(Re)reading the Bible #7

Here at long last is the next installment of the Bible study. This one focuses on the theme of Temple. Peace -Linda

Temple 05/20/11

The Book of Exodus, which tells of the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, the giving of the commandments and the establishment of the code of the covenant, also devotes eleven whole chapters to a description of the wilderness tabernacle. The architectural design of this tabernacle (another word for tent, later associated by implication with sanctuary and temple) is set out in some detail. The description is found in chapters 25-31, then repeated again in the account of its construction at Chapters 35-40.

Commentators say that it is highly unlikely that a people newly escaped from oppression and poverty would have had the means and ability to create and transport a tabernacle of such opulence and proportions. Therefore it is likely that what is described is an idealized desert sanctuary. It describes an outer tent and an inner tent with a holy of holies, a design that mirrors the later stone temple built under Solomon. It is a retrojection of the later temple onto the desert period.

33:7-11 describes another tent. The word for tent used here is different. This one is outside the camp (the Tabernacle was always placed in the center of the camp). This tent is called the tent of meeting. It is a tent of divination – a small sacred space, rather like a shamanistic cabin, where Moses communes with God. The passage also describes a different worship practice. The people worship in their own tents, not in this tent or in any other separate sanctuary. Only Moses and Joshua enter the tent of meeting. The likelihood is that this is a more authentic account for a nomadic people.

Amos, one of the earlier prophets, lived in the 8th century BCE. He wrote when the Temple tradition had been established for about 200 years. While the events the writes about are later than those of Exodus, it was actually written earlier than the book of Exodus. Exodus was compiled a couple of centuries later in the 6th century BCE). Amos is therefore closer to the actual events of the exodus. Amos 5:21-25 demonstrates his disdain and rejection of the Temple. God despises the festivals and takes no delight in solemn assemblies. God does not want burnt offerings – instead he seeks justice and righteousness. In v.25 God asks the rhetorical question “Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?” Amos implies that during the Exodus period there was in fact no established ritualized sacrifice. This came later with the establishment of the temple by Solomon. (In fact it stands to reason that a refugee group needing to eat manna and quail did not have cattle from which to select the sacrifice.)

2 Sam 7:1-13 describes yet another tent – this one housing the arc of the covenant (v.2). David, the great warrior king who established the Κingdom is contemplating building God a temple. God, however, responds through the prophet Nathan: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle”. Nathan tells David that God will make him a house (a dynasty) but David should hold off building God a temple. The temple will be built by his offspring. In this way the text tries to balance the tension that arises from two conflicting strands present in the Old Testament - the establishment of the temple cult and the historical and prophetic witness against it.

Chronicles, written from the priestly perspective, re-tells the story. Here the reason that David does not build the temple is because of his violent past. The Temple is not to be contaminated by unholy blood. The priestly perspective is concerned with ritual holiness.

In 1 Samuel 24:10-25 David, at the end of his reign, orders a census. The primary purpose of a census is for taxation, conscription and establishing an empire. This act so displeases God that he punishes David – but gives him the choice of punishment. He opts for three days of pestilence. At the end of the three days David erects an altar on the threshing floor of land he has just purchased. On this site he has seen a vision of the angel of death and he is hoping, through burnt offering, to avert further catastrophic plague. This plot of land is the same one on which Solomon later builds his temple. Although he does not actually build the temple, David establishes the holy ground.

The establishment of the Temple finds its roots in the establishment of empire. There is a need for temple sacrifice once imperial forces come into play. The reasons are many – for centralization of power; for display; for the displacement of the greatly increased forces of violence. Sacrifice and temple are integral to the heart of worldly power.

Sacrifice obviously existed before the Temple, but was not an established hierarchical event. Rather it was normally apotropeic and spontaneous – an act of warding off evil. The Passover sacrifice is an example of this. The blood on the door lintel acts as a protection against the angel of death. In contrast the heart of the prophetic tradition was that God communicated directly through the prophets. The people existed under the overarching care of God and called to practice justice and mercy under the covenant of the Lord.

Third Isaiah (who lived towards the end of the prophetic period, after the return from Exile) gives a thorough rejection of sacrifice. (Is 66:1-3). Cultic practices are equated with violent, impure, idolatrous acts. The whole world is God’s house, so how is it possible to build God a temple?

Jesus rejects all forms of sacrifice. He equates people to sheep – the primary sacrificial animal. As the good shepherd, he sets the sheep free. In Mk 11:15-19 Jesus clears the Temple. After he overturns the tables of the money changers and disrupts the purchasing of sacrificial animals “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (v16). The word for “anything” is actually “vessel” (skeuos). In 1Κings 7:45, 47-48 and 51 this same word is used to describe the vessels used for carrying all sacrificial materials. Jesus comprehensively stops the flow of offerings and the process of sacrifice.

The Oath

On May 19th I went down to the Federal Court House and became a US citizen. Instead of God Bless America the Spirit of Syracuse women crooners should have been hitting Subterranean Homesick Blues, Dylan's raucous rap on being young and American in the sixties. That song, and others like it, shaped how I felt about the US back in the day, and would have made a much better soundtrack to the occasion. I always imagined myself right there with Dylan ducking between some crooked Cold War spy and a frontier-scout dealing who-knows-what, all the while hounded by a guilty sense of fate. Coming now to America for real, was I still dodging destiny or was it truly an offer of something new?

