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

In the Bible we see a lot of bloody physical violence that God either commits, commands others to do, or silently watches as they do. That violence can take many forms, but mass killing, sending plagues, and starving people are among the most common and can be inflicted on anyone including God’s own people, the Israelites.

Precisely here it is good—actually, a relief—to remember that how any of us, including the biblical writers, see God is inextricably connected to our human experience.

As I mentioned earlier, whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers. And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, “Is this what God is like?”

I do believe that the Israelites at some point believed these things about God. They imagined God in the only way that God would make sense to them—through the language and concepts of their time and place. Such imagining of God isn’t a problem to be solved. We all do that. We can’t help it. And that tells us something about the nature of the faith and the role the Bible plays in our journey of faith.

Whenever we say to ourselves, “Well, that’s true, but of course God is ,” we should pay attention to how we fill in that blank. It will tell us a lot about how we imagine God in our here and now. Even something that seems really obvious and not culturally bound at all, like “God is love,” is loaded with all sorts of ready-made ideas about what we mean when we say the word.

In fact, what is the story of Jesus and the Good News if not a reimagining of the “God of the Bible”?

Jesus’s crucifixion, for example, represents a major reimagining of God. Child

No one struggled with this more than the apostle Paul, who pored over his Bible to find creative ways to connect Israel’s story with this unexpected turn in Jesus.

Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do.

The actual feeling of compassion for refugees doesn’t begin by reading the Bible. Rather, the Bible comes into the picture afterwards as a way of grounding that compassion in our faith tradition.

The ancient world, after all, gave us warring gods and heavenly board meetings. If that doesn’t fit the definition of “pagan influence,” I don’t know what does. And yet ancient Israelites imagined God within that world—and those images became part of our sacred scripture.

And so we are back to our paradox: to maintain any tradition, you need to hold on to some aspects of the past while at the same time thinking creatively about how the past and the present can meet—reimagining the faith, as I’ve been putting it. The perennial wisdom question is, “What remains and what gets transformed?”

We have the Old Testament uncomfortably assuming that other gods exist, and then when we turn to the time of the New Testament, it’s as if we’re looking in on another world entirely—which we are. We do see some movement, though, in a few Old Testament stories.

With no land, no king, and no Temple and surrounded by the religious practices of their captors, Israelites surely thought God had finally abandoned them. This raised all sorts of questions in people’s minds, namely, “Was all this trust in Yahweh worth it?” “Does this God want anything to do with us or has he turned his back forever?” “Is this even the true God?”

One big clue that the Bible came along later is how little the stories of the kings and the prophets look back to the time of Moses or quote the Law of Moses, even when the topic calls for it.

It was created and became part of their life, however, when the need arose—with the effective removal of God’s presence from the people in the exile and the centuries to follow.

Ironically, the thing that threatened ancient Israel’s existence, the exile, is what led to the creation of a sacred book that ensured Israel’s survival through the southern kingdom of Judah. Jews would become the “people of the book,” and that book has helped carry their tradition forward much farther than I’m sure any Jews would have imagined some twenty-five hundred years ago—and it hasn’t exactly hurt Christianity, either.

On the other hand, “putting it in writing” would also create several metric tons of challenges, all of which can be summed up as follows: once you put the sacred tradition in writing, it is less a living tradition and more locked into a time gone by.

And not only was the creation of the Bible an innovation, but the Bible itself experienced its own type of innovation early on in its history—namely, the need to be translated into other languages.

Hebrew was the language of the Israelites before the exile, but while in captivity they picked up the dominant language of the empire, the international language of politics and trade, Aramaic.

Aramaic was also, almost certainly, the main language Jesus spoke.

The language of Abraham, Moses, David, and God had to be translated.

We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element—maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science.

Jews living in the Greek period had similar challenges. They addressed those challenges in a number of ways, one of which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, called the Septuagint.*

Translations are great places for religious groups (ancient and modern) to introduce course correctives to some things that might cause embarrassment.

For example, Genesis 2:2 in Hebrew says that God finished the work of creation on the seventh day—which if you think about it suggests that God actually did some work on the seventh day and then took the afternoon off. But that would imply that God broke on pa...

The Hebrew word for a sacrificial altar, mizbeach (miz-BAY-ach), is used pretty much across the board in the Old Testament no matter whose altar it is. The Greek translators, however, liked to use two different words, depending on whether the altar was Israelite or pagan.

In Hebrew Exodus 24:10 says rather casually that Moses and a party of more than seventy Israelites saw the God of Israel, which is a problem because no one is actually supposed to be able to see God. The Greek translation shifts the focus (literally): they saw the place where the God of Israel stood.

