Mere days short of the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding, the state of Texas passed legislation to make the Bible required reading in public schools statewide. Including both the “Old Testament” and the New Testament, the bill would impact 5 million students and effectively spit in the face of this country’s founding ideals.
The great irony is that the decision that the Texas Board of Education made COULD be an incredibly insightful one, yet also one that fundamentally undermines the core beliefs that motivated the plan in the first place. From a purely academic perspective, studying the Bible as literature is a rich and vibrant form of scholarship, inviting all kinds of conversation about voice, cultural history, motivations, and motifs. But in order to gain any actual value in studying the literature of the Bible, one would first have to agree to the terms that the Bible is a book of metaphors and stories, therefore undermining the “historical accuracy” of the text. And that isn’t what Texas wants at all.
You don’t have to go far to see what I mean. In Genesis 1, we are told the story of the creation of the world in 7 days. This is the classic version most of us know by heart. Yet, in Genesis 2:4, we see an entirely new telling of the story. Instead of humanity being created on the sixth day with male and female created at the same time, this version says, “When the Eternal God made earth and heaven – when no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the Eternal God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth – the Eternal God formed man from the dust of the earth. God blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:4-7) So let us get this straight: in the first chapter, human beings were the very last act of the creative process, while the second telling in Genesis 2 depicts almost everything after the man was created. How are we, as readers, supposed to square a text that actively contradicts itself?
The very beginning of our Torah and the Bible as a whole clearly contains two distinct imaginations of how the universe was created. From a historical perspective, this is unacceptable. But from a literary perspective, this is a valuable opportunity to understand the text’s purpose. This is almost certainly two distinct imaginings of the origins of the universe, each likely created in different contexts by different people. Through the process of taking the early oral tradition of proto-Judaism and turning it into the singular narrative we know today, an editor spliced the two stories together to convey some kind of message. Perhaps that message is that we shouldn’t worry so much about the details that we forget the divine gift that is life. Perhaps it was an attempt to harmonize two different iterations of the tradition that had diverged at some point in our national identity. Perhaps there is a third reason that has been lost to history. Whatever the reason, exploring and dissecting these intricacies would make for an incredibly thoughtful, insightful education for children navigating media literacy and storytelling in their daily lives. Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with what is actually going on.
No, Texas did not make this decision because of the Bible’s rich cultural history or out of a deep respect for Biblical Criticism. It did so as a petty attempt to impose Christian values upon students in a country that was founded with the very notion of preventing this kind of behavior. And in so doing, not only does the Board of Education do violence to the religious freedom of all non-Christian students in their system, but they also do a disservice to the beauty and complexity of the sacred text that we share.
As a rabbi, I feel comfortable saying that the Bible is the most interesting, insightful, and impactful book ever written. And that is true because of a multitude of values, from pedagogical excellence to sociological insights. And none of those are accomplished with the simple-minded imposition that Texas is foisting upon its students. And we can’t really afford that, especially in a state that currently ranks 30th in the nation in education.
Rabbi Austin Zoot is the Associate Successor at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.