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

Let me put it right out there that I think owning other human beings is wrong, even though the Bible assumes it’s normal. Human slavery is one topic of the Bible for which wisdom clearly pushes us beyond the words on the page to accept the sacred responsibility to ask ourselves, “But what do I believe God is like? How does God want us to view our fellow humans today?”

It is clear from the book of Exodus that slaves were treated as property, not as full humans.

A male Hebrew slave, however, has the option of going free after six years of service (along with his family, as long as he came in with one).

You can read all about this in Exodus 21:1–11.

The book of Deuteronomy, however, has a different take. Now both male and female Hebrew slaves may choose freedom after six years of service.

My point here, however, is that these two slave laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy don’t match up, even though they are both said to come from the same divine source: God revealing his will to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

According to the book of Exodus, the meal is to be commemorated in the people’s houses (12:3–4, 7, 19, 22) and consist of, among other things, a lamb roasted over fire—and most definitely not eaten raw or boiled (12:8–9).

In Deuteronomy 16:1–9, however, we see no sign of this perpetual ordinance. Now the meal is to be held in the place that the LORD will choose as a dwelling for his name (verse 2), which is code in Deuteronomy for the Temple in Jerusalem.

Deuteronomy also includes a somewhat stunning detail. Exodus is clear that the lamb is to be roasted over fire and not to be boiled. Deuteronomy, according to English translations, only says that the lamb is to be cooked (verse 7). So what’s stunning about that? That word cook in Deuteronomy is the same Hebrew root word for boil in Exodus.

Not to get off track, but the choice to translate the same Hebrew root word as boil in Exodus and cook in Deuteronomy is aimed at avoiding this contradiction. This isn’t the only place this sort of thing tends to happen in modern translations of the Bible, though the better ones will provide helpful notes.

In fact—and here’s the interesting part—in order for these laws to remain God’s word, they could not simply be left in the past, as an artifact of a bygone era. These laws had to be revisited and adjusted if future generations will also hear God’s voice.

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.

Within the Bible itself we see writers both respecting the past and transposing it to the present—or better, they respect the past by transposing it, thus allowing the past to continue speaking.

But now I want to narrow our focus to something we’ve only glimpsed thus far. The Bible’s diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible’s true purpose for us.

It’s not enough for us simply to observe that diversity exists. We need to understand more clearly why. And because this is going to be such a big deal from here on out, let me repeat: 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.

The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time.

Between the earliest writings of the Old Testament (around 1200 BCE) and the latest writings of the New (around 100 CE), about thirteen hundred years passed.* The last biblical writers were as far removed from the first as we today are removed from the invention of gunpowder and the rule of Charlemagne. The idea that every writer over that great span of time was on the same page at every moment in spite of the myriad of complex and changing social and political factors is hard to accept in theory and impossible to accept when we read the Bible and see the diversity for ourselves.

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.” I get the point. To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it works out in detail have proved to be quite tough nuts to crack.

But any explanation of what it means for God to inspire human beings to write things down would need to account for the diverse (not to mention ancient and ambiguous) Bible we have before us. Any explanation that needs to minimize, cover up, or push these self-evident biblical characteristics aside isn’t really an explanation; it’s propaganda.

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.

For them, a life of faith and of rethinking the content of that faith weren’t at odds with one another, but worked off of each other. The ancient Jews understood full well that an authoritative tradition cannot simply stay in the past and still have its say. It must be brought into the present to speak to the present.

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). Actually, that isn’t just 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.

We just need to see that the main reasons for dating Deuteronomy much later than Moses’s time come from Deuteronomy itself.

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.

Still, Deuteronomy itself gives us some signs that a lot of time had passed from the time of Moses to the author’s day.

First, after notice of Moses’s death in the last chapter of Deuteronomy, we are told that no one knows his burial place to this day (34:6). Unless the Israelites had immediate mass memory loss, “to this day” surely suggests (as it did to Jerome*) that a lot of time had passed—so much time, in fact, that the grave site of the most important person in the Old Testament is unknown.

Most scholars have concluded that this was written after the establishment of the monarchy—no earlier than 1000 BCE, and likely, for other reasons, centuries later.

More specifically, 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.

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.

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. For the past to have any spiritual vitality in the present, it had to be reshaped for the present.

This practice of making the exodus present has continued throughout Jewish history in the Passover seder—all Jews everywhere are to see themselves as the exodus generation, saved by God.

It is much maligned in some Christian circles to suggest that different times require different responses, since “The Bible is God’s word. People may change, but God never changes.” I understand the logic, but the author of Deuteronomy doesn’t agree. Neither does the prophet Ezekiel.

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.

Apparently, a saying was making the rounds at the time: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (18:2). As the following verses make clear, this saying is a complaint: children are exiled in Babylon for what their parents did (worshiping foreign gods). If the parents were the ones who ate the sour grapes, why should the children’s teeth be on edge? Think of how your jaw locks when you bite into a lemon. Pretty effective metaphor, if you ask me.

Ezekiel’s answer—better, 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). It’s as if God is saying, “Yes, I see your point.”

If God’s justice looks like this, we might be better off giving up on being Israelite and instead joining a softball league or community theater. And so God declares the promise that everyone will be treated as they deserve.

Remember that the sin that landed the Judahites in exile wasn’t something like stealing or adultery or murder, but the very same topic that occupies the Second Commandment, false worship, which had been sponsored by one dumb Judahite king after another.

Jehu is anointed by the prophet Elisha to hurry on to Jezreel and massacre the entire royal family of wicked king Ahab, including seventy of his sons.

But another prophet, Hosea, seems to have taken issue with this coup—or better, according to Hosea, God takes issue with it. In a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. (Hos. 1:4–5)

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.

I trust no one will misunderstand my intentions. I don’t mean to compare the loss of a child to anything, let alone a national tragedy that happened a distant twenty-six hundred years ago. But I also know 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:

Rachel, the wife of Jacob in Genesis, is here symbolized as the “national mother,” disconsolate, watching as her children, vulnerable and defenseless, are plundered and pillaged and then taken a thousand miles away to Babylon. Surely, these children are no more.

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).

The first major crisis came when God took the nation of Israel from David’s grandson Rehoboam and divided it into the northern and southern kingdoms (around 930 BCE).

The northern kingdom eventually fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, leaving only the rump state of Judah to the south. And so the bulk of the promised land was no longer in Israelite possession, and the chosen people in the north were never heard from again.

But the worst was yet to come. In 586 BCE,* after a decade of struggle, the mighty Babylonians under their dreaded king, Nebuchadnezzar, exiled a portion of the southern kingdom after destroying Jerusalem and burning the Temple to the ground. The Temple, mind you. God’s dwelling place.

How much longer before we have our own king again? When will things finally get fully back to normal? What do we do in the meantime?