Friday, May 20, 2011

(Re)reading #6


Exodus To Jonah, 5/13/11

This bible study is pretty easy to report: it consisted in some of the most horrific readings in the Scriptures! We looked at passages where punitive violence against Israel seems to be a part of the divine s.o.p. and character, or where God directly orders the most extreme violence against Israel's enemies.

Why do this study? Why put ourselves through the scandal and shock of these readings?

Well, first of all, they're there, in the bible. If you're honestly reading the bible you have to read these scriptures. Secondly, you have to ask, why in fact are they in the bible? If the bible is divine Revelation what is the meaning of these texts? (Re)reading the bible has to come to grips with these passages. Can bible (re)reading help us get a handle on them?

Deuteronomy 28 15-68 gives us the terrible sequence of curses invoked by the Lord should Israel fail to keep the law. They form the antithesis to the prior (shorter) list of blessings promised if Israel is faithful. The two alternatives, curse and blessing, make up the classic Deuteronomic viewpoint: do well and good things will come your way, do evil and bad things will happen. We think at once of the book of Job's subversion of this viewpoint (bad stuff happening to a man who is innocent...), but Deuteronomy's simple math provided the central architecture of the biblical thought world all the way to New Testament times, and beyond. So the question remains: what sort of a God would threaten this?

...You shall become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your corpses shall be food for every bird of the air and animal of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away. The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt, with ulcers, scurvy and itch, of which you cannot be healed. The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusions of mind...

One way to look at it is to consider that the standard human reaction for bad things happening in a group is to find someone to blame, an odd-one-out or a stranger or foreigner, someone to be identified as the culprit. If there was a plague in Thebes it was because someone had offended the gods and, sure enough, they found it was the king, Oedipus. Here in Deuteronomy, relentlessly, the blame rests with the people themselves, under the judgment of the Lord. They cannot scapegoat others for the bad things that are happening, because they are the ones responsible. Even though the message is harsh, and can easily lead to a religion of guilt and fear on the one hand, and a God of violence on the other, it does at least have the value of taking ownership and possibly repenting: I am not permitted to get rid of my responsibility by blaming others.

No such possible justification exists for the next couple of passages. Numbers 25:6-15 tells of a Midianite woman brought into the camp by an Israelite named Zimri. The context is a plague afflicting the Israelites and its cause identified as the ritual and sexual relations of the Israelites with the women of the region and thus a "yoking" to their god, Baal of Peor. One of the Israelites named Phineas spears Zimri and the woman, called Cozbi, through the belly in their tent, and the plague is stopped.. No one today would begin to believe that these two were personally responsible for the plague virus, unless it happened by the decision and causation of God. In other words the primitive sense that plague is brought on directly by some human crime is preserved in the framework of a God of judgment and primary causality who acts to discipline his people by "sending the plague".

It's possible that in such a framework we might think, well, it was right for "God" to do this, because Zimri and the woman were bringing idolatry into the camp and threatening the Israelite religion itself. In other words we could turn a blind eye to the violence. But in the next story it is absolutely impossible to do so.

At Numbers 31:1-20 Moses commands the genocide of the Midianites in retaliation for their corruption of the Israelites just described And he does so on a direct order from the Lord. Every male is to be killed and all females who have had sexual relations with the Midianite men. The only ones preserved are the young girls who have not slept with a man, and so can be integrated ethnically to the Israelites. It is impossible to conceive of this as the work of a God of justice, let alone the God of Jesus. In which case we are driven to the conclusion that this is not in fact the God of biblical revelation but a "god"of human construction: a god generated through violence, and in this case the intense violence of a religious revolution. Moses orders the killing in order to preserve and strengthen the Yahwist religion, but he does so using archaic violence as the generative mechanism.

