How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That's Great News

by Peter Enns

Obscuring the tension between these two laws, besides causing readers to feel lied to when they later discover it, only creates obstacles for seeing how the Bible actually works as a wisdom book—where thinking about God and God’s will changes over time.

The writer of 2 Chronicles, who lived long after the time of either Exodus or Deuteronomy, about two centuries after the return from exile, saw the contradiction and felt compelled to create a hybrid in order to resolve it. Creative thinking about past laws is already happening during the biblical period.

For us, however, we really only need to note that the laws on slavery and the Passover differ, even though they are said to come from God on Mt. Sinai.

Ambiguity in the Bible isn’t a problem to be solved. It is a self-evident reality. It is also a gift, for this characteristic is precisely what allows the Law to be flexible enough to fit multiple situations over time.

Parents have to stay flexible and be ready to adjust on the fly, because situations change and children get older.

Different voices coexist in the Bible, because the Bible records how writers in their day and in their own way dealt with the antiquity and ambiguity of their sacred tradition.

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today.

What is true of the Law is also true of the Bible generally. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritten by people of faith, not because they disrespected the past, but because they respected it so much they had to tie it to their present.

The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, “Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, directed by God in what to write, and so not simply ordinary human writers.”

Biblical writers living in different times and places who wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances have modeled for us the centrality of wisdom for the life of faith. To rethink the past in light of the present moment, as the ancient writers did, is—again—not an act of faithlessness, but the very thing faith demands. To do what is necessary to bring the past to meet the present is the highest sign of respect. A wooden, inflexible view of the Bible doesn’t allow that.

The ancient Jewish scribes living in the centuries after the return from exile (after 539 BCE) were responsible for collecting these ancient traditions into one book (the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament). They clearly valued this centuries-long process of bringing the past and present into conversation. They intentionally included all this diversity in their editing work rather than snuffing it out.

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.

According to the biblical timeline, Deuteronomy and Exodus are separated by forty years of wilderness wandering, but the actual distance between them is much greater.

For various reasons, biblical scholars for over two hundred years have argued—persuasively—that Deuteronomy was written much more than forty years after Moses’s time (generally understood to be about 1300 BCE).

a modern theory, but goes back to the early centuries of Christianity, at least as far back (from what I can tell) as the church father Jerome, who lived around the year 400 CE. He mused that someone long after Moses, probably Ezra—who lived in the fifth century BCE—had possibly touched up Deuteronomy.

example, Deuteronomy begins, These are the words Moses spoke to all Israel beyond [on the other side of] the Jordan. Notice that the writer here is talking about Moses, and so the writer isn’t Moses himself.

Also, Deuteronomy tells us that Moses died in the land of Moab (34:5) and never crossed the Jordan River to enter Canaan with the rest of the Israelites—it’s sort of a big deal that Moses of all people never entered the promised land. So, since the writer refers to the words Moses spoke “on the other side of the Jordan,” we know that means the writer is

standing on the side of the Jordan that Moses never set foot on. The writer isn’t Moses. Already in the first verse, the anonymous writer isn’t exactly trying to hide the fact that someone after Moses wrote the book. But how long after Moses?

Second, just below in verse 10, we read, Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses. This comment—no one has ever come close to Moses—is actually stripped of its power unless a long time had passed.

When exactly was Deuteronomy written? The broad consensus is in the latter half of the seventh century BCE based on an earlier (perhaps eighth-century) prototype and then subject to revisions up to and including the time of the Babylonian exile and perhaps later.

scholars generally agree that Deuteronomy reflects a particular moment in Israel’s history—the Assyrian threat to the southern kingdom, Judah, in the seventh century BCE, after the deportation of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. In fact, Deuteronomy as a whole is structured like the treaties the Assyrians made with their conquered foes.

The overall message of Deuteronomy is that the people of Judah are to make an alliance only with their true King, Yahweh, and not with the Assyrians, despite the great threat. In other words, be faithful to Yahweh; trust him alone. And Deuteronomy is the treaty.

