Did Hilkiah invent history as we know it?
According to the accounts in 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34, a man named Hilkiah served as High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah (639–609 BCE). In the 18th year of his reign (622), he ordered some repairs of the Temple building. In the course of this work, Hilkiah reportedly found in the Temple a scroll that everyone had apparently forgotten about. That scroll contained "the Book of the Law." Scholars now believe he discovered much of our current Book of Deuteronomy. The newly recovered book inspired Josiah and Hilkiah to begin a reform movement, convulsing Judah in a period of iconoclasm and purification, refitting the nation and religion according to the iconoclastic, law-centered, monotheism of Deuteronomy.
Hilkiah's mind underwent a major paradigm shift when it occurred to him that he, the King, and everyone else in Judah, needed to drop everything and follow the book he brought out of the Temple. He could have dismissed it as an ancient and obsolete relic. He could have accepted it as part of the multi-dimensional Israelite religion. But Hilkiah decided that this text presented the real, lost essence of Israelite faith. The book demanded that they dismiss much of their current religion as corrupted and adulterated. He felt that now they finally possessed an original they could get back to.
Remember that in Hilkiah's time much of the Hebrew Scriptures had yet to appear.
In him we find perhaps the earliest instance of someone using a purportedly long lost document to justify significant religious and social change in the present. Hilkiah's action becomes the model for the emphasis on written texts that came so thoroughly to characterize countless later movements in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Modern Age in particular, ran with the slogan, "ad fontes!" meaning "to the sources!" Modernity starts with the acquisition of ancient Greek and Latin texts, opening Europe up to a barely remembered ancient past. In a sense, then, Hilkiah may have invented what we know as history: research into past events and documents, and applying conclusions to present concerns.
Hilkiah also grasped the implications and power of the still relatively new technology of written language. Writing connects past and present in ways impossible before. It raises communication above the organic, communal sharing of an oral tradition, and instead anchors it in the past, so that something written centuries earlier can remain authoritative indefinitely. Never before could we claim to know so precisely the thinking of a dead person. It must have seemed to offer an unimaginable stability and certainty.
Hilkiah and that book changed Israelite faith profoundly, and arguably gave it the chops to survive and even thrive during the catastrophe of the Babylonian Exile, which happened soon after the death of King Josiah. It moved the center of the faith from the land, the people, and the Temple, to the portable written Law. When the Babylonian conquerors separated the Israelite elite from the land and the common people, and destroyed the Temple, Israelite faith nevertheless survived and adapted, becoming more recognizable to us as a form of early- or pre- Judaism. By the 4th century CE or so, the Rabbis (the successors of the Pharisees) had revised even Judaism's other documents to fit what they considered to be the more original, authentic, and earlier pattern of Deuteronomy (and to distinguish them from Christianity). (We can tell this from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of apparently an earlier Hebrew text, something we verify from findings at Qumran.) Hilkiah's reformed Israelite faith equipped the people to get through the Exile; then it evolved into the Rabbinic Judaism which enabled that community to survive nearly two millennia of often violently oppressive global diaspora.
Two thousand years or more after Hilkiah, this same mentality came to characterize the Modern approach to biblical studies. Ever since, right up to today, "critical" translations of the Bible consciously seek to identify and present as authoritative the "earliest" version of the text. Indeed, many of us grew up assuming the self-evidence of this. If we look at the apparatus at the bottom of the page in a critical text of the Greek New Testament, we see the many different variations on particular passages rated according to their estimated age, with the ones deemed "oldest" having the greatest privilege. The ones assessed as "later" get demoted to the footnotes or left out altogether.
Scholarly arguments about dating ancient documents bear significant consequences for interpretation. Such debates have the potential to reshape the faith of millions of people. For instance, how one chooses to assess the date of the Gospel of Thomas has implications for the whole foundation of Christianity. If we decide on a late date, like the 2nd or 3rd century, we can consider it a historically interesting Gnostic document. But if we assign it an earlier date, even to the mid-1st century as some do, making it basically contemporaneous with the earliest writings of the New Testament, some would take it as a stunning window into the very formation of Christianity which has the power to literally change everything.
This mentality led to the periodic mania in Christianity over when someone comes across or even takes a new look at some ancient texts. This happened when Martin Luther reassessed the Bible itself and sparks a reformation to get back to this recovered original which had suffered corruption and adulteration at the hands of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. And it happens more recently when major stashes of ancient documents get dug out of the desert at Qumran or Nag Hammadi.
Hilkiah taught that faith begins in some seminal historical Event, that someone witnessed and wrote down -- in his case the story centered on Moses -- to which everything must still remain faithful. This requires a single, coherent, accepted, and enforced narrative, and something like a priesthood of specialists to maintain, interpret, and police it. The faith thus becomes strong and distinct enough to resist even conquest and exile.
But this approach can go off the rails. Faith can calcify into a set of propositions about past events which people must affirm verbally and obey for the sake of social identity, conformity, and differentiation. We see how this leads to the heartless legalism Jesus resists. In this system, the original spirit of the faith can get lost and reduced to us vs. them binaries. It also profoundly resists change when the social and historical context becomes very different.
