The Hebrew Bible is Unrealistic

Is the Old Testament interested in telling us what 'really happened'?

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Can we say, with any confidence, that the Hebrew Bible (at least in its narrative portions) is trying primarily to represent the ‘real world’? This is not a question of how closely the HB’s stories match what the modern reader considers plausible, nor how closely they line up with the findings of archaeology or reconstructions by historians of the ancient Levant. In other words, it’s not about whether we agree with their version of events.

The question is: Whether the author (to the extent that I can legitimately suggest a singular figure and not multiple, or assign the role of ‘author’ to the unknown person/persons implied by the word) intended (acknowledging that a writer’s intention is probably beyond the reconstruction of any reader, especially given the historical distance between this/these author/authors and myself) primarily (though the idea that any piece of writing has a single, coherent primary goal throughout is open to debate) to create (accepting that few if any HB texts appeared ex nihilo, rather than appearing over time and accruing gradually) a text (if ‘text’ can be understood as referring to all possible units of composition that existed in the mind of the writer/writers as constituting a discrete unit: a sentence, a chapter, a scene, a book, a collection of books, an entire canon etc.) which depicted (ignoring for the moment the obvious problem in using a visual metaphor– ‘de-pict’– when discussing textual issues) reality (an impossibly vague and unhelpful word which has not yet been usefully superseded, used in this context to mean something along the lines of ‘the world as I experience it in its most un-interpreted and general state’).

Surely the answer to this must be… no?

Even if I make my way through the caveat forest above and arrive uninjured at the heart of the question, I cannot see how the answer could ever be a simple yes. There is the fact that reality does not present itself in story-form, only in a sprawl of successive instants and ‘here-and-nows’ which we later group together into events, each instant of time being so full of data that could be included but is not (wouldn’t a full, complete account of the Cuban missile crisis have some account of the weather in East Timor or the height of the tallest tree in Dorset?). This on its own means that the writer of any story is responsible for crafting its elements into a story-like form, making it less real than it was previously. There is also the fact that the reality (especially the dialogue) we find in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is decidedly un-realistic.

Perhaps an example will help. The Hateful Eight is a film by writer and director Quentin Tarantino, telling the story of a whodunnit murder mystery in a single large room during a blizzard. The characters are played by human beings, and there is no obvious indication that we are meant to think of them as anything other than human beings. They perform the same actions as ‘normal’ humans, eating and so on, but as soon as we hear them speak we will be unavoidably aware that we are not encountering ‘reality’, we are encountering a movie: There are no hesitations. No moronic filler-words (like, um, uh, i guess, kinda, sorta, maybe) sprayed about as the speaker tries to hold on to their place in the conversational back-and-forth while recovering their train of thought. Sentences have rhythms, there are alliterative and assonant delicacies, Tarantino takes full advantage of the experience and talent in his cast to display a very particular vision. One reviewer of Tarantino described his dialogue as “stilted, derivative of dialogue in other films, artificial, and lack[ing] even a modicum of verisimilitude”. This was, I assume, meant as a slur but I wonder if QT might not claim all of those wordy words as high praise indeed.

Tarantino writes dialogue that, instead of reflecting the ‘real’ world of daily human interaction, reflects the ‘real’ world of films. His characters speak in a way that is stilted and artificial not because he is an idiot who thinks that’s just how normal folks talk but precisely because he knows it is not how they talk and because he knows that by having his characters talk in this way he can conjure up a representation of ‘reality’ that is more revealing than a simple documentary-cctv-‘neutral’ approach ever could. The same is true in a different way for Aaron Sorkin and The West Wing. Count how many times a character on that show stutters, changes their mind mid-sentence, says the wrong word by accident or is cut off by a closing door/loud beep/person intervening, and then count how often these things happen to every person you know in their daily life. These films and TV shows are not showing us ‘reality’ any more than Star Wars or even The Simpsons.

