I was recently received a question about inerrancy from a student in my MEMRA institute. Readers here know I’ve spent a lot of time on that subject (see the archived page). My short answer was that the difficulty in talking about inerrancy and errancy is defining what constitutes an error. That is in the eye of the beholder, and I’m no exception. Providentially, I was studying Genesis 48 for a project at work (honestly, how cool is it to be able to say that?) and came across a very good illustration of the difficulty. I thought I’d share it with you.
In Gen 48:21-22 we read (ESV):
21 Then Israel said to Joseph, Behold, I am about to die, but God will be with you and will bring you again to the land of your fathers. 22 Moreover, I have given to you rather than to your brothers one mountain slope that I took from the hand of the Amorites with my sword and with my bow.
Gen 48:21-22 refers back to the massacre at Shechem perpetrated by Simeon and Levi in the wake of the their sister Dinah’s rape (Genesis 34). “Mountain slope” is Hebrew shekem, which is an obvious wordplay on the Hebrew place name (and personal name) shechem. Genesis 33:19 informs us that Jacob purchased a plot of land (cf. the “slope”) from Hamor of Shechem–he did not take it by force. The plot of land was likely intended as a burial site (recall Abraham had purchased a plot of land from the Hittite Ephron for that purpose; Gen 23). Hamor is described as a “Hivite” in Gen 34:2.The text of Genesis 34 is quite clear that Jacob had nothing to do with the massacre and rebuked his sons in harsh terms for what they did. It is also clear they left Shechem and did not occupy it. (Read the chapter if it is not familiar).
That summary alerts us to two basic problems in Gen 48:21-22. One is easily adressed; the other is not. Let’s take the easy one first.
1. Hamor of Shechem, the Hivite — why is he referenced with “Amorite” in Gen 48:22?
Briefly, both Amorite and Hivite are used in the Old Testament broadly, meaning that Hamor could theoretically have been called either in normal discourse. For example, the term Amorite shows mixed ethnicity and geography. In Josh 10:5-6 two of the five Amorite kings are placed in Jerusalem and Hebron. Those two places are also associated with the Jebusites and Hittites, respectively (cp. Ezek 16:3, 45). The Amorites are also placed outside Canaan in the Transjordan (Deut 1:44). That scholars take the Amorites as the ancient Amurru makes this distribution comprehensible, since the Amurru kingdom extended from parts of Lebanon into Syria and northern Canaan (the location of Shechem) and the Transjordan. The Old Testament also places the Hivites in these same areas, and so that term has the same ethnic/geographical imprecision (see Gen 36:23; Josh 11:3; Judg. 3:3; 2 Sam 24:19).
So the answer to this question is that Hamor could be called either since either works.
2. “With Sword and Bow”?
The greater problem is how to reconcile the statement of Gen 48:22, that Jacob had taken the slope (Shechem) with his sword and bow, when Genesis 34 has him opposing what happened thereand buying a piece of land there (Gen 33:19), something he would not have had to do if he had conquered it prior to the treachery in chapter 34. Compounding the quandary is the fact that when Joshua enters the Promised Land he does not have to conquer Shechem; he simply holds a covenant renewal ceremony there. Indeed, the only conquest of Shechem at any point in Israels history occurs centuries later under Abimelech in Judges 9.
There are three possible answers to the problem:
a. Gen 48:22 contains an error (or Gen 34 lies to the reader).
b. Gen 48:22 preserves a lost tradition that is true, but the final editor(s) of Genesis were careless (or indifferent), in that they didn’t bother to reconcile the passages. This would be a case of scribal carelessness that is *not* an error. Their work just lacks clarity. (But would some call that an error?) This answer suggests there is a way to reconcile them but it is unknown.
c. Gen 48:22 preserves a lost tradition that is not actually related to Genesis 33:19 and Genesis 34. If this is the case, the editors were also careless (or indifferent), since they don’t inform the reader there is no relationship, avoiding the confusion. This answer suggests they don’t need reconciliation, but are best explained separately–but there is no data to tell us how to do that.
