Graetz and Tobit

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 430.

“Hadrian and Rufus’s cruel measures were directed not against the survivors alone, but also against the dead. The heaps of dead [Jewish] bodies were not permitted to be interred, but the horrible sight was intended as a warning to the survivors that they should no longer dream of deliverance from the Roman yoke…It appears that a pious man desired to impress upon the survivors who had made peace with the Romans, and who lived in seclusion, the necessity of interring the corpses in the darkness of the night, even at the cost of their own happiness and peace. To this end he composed a book–the Book of Tobit–in which great weight is laid on the duty of secretly interring the bodies of those whom the tyrants doomed to disgrace; and at the same time it was hinted that the danger attending his duty would bring a rich reward. In evidence of this the case was cited of the pious Tobit, who after suffering many misfortunes as the result of his labor of love, was in the end rewarded with rich blessings. The contents of the Book of Tobit undeniably indicate that it was composed in the reign of Hadrian.”

Most scholars these days do not date Tobit to the time of Hadrian, who ruled in the second century C.E. This is for a variety of reasons, one of which is that an Aramaic version of Tobit was found at Qumran, and Qumran was destroyed before the time of Hadrian. So obviously the book existed before then!

But Graetz was doing what he could with what he had at the time, in this case, the nineteenth century. And he noticed a parallel between something that happened in the time of Hadrian and the plot-line of Tobit. Many scholars today use the same sort of approach to date books–if a book has themes like a tyrannical madman and the Jews’ desire to preserve their religion, then it probably originated in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, who was a tyrannical madman trying to destroy the Jewish religion. Now that I see how Graetz fowled up while being so sure, I wonder how certain such an approach actually is.

On a related note, it amazes me how late some books of the apocrypha/deutero-canon may be. Many scholars date the Wisdom of Solomon to the first century C.E., since it reflects knowledge of Rome. Isn’t that a little late to be part of the Old Testament?

Bad Birds!

Source: George W.E. Nickelsburg, “Stories of Biblical and Early Post-Biblical Times,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 42.

“Sarah’s suffering [in Tobit] is caused by the demon Asmodaeus, Tobit’s blindness is caused by sparrows. For birds as instruments of Satan, cf. Jub. 11:19-24.”

The Satan part of the Jubilees passage actually occurs in v 10: “And the prince Mastêmâ sent ravens and birds to devour the seed which was sown in the land, in order to destroy the land, and rob the children of men of their labours.”

I wonder about the role of birds in various movies I’ve seen. First, there’s Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Were they Satanic? No, but they were mean and destructive. I think they were mad at that one woman for bringing songbirds in a cage, so they launched a mass protest against the captivity of their own kind. But Alfred Hitchcock is playing to something within us that doesn’t like birds.

Second, there’s Stephen King’s The Dark Half, in which birds take away the evil side of an author. There, the birds do good in that they defeat the bad guy.

Third, there’s the bird on the Passion of the Christ, who takes out the eye of one of the malefactors on the cross. A former nun at Jewish Theological Seminary once said that this is a common medieval Christian motif, though I don’t remember her precise words on this topic.

Can God use Satan to accomplish good? That would explain how the birds in the Dark Half and the Passion happen to do God’s will, assuming that Stephen King and Mel Gibson are familiar with the motif of birds as Satan’s emissaries. The answer is “yes.” In Revelation 9, God uses the scorpions of Apollyon to execute his judgment. Apollyon is the lord of the bottomless pit, which is the abode of demons and the source of the Beast (Luke 8:31; Revelation 11:7).

Canon and Ben Sira

Source: M. Gilbert, “Wisdom Literature,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 300.

On Ben Sira:

“In the first century C.E. the book continued to circulate, as at Masada and Qumran. But nothing is known about the use made of it or the interpretation it was given in Judaism. There is no trace of its canonicity being debated at the synod of Jamnia (Yavneh) at the end of the century. One even has the impression that no objections were raised to its not being part of the Jewish canon of scripture. The opinion of Rabbi Akiba (d. after 135 C.E.) is of great importance. According to P.T. Sanhedrin 10, 28a, Akiba held that the book of Ben Sira was one of the ‘exterior books, the reading of which excludes from the world to come.’ According to Moore, the ‘exterior books’ would be the equivalent of ‘the books of the minim’, meaning those of heretics, as can be seen from B.T. Sanhedrin 100b, and probably according to T. Yadaim 2:13, Christian books. But Ginsberg has shown that ‘exterior books’ are simply ‘books which are not part of the canon of scripture’. According to Rabbi Akiba, they could not be used for public reading or for school instruction. But Ben Sira could be read in private. And the many quotations from it given by the Tannaim and the Amoraim show that it was highly esteemed.”

Ben Sira may have considered himself divinely-inspired. In Sirach 24:33, he says that he will, “pour out teaching like prophecy, and leave it to all future generations” (NRSV).

I’m not sure why some believed he belonged in the biblical canon, or why others did not. I’ve learned at least one thing from my study of the deutero-canonical writings: the post-apostolic fathers disagreed about the status of what Protestants call the “apocrypha.” And scholars usually seek ideological reasons that Jews rejected the deutero-canonical writings: Ben Sira, for example, doesn’t believe in an afterlife.

But there are books that made it into the Jewish canon, and they don’t really believe in an afterlife either. Job is one example. Ecclesiastes is another. And, as we saw in Uninspired Canonical Books?, rabbis debated about Ecclesiastes’ inspiration.