In watching these things, we’re usually not struck by the strangeness of the dialogue. In fact, people like Tarantino and Sorkin are famous and praised precisely for their prowess in crafting sentences that stick in the mind. On the other end of the spectrum, though still very carefully written, consider the dialogue of Noah Baumbach in “The Meyerowitz Stories”, full of interruptions and stutters, cross-purposes and hesitations. Films like Baumbach’s are often difficult to relax to, because the prickliness of the dialogue doesn’t allow us to sit back and enjoy the tapestry of sound, but instead jabs us with a prong of ‘reality’.

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Literature is, in many ways, hamstrung when it comes to depicting human interaction. If a film or painting wants to depict simultaneous action, it can. Two people can yell at each other in interwoven monologue in a movie because in a movie you have the technological ability to play two sounds at once– books cannot do this. Even if the writer were to tell you that two people were speaking over one another, the human eye can only read one word at a time and so the interrupting/overlapping effect has to be reconstructed in the mind, rather than experienced up-front. In the entire Bible, is there an example of one character interrupting another? Or even of simultaneous speech plus action? What we find is action then speech, or vice versa, but the narrator is always very careful to keep our mind’s eye pointed in one place at a time, because each thing in the narrative has its own significance.

Rather than being a CCTV-like rendering of events, literature seems more to be the distillation of all possible versions of a story into the most precise and meaningful version of it. Good novels have no spare words, no flabby sections, but only that which serves the story and achieves the writer’s aims. In some ways, the tasks of the novelist and the historian are probably not dissimilar; selection of the material, arrangement of it, and the identification of some kind of narrative that ties the work together. The only difference is that one is creating their narrative from scratch and the other is building it from the raw material of the past.

The Hebrew Bible’s history is, in a way, fiction-like. My own day-to-day life does not appear cyclical or possessed of a character arc, so much as scattered and random events flowing through a sluice-gate of consciousness. But the lives of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Sarah and Samuel are all– all– cyclical, repetitive, running along an arc of development, and visibly composed in a way that non-literary lives are not. Part of the fascination of biographies and autobiographies of great figures is that their lives take on a literary, fiction-like quality of dramatic narrative. Of such people we say that they were destined for a time like this, or that “you couldn’t have written it if you tried”. In our greatest moments, humans approximate our best inventions.

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All of this is not to say that the Hebrew Bible is make-believe. It is, however, to suggest that the stories of the Hebrew Bible are operating with some of the rules that we moderns relegate to the realm of fiction. Our distinctions between ‘made-up’ and ‘real’ are usually quite clear, but what if this is not the case in the Hebrew Bible? Or, to use less pejorative language, what if the reality of an event is not separable in the Hebrew Bible from its broader significance? If it is technically true but utterly insufficient to describe Abraham’s banishment of Ishmael and Hagar without narrating it in language infused with his sacrifice of Isaac? It’s easy in a modern context to think that the job of the Bible is to tell us what happened then allow us to interpret its significance and draw our own conclusions, and we naturally dislike any attempt on the part of the writers to step on our toes or obscure the plain reality of the past by filling it with meaning. But if, as I am suggesting, the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not separate the narration of an event from its interpretation, and in fact believed (or simply assumed) that interpretation is a blossom on the branch of description, what then?

Well, that would probably mean the Hebrew Bible’s version of “reality” looks more like art than it does our daily experience. If the Hebrew Bible (we could simply say God, if you prefer) sees the significance inherent in events that it describes, surely that is a fuller and better version of ‘reality’ than one that blindly regurgitates moments from the past.

I was born on the 2nd of July. I also got married on that date, some years later. Both events mark a kind of new life, and more and more I realise that the two are woven together, marking beginnings and endings of things. I could describe the 2nd of July as simply my wedding anniversary, or my birthday, or both, but the truth is it is becoming a day that encapsulates my entire being, a reminder of the layers upon layers that make up a meaningful existence. If I were to try to write a story about either the original 2nd of July (original to me, at least) all those years ago, it would from my current vantage point be incomplete without reference to that other 2nd of July which has become a kind of fulfilment of the first. In these moments I begin to see how God might grant the divine perspective– if only for an instant– to those authors who undertook to narrate the story of the people of Israel, from their birth in Egypt all the way to a kind of wedding entirely their own.