So, is there an error?
I think the best response to this (and “response” does not mean “solution”) is “I don’t know.” I don’t see any of the three options as compelling or more or less reasonable than any of the others. In other words, I see no reason to pick one and reject the others. So I don’t know if there is an error here or not.
Hence the problem.
What if Jacob was just taking responsibility for what his sons did? What if, in his mind, it was as good as him having done it?
He rejected what his sons did – and later (Gen 49) in his deathbed speeches, he still condemns both Simeon and Levi for the incident. He never owned it.
Don’t you think you can give this one a ‘pass’ based on how you deal with scientific inerrancy? In a similar vein to that, can we expect the compiler of Genesis to be able to look up the details on wikipedia of an event which happened hundreds of years before and had time to develop differing details in different accounts?
I’m just saying I don’t know which option is best. It’s fine with me if the author just wasn’t interested in correlating the two items. I just don’t know if that’s what’s going on. Hence I can’t consider it an error, but I don’t know the best way to talk about it.
Very good illustration and lucid as usual.
thanks
Michael,
Could Israel/Jacob be speaking there as the representative man for the family? As a representative for his entire family and their fortunes and misfortunes?
The reason I wonder is the alternative views (a)&(b) of scribal indifference/error just seem out of place knowing ancient Jewish culture.
They took the Torah awfully seriously, imagining they missed things like this w/o some group oversight is difficult. A screwup like this would need to be one lazy scribe w/o oversight or checks and balances.
I picture them as very much like rural Arabic culture today. Kenneth Bailey has written some nice things after spending ~ 40 years in Arab lands.
They have oral traditions and a strong ethic of “control to prevent mis transmission”.
Elderly over seers listen and correct if the transmission is erroneous, it is hard to imagine the ancient Jews being less careful.
The representative man idea is part of the Hebrew cultural milleu, i.e. Adam for mankind, Noah and Abraham and Jacob as the “new Adams”, Jesus as the “final/2cd Adam”, etc.
Option (c) may be more likely, I’m just asking here.
The apparent contradiction is so obvious and Jacob is so significant in the narrative of the Bible and ancient Jews were so dedicated to Torah that I believe options (a)&(b) are the least likely answers.
Jacob never owned this event in any way – even on his deathbed he still (again) condemns it (Gen 49).
I’m just saying I don’t know which option is best. It’s fine with me if the author just wasn’t interested in correlating the two items. I just don’t know if that’s what’s going on. Hence I can’t consider it an error, but I don’t know the best way to talk about it.
MSH,
Two questions:
(1) Couldn’t it be possible that old man Israel was wrong? I mean, the concept of inerrancy doesn’t at all suggest that fallible men (as quoted in the bible) are correct in their statements.
(2) Under option (C), why shouldn’t the editors be indifferent, since the lost tradition has very little to do with the purpose of the Scriptures or perhaps the statement by Israel is just another way of establishing a historical fact, another avenue of communication if you will?
Thanks,
Matthew
I’m a little leery of the “inerrantly recorded error” view. I’m more comfortable with the author just not being interested in correlating the two items. I just don’t know if that’s what’s going on. Hence I can’t consider it an error, but I don’t know the best way to talk about it.
Mike,
This may or may not be the time to ask this, but at least there’s a mention of Shechem in here to keep it mildly related and this is probably the best shot I’ll get. As an editor and writer (albeit one who reads only one language), certain things stick out to me in a narrative as being incongruous with the story that is actually being told. When it happens in English, it often serves a higher purpose in the narrative such as allusion or foreshadowing. When I see it happen in the Old Testament, my red flag goes up that there may something more going on than I understand.