This (re)reading takes revelation of theology out of the text, leaving the text as revelation of anthropology. We are justified in doing this by the canon of the bible itself, taken as a whole. The book of Jonah demonstrates with acid precision the mechanism of finding an individual who is the guilty one, responsible for a natural disaster. The pagan sailors "know" that someone has done some evil as the cause of the storm and yet they strive might and main not to have to kill Jonah. At the same time Jonah's ready offering of himself as the guilty one is motivated not by honesty, but by resentment and anger.

The point then of the story is that God, who is the one who sends the storm, does not remain on the level of this kind of appeasement or punishment. He acts from within the ocean to save Jonah from his own violence, and thereby the sailors too. Further, God's actions to save Jonah are one with his willingness to pardon the Ninevites who repent of their violence at the preaching of Jonah. In other words the story subverts the whole work of violence at every level--both its generative power to return the world to order by driving out the evil thing, and then its evident oppressive imperial character.

The turning point of the story is Jonah's prayer from the belly of the fish. This has the effect of redeeming the "guilty victim" supposedly underlying natural disaster, and thereby undoing the whole phoney construct of group violence on which the world order is founded. The book of Jonah doesn't say so explicitly but the repentance of the Ninevites flows from Jonah's prayer in which the guilty victim finds deliverance and life in the depths of death. They are set free from the work of violence because Jonah is set free. After Jonah's deliverance it makes complete sense the Ninevites would repent!

The book of Jonah is, therefore, an absolutely crucial (re)reading of the stories of divine violence we were reading. It shows God reversing God's role in collective human violence against the scapegoat. Rather than accepting this violence (to stop the plague, to purify the people) God works to undo it at its core, and so set everyone free from the endless mystifications of violence. Of course this (re)reading by the prophecy of Jonah could not become dominant unless Jesus had chosen the sign of Jonah as his own and followed its pathway in definitive terms. But our study has shown that it was already well underway in the Hebrew scriptures, and Jesus could not have taken his pathway unless it had been first prepared for him there.



Thursday, May 12, 2011

(Re)Reading #5

Genesis Part III  5/6/11

We continue to (re)read the first book of the bible, understanding it as a bedrock meditation on the human issue of violence. God is inevitably framed in and around that question. What do you do if you're a God of life and justice and your human creatures turn to killing? Well, you can punish them, but doesn't that just encourage them further, like the example of a violent parent? What is desperately needed is a set of different models, and that's exactly what Genesis strives to give us. (Re)reading Genesis takes us away from a mechanical account of "the fall", and God's successive covenants which will ultimately work out as "salvation". Its truth is much more radical, showing us an underlying generative anthropology opening up and transforming the question of humanity itself.

From chapter twelve onward Genesis is the story of Abraham and of Abraham's grandson, Jacob. These two patriarchs are the major protagonists of the book (Isaac is little more than a bridging figure); furthermore the greater proportion of these chapters (twenty five to fifty) is taken up with the saga of Jacob and his sons. It is true, of course, that the covenant with Abraham and his descendants is a major structural feature, the narrative and conceptual hinge of the book, but it is equally evident that the underlying drama of the story is rooted in the problem of violence. And this deep concern has a double generative aspect. First, the figure of Abraham struggles with the violence of God, and then Jacob is the epicenter of a constant tremblor of human violence which finally finds resolution in forgiveness.

Abraham in chapter 18 seeks to bargain God into not wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah. This is hugely significant. God concedes that he has to inform Abraham of his intentions, because he has chosen him so that "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him" (i.e. including necessarily the most evil; 18:18). Abraham fulfills his role to perfection, intruding into the story the principle of the innocent caught up in the fury of collective punishment ("Far be it from you to slay the righteous with the wicked..." 18:25). But then, in a crucial biblical moment, this principle is transformed in the text into something else, still more positive--the possibility the innocent will act as a protection for the guilty. Abraham gets God to agree to spare the wicked for the sake of a remnant of the righteous. God agrees; he will not destroy Sodom "for the sake of ten righteous" (18:32).

