THEOLOGICAL HISTORY

Reading Genesis completely through at this point in my journey has been made easier by using a study Bible with good notes and having some books as companions like Walter Brueggemann's "An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination" and Lester Grabbe's "Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It." The study Bible helps keep the names and places straight and points out the odd customs that we would just not get as 21st century westerners. The Grabbe book deals with questions of history and historicity. Taking literally, the Bible causes many people, myself included, to do the impossible: take stories and information generally believed to have been told and retold, shaped and changed, written and re-written over centuries and declare it actual history, as we modern westerners understand history. We have a hard enough time getting the story straight on what happened during battles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a few years ago, why would we expect something better for those who wrote down remembrances of events in the OT? We Lutherans do not declare Holy Scriptures as inerrant or literally true, but we say that they are inspired, that is, that God through the Holy Spirit was at work in the events recorded and the shaping of their recording into what we call the Bible. Inspiration and inerrancy are not close to synonymous. The Bible is full of all types of literature and some types aren't concerned with "facts" but rather explanations of some point of God's relationship with us or why things are the way they are. Was God worried that humankind would build a tower high enough so that the humans would make it to heaven? Or if the humans completed it that they could do anything and be just like God? Seriously. Was God afraid of us elbowing our way into God's domain? The story does show our primal sin: our desire to be God. It does offer some explanation for what must have been obvious to the people living at the time the story was told: People speak different languages: why? I suppose it even offers an explanation for why people live in different places. You see, as a legend it contains the truth of humankind's continual descent into sin of wanting to be God, rather than trusting and obeying God. Was God in fact worried about some ziggurat tower becoming a ladder to the heavens? What do you think?