Learning from the Bible

What It Might Do for Young American Undergraduates: A Proposal

by Geoffrey Clarfield, NEW ENGLISH REVIEW (March 2018)

Moses Abandoned, Sadao Watanabe, 1979

he United States has for most of its history prided itself on a moral exceptionalism that is Biblically inspired. It finally has its own Museum of the Bible. It has taken two hundred and twenty-five years for this to happen, ever since the United States signed the peace treaty with its former British ruler, beginning an independence that has lasted to this day, and which has been a beacon of hope for all peoples and nations struggling to be free.

I have visited the museum web site, and I intend to visit the museum soon. I have also spoken to a senior staff member of the museum at some length. As a former museum curator, myself, I hope that this museum will be part of the pushback against the cultural Marxism that now imbues most of our educational and cultural institutions and that it will help us return our children to the political values of ethical monotheism, which are the foundations of the English-speaking democracies and their like-minded allies in new democracies such as India and Israel. This article/proposal goes some way towards showing how that can be enhanced by sponsoring a seminar abroad in Israel focusing on the Bible and Western democracy.

When I look at museums I usually assume that they are a means towards an end, some sort of “public good,” a term much loved by the World Bank. In addition to its current mandate, I hope I am not wrong in assuming, from what I know so far, that one of the goals (perhaps implicit?) of the Museum of the Bible, is to show visitors that the Bible is the basis for Western civilization in all its stripes and, one of the three pillars of English speaking democracies.

From my vantage point as an anthropologist, the Bible is one of our complex charter myths, as it comprises one of the two major blueprints for Western civilization, the other being the heritage of the Greeks. The third may be the legal customs of the Germanic peoples. But the Bible is the most mythological (in the positive sense of the word) of the two charters, as we have received them over the millennia and this is no longer common knowledge.

We now live during a time when most college students in North America have not read the Bible. The study of Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek have become the almost exclusive domain of theologians, Biblical archaeologists, and historians. Yet, as the late great literary critic, Northrop Frye used to argue, the Bible is also the “Great Code” of English literature. One cannot truly grasp the literature of Britain, Canada or America without it.

In addition, recent scholars of political Hebraism suggest that, with regards to the Old Testament, its political history is one of the enduring foundations of modern Western democracies and a direct contributor to the US constitution.Writings on these subjects are worth reading.

The Bible is the only one of the Great Books that is growing in popularity, at least among those who still believe in God. The rest-the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung are now widely considered to be the products of patriarchal, pernicious, “dead white males” whose works are rarely taught to undergraduates without some sort of cultural Marxist filtering.

American professor Joshua Berman wrote recently about this paradox in Mosaic Magazine:

In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one kind of Bible study—namely, the academic kind. Major websites now offer the latest that scholars have to say about the Bible—its authorship, its historical accuracy, its proper interpretation—and those websites attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. In an age when interest in the humanities is generally waning, the department of biblical studies is providing enrichment to what has become the most popular online branch of the liberal arts.

This opens a great opportunity for the Museum of the Bible.

I believe that North American undergrads (and even grads) need to spend a semester abroad in Israel to study the development of the Bible and its effect on Western civilization.

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