This one (verses 15-17) hit me the other night when I was reading Genesis 37, and I’m curious as to whether or not there’s something (an allusion, foreshadowing, anything) in this section or if it is simply the author adding what appears to be fluff for fluff’s sake:
Gen 37:14 So he said to him, Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word. So he sent him from the Valley of Hebron, and he came to Shechem. 15 And a man found him wandering in the fields. And the man asked him, What are you seeking? 16 I am seeking my brothers, he said. Tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock. 17 And the man said, They have gone away, for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.
To my limited mind, 15-17 seem entirely irrelevant and, if this were a narrative written in English that I was editing professionally, it is something I would suggest strongly that the author remove. Is there something more going on here than meets my eye?
Thanks,
DT
There’s naturally a lot of speculation in rabbinic material about this “man” – particularly since the “man” of Gen 32:22-31 turns out to be a divine being, most likely the Angel of YHWH, and so YHWH in that form. However, there’s nothing here to suggest the man was anything unusual. Anything said is speculation. It simply gets Joseph to Dothan, and so in that sense, it isn’t intrusive.
What if Jacob bought the land and then he had to fight for it at some later point ? He can still hold fast his disagreement with the actions of the others, I mean it’s not a detailed comprehensive history thats given it can be both events happened, misunderstandings and cloudy history dont count for errors with me. I dont see why it has to be a “either or” ,why not “a both and” ?
right – and the “later point” is never noted or explained (this is in the list of possibilities). If this is the case, the author / editor(s) have no interest in explaining it — one can speculate they assumed readers would know of such a tradition from some other source. My point was that I don’t know this is the case, and neither does anyone else.
Fair point. I guess i dont agree with the policy of giving “Error” as an option for a text that has possible explanations. Granted these possibilities may never be realized due to some some oral history being lost… still the conclusion is not a necessary inference to “error” though it may always remain possible conclusion. Kudos to you for being honest and upfront, i’m just weary that detractors may think they have gained ground by immediately crying “Error” when logic dictates otherwise, leaps of logic are not unknown among scholars Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulout spring to mind here. Good blog !
Would you agree with this statement by J.A Alexander ?
It is best, however, as in all such cases, to leave the discrepancy unsolved rather than to solve it by unnatural and forced constructions. Although we may not be able to explain it, and the multitude of cases in which riddles once esteemed insoluble have since been satisfactorily settled, should encourage us to hope for like results in other cases”
I could agree with it, but it doesn’t strike me as something to be agreed to so much as it is a policy of simple honesty.
right – I can’t say it’s an error either since that option isn’t compelling (i.e., it cannot overturn the others).
I just love this.
It is timely to my recent personal study,and it is vintage MSH.
I dunno either, but I do know that our God is not a pre-wired machine
OK, Since you have corrected me on my thinking – thank you by the way, and if (c) is the correct way to think about it (which was my line of reasoning before I even read that option.) How is it that a scribe (if you think it is a scribal error) is careless in doing this? Don’t we generally leave out information in stories all the time that we do not think are pertinent in the long run? I guess I just am never really bothered by absence of information. My line of reasoning would just be to say that we don’t know what exactly Jacob was referring too. Now if you want to wrangle with what appears to be a clear contradiction, and is either scribal error, or something else is afoot, look at this:
Matthew 12:3 –> compare with 1 Samuel 21:1.
I have tried to unravel this for a long time to no avail.
it could be characterized as careless, but that assumes there was an intent to explain — which itself we don’t know. It could be simply a lack of interest, which isn’t uncommon elsewhere (e.g., the biblical writers don’t bother to tell us why their genealogies are selective — that has to be figured out — they may assume the reader fully capable of doing that).
“they may assume the reader fully capable of doing that”.
Negative and positive readers it seems.
I can’t find evidence of any ancient non Christian Jewish or pagan writings that seek to make textual comparative dialectic against Jesus’ claims.
That tells me this wasn’t such an issue back then.
The writings we can access are sometimes Christian responses to them, such as Tertullian’s & Origen’s early ones.