Justice needs to be done--the evil in the earth cannot be allowed simply to continue their evil. Who would not agree? However, in the process the innocent are inevitably swept up by the broad brush of justice. But then, like the bursting of a meteor in a dark night, it seems God will in fact simply spare the wicked from violent punishment for the sake of the just. (It should be emphasized this is not any sort of exchange, as in Christian thinking, the righteous punished for the wicked. It is simply the righteous deflect or neutralize "divine violence" itself.)

In the case of Sodom the Lord manages to get everything mathematically right, fulfilling retributive justice while letting the one righteous man, Lot, and his family, escape from the city, before raining down sulfur and fire. But Abraham's insistence on the possibility of forgiveness for the sake of a few individuals clearly suggests the general indiscriminate character of violence and the need to forestall it. Even more significantly it is Abraham, not God, who introduces the principle of discrimination and then the effective pardon of the wicked for the sake of the just. In other words, here in Genesis the path to human salvation lies through a human being effectively learning and promoting the practice of compassionate nonviolence, and, because of this, God is willing to do the same!

The story of Jacob and Esau returns us to the human scene with a vengeance... Esau has every reason (and right) to kill Jacob who has stolen his inheritance and very identity (27:36, 42). Jacob flees for his life, but then after twenty years the time comes for him to return and he fears intensely Esau's violence. He sets up an elaborate show of gifts and respect to appease his brother (32:13-20; 33:1-3). In the meantime he has an encounter with God in which he wrestles with the divine figure but God does not destroy him. Jacob says "I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved" (32:30). The God that Jacob meets is precisely one who will not overcome him with superior force, who does not win violently. The message is directly confirmed in the following story when Esau comes to meet Jacob, embracing and kissing him and offering him none of the expected violence. In the dialogue Jacob then says "Truly to see you is like seeing the face of God--since you have received me with such favor" (33:10). Jacob should know: he has just discovered that God 's face or person is defined by non-conquest. Esau's "favor"--read nonviolence--is a precise mirror-image of this. The twining of God's gentleness and Esau's forgiveness is a triumph of biblical narrative.

In the encounter with God Jacob was given the name "Israel" meaning "the one who strives with God" or "God strives". The narrator interprets, saying Jacob has "striven with God and with humans and prevailed" (32:28), but hidden in Jacob's apparent victory is the deep nonviolence of the God of Israel revealed in this episode. It is that by which Jacob "wins" and is surely the wound which Jacob takes away from the encounter (32:25) and the whole of biblical revelation with him.

The story of Joseph is one of the best known in the bible, a tale of fraternal jealousy, attempted murder, slavery, lust, dreams and a great reversal. Joseph is the final and true hero of Genesis. His brothers intend to kill him out of jealousy because of preferential treatment from his father (basically the same scenario for which Cain killed Abel). Because of the intervention of Judah he is sold into slavery, the next best thing to killing him. As we know Joseph eventually rises to the pinnacle of power but that is only a stepping stone to the true reversal of the story.

In the time of famine his brothers come to Egypt seeking food and Joseph engages in an elaborate pantomime, stretching over a considerable space of time, to bring them progressively to a duplicate of the situation in which he was abandoned by them and thereby an intimate knowledge of their crime. This time it is Benjamin, his full brother, who is threatened with descent into the pit, but now in contrast Judah steps forward and volunteers to take his place in order to protect him. Joseph can bear it no longer and reveals his identity. The brothers are terrified but Joseph tells them not to be angry with themselves for what they had done, rather to see it as the working of God's purpose: "God sent me before you to preserve life..." (45:5)
In the story Joseph weeps four times when encountering his brothers in Egypt (42:24, 43:30, 45:2, 50:17). The first two times he does it in private, apart from them, the other times in their presence. The final time is after Jacob's death when the brothers, still wary of Joseph, try to get him to say he forgives them because Jacob had made a deathbed request that he should do so. Joseph weeps and on this occasion, for the first time, the brothers weep too. They have gone from murderous jealousy, to fear and remorse, to empathy, to something approaching sorrow. Joseph speaks to them kindly saying "Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God?" (50:19). He again assures them that all this was intended by God for good.

