Viewing the Hebrew texts as individual books is a very freeing way of understanding scripture. Too often folks try to create a narrative that doesn’t exist or ascribe a kind of continuity that is dishonest.
Understanding the complex nature of how these books came together and that they came together over centuries is important to being able to give the text the love I think it deserves. In my first reading of these texts in my teens, I was as often struck by their violence as by their beauty. In approaching the texts from a scholarly perspective, I can understand that the views that might disturb me were coming from particular people in particular places. I may not completely understand their circumstances, but knowing some of it gives me the opportunity to acknowledge how different their world was and how different their understanding of it was. I feel scripture is often treated as though it were written yesterday about people in our personal lives, which is, of course, pretty far from the truth. I don’t mean to suggest that these books can’t have some kind of transcendent value, because they surely can, but when looking for that value, we need to try to do it through the lenses of people who wrote these books and what was important to them and their very different lives.
As someone who didn’t grow up in a religious family or in a church context, I think it is easier for me to adopt scholarly understandings of texts because I don’t feel as rooted in a particular way of understanding. In fact, it was scholarship’s opening of these texts that led me to seek a religious community (as opposed to reading conservative authors in my bedroom and thinking their perspective was the only kind… the media did little to dispel that notion). When I took Religious Studies courses in undergrad, they opened my perspective and freed me from the idea that I had to interpret these texts literally and try to accept some kind of meaningful, sacred value from texts that were talking about slaughtering people.
Similarly, when I was able to separate the books as representative of different times, places, people, and circumstances, instead of trying to make a continuous narrative out of wildly different books, I was able to imagine some of the people “under” those books and how their different worldviews played a part in producing such different understandings of what a religious life looks like.
That said, sometimes trying to remember the varying contexts and times is difficult for me as I DO try to create some kind of story about the development of the Jewish faith and its people. Timelines are helpful in that respect as I try to ponder, “Now where was Solomon in all of this?” Sometimes that development and the “maturation” (to use a word that will hopefully not be construed as condescending) of ideas about God as the world changed and people’s views adapted to meet the needs of their contexts is something I try to think about. However, I think that “narrative” or somewhat linear story I try to construct in my mind is benefited, not hurt, by being able to separate the texts and see them as representing different circumstances.
