This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
22 July 2022 Navigate to the topical index: index-topical-hb.
I've used the term biblical ambiguities as a short-cut for what I've tried to cover with biblicalambiguities.net. The term doesn't quite cover what I'm looking for, but things-worth-noticing-about-the-bible-roughly-organized-around-the-concept-of-biblical-ambiguities.net seemed like overkill. So this page is for fleshing out the concept a little more.
To put it simply, I'm interested in places in the Bible where multiple ways of reading it appear: either because the text is unclear, or because the text seems unclear, or because readers have later done interesting things with it. The word "ambiguity" will fit some of these cases better than others.
Here's a fairly simple case. In Genesis 1:26, God says, "Let us make humanity in our image." Who is us? The text does not say. Weighing the kinds of evidence for and against various readings is the kind of thing that is well within the scope of this site.
Here's another fairly simple case. In Genesis 6:3, the Hebrew word (or phrase) beshagam appears. It appears nowhere else in classical Hebrew. When a word appears once, we call it a hapax legomenon, or, as the cool kids abbreviate it, a hapax. Hapaxes are a truly thorny problem. How can you know what they mean?
The words bnei ("sons of") and elohim (God/gods) show up all over the Bible. But when the phrase bnei elohim appears, we have questions. Are these "sons of a god" or "sons of the God" or "sons of gods"? If they are "sons of God", in what sense are they his "sons"?
The Bible is not a book where a single, original, definitive edition exists that everyone can look at. The oldest witnesses to the text of the Bible's various books disagree with each other on many things, mostly small, some larger. For example, the book of Jeremiah is very different in the Septuagint than in the Masoretic Text. The study of these kinds of disagreements, with the aim of reconstructing earlier forms of the text, is known as "textual criticism".
Sometimes, it looks as if something has gone wrong in the process of transmitting the text. For example, in Deuteronomy 32:8, the Hebrew text has bnei yisrael ("sons of Israel") in a place where bnei elohim ("sons of God") seemed to some scholars as if it would make more sense. This was later confirmed by the finding of a fragment from Qumran which which had the hypothesized bnei elohim reading. But at the time that bnei elohim was first suggested, it was a "conjectural emendation" to the text.
Different traditions include different works in their Bibles. Is Baruch, for example, part of the Bible? What about the parts of Esther and Daniel found in the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text? The answers people give to these questions vary.
Take, for example, the book of Jonah. It's about a prophet named Jonah and his adventure in bringing the city of Nineveh to repentance. Who wrote it? Why? How did they view the relationship between Israel and the Assyrian Empire? When did they write it?
A lot of these kinds of questions, for a lot of biblical books, cannot be answered with complete certainty. But they are important to understanding the Bible.
Take, for example, the book of Jonah. It's about a prophet named Jonah and his adventure in bringing the city of Nineveh to repentence. Did the events described actually happen? What, if anything, can the book of Jonah tell us about history? The answers to these questions vary from book to book, and for some books some of these questions cannot be easily settled, and various opinions exist.
Sometimes, one part of the Bible comments on another. Sometimes, the later passages re-interpret the old passages in new ways. This is interesting and worth noting. A good book that addresses this phenomenon is Michael Fishbane's Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.
In books like Genesis, sometimes we can, with varying degrees of plausibility, get an idea of what was contained in the various sources used in putting a book together. We can compare these various sources and learn things about the various ways they viewed the issues they address. We can also notice the complexities that arise when older source material is reused in new ways.
Sometimes two passages will disagree about something. For example, did Joab count 800,000 or 1,100,000 Israelite soldiers in his census? We can try to figure out how these contradictions arose, and see what they can tell us about the Bible.
The "reception history" of a passage is the history of how that passage has been interpreted. Sometimes the reception history tells you more about the Bible's readers than the Bible itself. When readers over time have done interesting things with a passage, this website is interested in that. One sort of reception history is inner-biblical exegesis, mentioned above, in which one part of the Bible does interesting things with an earlier part.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.