The story demonstrates a genuine human process coming to a final point of bodily compassion for and with the victim (the brothers weep when they see Joseph weeping) and in a few ironic words suggests that human forgiveness is a much better way than divine revenge. The God that Joseph is talking about does not in fact look for revenge but rather finds a way to turn the harm to good.

The book of Genesis concludes, therefore, with a brilliant account of a new generative pathway in human life, the only one that can assure God's purpose of life. Surely the demonstration of this pathway is at least as much "Torah" (law and teaching) as any formal relationship of covenant.

Friday, May 6, 2011

(Re)Reading #4

Genesis Part II 4/29/11


We have seen how Genesis offers us a dramatically unfolding story not a legal docket. To take this intra-textual (the drama-in-the-text!) approach does not deny the inspired character of the text, rather it demonstrates it more powerfully. In contrast reading Genesis as a legal constitution in which an "original sin" implicates all humanity in its punishment does not change our human frame of reference. God becomes the most possessive and conflicted monarch ever, insanely reactive when his citizens exercise the freedom that he prompts in them in the first place! It means God is just humanity writ very large, and can only lead to atheism...

But if we see the story attempting to describe desire and its exercise which from the start sets itself up against God, but which God also creatively wills as the necessary process by which humans become humans, then everything becomes much more persuasive. In this case it is God who is at least as much at risk as humanity. And the prehistories hint at this, showing a very human sense of apprehension in God who takes a variety of defensive measures against his creatures. (In respect of the tree of life, 3:22-23, and the Tower of Babel "nothing will become impossible for them", 11:6-7.)

As already pointed out this kind of description of God belongs to the Yahwist writer and to grasp that there are at least two writers or voices running through the editorial composition of Genesis is at once a crucial event of "re-reading". It means the bible itself works on the assumption that one "angelic" voice cannot quite give us "revelation", because there is something at stake here which exceeds any single framework. And if someone might say this is just fancy highfalutin lit.crit. directed at sacred text which cannot be treated that way, what about the fact the bible as a whole clearly has multiple authors? Why are there two versions of the ten commandments? Why are there two histories of the kings (Kings and Chronicles)? Why are there four gospels? It's obvious the bible accepts in principle that the same story can be told from more than one perspective. In this light the two voices in Genesis simply show the same principle working in the creation of a "single" text. And to tease out those voices becomes critical part of understanding how revelation precisely exceeds one mono-linear meaning. Communicating a whole new dimension cannot be mono-linear because it takes at least three lines to create depth! 

For example, there are two accounts of the flood, one from the Priestly writer, one from the Yahwist. At 7.2 God tells Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals and only one pair of unclean animals into the ark. But at 7:8-9 God commands only one pair of all animals, regardless of whether they are clean or unclean. Why? Because for theYahwist sacrifice and meat-eating already exist (so the clean animals need to be in small herds, for those purposes.) But for the Priestly writer meat-eating only begins after the flood (9:3) and sacrifice only with the covenant at Mt. Sinai. The presence of these two versions side by side--like a split-screen movie with two different pictures of what is going on--is blatantly obvious and it must mean something!

It means that shedding blood is a hugely significant issue, enough to confuse the plotline significantly, and to be left just like that, out in the open. The Yahwist (and therefore the final editor who includes this writer) recognizes that there really is no humanity without sacrifice and killing, and that is why it's got to be there from the get-go. (Abel, the very first generation after creation, offers blood sacrifice without being commanded, 4:4; and then of course Cain kills Abel.) But the Priestly author feels the deep anomaly of spilling the life God has given in creation, and so deliberately excludes it from beginnings. And the editor leaves this in because this "second opinion" is also a core part of revelation. There is a huge built-in tension around killing, and it's that which is being revealed. Meat-eating is then introduced after the flood as a concession, and only so long as the blood is not consumed--a clear attempt to deflect from the mind of the meat-eater the felt reality of killing. In addition the Priestly writer then establishes a law requiring exact reciprocal killing for murder (9:5-6)--a fundamental rule to narrow the response to violence to mechanical equality, and prevent the escalation as in the case of Cain (sevenfold vengeance) and the virtual genocide demanded by Lamech (4:24).

