The Why Question- With Jacob Wright

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Jacob Wright (0:27)

That's where the Bible really gets going in interesting ways. It's in a certain sense, very real sense, all responses to what makes the people, what brings us together as a people, how do we survive? You know, what role does a kingdom play in all? How is that not everything? What do we do when that kingdom is defeated and conquered?

And the biblical project, I think, is just this magnificent collaborative effort to prepare for that or to respond to it in very honest ways and also creative ways.

Daniel McClellan (1:03)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Daniel Beecher (1:04)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Daniel McClellan (1:06)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Daniel Beecher (1:18)

Things are good. We've got a great guest today, hawking a book that I have found very interesting.

Why don't you introduce him, Dan?

Daniel McClellan (1:27)

Yeah. So this is Jacob Wright. He is a professor of Hebrew Bible at the Kandler School of Theology at Emory University down in Hotlanta.

And welcome to the show, Jacob.

Jacob Wright (1:38)

Well, it's nice to be here, Dan and Dan. And it's not too hot today. It's actually like maybe 45, 50 degrees. I guess that's pretty low for you.

Daniel McClellan (1:47)

Yeah, right now it's 31 where I am.

Daniel Beecher (1:51)

So I imagine in Atlanta, the people are walking around in full on winter parkas at that temperature.

Jacob Wright (1:56)

I had my gloves on to go out.

Daniel McClellan (2:00)

Well, as long as it's getting toward wintertime, and so fewer people being carried off by mosquitoes, I imagine right now.

Jacob Wright (2:08)

That's true. I just know I got a call from the exterminator for the mosquitoes. And they said this is the only three months that they're not going to spray for mosquitoes, but they'll pick up in March. So there you go.

Daniel McClellan (2:20)

Well, hopefully that's because they're not around and not because they just not worried about it right now.

Jacob, you've just come out with a book through Cambridge University Press, Why the Bible Began, an alternative history of scripture and its origins. And we've been Dan and I have been poking around in the book. And there have been a handful of books in recent years that have talked about this kind of thing, both scribal practices behind the composition of the Bible, source critical theories behind the composition of the Bible, how the Bible got started. Can you tell us why you decided to throw your hat into this ring? What was the impetus for this book?

Jacob Wright (2:58)

Thanks for that, Dan.

I mean, the why question I still think has not really received the attention it deserves. It's a question that we as scholars, I think, Dan, you would agree with this, to explain why something happens is a really tricky and messy problem. We can say what, where, who, when, but why? That's a philosophical issue. And it's like, why is there something better than nothing? And it gets really to existential kinds of questions, but also to culturally difficult questions. Like, does it say something about the superiority of monotheism, or is it about Jewish genius, or all these kinds of really culturally problematic things that we want to avoid? And we set aside that question, and I think to our detriment, because the answers to the why that we have, informs the way we think, but we're not doing it in an explicit way.

And the one, the thing that really informs us is an answer that had been provided long ago to the why question, and it's Wellhausen's answer.

And he began, Wellhausen was this scholar in the late 1800s in Germany, and then your work engages him still, right? We all are working in the shadows and in the following Wellhausen. And what his approach was to this why question is that what emerges in Israel and Judah is some kind of transition to religion, right? From a political community to what he called Das Judentum, Judaism, which was a new artificial construct, and it was a separation of religion from the political sphere, which we might appreciate in our democracies. But for Wellhausen, that was problematic because he wanted a, he didn't want the French imperialism of the age. He was working after that where he wanted Germany to be a spiritual nation, and which religion and nature and all of that came together. And he kind of was poking his finger, not at Jews, really. He didn't have that much, but at Christians and at the church. And he did that by showing how the church is really the inheritance, claims the inheritance of what begins in the Hebrew Bible, and how that is something that we need to avoid. So he had this idea of the why question. Well, the Bible exists because it's scripture for a religion. There was this nation, and it was destroyed, and something new emerges from it.