The Inescapable Personhood of God

I’m grateful to Joshua Berman, R. R. Reno, and James Diamond for their learned and thoughtful responses to my essay, “Is the Torah a Work of Philosophy?,” in which I mainly addressed myself to Kenneth Seeskin’s new book, Thinking about the Torah. In replying now to their observations and criticisms, I hope to shed further light on the challenges and pitfalls confronting anyone who would try to view the Bible through the lens of philosophy—and, in the process, to clear up some misunderstandings that my essay may have created.

Joshua Berman points to one especially important feature of the ancient Near Eastern world in which the Bible originated: its high tolerance for contradiction or, to put the point negatively, its lack of systematic thought and organization. This he rightly connects to the centrality of family life in the society of the time, for in families “ideas and attitudes [are] unexpressed in systematic fashion.” In this sense, the Bible is no outlier to the general pattern. Even “when the Bible does communicate its ideas in writing,” Berman adds, “it is always with only partial expression, very much framed for the needs of the moment and the given situation.” For that reason, the Bible’s “separate and apparently incompatible statements about creation” that I adduced in my essay make eminent sense if we remember that they are “tailored in each case to the spiritual needs of an audience and its time.”

Berman is correct that in this sense the Bible is the opposite of most philosophical works (there are exceptions), for the latter prize systematic thinking, precision, and a keen awareness of alternative ideas and the need to refute them. To the extent that we attempt to fit the Bible as a whole or even individual texts into a template borrowed from philosophy (or its cousin, systematic theology), we run a high risk of distorting its messages.