Reading Biblical Repetitions
Between pious and skeptical approaches to the Bible's many parallel stories
I believe that the Bible– primarily the Old Testament, though also the New, and mainly in the narratives– is packed with analogies. By ‘analogies’ I mean connections between one story and another, intended and crafted by the authors, which create meaning through their similarities and differences. To put it another way, you could say that some stories use the frameworks of other stories, or that they hark back to older stories, or even that they are based on older stories. From the beginning of Genesis right the way through to the end of Acts (and perhaps beyond), the stories of the Bible are built out of the leftover pieces of other stories.
There are a couple of ways one could think about this. The first, let’s call it the most skeptical option, is one often found in secular academic work on the Bible, and it says that the similarities and connections between Biblical stories are the result of bickering and bad editing. Take, for example, what are often called the ‘wife/sister stories’ in Genesis: Abraham goes to Egypt, pretends that Sarah is his sister, consequences ensue. Then, a few chapters later, Abraham goes to the land of Abimelech, pretends that Sarah is his sister, and consequences ensue. Then, a few chapters later, Isaac goes to the land of Abimelech and pretends his wife Rebekah is his sister, and consequences ensue. A common explanation for this threefold wife/sister narrative is that each story is a version of a lost, pre-textual tradition which was preserved in different communities, and by the time it came to write the Bible down on parchment all three versions were so popular it was impossible to pick one over the others and so all three ended up in Genesis. This, for our purposes, is the most skeptical approach.
A second approach is perhaps best described as the most pious option. This is the approach with which you might be familiar if you’ve grown up in conservative or evangelical church circles. In this approach, the Bible itself is basically a naive, simple, honest recording of the events that took place in history, and therefore the repetition of events or the appearance of similar stories is not a feature of the text, it’s a feature of the real world as ordered and governed by God. A great example of this is in the way you might hear someone explain the opening chapters of the gospel of Matthew. In those chapters, a messianic baby is born to a people who suffer under foreign rule, and a jealous ruler orders that all male children under the age of 2 be executed, before the baby is taken by his parents to the safety of Egypt. These elements are strongly reminiscent of the story of the birth of Moses in the book of Exodus. But because Christianity takes Jesus to be the centre of history, not a side-character, you will often hear the explanation that these earlier events– the stories in Exodus– were arranged by God so that they would point forwards to the events surrounding Jesus’ birth. Exodus and Matthew are both innocent, naive, straightforward tellings of history, and all of the connections between them are actually predestined, foreordained, planned by God in eternity past. This, in many respects, is the most pious approach.
I would like to spend a few paragraphs thinking about an option that sits vaguely halfway between these two. We could call it the compromised option, or the Curious option, or whatever you like. In this approach, we pay close attention to the fact that what we have in the Bible is a collection of tightly composed, obsessively studied, jealously guarded texts, all of which are written by people who know the other texts in the canon. While it may well be the case that everything happened exactly the way that the gospel of Matthew records it, the fact remains that Matthew records it in a way which preserves and even emphasises the connections between Jesus and Moses. Matthew chose not to talk about the two years between Jesus’ birth and the flight to Egypt, or about any other members of Joseph’s family in Bethlehem, or the political dynamic between Herod and the Roman officials, or the various Jewish rebellions and riots which sporadically flourished. The story of Jesus’ birth is written for us in a way that connects Jesus to Moses, and it is written that way by someone for whom the story of Moses was a fundamental, essential, paradigmatic narrative. It seems impossible that Matthew wrote down his account of Jesus birth and, upon showing it to a friend for proofreading, was shocked to discover that it so closely paralleled the story of Moses. Matthew had to know what he was doing when he highlighted the Moses-ness of Jesus. If this is true for the books of Matthew and Exodus, separated by language, culture, even religion, how much more true is it likely to be for the books of Exodus and Genesis? Samuel and Genesis? Genesis and Genesis?
Let’s consider a real example, before things get completely fuzzy. Genesis 21 and Genesis 22 share so many parallels that we actually probably don’t have space to consider them all. Here are some of the most notable:
Genesis 21 tells the story of Hagar witnessing the imminent death of her son Ishmael, who is then dramatically rescued at the last minute by an angelic figure. Genesis 22 repeats the same story for Abraham and Isaac.
Each parent goes on a few days’ journey into the wilderness with their child before the near-death experience occurs.
After the rescue of the child, Hagar and Abraham both receive blessings from the angelic being and go on to thrive.
Each parent is told that God will make their offspring into a great nation through this rescued child.
If these similarities do not seem strong enough, consider the fact that the two stories are separated by only twelve verses. Now, it seems likely that whoever wrote these two stories was supremely aware of the potential for complex and rich meaning in comparing the two stories, and consequently crafted the narratives to enable this complexity to arise. Surely it is harder to imagine that someone wrote down the story of Genesis 22, then showed it to a fellow scribe who was stunned to discover that the immediately preceding story looked very similar. For the writer of Genesis 22 to be unaware of the similarities to Genesis 21 is almost impossible to believe.
Again, it is certainly possible that each of these events occurred exactly as it is recorded, and that God ordered history in such a way that these parallels and connections would appear. But there are two important things to say about that: First, how long would it take before the people writing and recording this history noticed the plethora of connections, and started to think that the connections were important, and begin to make connections of their own? Second, at what point in history did God stop ordaining these parallels and connections? I don’t know of any other historical stories, except those which are normally dismissed as pious fictions or poetic license, in which repetition, parallel and connection are so common as in the Bible.
In essence, what I’m trying to suggest is that the Bible’s many overlaps, echoes, foreshadowings and parallels are neither evidence of confused and competing traditions, nor simple evidence of God manipulating bits of history, but rather a conscious literary and artistic device on the part of the Bible’s writers. In this sense, repetitions and analogies are no different from word choice, grammatical mechanisms, perspective, scene-setting, dialogue or other rhetorical devices in the writer’s toolbox. If the skeptical approach denies all artistic and creative merit in the Bible’s repetitions, and the pious approach (curiously) also denies these things, doesn’t this suggest that both the pious and the skeptical reader actually have very little regard for the beauty and skill of the writer’s pen (Psalm 45:1)?
Rather than reverting to the usual conflict over ‘did it really happen or did they make it up?’ that often occupies the skeptical-pious relationship, why not spend a little more time on both sides considering how much more meaning, depth, richness and complexity can be savoured in the Biblical text when its unique and (to us) foreign literary techniques are allowed to work their magic?