Very personal disclosure:

Currently I am a student at a Christian college working my way through the oral, written, and translated, and canonized history of the biblical texts. I am beginning to see something of a parallel with certain aspects of Tolkien’s ‘histories’ and the stories in the biblical text.

I came up in a fairly fundamental environment (not nearly as much so as others I’ve heard of, but still pretty evangelical), and thus was trained to regard every word of the biblical text as literal written history (or science or life rules or whatever the text happened to be dealing with). Any other interpretation was nothing short of unfaithfulness to the Bible and unfaithfulness to God. My relationship with the Middle-Earth canon worked much the same way: every part of the text was meant by Tolkien to be the literal history of the fictional world of Middle-Earth.

However, I’m also the kind of person who believes that everything a human being does or says has a context, and of course contexts change with time and place. As a teenager, I began to feel that even the Bible must have some context: after all, it hadn’t fallen out of heaven, leather-bound and printed in King James English with a ribbon down the middle. (Nothing against such Bibles, of course. My dad gave me one for Christmas as a kid and it remains one of my most treasured possessions.) However, it has taken me a number of years, and two college-level survey courses, to even start to really unpack what it means for the biblical text to have a context.

For example: Recently I had to read that really weird story in Genesis 9 (right after the Flood story) where Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. (I’m sure college students can’t relate to that at all.) One of his three sons, Ham, goes and looks at him and mocks him; the other two sons, Shem and Japheth, are more respectful. And after Noah wakes up, he curses, not Ham (who did the Bad Thing), but Canaan, one of Ham’s sons.

Now if you know much about Israel’s history with the Canaanites throughout the Old Testament, you know that the Canaanites are one of the most frequent “bad guys” whom Israel is always either killing, getting killed by, or getting in trouble with God for not killing. It’s been suggested that this particular cursing-of-Canaan story is less about History 101 and more about “see kids, this is why them Canaanites is baaad news and they goin’ dooown.” Stories were the foundation of how the world operated in the Ancient Near East; if you wanted to explain why rain fell from the sky, or why humans die, or why We Ought To Kill Those Weird People Who Are Not Like Us, you explained by telling a story. Israel doesn’t seem to have been an exception to this. (Neither are we, actually.)

But here’s the thing: As a modern reader, opening yourself up to the possibility of the cursing-of-Canaan story being propoganda rather than literal history permits you to try to read between the lines of the biblical text. And when you do that, you learn something about the values and assumptions of the people who actually lived behind (and wrote) the text. You experience a little piece of the ancient world in a way that simply reading the story as ‘History’ doesn’t really allow.

My point? That a story such as the Noah/Ham/Canaan story (or the Abraham story cycle) could be said to function in the Bible not unlike a story such as the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (or the 144 Elves by Cuiviénen) function in Tolkien’s world. What if reading these stories as fairytales and/or propoganda instead of literal history actually tells us something about the world from which they came?

Reading between the lines of the text (while doing honor to the world from which it came) is an art form that takes humility, imagination, knowledge, good sense, and a willingness to examine your own assumptions. This is true in reading the Bible and Tolkien’s legendarium. Frankly, it’s my suspicion that the kind of Tolkien fans who believe that every single scrap of Tolkien’s writing is literal Middle-Earth history are probably (young) evangelicals who feel the same way about the text of the Bible.

Hey, I’m not pointing fingers. That was me. Some days, that still is me.