Some think that the deutero-canonical writings were excluded because the Christians used them. That’s what a Catholic apologist said in a debate with James White. Maybe, but I don’t see how the “apocrypha” supports Christian doctrine more than other books of the Hebrew Bible.

One professor told me years ago that the problem was their language: they weren’t in Hebrew or Aramaic. But some of them had Hebrew or Aramaic originals (i.e., Ben Sira, possibly Tobit), so language can’t be the only factor behind their rejection.

I’ve read somewhere that the rabbis closed the canon with Ezra, implying that they viewed Ezra as the last prophet. And that fits the Jewish canon quite well. The Hebrew Bible does not contain a prophet after the time of Ezra. While liberal scholars date Daniel to the second century B.C.E., the book presents itself as exilic, and that’s probably what the rabbis went with when they included it in the canon. And Jewish tradition affirms that Ezra wrote Chronicles, the last book of the Hebrew Bible.

Why did Christians accept the deutero-canonical writings? I’m not sure. Maybe it was because Jews in the diaspora embraced them (for whatever reason). Or perhaps they weren’t eager to close the canon with Ezra, since they believed that prophecy still continued. After all, they had their own set of new biblical books, which post-dated Ezra by over five centuries. We call it the New Testament. So why wouldn’t they believe that books after Ezra could be inspired?

The Palestinian Jews, however, may have desired a clear cut-off point because of the instability of prophecy. As a professor at Hebrew Union College once said, prophets create instability, since they can claim a divine revelation that undermines the social structure. And, in the time of the Romans, the Jews felt they didn’t need prophets who continually instigated political revolution. That may be why they made Ezra the cut-off man.

Job and Tobit

In my opinion, Job and Tobit are figures whose suffering made them care about other people.

What do I mean by that? Didn’t they already care for others? Wasn’t Job an advocate for the poor and oppressed (Job 30-31)? Did not Tobit go out of his way to bury his fellow Israelites and to give alms (Tobit 1-2; 4:6-11)?

Yes, but why did they do those good deeds? I think it was because they wanted to earn God’s favor by doing the right thing. Job offered sacrifices to God on behalf of his children because they might have cursed God in their hearts (Job 1:4-5). He was trying to stay on God’s good side so that nothing bad would happen to his family. Not surprisingly, there was a rabbinic view that Job only served God out of fear, not love (Mishnah Sotah 5:5). And Job also had a deep-down contempt for the poor people he was trying to help, seeing them as riffraff (Job 30). He probably helped them because he was paternalistic, or out of a desire to get God’s goodies by obeying the rules.

Tobit brags a lot about his righteous deeds. His very first words in the book are: “I, Tobit, walked in the ways of truth and righteousness all the days of my life. I performed many acts of charity for my kindred and my people who had gone with me in exile to Nineveh in the land of the Assyrians” (Tobit 1:3 NRSV). And he tells about how God gave him favor in the eyes of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser because he was mindful of God with all of his heart: unlike most Jews in Assyria, Tobit avoided the unclean food of the Gentiles (Tobit 1:10-13). Tobit never really says why he was so religiously scrupulous. But he seems to mention divine rewards every time he talks about his actions (see Tobit 4:6-11).

Both were floored when they got hit with hard times. Job initially refused to curse God, but he came to the point where he expressed a lot of bitter disappointment with him, to the consternation of his self-righteous friends. Regarding Tobit, after he was blinded in his attempt to do the right thing, he tried his best to believe that God was fair–that God was someone who rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. But he struggled with despair and wanted to die (Tobit 3:1-6; 4:6-11; 5:10).

You see a lot of “Why me?” in the speeches of Job and Tobit. They wonder why they’re suffering, especially after they had diligently obeyed God’s rules. Eventually, however, they come to think about people other than themselves. There are times when Job stops thinking about his own suffering and asks God why he allows pain for anyone, not just him. He discusses rich people who throw folks off their land, making them homeless and hungry in the desert (Job 24). Job wonders why such oppressors die in a state of happiness and prosperity (Job 21). Why doesn’t God punish them? Job probably never asked these questions while he was prosperous. He just focused on obeying the rules and reaping the benefits of his good deeds. Prior to his suffering, he never stopped to ask why the world was so unfair.

And Tobit is rather self-centered until he finally gets his sight back. Tobit sends his son Tobiah on a mission, and God works it out so that Tobiah helps (and marries) a woman who’s troubled by a demon, and returns with material that can heal his father’s blindness. God had a plan for Tobit’s blindness, which helped not just Tobit but others as well. In Tobit 13, we see that Tobit comes to think beyond himself, for he looks to the day when God will restore and bless Israel and convert the Gentiles. Tobit’s experience of God in his suffering leads him to have a universal vision.

Job and Tobit arrive at a deeper understanding of God as a result of their suffering. Job says that he always heard things about God, but now he sees God face-to-face (Job 42:5). And Tobit probably was familiar with the writings of the prophets prior to his blindness, since he quotes Amos 8:10 in Tobit 2:6. But he arrived at a genuine appreciation for God’s activity in the world as a result of his suffering. The prophets came alive for him after that experience. He was no longer just thinking about God and Tobit–he was praising God for what he was doing in the world.

My purpose in this post is not to say, “Okay, you need to arrive at a level of authentic obedience from the heart, rather than acting like Job and Tobit before their suffering.” We do what we do, with the motivations that we have. Rules will not change that fact. I personally can’t wave a magic wand and make myself suddenly have the right motivation. What I am saying is that God can use our experiences to give us a different outlook on things, one that transcends our usual focus on self (see Character, McCain’s “Inaccuracies”).