The bottom line is that Deuteronomy is a late revision of ancient law. And what is so striking and so vital in all of this is that whoever was responsible for Deuteronomy apparently had no hesitation whatsoever in updating older laws for new situations and still calling it the words that God spoke back then to Moses on Mt. Sinai (or Horeb, as it is called in Deuteronomy), even though they don’t match what God said in Exodus.

The writer of Deuteronomy sees his updating of the older laws as God’s words for his time and place.

And so God isn’t just a voice out of the past. God still speaks.

Deuteronomy 5:1–5,

Think of Deuteronomy as a motivational sermon. The second generation was to see itself as the “exodus generation,” to whom God is present and accessible, not a long-gone deity from days of old.

Deuteronomy reimagines God for a new time and place. Deuteronomy is, in other words, an act of wisdom.

Deuteronomy is a hard book to wrap our heads around and drives scholars batty. But it is also a beautiful book for showing us how the Bible itself models that God keeps speaking, that God is not just a God of the past, but a God of the present—and we are truly responsible people of faith when we keep our eyes and ears open for how, reading the times as well as the text.

Deuteronomy doesn’t line up with Exodus not because the writer was distracted and dropped the ball, but because Deuteronomy is an act of wisdom. The author accepted the sacred responsibility to rethink the past because the changing circumstances demanded it: “What does God require today? How do we embody God here and now, in our time?”

Deuteronomy gives us permission to strike out in bold faith

to discern what it means to live God’s way for our time—not by scripting that for us but by modeling for us a process that we now have to own for ourselves.

exile. A prophet’s job in the Bible was to interpret for the people the events of the day from God’s point of view—in Ezekiel’s case, to proclaim that the sack of Jerusalem and the (for all intents and purposes) end of the nation of Judah was no accident of history, but God’s punishment for generations of corruption, namely, worshiping false gods.

God’s answer spoken through Ezekiel—is: As I live, says the LORD God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the

life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine; it is only the person who sins that shall die (18:3–4).

God will bless a righteous and lawful man, but if his son is wicked, that son will be treated as he deserves; he can’t appeal to his father’s reputation. Likewise, if the son is righteous and does not follow in his father’s wicked footsteps, he will not bear his father’s punishment.

Judahites were struggling with God’s fairness —wasting away in a foreign land, punished by God for something some of them had no part in, wondering whether all this God business was really worth the effort.

And so God declares the promise that everyone will be treated as they deserve. Of course, this is wonderful, but here’s the problem. Ezekiel’s prophecy, his word from the Lord, collides with an earlier word from the same Lord—the Second Commandment, against false worship (the making of idols). In Exodus 20:4–6 (and the later version in Deut. 5:8–10), false worship merited a punishment extending to the third and the fourth generation.* The blessings for obedience

will

linger to the thousandth generation. Sure, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, which the Bible tends to do a lot when numbers are involved, but the point still sticks: when it comes to worshiping God, obedience and disobedience have multigenerational ef...

So, which is it? How does God feel about Jehu’s coup? It depends on which book of the Bible you’re reading. These two authors give polar opposite perspectives on Jehu’s act.

Does this mean God changes? I don’t think so (though some do*). It means, rather, as I see it, that different times and different circumstances call for people of faith to perceive God and God’s ways differently.

God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully

captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, ho...

So why can’t the biblical writers, and God who is somehow mysteriously behind them, do the very same thing? I think they can, and in fact they do—especially when in crisis mode. And speaking of which

modern Western Christians have a lot of trouble identifying with the depth of panic and pain of the Babylonian exile, which one prophet compared to a mother losing her children: Thus says the LORD: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. (Jer. 31:15)

Exile was the trauma of the Old Testament—and we dare not underestimate its impact. Moving to Babylon wasn’t just a setback, an inconvenience. The Israelites believed they owed their existence to God’s irrevocable promise to Abraham of countless descendants and a perpetual kingdom of their own in a land of their own—the land of Canaan (Gen. 12, 15).

series of steps,

beginning with the miraculous birth of Abraham’s son Isaac (Gen. 17), Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery and receiving the Law on Mt. Sinai (Exodus, Leviticus), the successful conquest of Canaan (Joshua), and the founding of the mon...

The northern kingdom eventually fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, leaving only the rump state of Judah to the south.