Free Will & Teachings of Collective Importance
Stories of Mythological Proportions
Myth in its popular use can be understood as fantastic or untrue. Any clergy could feel uncomfortable with that word talking about sacred scripture. Yet, scholars when using the word myth intend a story of collective importance. We can refer to the Hebrew Bible as containing teaching and stories of collective importance.
Teachings are Deeper Truth of Collective Import
The traditional understanding is that God intended to tell mythological truth, stories of collective importance. For example in the story of creation it is teaching that men and women are both human, but both have significant differences that complement each other. Literary criticism analyzes the final product, the Hebrew Bible as it has arrived in our hands as a single bound text. My teacher Professor Ed Greenstein teaches that if the Bible was intended to be studied as a set of torn pieces of cloth, we would have received it that way. He adheres to the literary school. Academic Bible scholars ask how the editor of the torah is pulling together two, or more, documents that existed in antiquity. The modern scholar would ask what was the editor thinking. One who follows the school of higher criticism seeks to identify the authors. In this blog, we will focus on the traditional understanding while using literary criticism to better understand these teachings, stories and laws of collective importance.
Teachings Hebrew Bible Afford Humans Free Will
Hebrew Bible is Finite Will Have ‘Gaps’
In the previous session, we learned the story of Cane and Able. In Genesis 4:8, “And Cane says to his brother Able…” The text does not say what he said. The midrash suggests that the issue may have been which of them would marry their sister, who is closer to God, or what is the property division between them. The approach known as higher criticism interprets variant uses of God’s name as denoting different authorship. The approach known as lower criticism seeks the most authentic and accurate text. In this blog, we will focus on lower criticism rather than higher criticism.
Every every text is finite. So there will always be gaps where the Hebrew Bible remains silent. From a literary perspective, gaps lays the groundwork for the partnership between the learner and the text. Each will learner imagine it and learn it slightly differently.