There and in the Talmud the negativity is directed at Jesus and Mary pretty much saying they are the opposite of the Gospel narratives.
Origen’s retort to Celsus, that was a philosophical debate between Celsus’ position that Plato’s logic exceeded the Biblical logic or not.
However, I can’t find any evidence of a dialectic style disputing the Matthean references to the OT prophecies linking them to Jesus for example ( like the current Isaiah 7:14 debate or claims Nazareth didn’t exist in the OT era so “He shall be called a Nazarene” is a fraud) or examples of what we today are reading about, textual deviations/discrepancies, etc.
All the surface contradictions today would have been great stuff to counter the Jesus movement in the first say 10 centuries. Especially by Jews among Jews.
It’s mystifying we have these cases today and not until near the reformation era can we find these type attacks.
Did the non Christian activists ignore this avenue, did the ancients not have scroll access ( surely the rabbinical leaders did?), were the post 70 AD rabbis lazy or did the apparent problems not exist?
I tend to think they didn’t care as much. The Jewish tolerance of contradiction within their oral (later codified) traditions may give us some insight here, but I don’t know how much.
I am looking at your other views as I read UR. And here I find you essentially taking a position that does not affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. To say that you do not know if there is an error in Scripture is to deny the claim that Scripture is inerrant.
Wrong. I use the terms inerrancy and inspiration. They don’t make me nervous. But you apparently don’t realize that there are about a half dozen different definitions of both terms. See the third video at the link below:
http://www.nakedbiblepodcast.com/shows/
My remark really isn’t about definitions. It is about this comment at the end of your post:
[So, is there an error?
I think the best response to this (and “response” does not mean “solution”) is “I don’t know.”]
If I affirm that the Scripture is necessarily inerrant, a strong modal claim, then I cannot very well turn around and answer a question that implies that an error is possible. If an inerrant text is the basic commitment and that basic commitment is joined with the basic commitment of a self-interpreting text, then it seems the one thing that can be ruled out up front is “error.”
Whatever the solution, error is ruled out up front. Textual issues, lost tradition, divine intentional omission.
A better response would have been: No, definitely not an error in the autograph to be sure. There are other, far more plausible explanations than entertaining the possibility of an error.
I may be misreading you but that seems pretty easy to do in this post if that is the case. When talking about the possibility of error in the original, I would do my best to make sure that I minimize the likelihood of being misread.
Textual errors are errors. They aren’t fabrications. The original text may resolve the situation, but since we don’t have that, I can’t say I know that’s the solution. I;m not saying there isn’t a solution. I’m saying I don’t know what it is with any certainty.
Then I think that is exactly how you should have stated it in the post. But to ask the question: is there an error in the text? and to answer with “I don’t know” is not in keeping with an evangelical view of inerrancy. We all know that the copies have errors. We all know inerrancy does not extend to any particular manuscript. That was my concern and I am glad you have addressed.
I am allowed to state the idea in different ways. And it’s clear by now, so I’m not going to invent more ways. Anyone following this thread will know where I’m at.
One of my gripes about Scholars is that they have fully adopted the culture’s way of playing word games. There are a thousand different ways to say that “the autographs” contained errors without actually coming right out and saying it. It is usually the case that when someone is given an opportunity to speak clearly on a subject and instead of doing so, they couch the language and couch the language some more, that it usually means they do NOT wish to be clear on the matter ON PURPOSE. It is a coward’s way of communicating in my opinion. Some call it scholarly, but I think Paul would have called it something else. Wouldn’t you agree?
For the record, so that you know where I am coming from, I am going to state it plainly and clearly so that it will be very difficult to misinterpret my view of Scripture:
I affirm wholeheartedly and without doubt or hesitation that the original writings of the Old and New Testament Canon as we currently possess them were the product of God supernaturally moving holy men to write in a way that those men were protected from error in everything they recorded, included matters of history, science, and faith. Moreover, I am confident in the art and science of textual criticism and believe we have essentially a reliable copy of the original autograph in our modern copies of Scripture. Can you make a similar statement?