The concern of the Priestly writer to show God is "other from violence" is given its greatest platform in the very first chapter of Genesis, in the seven day creation account. Chapter 1.1 to 2.4 displays a unique sense of God creating without a battle against darkness or chaos or any other kind of violence. The result is a created space overflowing with goodness and life, the absence of all harm. The succession of days culminating in rest by God and blessing for the seventh day suggests that the earth is destined temporally for the enjoyment of perfect peace. 

The placing of this prologue before the more "human" Yahwist account of God presented in the Garden of Eden and Cain and Abel stories gives a distinct priority to the nonviolence of God and sets the tone for the whole of Genesis, and indeed the whole of the bible. The priority of this account gains even more meaning when it is set against the background of alternative stories of creation available in the classic Hebrew culture. For example, Isaiah 51:9-11 and Job 26:12 both mention the tradition of a primordial battle by God against a sea serpent or beast, a mythic account shared with other cultures of the ancient near east. Second Isaiah and Job date from the time of the exile or later, proving that the text of Genesis 1 stood in contrast to violent stories of creation well accepted in the middle to late biblical period. In other words the Priestly version must be seen as a decisive re-reading that established itself progressively during this time, finally becoming the norm. There could hardly be a stronger case for the way the bible is a continual re-reading of itself, above all in relation to violence.

The more we read Genesis in this way the more we see it as a workshop of deep inquiry about the character and role of violence in relation to the meaning of both humanity and God. And the fact that this laboratory is present right at the beginning of the bible should tell us that these are absolutely key questions being posed by biblical revelation and faith.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

(Re)Reading #3


Sorry this has taken a little time to post. Linda is in England with her Mom who is very ill. Next study to follow soon.

Genesis Part I  04/15/11

Genesis is a rich field for re-reading the bible. In fact the book of Genesis--if you look at it attentively--announces itself as a re-reading, and shows itself all the way through as re-reading. 
 
Thinking about the construction of the Torah (the first five books of the bible) we should ask why the scribes put Genesis before Exodus. Of course, yes, it's about beginnings, what comes first. But what are the themes at work? In Exodus and following books there is no question that God uses violence and that the violence is righteous. But Genesis from the get-go sees violence as human and intensely problematic. The initial creation work of God is entirely without violence and when God resorts to violence (cursing the ground/sending the flood) he decides afterward never to do that stuff again! (8: 21) God re-reads Godself! And the reader is put on alert that the violence in subsequent books of the bible is seriously open to question (needing to be re-read, from "the beginning".)

"Genesis" means beginning, but also "generation". It is about the "generations" of the earth, the various ways in which the human space and human beings get put in place. The seven days are "generations" (2:4) just the same as Cain and Seth born of Adam and Eve, and their descendants, are "generations" (5:1, same word). The book is talking about generativity (the way things get put in place), as much as the fact of their beginning. In short there are two broad concepts or styles of generation: the one described by the "Priestly writer" (the text using the name God/El and picturing the divine as "other" to violence) and the one described by the "Yahwist writer" (text using Yahweh/Lord as name and picturing the divine in very human terms, prepared to use violence, and yet open to change). 
 
If we fail to read these very evident concerns and tensions in the text--the way it is struggling hugely with the question of violence--then we are not really reading it intelligently, with its own intelligence. Instead we read it like a fairy tale, with no meaning except "weird stuff happens".

