Committed Critic

Virtually any movie about a leader facing a crisis––whether the movie is fictional or historical––includes a scene where the boss/king/president/warlord gives a speech to the beleaguered troops that inspires them to face the challenge at hand. As it turns out, history writers in the ancient world often used the same kind of dramatic scenes when they told the stories of real wars.

I want to look here at two renditions of one speech in the mouth of an ancient Jewish warlord, and what implications they may have for how we read the Bible.

Speeches outside the canon: Judas “the Hammer” addressing his men

This speech is set during the Maccabean revolt, which began in 167 B.C., and which amounted to a family of Jewish priests/warlords rising up in response to religious persecution under a Syrian king. 1 Maccabees 3:58-60 (NRSV) says that Judas, leading a small revolutionary army against a more powerful army of Syrians, gave this speech to encourage his men:

“Arm yourselves and be courageous. Be ready early in the morning to fight with these Gentiles who have assembled against us to destroy us and our sanctuary [the Temple]. It is better for us to die in battle than to see the misfortunes of our nation and of the sanctuary. But as his will in heaven may be, so shall he do.”

This is neither the first nor the best speech that Judas gives in the book, but it is a solid (if brief) piece of rhetoric.

Next, I want to consider the account of the same event by Josephus, whose Jewish Antiquities paraphrases huge portions 1 Maccabees. In fact, for much of this story, it appears that Josephus (writing around A.D. 90) used 1 Maccabees (written around 100 B.C.) as virtually his only source. (You can see how the two texts line up on this page.) Here’s how Josephus relates this same speech (adapted from Whiston’s edition):

When Judas had thus disposed his soldiers, he encouraged them to fight by the following speech, which he made to them:

“O my fellow soldiers, there is no time more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight bravely, you may recover your liberty, which, though it is a desirable to all people, is much more desirable for us, since it gives us the liberty to worship God. So, since you are in the present circumstances, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living (which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country), or submit to the most opprobrious sufferings.

No seed of your nation will remain if you lose this battle; so fight bravely, assuming that you must die even if you do not fight. Keep in mind, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, and of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory. Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning.”

And this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them. (Josephus, Ant 7.3)

It doesn’t require very careful attention to notice that Josephus’ version is several times longer than the same speech in 1 Maccabees.

There are two really important reasons why this matters for our interpretation of ancient historiography:

• Josephus introduces his book by insisting that he will “accurately describe what is contained in [Jewish] records…without adding anything to what is therein contained, or taking away anything therefrom” (Ant Preface, 3).

• Josephus is writing well over 200 years after the events he describes, and this speech occurs in a passage where he is completely dependent on 1 Maccabees; there is no reason to think Josephus had access to any other transcript of Judas’ speech.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Josephus invented almost the entirety of Judas’ speech, and then wrote, bluntly, that “this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them.”

Some people’s first reaction might be to say that Josephus was being dishonest, but it turns out that composing speeches for figures within historical works was standard practice in antiquity, and Josephus probably thought he was being a good historian by doing it. No one seems to have expected a word-by-word transcript in a book like this (and in any case no such transcript was available to Josephus), yet it obviously was important to these historians to include these speeches to add drama to their stories and help the reader interpret what was happening. In all probability, the author of 1 Maccabees had made up the original version of Judas’ speech in the first place.

Speeches within the canon: Major figures

This has enormous implications for how we read the Bible, because we find speeches throughout Scripture, often at the most climactic events in Israelite and Christian history:

• Moses’ last words to Joshua as Israel begins the conquest (Deut 31–34);
• Joshua’s exhortation to the tribes as they settle in the promised land (Josh 23:2–16);
• Samuel’s announcement of the transition from the rule of judges to the rule of kings (1 Sam 12);
• David’s prayer upon receiving the covenant of eternal kingship (2 Sam 7:18–29);
• Solomon’s dedication of the Temple (1 Kgs 8:14–61);
• Daniel’s prayer of confession in exile (Dan 9:1-19);
• Ezra’s prayer of confession when the people return from exile (Neh 9:6–37);
• Jesus’ announcement of the ethics of the kingdom of God (Matt 5–7);
• Peter’s presentation of the Gospel to the people of Jerusalem (Acts 2:14-36);
• Stephen’s explanation of how Jerusalem has rejected Jesus just like they rejected the prophets (Acts 7:1-53);
• Paul’s presentation of the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles living outside of Judea (Acts 13:16-41).

What we learn from Josephus (and others) is that there’s really no reason to think that any of these Scriptural speeches reflects anything like a transcript of what was said on a particular occasion. That kind of literal accuracy simply wasn’t expected, and I don’t know of anything in the way the Bible was written to suggest that its authors operated by a different standard.

The one exception to this would be Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which probably does reflect Jesus’ actual teachings, perhaps in many cases even word-for-word. But Jesus was a unique figure, whose particular teachings were very important to his followers and were written down within a generation or two of when he spoke them. And in any event, many of the teachings of the Sermon are found scattered throughout Luke, so it appears that Matthew is the one who gathered them here into a single “sermon.”

