Tidal Waves or Tsunamis in Ancient Literature

[Jona Lendering]

Would you object to :

• a science teacher who did not believe in science ?
  
• a marxist teaching capitalism ?
  
• an anarchist teaching about representative democracy ?
  
• a medical professor who didn't believe in medicine ?

Yes, of course; that they are critical does not mean that they are talking nonsense. Marx has said a lot of interesting things about capitalism, which have become mainstream economic theory.

Believers have the advantage of making allowances for allegorical literature. Non-believers would not tend to be so open-minded or have the same spirit of adventure

That's too simple, in my opinion. It was believers like Robinson and Albright who went digging in the biblical soil, because they took it litterally and ignored that many lines had to be read metaphorically (e.g., the falling of the Jericho walls is probably best read as a first-fruit; it can by no means be a historical event). It was litteralists like James Irwin who believe there is really an Ark of Noah in the mountains.

I hope that, when you wrote "allegories", you meant "metaphors". Allegories (=an interpretation of a text that the author did not intend) are a Greek invention, not present in the Bible, although Christians have tendency to read the Bible metaphorically. I will not object; if they present the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 as an allegorical prefiguration of Christ, that's their right. But they can not claim that this is a scholarly statement. (What Isaiah did have in mind, is another question.) To put it bluntly: there is no room for allegory in a scholarly debate, because the Jewish Bible is not a Greek text.

As far as metaphors are concerned, scholars -I am not talking about believers- have to read the Bible like any other ancient document: it contains poetry that is related to that of the ancient Near East, it contains myths that belong to the Near Eastern family, and it contains historical sections that have to be read like any other ancient Near Eastern chronicle. You just cannot read the Jewish Bible without studying the ancient Near East. If there is a difference, it has something to do with literary quality; the book of Samuel is nice to read, something you can not maintain of the Babylonian chronicles.