Is Scientific Inquiry an Intellectual Descendant of the Hebrews?

Dru Johnson

 

Could the Christian Bible contain the conceptual seeds of scientific inquiry? It seems odd to ask such a question about a notoriously religious collection of texts. However, in the milieu of ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature, the Hebrew texts stand out as distinctively rational with regards to creation. By this, I am not referring to the standard line that, because creation is ordered for the Hebrews, we can therefore study it empirically and predictively. That may be correct. Rather, their depictions of human knowers in these Hebrew texts distinguish themselves amongst their peer traditions, and resonate with scientific inquiry today. 

Over seventy-five years ago, ANE scholars claimed that the Hebrew biblical literature uniquely contained a sustained ‘critical intellectualism’ and a curiously ‘skeptical mood.’[1] Why would they say that?

These twin observations from the Egyptologist Henri Frankfort and his colleagues at the Oriental Institute of Chicago (renamed Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) have only gained traction in the twenty-first century. While the so-called Western tradition has been stuck, pitting science against religion and relegating the Bible to an amorphous category called ‘revelation’, a group of scholars, religious and not, have emerged to examine the philosophical contributions of the Hebrew Scriptures.[2]

In that discussion, I have argued that not only is this biblical literature skeptical and critical, but it also contains stories, legal reasoning, and philosophical poetry that resemble the rational impulses of scientific investigation. Notably, this investigative impulse begins in the creation narratives of Genesis.

The inaugural story of the Hebrew canon describes a man coming to know who is his proper ally (Genesis 2:18–23).[3] Though the Hebrew’s god interacts directly with the man, the god does not directly reveal anything to him. Rather, this god guides the man on a journey where he names animals being presented to him, he cannot find his proper ally, and then he discovers for himself that the wo-man is the one that the man was looking for (cf. Gen 2:20, 23). The Hebrew creation fronts a story of coming to know by means of a divinely guided taxonomic encounter with creation that ends in discovery. 

The infamous story that ensues (Gen 3) also centers on a guided and embodied encounter with creation that ends in discovery. This time, the unidentified serpent guides the couple and the discovery comes in a mysteriously undesirable ‘knowledge of good and evil.’ We do not need to speculate about what that kind of knowledge that might be as it plays a flat role in these twinned stories of discovery.

From these initial stories, the well-worn tropes of community, authoritative knowledge, guidance in order to see, discernment, embodied scripts, and more, appear prominently positioned in ancient Hebrew thought. Recall that the creation accounts in Genesis are exceptionally brief and ‘famously laconic’.[4] In their brevity, these stories about the creation of everything are tersely pointed. What do they choose to focus their attention upon? Guided discovery. A summary might help to make the point:

 

Genesis 2

  1. God commands the man (2:16–17)
  2. God observes ‘no good’ (2:18)
  3. God guides man’s naming/not finding (2:19–22)
  4. Man realizes on his own (2:23)

 

Genesis 3

  1. ‘Wise’ serpent engages the woman (3:1–3)
  2. Serpent observes “not true” (3:4)
  3. Serpent guides woman’s behaviors (3:5–6)
  4. Man/woman realize on their own (3:7)

 

These twinned narratives portray how humans come to discern their environs accurately and erroneously. Unlike the creation accounts of the ANE and Aegean, the Hebrew story of humanity does not begin in humans or gods committing atrocities, divine sex with self or others, or

in wars. Instead, the Hebrews start with proper routes to human discovery and discernment. On their account, the single descriptor of humanity should not be homo necans (humans as killers), homo adorans (humans as worshippers), homo economicus (economic humans), homo rationalis (rational humans) nor homo imago dei (humans as the image of God)—though these will all feature in the coming narratives. The Hebrew’s god interacts with humans as homo sapiens (humans as discerner). 

The Hebrew ‘skeptical mood’ blossoms in the ensuing narratives. Humans push back when God’s plans appear dubious (cf. Gen 15:7–8; Exod 4:1; Jdg 6:12–13). Experimental design comes to the fore when an unanswerable dilemma is posed. God gives historically observable data specifically counterposed against the possibility of them happening at chance (cf. Num 16:28–30; Jdg 6:36–40; 1 Kgs 18:1–40). 

