Tradition and the Biblical Text

by Richard W. Coffen  |  7 March 2025  |  

You saw Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof singing, “Tradition, tradition! Tradition!” That’s the theme of this essay: specifically, the role tradition plays in our reading of the biblical texts.

Traditional behaviors aren’t necessarily wrong, but they can be arbitrary. For example, Americans open gifts in the presence of givers, which surprises people in some cultures because it makes us seem greedy rather than, as we would assume, appreciative. Why do we do this? “Tradition!” When we Americans get a taxi, we slip into the backseat, although in many cultures, people hop into the front seat. “Tradition!”

Presuppositions

Fairness prompts me to spell out a few assumptions. 

• The Judeo-Christian Scriptures are communications. 
• These communications, I believe, resulted from divine and human impulse. 
• In order to communicate, communications should have communicatees specified by the communication. 
• “Noise” of various kinds can impede each stage of communication. These basics form the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. 
• Unless good reasons prevail otherwise, Occam’s Razor (the simpler, the better) prevails. 
• For sake of argument, I’ll assume that during the 15th century B.C., the 1440s (some scholars specify the 13th century, the 1200s) Moses and YHWH wrote the Pentateuch. Toward the end of the first century A.D., the ’90s, the book of Revelation was penned. (Not all scholars agree with these dates.)

And this, which is probably most important:

• The cultural context for all biblical communications was the ancient Near East—a culture very distant from where you and I read today.

Language & errors

The historical fact is that at the time of communicating to the ancient Hebrew people, no Hebrew language and alphabet existed. If Moses wrote the first word of Genesis, he used the proto-sinaitic alphabet: instead of each Egyptian hieroglyph picturing a word, each hieroglyph stood for the initial sound of a word. The hieroglyph 𓈖 pictured water. In Canaanite, that term was mayim. Therefore, that hieroglyph came to stand for the sound of the first letter of the word for water: “mmm”—a vocalization with the lips closed. (We retain a remnant of that shape in the English alphabet, inherited via Latin, in our wavy “M.”) Moses might have written that first word as a pictogram, but through a series of steps that have been charted by scriptologists, the characters of that first clause evolved to become (read right to left):

During the subsequent 24 centuries, many handwritten copies of the Hebrew text were made. Sometimes a copyist would inadvertently introduce an error—scholars call it a “gloss.” How many glosses exist? Between 200,000 and 400,000! Bart Ehrman has said that there are more variants among the handwritten copies than the total number of words in the New Testament! 

Scholars insist that only a few of these glosses alter the meaning of the text—but they are there.

Autographs & inerrancy

More than 10,200 manuscripts contain the Old Testament or parts of it. In comparison, there are only 643 extant copies of the Iliad, 10 copies of Gallic Wars, two manuscripts of Tacitus’ Histories and Annals. There are 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 in other ancient languages (Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian).

Those who espouse biblical inerrancy insist that the original manuscripts (“autographs”) are without errors or variants. However, this claim is unprovable because there isn’t a single manuscript available that’s an “autograph”—that is, no one has a manuscript in Moses’ or Paul’s actual handwriting. All existing manuscripts are copies of copies of copies of copies. Inerrant autographs are figments of the imagination.

Seventh-day Adventists have an interesting illustration of this. There are many “autograph” writings of Ellen White—50,000 pages that she wrote, some in her handwriting. “The entire 50,000-page collection is available for study and research at 23 White Estate offices worldwide,” says the Estate on their website. Study of her handwritten pages shows errors: spelling, syntactical, grammatical, historical, and others. Her “bookmakers” corrected what she’d written before dissemination.

With such an example, Adventists shouldn’t be tempted by the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in autographs.

Context & authority

As to authority of Scripture, a significant issue is the occurrence of scientific, ethical, and theological concepts straight from the ancient Near East—a culture that is too long ago for us to understand fully. As Jan M. Long in The Sacred Hill We Climb has put it: 

“Some of the ideas that come to us from the written sacred records of antiquity are not consistent with what we now know about the physical world. Additionally, we must contend with writings that are not entirely consistent with each other in all particulars—Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an, etc.” (p. 25). 

Suppose you were from another world culture, and came to a Christian nation. Suppose your neighbor hands you a book, admonishing: “Here’s an authoritative book that will tell you about everything—biology, geology, astronomy, history, and theology.” You glance at the publication date: 1611. You investigate further. The initial section of the book is nearly 3,500 years old! Why should you regard the information as authoritative? 

Here are some biblical data that 21st-century westerners struggle with.

• YHWH created the entire universe in six days (Exodus 20:11). 
• God needed to rest after creation week (Genesis 2:2) and was refreshed (Exodus 31:17).
• During menstruation, women are unclean for seven days a month—84 days every year. Assuming a woman gave birth to a boy, she’d be unclean for an additional 40 days. Assuming she delivered a girl as well, she’d be unclean for 80 days. YHWH ruled that during this time, coitus was taboo (Leviticus 15:24; 18:19; 20:18). Depending on how many children she bore, she’d be unclean and untouchable for a significant part of her year (Leviticus 15:19-27). 
• YHWH’s anger “is quickly kindled” (Psalm 2:11, RSV); he “has indignation every day” (Psalm 7:11, RSV).
• Warrior YHWH (Exodus 15:3) trained David’s “hands for war” (Psalm 18:34, RSV).
• YHWH “could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron” (Judges 1:19).
• YHWH commanded a war crime: “Kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Samuel 15:3, RSV). Today we would call that genocide.
• YHWH gave King David the wives of his predecessor (2 Samuel 12:8).
• YHWH inspired false prophecies (2 Chronicles 18:20-22).
• “There shall no evil [“harm” (New Revised Standard Version); “grave trouble” (New King James Version); “disaster” (Holman Christian Standard Bible)] happen to the just” (Proverbs 12:21). That doesn’t seem true to experience.
• Jesus recommended amputation of body parts for sins (Matthew 5:29,30).
• Jesus lied, saying he wasn’t going to the feast; his brothers later saw him there (John 7:8-10).

Mostly, we ignore these problematic passages in favor of those we understand more easily—but even the ones we claim to understand, we read through our own culture. And that means traditions!

Antiquity & authority

The Judeo-Christian Scriptures are just one set of ancient holy writs. Why don’t we accept others as authoritative because of their antiquity? 

• The Kesh Temple Hymn, the oldest surviving literature in the world, was written c.2600 B.C.—at least 1,160 years prior to the Pentateuch.
• The Pyramid Texts are at least 1,000 years older than the Torah. 
• The Rigveda from India were written around 1700 B.C., at least 260 years prior to the dating of the Torah. 

We recognize as authoritative documents that are nearly 3,500 years old but not religious texts written as long as 4,600 years ago! We must concede that if we were born in a different culture, with different traditions, we might regard some of these as having authority, instead of just the Torah. As it is, we inherited a tradition (there’s that word again) that the Jewish and Greek texts are authoritative, and not, say, the Bhagavad Gita.

Communication

So we return to principles of communication that I mentioned at the beginning. The distant age and culture of the Bible produce “noise” that blocks the efficacy of communication. At this distance in time, our best effort is to decode those ancient communications made to ancient peoples, and then isolate any concepts that make sense to those of us who no longer share the mindset of ancient Near Easterners. 

And we must admit that the way we do this interpretation, and how we choose which documents we interpret, has—at least to some extent—to do with our “tradition!”

Richard W. Coffen is a retired vice president of editorial services at Review and Herald Publishing Association. He writes from Green Valley, Arizona.

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