In Genesis 6:6, which still troubles some readers today, Yahweh says he was sorry he created humans; it grieved him to his heart (because they kept sinning, which led God to drown everyone). How can someone the Jews claim to be the true God seem so indecisive, not to mention prone to reactive humanlike emotions? So the Greek translation simply gets rid of that idea altogether. Instead of being sorry, the Lord thought deeply; instead of grieving, he pondered.

These examples illustrate a vital concept for us—Jews at the time changed their sacred text to “clarify” in their time and place what God is like. They changed the Bible to accommodate their culture.

Another way of handling difficult portions of the Bible was to interpret them in a creative manner called “allegory,” which is how sophisticated Greeks also handled their religious literature. Allegory is something of a mindset. It was thought that the true meaning of any literature worth reading lay beyond the literal, surface meanings of mere words, and took on philosophical or symbolic meaning.

But Jews also had an internal challenge. God’s delay in coming to their aid and setting things right for them raised questions of God’s justice and goodness. Answering those questions meant reimagining God even more.

One key way of reimagining God at the time concerns the resurrection of the dead—another thing that Christians may think is more or less fundamental to the biblical package, but that is not the case. You can read the Old Testament from front to back while standing on your head, and you’ll barely get a whiff of the idea that God raises the dead.

The only place we find that specific idea in the Old Testament is in the book of Daniel: Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt (12:2).

Which brings me to my point: resurrection of the dead was an adjustment to the story, a reimagining of what God will do that arose (an unintended yet fitting pun) during the Greek period to solve a pressing problem that had to do with God’s justice and fairness to his people.

What was that problem exactly? A key promise of God to Jews was that faithfulness to God is rewarded; namely, the faithful would take part in the coming restored kingdom of Israel.

The brothers’ faith that God will raise them from the dead for being obedient is a huge shift in Jewish thinking, brought about by the difficult reality that God seemed to be taking his sweet old time restoring the kingdom of Israel—centuries, in fact—while Jews were dying for their obedience to God. For God to remain just, for God to remain faithful, something had to give—and what gave was the finality of death. To be just, God would have to raise the dead.

Daniel is concerned why the exile was taking so long, since the prophet Jeremiah said it would only last seventy years (Jer. 25:11–12; 29:10). Gabriel answers by letting Daniel in on a little secret: seventy really means “seventy sevens,” or 490 years.

Prophets who relayed God’s word to the rest were becoming scarce, a thing of the past, one of the side effects of having God’s written word.

Though belief in fallen angels is common among Christians, the chief one being Satan or the devil, the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about them.

Satan is a word that comes up in the Old Testament, but its meaning shifts as we get closer to the time of Christ. We meet “the satan” in the book of Job (chaps. 1–2), where he is a member of God’s “divine council.” “Satan” isn’t a name here, but a descriptive title meaning “the adversary” or “the accuser.”

The presence of an anti-God figure solved (somewhat) a problem caused ironically by Judaism’s deep belief in only one God: Why do bad things happen? Where does evil come from? Who is responsible?

It’s a real problem. If God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing and yet bad things happen, might it be that God is none of those things? Blaming human misery on a very powerful divine archenemy keeps God from having to take the blame—though you’d still need to ask why God allows that dark figure to exist, but let’s not get sidetracked.

The Satan we take for granted is a new addition to the ancient tradition. Satan, actually, is a great example of a New Testament “given” that wouldn’t exist were it not for the Jewish reimagining of God that went before.

Christians have said rather freely for almost two millennia that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and present everywhere at once (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent). We do not always realize how completely dependent these ideas are on the ways Greek thought influenced Judaism before Christianity and how ill-fitting these descriptions of God are, biblically speaking.

These descriptions of God were introduced under the influence of Greek thought, and yet they came to form the foundation of the language that Christian theologians use to speak of God. We Christians just think of these as biblical concepts, but they are actually tied to how Jews reimagined their ancient God for a new day.

The Sanhedrin, a body of Jewish civic leaders who had authority to adjudicate cases, is a Greek idea; the term means “sitting together.” A synagogue was a house of prayer and study, and its name was likewise derived from a Greek term meaning “assembly.” Both institutions arose as innovations in Jewish life after the exile and are known to us from the New Testament.

We know from the New Testament and other ancient documents that Judaism sported no fewer than four broad ways (“parties”) of addressing the collision of past and present, especially in how to respond to the Roman Empire.

The Sadducees were more willing to keep the peace with the Roman government that gave them control over the Temple, while the Pharisees, who focused on legal interpretation, were less inclined.

For the ancient tradition to survive, it had to transform—adapt to changing circumstances. To seek to remain as it always was would simply ensure its isolation, if not its death. The act of transformation is, therefore, a sacred responsibility on the part of people of faith in order to maintain that faith. And how a tradition is transformed is an act of wisdom.