When Gideon realizes that the sign he requested could have happened by the typical meteorology of southwest Asia, he then asked for a reversal of the sign as a control against chance (Jdg 6:39). The omenology of the ancient Near East operates with a similarly strict logic, but not dependent on a skepticism of verifiability seen in these Hebrew texts.[5] Hence, Frankfort et al observe that amongst Israel’s neighbors, Israel was “without peer in the power and scope of their critical intellectualism.”[6]

In Biblical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), I argue that the Hebrew intellectual tradition, what Christians call the Old Testament, shares pronounced affinities with the story of scientific epistemology told by Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Grene, Norwood Hanson, Thomas, Kuhn, and others.[7] The best kinds of knowing happen within a community of knowers who trust one another, accredit varying degrees of authority, and embody the ritualized scripts of their traditions in order to discern what was always there—things others cannot see. This uniquely Hebrew view of knowing precisely captures the critical intellectualism noted by twentieth-century ANE scholars. 

And their view of knowing must be skeptical in order to break from the irrationalities of superstition. Thus, Frankfort et al notice the role of self-skepticism in Hebrew thought that sets it apart from its peers: 

Here is the seeming paradox that a people, freely recognized as supremely the religious people of the ancient world, at the same time were without a peer in the power and scope of their critical intellectualism. But indeed it is not paradoxical, for religion that is not criticized quickly deteriorates into mere superstition.  . . . Hebrew thinkers were able to attain a view of the world that still shapes our outlook.[8]

What hath science to do with Jewish and Christian scripture? The relegation of biblical literature to mere revelation will persist without our help. However, the need to listen and think about the conceptual basis for science now knocks on our door. 

Any conceptual world that begins with creation as deceitful might always struggle to develop science as we know it. If we begin with the premise that nothing material can be truth-bearing (e.g., Brahminism) or that reality itself is known only in the heavens (a dominant Hellenistic view), then our structured inquiries into the material world lose coherence. 

The Hebrews believed the material world was real. They included the heavens as part of the material world, even if inaccessible. As many have noted over the centuries, the world, to them, was knowable. Their god even used historical material encounters at every juncture of their history to convince them. 

The biblical literature does not depict a mind-melding god, but one who used the material universe to persuade his people against the possibility that these things just happened at chance. This accounts for the skepticism that the Hebrew god encountered from his people and seemed to welcome. 

Humans, per the biblical literature, need to be convinced through what most would now call normal and rational means. Our view of ‘normal and rational means’ did not come from nowhere. It does not seem to have existed in the intellectual traditions of Mesopotamia or in the schools of Greek and Roman thinking. 

As Nicholas Spencer’s recent work Magisteria has recently spotlighted, the critical discernment that twentieth-century philosophers of science would describe as the actual practice of science appears to depend upon categories within the Hebrew tradition, more than upon much of Greco-Roman categories. 

Tracing the precise lineage of Hebrew intellectualism from the Iron Age into modern scientific inquiry is another task altogether. But noticing that they are not two incommensurable types of intellectualism should offer us better ways to think through the science and religion conflict narrative from the Jewish and Christian perspectives. 

 

 

  1. “[The Hebrews were] without peer in the power and scope of their critical intellectualism.” And, “It was only by virtue of their skeptical mood that the Hebrew thinkers were able to attain a view of the world that still shapes our outlook.” Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 234. I am aware of the critiques of progressivism and evolutionism now lodged against most so-called ‘orientalists’ including Frankfort et al. However, my assessment here only aims at explaining why they saw the Hebrew intellectual world as strikingly different from all the others in the ANE.
  2. E.g., Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James Diamond, Jewish Theology Unbound (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jaco Gericke, The Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2013); Arthur Gibson, Biblical Semantic Logic: A Preliminary Analysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Dru Johnson, Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Shira Weiss, Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible: Philosophical Analysis of Scriptural Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and so on. See summaries and developments in the field by Authur Keefer, “Philosophical Engagement with the Bible: Some Methodological Reflections,” Currents in Biblical Research 21 (2022): 349-374 and Jaco Gericke, “The Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion: An Update on Recent Related Research (2012–2022),” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 10, 2 (2024): 346-370. Jaco Gericke, A Philosophical Theology of the Old Testament. A Historical, Experimental, Comparative and Analytic Perspective (London: Routledge, 2020).
  3. ‘Ally’ is my translation of ezer, a term will militaristic connotations to it. Thanks to Leslie Bustard (of blessed memory) for helping me translate this more accurately.
  4. “Biblical narrative is famously laconic.” Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 41.
  5. Francesca Rochberg, “‘If P, then Q’: Form and Reasoning in Babylonian Divination,” in Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, ed. Amar Annus (Oriental Institute Seminars 6; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
  6. Frankfort, 234.
  7. Johnson, Biblical Philosophy, 238–63.
  8. Frankfort, 234.