For instance, a text originally written for an oppressed minority will have a completely different meaning and effect when put into use by a dominant majority, with often tragic consequences. Power dynamics, among other things, matter when interpreting texts. Or a later generation could take as literal history stories originally written as myth, parable, or poetry.
And, well, why do we value the ancient in the first place? Why do we assume the old to have more weight, authority, integrity, and purity than the product of a long, communal tradition of development? And why do we mainly think this way when it comes to religious and maybe legal documents, but not much else? I mean, if I find in a box in the attic a book full of my great-great-grandmother's recipes, I take it as an interesting and even beloved heirloom. I might even try to make one or two of the dishes... but I would not decide to impose it as the exclusive and infallible basis of my diet going forward. I would not get rid of the food processor and the microwave, and the curry, chilis, soy sauce, and other spices because they do not appear in this old book. No one imagines a Model-T to outperform a 2024 Mustang, or prefers a Commodore 64 to a MacBook Air. And I remain grateful that my cardiologist does not exclusively rely on the most ancient ideas of medicine. And so on. But when it comes to religion we seem to have decided that older means better.
Then we run into the question of the possibility of accessing the old at all. For the world does change, time moves in a particular direction, how we communicate and think, our technology, the climate, migration, and many, many other factors mean that the world today looks and feels different from that of yesterday. And people are different. No matter how perfectly we recover something from the past, we cannot possibly understand it in the same way as those who originally produced and experienced it. Heck, I have sometimes trouble understanding things I myself wrote a couple of decades ago... or even last week, for heaven's sake. Context makes all the difference, and the the wider the rift between different contexts the more problematic any attempt to translate between the two becomes.
The consequence here means that whatever we come up with today is unavoidably contemporary to now, no matter how venerable and archaic we imagine it to be. Hilkiah's reformed theology spoke directly to the people receiving it and responded to their concerns, needs, and hopes. It was new and relevant, no matter when someone supposedly wrote it. Perhaps because he had witnessed the obliteration of the northern kingdom of Israel, Hilkiah may have feared that their received religion would not have the strength and focus necessary to withstand the assault of an Empire wielding unimaginable and inhuman violence. Without Hilkiah's drastic reform, Israelite faith might very likely have finally collapsed and dissipated in the streets of Babylon, and its basic anti-imperialist, emancipatory, liberating character get lost forever. The story that he found it in the Temple looks more like a practical strategy to justify a necessary change in direction.
Furthermore, everything comes to us through a process of a communal interpretive tradition. Even the iconoclastic periods become part of that history. We do not escape tradition. We cannot wipe out what has gone before any more than Hilkiah could. We may convince ourselves we do the work of recovery and restoration, returning to something pure, authentic, original and pristine. We do not. We live on the growing edge of an on-going tradition and produce what works for us now. We need to face and express some honesty about that.
I wonder if we don't need to move to a more evolutionary, organic, oral, communal practice, one that employs symbol, vision, metaphor, art, and ritual, in which faith may grow and develop, shift and adapt more flexibly and democratically according to changing circumstances. It does not rely on one exclusive, historical Event but understands the Event as the ongoing unfolding of the tradition in community. In other words, we are together the Event; it didn't happen just once but still happens now, within and among us.
As it happens, the emergence of Christianity occurs in just these terms. Jesus perceives a longer range to the faith event, including both the mystical creation-centered Wisdom of the first Temple, and the austere, iconoclastic, text/law-centered faith of Hilkiah's reformers and their successors, the Pharisees. He identifies and embodies the core thread of liberation knitting them together, through and within shifting cultural contexts.
Thus he enacts a nondual, nonbinary, both/and approach to faith and history. At its best, Christianity came to balance, dance around, and hold in tension both law and grace, preservation and inclusion, the written and the oral, a bounded and a welcoming community, core definitions and distributed adaptations, the political and the mystical.
This all culminates at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which more or less finally affirmed the insights expressed in the Nicene Creed describing Christ as "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father." We therefore confess Jesus Christ as both fully human and fully God, a logical impossibility but the non-dual, non-binary core truth which the Church nevertheless steadfastly held to.
In terms of history I get from this the necessity to say both that we hold to a primal Event and the documents that witness to it, and that the Holy Spirit empowers the on-going community of disciples to interpret, discern, and apply this original insight in different ways and contexts. We do both, and this only happens in active conversation, mutual consultation, and self-critical consideration, in which we identify, recognize, and admit our biases, prejudices, and assumptions, and always keep in mind the good news, the original/ongoing Event, the unfolding revelation on which we base our faith and in which we trust. In this way that Event continues to unfold. We don't allow it to calcify into a dead historical fact needing preservation. Neither do we abandon it in an orgy of reckless adaptation, dissolving into our changing circumstances. We do not take a scalpel -- or an axe -- to it, reducing it to dead parts. Neither do we pretend whatever randomly erupts from our imagination always works even better.
For Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture, is this Event, grounded in history and at the same time continuing by the Spirit in the community, to reveal the Wisdom of the Creator's pervasive Presence in all things.
We can appreciate Hilkiah's insight and cherish the echoes and signs of the earlier faith, seeing how in Christ both get carried forward. For the point remains of extending the liberation and compassion, humility and justice, equality and shalom at the heart and core of Israelite faith into our lives and world today.
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