A Is Not A

“For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.”

George Orwell, 1984

I mentioned that I’ve been a biblical scholar, and I’ve long wanted to write about a topic I find fascinating: contradictions in the Bible. Now, if you Google “contradictions in the Bible,” depending on who you are, you’re likely to find one of two things at the top of your results: atheists.org, and Answers in Genesis. These represent polar opposites in approach, but for the most part they follow the same method: they take texts that are far apart from each other, sharing no context, and show how they either contradict each other, or merely appear to contradict each other.

These are not the droids we’re looking for. Any collection of texts as big and diverse as the Bible (Hebrew or Christian) is going to have different takes on things. You can emphasize the difference, like atheists.org, or massage them away like Answers in Genesis. Either way, you end with a flat document that is either completely untrue or completely true. The Bible, instead, is a living document, some of which is in profound tension with other parts of itself. That’s okay. Families are often in profound tension with each other, and they’re still families. Heck, that even goes for individuals.

One of the most common things both atheists.org and Answers in Genesis do is find a quote in the Hebrew Bible, and match it with something in the New Testament that contradicts it. Either way, there’s more than a whiff of anti-Semitism about these projects: neither the atheist nor the fundamentalist much likes what YHWH, the God of the Hebrew Bible, has to say. We won’t be doing that here.

What we’ll be looking at, instead, is texts that are (a) very close to each other or (b) otherwise clearly talking about the same event. We can best proceed by an example–my favorite example: Proverbs 26:4-5:

“Do not answer a fool according to his foolishness,
lest you transform into one–yes, you!”
“Answer a fool according to his foolishness,
lest he become wise in his own eyes.”

al-ta’an kesil ke-iwwalto,
pen-tisweh-lo gam-attah.
‘aneh kesil ke-iwwalto,
pen-yiheyeh chakham be’eynayw.

(All biblical translations will be mine unless otherwise noted. I will use somewhat wooden translations so they are easy to compare to the original. One of the obvious pitfalls in this business is finding a contradiction that’s really only an artifact of translation.)

If you read the Bible flat in the way atheists.org does, this is just another example of why the Bible is unreliable. If you read the Bible flat in the way Answers in Genesis does, you’re going to need to find a way to argue that these two sentences do not really contradict each other somehow, that they belong to a text that has only one level.

I don’t read it either of those ways. It’s a real contradiction in the Aristotelian sense: A/Not-A. And that’s what makes it interesting. Like life, the Bible is full of contradictions. And we have to deal with them. (Another thing we’re not going to do is invoke paradox. As a friend of mine says, “A paradox is a contradiction in the hands of a theologian.” He’s pretty sure that’s a quote, but we can’t find it. If you recognize it, pipe up!)

What I like most about Proverbs 26:4-5 is that the collector of sayings who put these two proverbs right beside each other obviously was aware of the contradiction. However, he understood both as “sayings of Solomon,” both part of a received tradition he (the proverb collectors are specified as men) could not alter or harmonize. Both verses were part of the tradition, so they both had to go in. The biblical editors were not foolish or blind. They knew what they were doing.

So where does that leave us? Most people reject the text as incoherent, refuse to see the obvious contradiction, choose one or the other verse as the right one, or invoke paradox in the face of an unknowable God. These are all ways of avoiding the issue. They are all ways of making the contradiction go away.

Non-contradiction is essential in many human fields—science and law spring to mind. But not all. Science and law are ways of focusing our minds to do specific tasks that are, evolutionarily speaking, kind of unnatural. They don’t come easy. But living an ordinary life isn’t simple either, and in living it, we are bound up in inconsistencies. Many of them are simply hypocrisy: Do as I say, not as I do. Hypocrisy is a refusal to think about inconsistency; contradiction is a refusal to look away.

Do I have the solution? No, of course not. But I do know that pretending contradictions don’t exist, or wishing them away to the cornfield, is no answer. so we’re going to look at contradictions in the Bible until we can’t find anymore. It’ll take a while. And maybe somewhere along, we’ll figure out what a truer answer looks like.