Genesis chapters 1-11 consists of the prologue (seven day creation) and five prehistories (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Sons of God and the Daughters of Men, the Flood, Tower of Babel), along with genealogies, lists of generations). It all sets up the introduction of Abraham, the single individual who would trust God completely and in whom "all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (12:3), the one who promises a solution to the human situation. The question then is always "What is the nature of the human situation to which Abraham offers a solution?"

In church teaching from Ambrose and Augustine onward the problem has been strictly legal in nature. Our first parents disobeyed a rule given by God and now they and their descendants must suffer the consequent punishment. In time, however, Christ came and offered a way out, a legal satisfaction or compensation for sin for the sake of "salvation"... But this is a very narrow reading of the book of Genesis. Certainly the Lord makes rules in the Garden of Eden but the key issue is not the rule but the rivalry-with-God that underlies rule-breaking. And even more crucially this rivalry with God cannot be read in distinction from rivalry between human beings. The story of the Garden of Eden cannot be read in isolation from the other prehistories, especially the one immediately after, that of Cain and Abel. (The old legal reading sees these other stories as simply subsequent effects of a "fallen nature" and not first-hand descriptions of primordial human condition.) 
 
Reading carefully the story of Cain and Abel we can see at once it is crafted as a doublet of the Garden story. In other words it is the selfsame story told over from a slightly different perspective, one that illuminates the first. The evidence of this is overwhelming and once it is accepted it throws a startling new light on the basic issue with which Genesis is dealing. Here are at least eight points in which the two stories repeat the same motifs and features, and in ways that are not duplicated elsewhere in Genesis
  1. These are the only stories in the Bible where God speaks so familiarly with human characters (with exception perhaps of the book of Jonah). "Who told you you were naked?" "Where is your brother?" Both stories share a sensation that God is a protagonist only a little removed in life-setting and character from his human creatures who in some measure appear as his counterparts.

  2. In both stories there is a sequence of individual crime and punishment (eating fruit/killing brother, expulsion from Eden/from ground and the face of God). As evident in both cases the core of the punishment is a double alienation: from blessings of the earth/from assured company of God.

  3. In both stories there is mitigation: God softens the punishment and gets newly involved.. He clothes Adam and Eve at 3:21. Even more significantly he puts a protective mark on Cain 4:15. God in fact is seen as caught up in human culture, in ways that seek to soften and control the violence that has entered human life. 
     
  4. In both cases desire is a pivotal element, mentioned by name (3:6, 16; 4:7).

  5. In both cases the desire is plainly mediated, i.e. it is provoked by a third party. The serpent (the most cunning of the beasts created by God) suggests to Eve the desirability of the fruit (the opening of her eyes, 3:5). In 4:4-5 it is God who is the agent of desire, arbitrarily preferring Abel's offering to Cain's, setting up the jealousy between them. Even God's words at 4:6-7 could be construed as provocative, challenging Cain rather than offering him a concrete way out.

  6. In both cases the actual object of desire is possession of what might be called "divine rights". With Eve and Adam it is equality with God, through moral freedom. With Cain it is God's preferential favor (which in fact Cain then obtains for all practical purposes).

  7. Rivalry with God for God is therefore the central motif of both stories. Rivalry between humans is shown to be an aspect of the former. Cain kills Abel in order to have exclusive rights to God!

  8. Death is the result of the rivalry with God. God threatens it at 3:3, but in fact Adam and Eve do not die. (Rather Adam lives an extremely long time, almost a thousand years--5:5!) It is Cain who introduces the first death, uniting the two stories in an outcome that is systemic--desire, rivalry, violence--rather than legal.
Far from Genesis showing the legal consequence of "original sin" God reverses key aspects of the punishment. As we see he continues to accompany humanity, reaching toward the intimate relationship with Abraham, and he promises never again to curse the ground (8:21). The real picture of our human condition that emerges from Genesis is systemic than legal. And the picture of God is of a figure both provoking desire in his creatures and seeking to undo the violence this precipitates among them.