I already have, on this blog. But you don’t seem to realize that not every problem is cured by comparing manuscripts.
I am not talking about the mss. I am interested in the clearest statement you can make regarding the autographs. Inerrant or not. Anyone with the slightest education understands the challenges of the mss. Surely you understand why a new reader would be interested in your position on inerrancy, right? It is no secret that many evangelical scholars are compromised on the doctrine. Men have been fired from solid schools for adopting positions that either contradicted inerrancy and/or compromised it. And I think such actions are easily defensible given what Christian scholars, true Christian scholars are called to: the instruction and defense of Christian Scripture as the Word of God.
I know of no evangelical scholar who classifies textual variants as “errors.” When we talk about errors in the text, the referent is the original text. An editor making a copying error has no bearing on the integrity of the text. It would have been better had you said it more precisely rather than leaving open the possibility that some readers may think that YOU think that the original contained errors.
I’m not talking about textual criticism here (errors in manuscript tradition). But I can see the confusion my last reply created. “Textual problem” is better in this case, as there is no alternative manuscript reading in the discussion of this instance. I think the rest of what I said in the reply and the original post is clear — I don’t know if we have an error here. I’m personally predisposed to think that if we were aware of all the real-time details of the situation, there would be no error. But we aren’t, so I’m telling the truth — WE DON’T KNOW. So, it’s unwarranted to call the item an error. It’s also unwarranted to say we know the answer when we don’t.
Is it proper to say, we don’t know the details behind this event enough to reconcile the two passages but we do know this?While there could be an error in the copy of the MSS, we do know that there was no error when this text was originally written down. I am not claiming that all textual problems can be solved in this life. What I am pinpointing is a basic evangelical presupposition and hoping that when we speak of such matters we do our best to ensure that that presupposition always receives the attention it is due given its significance.
The first line is a bit confusing, but this line of yours
we do know that there was no error when this text was originally written down
Is something I’d agree with.
My predisposition (like I just said in the one before this) is that, if we had all the facts in the real-time situation, we’d get the answer and there would be no error. I’m content to leave it at that without making up an answer.
just a thought to lighten up a bit — maybe it could just be one of those father son fish stories,
maybe if one would look at it from this way — Gen 34:26- 30 , in verse 30 Jacob said to Simeon and Levi , Ye have troubled me to stink among the inhabitants of the land etc. — and then if you read in Gen 49: 5 he is stating in the Blessing exactly what they did , but is it not that in their culture the Father was the head and was as much to blame or more than the son who did this terrible thing…. this is how I read this and as I go over it again , my soul still sees it this way …… Thanks for reading
so sorry I forgot to add that possibly his , Jacob’s sword and bow was that of the Lord’s …. Gen 35 : 1 God tells Jacob to rise and go to Bethel , v4 and they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand etc.. and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem and then v5 and they journeyed and the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob so altogether Jacob is to blame for what his sons did but it is God his sword , his protector.
so I posted a thought on this and have yet to hear back … it has been a while …. realizing that you are a very busy man , but am wondering if you could be as quite a few are, not willing to have a point made straight from the bible … I believe the point I made should be looked at and shared Thank you ,
All I care about is what is defensible from the text. Quoting something from a translation is often not as “sure” as you might think. If the text can sustain a point, then it’s on the table for me.
hey Mike — maybe you have read my post here in Disqus — Praise God to HIS GLORY , GRACE is found ….. 1 Corinthians 15 : 1-4 …… have you found the proper text so I can see how I am misreading this ? God will fight for us , he is our strength …. Mike all I want to do is help with understanding the Word of God …. religion has muddy the waters and taken away the POWER of God’s holy ones …. let me help do that along with you and the very few others that feel the same way …. Blessed be your day …. .