From Eden to Exile : Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible by Eric H. Cline

From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible Eric H. Cline Book  2007  26.00 Rating: C+

When I was a freshman at Calvin College, I was told by my academic counselor that one of the core curriculum requirements was to take two of any classes in three disciples: either philosophy, sociology, or religion.  Philosophy has never appealed to me; I'm far too pragmatic a person.  So I took sociology and religion, one of each - religion first, because it was open and I was in one of the last groups of freshmen to register.  That Religion 101 course was the first exposure I'd had to the idea that the Bible didn't come straight from Heaven Press down to earth.  Growing up in the evangelical tradition, I'd had lots of religion.  I knew almost all of the Bible stories.  I'd read the whole Bible by the time I was 15, and parts of it many times over.  I'd gone to Sunday School and Wednesday night and heard hundreds, if not thousands of sermons.  But I had no clue as to how the Bible came to be written and compiled.  It came as quite a shock to me that there were plenty of ghostwritten books in there - books supposedly written by Paul or Isaiah or whomever, but really recorded much later by We-really-have-no-idea-whom.  Some devout guy in 100 A.D.  We think.

Considering that Calvin was a Christian college, this seemed, well, heretical to me.  The Bible was as it was, right?  The inspired Word of God.  God wrote it, using the fingers and styluses and pens of other people.  So if Noah was in there, by gum, there had been a floating ark and it had had two kinds of every animal in it.  Every kind.  And the world was created in 6 days, damn evolutionary "science."  This was history - the earliest history we had.

To pass the class, however, I had to read and familiarize myself with all of this heresy, some of which is of the same kind as Eric Cline presents in From Exile to Eden.  So I had to come to grips with the fact that in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis there are actually two creation stories, one right after the other, and they don't entirely agree with each other.  I was confronted with the idea that there are multiple Noah-type stories in antiquity, but, far from confirming the validity of Noah and explaining away some of the doesn't-really-make-much-sense aspects, these stories suggest, as Cline says, that this is a transmitted narrative, a very old story, already long in existence, that the Hebrew writer molded to fit what he wanted to say about God and man and their relationship.  In other words the stories in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible tell less about Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses (if they, in fact, did exist) than they do about the writers of Genesis.  

But, honestly, who cares about the writers of Genesis?  What do we know about them?  Virtually nothing except what they believed and wanted to pass on.  They themselves have no stories.  That's what makes Biblical analysis so hard and what shook me and my perceptions of religious faith back when I first started studying this at the young and dewy age of 18.  I believed what my professor was teaching, but it seemed so wrong.

Anyway, the book.  Cline examines seven Biblical mysteries: The Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the Exodus, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, The Ark of the Covenant, and The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  He looks at each mystery from several standpoints.  He examines the biblical accounts, determining if the account has factual flaws or obscurities that biblical scholars have cleared up lately. He takes into account any other contemporary accounts, written by the ancient non-Jews, that might corroborate or discount the biblical record.  And he examines the archeological record to see if it adds or subtracts anything.  

In most of the earliest cases, there isn't a lot of help from archeology.  The precise coordinates of the Garden of Eden are, of course, not given, so who can dig for it?  And what would they find if they did dig?  Noah's Ark was made of wood.  Wood rots.  The archeological record doesn't give the Sodom and Gomorrah, Exodus, and Jericho stories a lot of help either.  Cline writes off Sodom, questions whether Moses ever existed and dismisses Jericho as myth.  He also gives voice to the idea that there was in fact no conquest of Canaan at all.  Which should have depressed me, but relieved instead.  The idea of the ancient Hebrews as brutal ethnic cleansers has always been horrifying to me.  

The Ark of the Covenant and the Lost Tribes of Israel stories have more weight attached to them and get more "respect."  The latter has a rather satisfying explanation, but by this time in the book, I was tired of examining ancient scripture and was more or less skimming.  It all seemed a lot of mental energy to expend - participating in the debunking of holy scripture.  However, there was one paragraph that made the whole book worth reading.  It was found on page 91, attached to the examination of Moses and the Exodus.  I'll quote:

"Rather than it being a strictly historical account, the tale of the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible is interpreted by some as simply the story of an oppressed people, a theme that still resonates today as much as it did back in ancient Israel and Judah.  Israel Finkelstein perhaps said it best in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, which noted that he 'sees no contradiction between holding a proper Pesach [Passover] seder and telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt, and the fact that, in his opinion, the Exodus never occurred.'  Finkelstein said, 'I am a great believer in a total separation between tradition and research.  I myself have a warm spot in my heart for the Bible and its splendid stories.  During our Pesach seder, my two girls, who are 11 and 7, didn't hear a word about the fact that there was no Exodus from Egypt.  When they are 25, we will tell them a different story.  Belief, tradition and research are three parallel lines that can exist simultaneously.  I don't see that as a gross contradiction.'"

This is something I can use and makes reading 188 pages of unsettling biblical examination worthwhile. 

tags: books  nonfiction  bible