A Review of Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies

“Literary Criticism: Aesthetics as Apologetics.” Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007) 219-247.

 Avalos covers a lot of ground in this chapter. The texts he touches on include Isaiah 40, the Hebrew and Greek versions of the book of Jeremiah, Jonah, Psalm 68:21, Psalms 9-10; Psalm 35, and Psalm 137. The scholars whose work he passes in review include Robert Alter, Sakae Kubo and Walter Specht, Robert Lowth, David Noel Freedman and Frank Moore Cross, James Kugel, Jack Sasson, Stanley Gevirtz, Carroll Stuhlmueller, Hermann Gunkel, James Ackerman, Alan Cooper, Susan Niditch, Mitchell Dahood, and Phyllis Trible.

Avalos’s basic point seems to be that if a text like Isaiah 40 is a literary masterpiece, then so is the Great Hymn to Osiris, an Egyptian composition that also soars from a literary point of view. I agree: but what’s the scoop? I plan to keep reading one as a masterpiece of ancient Hebrew literature and the other as a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature.

Avalos also notes that ancient Hebrew literature is characterized by asymmetries as well as symmetries. I made the same point recently on this blog. Is Avalos channeling Roman Jakobson here, who famously noted in his analysis of Baudelaire’s Les Chats that the sonnet is based precisely upon a tension between symmetry and asymmetry? No, according to Avalos, the beauty of a text must be located in its symmetry or asymmetry, not both. On this score, Avalos’s approach to literature lacks sophistication.

Avalos tars the biblical texts he discusses with adjectives like “ugly,” “morally objectionable,” “vicious,” and “mangled.” His treatment of the book of Jonah may illustrate. He uses comments made by Jack Sasson as a foil. Sasson notes that the book of Jonah is remarkable for its “jaggedness, imbalance, asymmetry, and discord.” Sasson also urges that the book of Jonah is “haunting,” “comforting,” “serene,” and “purposeful.”

To which Avalos replies, “[W]hy not just say 'distorted,' 'aggravating,' 'annoying,' [or] 'ugly '. . .?”

That is Avalos’s take on the book of Jonah: “distorted,” “aggravating,” “annoying,” “ugly.” Ironic, I think. The book of Jonah is delightful precisely because it is permeated by a self-deprecating humor that is altogether lacking in Avalos.

If I look into the eyes of the woman I love, what do I see? I see a reflection of the gaze of love I direct towards her. Avalos looks into the eyes of the book of Jonah, and what does he see? A reflection of the spite he directs towards it. Avalos has eyes that kill.

With rare exceptions, Avalos dismisses other biblical scholars because they are, in his words, imbued with “apologetic intent.” They traffic in “meaningless or circular rationales.” Avalos is particularly incensed that Psalm 137, which he formats as prose and quotes in its entirety, has not led to an expression of revulsion among his colleagues. “None . . . use the psalm to repudiate it, eject it from the canon, or as an argument to reject the whole Bible for endorsing violence in any portion.”

Avalos takes himself very seriously. He is a man on a mission. Behind the carefully constructed scholarly apparatus, one can still discern the child evangelist he once was.¹

Avalos does not think highly of his fellow biblical scholars. In his “Introduction,” he says that what they have to say is “either bland, ambiguous, or outright fatuous. Since 1982, I have encountered only about a dozen truly memorable papers.” I’m not making this up. That’s what he says.

Shiver me timbers. If Avalos's twelve paper remark is on target, I am a world class Pollyanna. I can think of hundreds of papers I have read since 1982 that I think advance our understanding of the Bible in significant ways.

There is an anti-intellectual foundation to the approach that Avalos takes which is simply arresting.

I will say this. Ps 137, the text Avalos chooses to engage at a high point in his sermon, is well-chosen. Ps 137 is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. My feeling is that if one can embrace this text rather than be repelled by it, then one has come close to understanding the human predicament.

According to Avalos, Psalm 137 is vicious. You don’t say. In my view, the fact that this prayer is found in the Bible is a remarkable testimony to that body of literature’s ability to hit the reader with truth as hard as Tarantino does in Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill.

The Bible has an uncensored quality about it that continues to offend the pious, including pious secular humanists. I will post on this in more detail at a later date.