The rest of the biblical speeches I listed, however, make a lot more sense as compositions of later writers, perhaps with some scattered traditions to build on. The goal was not to give a transcript but to (1) engage their readers with dramatic speeches at climactic points in the story, and (2) teach their readers how to theologically interpret what had happened in their nation’s history. That’s what 1 Maccabees did, that’s what Josephus did, and that’s what it looks like the authors of Scripture have done as well.

Implications for reading the Bible

Part of the purpose of this post is to try to disabuse people of the idea that the speeches in the Bible were spoken word-for-word by the people they are attributed to. But my point isn’t just to be critical: understanding how these texts were composed is important for understanding what they mean.

As I have tried to argue here often, a literalist reading of Scripture sometimes manages to distract people from what a passage of Scripture is actually trying to say. It doesn’t do to fixate on something Paul says in Acts as a key to interpreting, say, Romans, when the speech in Acts probably represents simply the kind of thing that Luke thought Paul would have said.

Since Luke appears to have been a pretty good historian, the speeches in Acts probably really do reflect the kinds of things that were taught in the early church; we just need to understand that some of those teachings in the mouths of Peter and Paul might have actually been introduced only later, around the time Luke wrote. We probably have very little idea what Peter actually said in his first sermons.

We should still read the speeches as intended for our edification, and it’s useful to imagine Peter actually giving the sermon at the feast of Pentecost –– that’s what Luke wanted us to imagine, after all. But as careful readers of Scripture, we should also read the speeches as part of a theological argument that Luke is making about who Jesus was and what it meant (and means) for the church. This may end up being at odds with, for example, what the real Paul thought, and that’s an important point to remember if we want to understand Christian origins.

A few weeks back I wrote about why the word “Calvary” isn’t actually in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

Here I want to look at another example of a nonsense word that gets used pretty frequently, again because of a misreading of the KJV’s archaic/awkward English. People, especially from conservative Protestant traditions, sometimes refer to a man’s helpmeet, with reference to the wife (Eve) that God created for Adam. The problem is that the word doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Genesis 2:18 explains why God decides to create Woman. It says something like,

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

This last phrase, “a helper that is suitable for him,” consists of two Hebrew words: ‘êzer ke-negdô. The first word means simply help or helper. The second word is actually a prepositional phrase, which would literally mean something like, “like that which corresponds to him.”

It’s pretty obvious that the text is trying to say that the Woman corresponded to the Man, or that she was appropriate for him (see Gen 2:20, which uses the same phrase ‘êzer ke-negdô), whereas the animals (2:18) were not. In other words, Eve was another human.

This is where the English of the KJV gets confusing. The KJV translators never used the words suitable or fitting, but they occasionally used the word meet, which had a similar meaning (see, e.g., Ex 8:26; Deut 3:18; Jud 5:30). As it turns out, the word is not particularly fitting or helpful for the modern reader, as Gen 2:18-20 demonstrates.

The KJV translates Gen 2:18,

And the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

A relative pronoun could have helped avoid misunderstanding (“I will make him a help that is meet for him”), but as the text stands it is easy to see why people have misread the phrase. The phrase “an help meet for him” doesn’t really make sense to modern readers, and so people have tended to combine help with meet to make a single term. Presumbably most people just assume that it’s an archaic word that people knew back when the KJV was translated, which of course is partly ironic because the original readers of the KJV (published in 1611) apparently would have understood it as two separate words.

Part of the blame for the misunderstanding goes back to the 17th century, where we have an author named John Dryden who used the two words as a hyphenated phrase (“help-meet”) to describe his wife in 1673. (These are the kinds of things you can find out in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Today, Webster’s simply lists it as a single word, helpmeet, which it notes is a combination of the noun and the adjective.

I probably shouldn’t talk about blame for the word, since in theory, any word is legitimate if it’s useful. If a man wants to refer to his wife using biblical language, helpmeet seems to get the job done.

But then, maybe it doesn’t work so well. My favorite part of all this is that the English language now also has the word helpmate. It’s possible that this word came about on its own, since its first known attestation (1715) refers to helpers in general rather that to a wife in particular. But in my copy of Webster’s, it’s listed simply as another way of writing helpmeet.

The convergence of these two words makes perfect sense considering that for the average person who hears the word helpmeet, the meaning of help is very clear, but the attached word meet doesn’t make any sense. So, people adjust the word (through an intuitive kind of folk etymology) to something that does make sense, and mate obviously fits when referring to one’s wife.

So, is it meet for us to judge a word like this? My tendency is to say yes: I think it should be phased out of use. Even though the word is useful for alluding quickly to Genesis, language should help us communicate clearly, and the alternative use of the word helpmate shows that for most people, this word is confusing. People who don’t know what meet originally meant in the KJV are likely to have a vague sense that it should be mate instead, and people who do know what it meant aren’t likely to use it at all.