Stephen A. Geller, “The Religion of the Bible,” in The Jewish Study Bible, second edition, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1996.
Can one summarize biblical religion in a way that will organize its disparate traditions? The Bible is the most unsystematic of sacred texts, representing 1,000 years of textual development from different areas and social and religious groups. The several traditions of biblical religion we have listed, and the added complication of there superimposition on an earlier, and in many ways quite different, stage and type of religion, are so complex and confusing that one despairs of finding meaning in the whole, rather than in the parts. The historical discipline of source criticism has isolated the traditions and strands, without explaining their presence combined in the same work, often next to each other, in a way that seems intended to bewilder the reader. The traditional Jewish strategy in dealing with the multifariousness of the Bible is midrash, with its joyously insouciant ability to connect both the similar and the contradictory with a leap of imagination. However, historical scholarship, more limited in its agility than madras, seems to be faced with two stark choices: to renounce interpretation of the whole and consider only the parts; or, conversely, to overlook the diversity and deal only with the whole on the canonical level. Indeed, canonical criticism, which views the Bible in light of the communities that regard it as their Scripture, is one of the most important hermeneutical developments of recent years.
The Amateur Exegete 
“The several traditions of biblical religion we have listed, and the added complication of there superimposition on an earlier, and in many ways quite different, stage and type of religion, are so complex and confusing that one despairs of finding meaning in the whole, rather than in the parts.”
Well, one “despairs”* in large part because so many of us–theist and heathen alike–have been culturally conditioned to presume and look for that “meaning in the whole” Hebrew or Christian Bible, which would not be the case with any other collection of ancient texts. Suppose we had an analogous 5th-century codex containing select books, letters, etc. purportedly from Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, etc. We simply would not get hung up on matters of univocality or the disparity of traditions. Rather, we would comfortably approach this codex as an anthology of diverse works from different authors spanning nearly a millennium–with some shared themes and motifs, to be sure, but also noticeable differences in contexts and thinking, as well as outright inconsistencies and disagreements. So it is with the Bible, by my reckoning.
-Lex Lata
*Yes, of course Geller is being a bit poetic here.
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Yes. And maybe also a bit poetic in saying it’s “the most unsystematic” of sacred texts. He might not be remembering the Mahabharata, for instance. Or even the Talmud.
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