In my view, the humorless, missionary style of The End of Biblical Studies dooms it to irrelevance except among those on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum who suffer from the same illusions of self-importance that afflict its author. I imagine there are days when I might fall very easily into that camp, so it does me good to read Avalos. I thank him for holding a mirror up to my face. I wish him well and will continue to follow his scholarly and existential path.

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¹“I grew up in a Pentecostal Protestant home,” he says, “and I became a child evangelist soon after immigrating to the United States” (p. 26). Avalos self-identifies now as a secular humanist.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

I just spent the evening with Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire with single malt and a fire in the fire place - watching the goblins in the film. You have pulled a few out of this chapter review too! No one commented on my 'translation' of Psalm 137. Was I too just finding an apology for the bitter?

[JohnFH]

Psalm 137 with the conclusion it has always been understood to have is a challenging text. I understand why you might look for alternatives.

I hope to post on the psalm in the near future. For the moment, suffice is to say that in my view anyone whose own child has been dashed against the rocks by someone else has the moral right to pray down God's poetic justice on the one who did so. A similar point is developed masterfully by Ivan in his conversations with Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov.

That God, historically speaking, did not fulfill the request, but, at the same time, the request was preserved, are equally salient facts to keep in mind, it seems to me.

[Angela Erisman]

Hi John,

What I am curious about is why, if what Avalos has to say is so irrelevant, are so many of us spending so much bandwidth talking about it? That's not directed so much at you (as you are not the only one to discuss the book), as to the "air" for general consideration.

All of the talk about this book reminds me about how there is a social element to scholarship. If Avalos is the party pooper, why don't we simply ignore him? I haven't read the book, so I am not passing judgment on his contribution. Merely observing the discourse.

I also recognize that questions like this are not a given. Why should scholars pay at least some attention to the controversies generated by BAR? Because non-scholars read them, and might take them for "all there is" unless we contribute different perspectives to the publicly-accessible pot. So by asking the question, I am not merely trying to state the obvious.

Just food for thought.

[Angela Erisman]

PS. One of the things I really appreciate about texts like Ps 137 is that they confront us with the tensions that humans feel between things like morality, compassion, and vengeance. When I read that Psalm I feel both sympathy and outrage. Likewise, when I hear of a life wasted on death row, I feel both sympathy and outrage. I like that you point out these functions of biblical literature. Being human and being human with God, when it's "real," is often not pretty, and we learn a lot about ourselves from such texts if we pay attention. Thanks!

[JohnFH]

Hi Angela.

Thanks for your comments.

One reason, I think, that Avalos receives attention, even if his books will be pumped one day and forgotten the next, is that he is a consistent thinker. He is genuinely pained that others who are former fundamentalists like him, or former Roman Catholics, are not as consistent as he is. I think he has a point. Why don't they join him in his crusade to rid the world of the influence of the Bible, Shakespeare, and everything else written by violent, religious, and superstitious people of the past?

Another reason is the novelty factor. A biblical scholar trained at the best universities who is a committed, intensely pious, atheist. You don't see one of those every day.

A final reason, in my view, is that Avalos is a utopian thinker. He is not good at bringing this out, because he is relentlessly negative in his rhetoric. But the utopia he believes in is very well-known, and wonderfully expressed not that long ago, in the following words:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one.

For Judaism and Christianity to be potent cultural forces, they have to vehiculate utopias at least as winsome as that of John Lennon. I think both faiths are far more vital, complex, and enduring than anything Lennon said or thought, but I also think that Jews and Christians are lousy at driving this point home to those who have no vital connection to either faith.

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

Oh come on. These petty crusaders are all alike. They lack the sophistication to understand and really plumb the depths of ANY literature, much less the Bible, so they get angry at it. And then everyone stands back and gives a nice little opera clap. All the while we're simply witnessing the agonies of the mediocre when confronted by genius. It's the twentieth century writ small, mumblingly scrawled in crabbed letters on crumpled sheets in a damp and dingy basement of pseudo-profundity.

[Mark]

It's too bad Avalos was exploited as a child. I'm sure his recovery from that abuse has been traumatic for him.

His role in driving Guillermo Gonzalez out of Iowa is consistent with his contempt for other academics. I provided some links in a post a while back: http://alterfaith.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/self-loathing-professors/