Joel Baden Profile picture
Feb 10 4 tweets 1 min read
#Deuteronomy 11:1-7

What Israel saw

In a vague reference to the plagues, a clearer description of the encounter with the Egyptians at the sea, and a nearly verbatim recollection of Dathan and Abiram, Moses here reminds Israel of all the things they saw with their own eyes.
I think there are three big takeaways from this small passage. First is that D here, as everywhere, not only assumes but makes explicit that the Israelites addressed by Moses in the plains of Moab are the same Israelites who left Egypt. No generation change in the wilderness.
Second, D again demonstrates that it picks happily among the narrative fields of J and E, choosing whichever stories and episodes and references are best suited to its rhetorical purposes at any given time. Here it isn’t the moments of disobedience, but the big miracles.
Third, in referring to Dathan and Abiram - but not to Korah - D shows again that it knows an E that existed independently of J. For in Num 16 there is no Dathan and Abiram, but only Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. To know the story without Korah is to know E alone.

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More from @JoelBaden

Feb 12
Sometimes, in trying to understand or explain various approaches to reading, interpreting, and studying the Bible, I find it helpful to imagine the text as an old unattributed painting. Bear with me.
You can concentrate on what’s happening in the painting itself, asking things like “is this a painting of a real event or person?” You can try to imagine what happened just before or after the moment captured in the painting, give the figures backstories etc.
You can imagine what’s happening just outside the frame - where the light is coming from, who the figures are looking at. You can invent an entire world in order to explain what’s going on in this painting. And in this way you can try to say what the painting must mean.
Read 13 tweets
Dec 21, 2022
#Deuteronomy 6:5

The Shema, cont.

Another super famous line - “you shall love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” - that has come to mean something pretty far from what it once did. Lots to unpack here. Sorry in advance.
One of the great scholarly realizations of the mid twentieth century was that Deuteronomy followed the basic form of an ancient Near Eastern vassal treaty (see yesterday’s thread). YHWH is in place of the conquering king, and Israel is the vassal that must obey.
Part of that discovery was that some of the language used in D is actually formal treaty language. Like, imagine that someone wrote something today, and used the “whereas…whereas…therefore” structure. You’d know it was modeled on legal documents. Same thing here.
Read 13 tweets
Dec 20, 2022
#Deuteronomy 6:1-4

The Shema, part 1

“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our god, the Lord is one” - that’s how I was taught this verse (6:4) growing up. And I was also taught that this was a, if not the, major expression of monotheism in the Bible. Alas…
This is one of the (many) verses that really suffers when the name of Israel’s god, YHWH, is rendered as a title, “the Lord.” What’s lost is the very specific, very non-monotheistic sentiment here: of all the gods - and every nation has one - YHWH is ours.
It’s almost the very opposite of what I, and I think many people, are taught. People concentrate on the second half, but the first half is where the real money is. We know all the other national gods of Israel’s neighbors. What would Moab say? “Chemosh is our god.”
Read 13 tweets
Dec 19, 2022
#Deuteronomy 5

The Ten Commandments

Here they are, in all their (original) glory. But as I’ve commented on the content of them already, here I’m going to talk about how they function in D, because they do two neat things at once.
We gotta remember that D never just recounts past events for their own sake. This isn’t a history - it’s a speech by Moses that has a clear purpose, to convince his audience to follow the laws that he’s about to give them. Everything has to be understood through that lens.
So here’s Moses, at the beginning of this second oration, telling them about the Ten Commandments. Why? First, because those laws were the beta version of the expanded laws he’s about to proclaim. They were the wilderness laws, the basic starter package.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 18, 2022
When you find yourself saying “I don’t believe that so the Bible can’t really say/mean that,” that’s on you, not the Bible.

It’s an admission that there is no “originalist” reading of the Bible - it’s always being read in line with the reader’s values.
This is true for everyone, liberal and conservative alike. “It couldn’t possibly support slavery!”…so how can I read it to make it not say that?

“It can’t be socialist!” “It can’t be anti-gay!” “It can’t promote genocide!” “It can’t have multiple voices!”
And it’s as true of readers past as it is of readers today. “I’m monotheistic, so everything in the Bible must also be monotheistic!”

The very words of the Bible are redefined and reimagined as conforming to contemporary beliefs, norms, values. The Bible is subordinated.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 16, 2022
#Numbers 32:33-42

The distribution of the Transjordan

After all the requesting and haggling, finally Reuben and Gad get to it. As always, if we followed what happened in the stories before, we can see how to understand the division of the text here.
Remember that in P, Moses tells R&G that they will get the land formally only after the conquest, when Eleazar and Joshua will be in charge. So in 32:33, when Moses himself gives them territory, that can’t be P - that has to be E. As confirmed by the mention of Sihon.
Likewise in 32:34-38, where R&G build fortified cities and sheepfolds, that has to be P, because this is exactly what they said they’d do earlier in the P story. No need to build cities in E - the Amorite cities are already unoccupied and waiting for them.
Read 11 tweets

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