyone could want for her civil-war reading. She does not use them. Nor does she engage the verses where the sovereign good God claims the other side of the ledger, Isaiah 45:7 forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil, or Amos 3:6 asking whether evil befalls a city unless the Lord has done it. Her rebuttal at 34:00 to the student who asks whether monotheism just renamed the metadivine realm as God is that this God is only good. The verses say otherwise, and the theodicy problem she names at 30:02 as a huge problem for monotheistic thought is that problem, produced by the very claim she uses to answer the student.<\/p>\n<p>Her distinction from Geller between Israelite-Judean religion and biblical religion (38:18 to 39:22) is the right tool. Yahweh had no consort in the text (23:41) and had one in the inscriptions, and the gap between those two facts is the gap between what people did and what the editors wanted. The historicized festivals she describes at 28:42 show the process mid-stride: Leviticus 23 gives Sukkot an agricultural rationale and Deuteronomy 16 and Leviticus 23:43 give it a historical one, and both survive. Genesis 6 with its divine beings marrying human women she calls, at 41:25, a fluid boundary if you ask me. Psalm 82 gets a paraphrase at 41:45 in which God stands up in the council and tells the other gods they do not know what they are doing. All of that is Mark Smith&#8217;s case, and the &#8220;minority movement that grew to prominence over centuries&#8221; at 43:38 is Morton Smith&#8217;s Yahweh-alone party. Neither is named. An undergraduate lecture rarely credits the scholars whose conclusions it delivers, and the effect is that Kaufmann gets a name and a hundred pages while the people who refuted him arrive as &#8220;most scholars conjecture.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>One thing she gets that Kaufmann&#8217;s critics sometimes lose. At 37:34 she holds that the difference between Israel&#8217;s God in the monotheizing sources and the gods of the neighbors is qualitative, and the case for that survives the demolition. A god who is the source of all being, with no birth, no consort, no rival, and no substance a magician can work on, is a different kind of object from Marduk even if Marduk&#8217;s hymns sometimes reach toward the same thing. The lecture&#8217;s own trajectory is the argument: the object was not there in 900 BCE, was there in the sixth century, and the road between was a fight inside Judah that the text records without meaning to. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She teaches the way a good trial lawyer opens. Before the jury hears any evidence, she tells them what to distrust, and the thing she asks them to distrust is everything they walked in with. At 16:02 she says that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201986\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[599,43121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-christine-hayes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201986"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201999,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201986\/revisions\/201999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}