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

I stood there with all the other immigrants (thirty odd from twenty one nations, places as diverse and distant as Uzbekistan and Argentina) pledging my allegiance to the flag and the United States which it signifies. I had done my best to condition my oath to an intentional lifestyle of nonviolence and, fair enough, the federal officer at the interview had accepted, without skipping a beat, the conscientious refusal to bear arms. But the oath continued... "to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law," and I had agreed to that. At the time I felt "noncombatant" was the key word which allowed me to go along in conscience. But this morning it struck me, there in front of the judge and the flag, that I was pledging myself to a nation that saw itself for ever and always on the brink of war. Nothing about pledging yourself to peace or the welfare of your fellow human being.....

Through my twenties the US was in Vietnam. It seemed that war went on for ever. I identified with the students at the time who saw the far eastern engagement as a piece of brutal militarism in the cause of capitalism, waged against Vietnamese peasants who wished simply to live and work in a country governed by themselves. Plus it seemed that many young Americans felt they had no stake in the fight and wanted out. It always seemed the young people were the good guys on both sides of the big pond.

But then we were all getting older and the Cold War shifted focus from the far east to Afghanistan and the build up of nuclear weapons in Europe. Even though it seemed anti-war had been victorious in response to Vietnam the battlefield had simply morphed and moved location, and the dangers had become more acute and terrible. Thatcher and Reagan were remaking the world economically and politically and the voice of protest seemed effectively neutered. It was more or less at that time that my own life changed dramatically and, as I concentrated on survival, "Power to the People" sounded like nothing so much as on old hippie rant....

I would dream about far away places. I would go constantly on these dream trips up through the mountains, or on a long train journey, but I never thought it would be the USA. Essentially I was trying to get away from a previous life, and any place would have done. Yet it was the USA it turned out to be.

And, of course, that makes sense. The USA is the single most evident place in the world where people who wish to start over have come. America is the place where the whole Western world started over back in the sixteenth century and it's been rebooting the universe every since. I really am grateful to get to be a part of this country and its immense sense of possibility. But pledging allegiance, especially with all those references to arms, well it doesn't sit easy, and, in point of fact, what private personal sense can it have?

So I have to say for the sake of self, and any integrity I might claim, that when I made the pledge I did so in a way that went deeper than militarism, far deeper. As a kind of apologia to the past and promise to the future here then is what I do mean.

I do not pledge loyalty to the US in the Enlightenment sense that supposedly moved the framers of the constitution, the belief in effortless rationality, in self-evident truths. Neither do I do so in the popularly embraced frontier sense, the manifest destiny to conquer all that stands in the way, leaving no stone unturned or enemy unconquered. Nor at all did I do it in the Holywood movie sense, the belief that anyone with half a brain and willingness to work hard can become as rich as Bill Gates..

I take the oath of loyalty to the USA in a sense which I believe underpins all these expressions of human self-projection. I am committing myself to something which in fact gives life and breath to the whole exceptionalist and expansionist mood even as it is almost completely unrecognized, and constantly distorted and disfigured by it. What is at work in America is the spirit of deep freedom and boundless possibility communicated by the Christian gospel and instilled in the veins of Western culture. There are two things that can push men and women out into the unknown. One is greed for conquest and the other is faith and hope. And the third is a profoundly muddied mixture of the two.

This last state is what characterizes the US and its history but that should not blind us to the authentic presence of the gospel in the mix. Pledging myself to the US is really pledging myself to the work of the gospel in human culture. It means promising myself (with apologies to Dylan) to a "subterranean life-quick news" that knows no ultimate boundaries of state or race, of politics or party, of pride or past. For me the US is the land of Holywood in the core sense of imagination, the land of fluid and constantly re-envisioned self-image. It is the place where a dynamic idea can take hold and sweep all before it, and that is so because the most dynamic idea of all---of God-made-flesh--is at the root of its borderless self- meaning. The US is a long difficult work of human transformation. Ranged against its positive outcome are all the risks of wealth and war, of paranoia and anger, and now in addition climate change and environmental breakdown. But the boundless horizons of the US are encompassed finally in one world because they are radically shaped by the hope and love of the gospel.

I am o.k. to take this oath, therefore, because it is a spiritual error waiting to correct itself (which is par for the course for just about any other oath I have taken). All our words, just like the whole earth, are under the long slow arc of divine possibility and one day that one great Word will make all those other, lesser ones true. "Look out kid. It’s somethin’ you did. God knows when, but you’re doin’ it again!"

Tony Bartlett

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(Re)reading the Bible #2

Here is the next in the study summaries in our new series. It is an overview of the Bible with the Wood Hath Hope slant - showing how the understanding of a non-violent God emerges through the text. Peace, Linda

Job 04/08/11

The forty-two chapter book of Job begins and ends with a "frame story" describing the basic circumstances of the loss and restoration of the fortunes of Job. Job, a devout and successful man, becomes the object of a wager between God and Satan in the heavenly court. Satan at this point is not the Satan of the Gospels (the symbolization of earthy evil and violence). Rather he is a kind of officer whose job is to prosecute (accuse) guilty humans. The Satan has been "patrolling up and down upon the earth." God boasts to him of his servant Job, “a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil”. The Satan replies that Job has no reason to turn from God, but “stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face”. God accepts the Satan’s challenge, allowing Satan to take everything from him – his possessions, family and health --sparing only his life.


In Job 2:3 God is portrayed as the first to succumb to the Satan’s temptation. He says: “Although you incited me against him to destroy him for no reason ('for nothing').” The Bible is saying that God was tempted by the Satan/the accuser. He crushes Job “for nothing” (Job 9:17). In contrast, Jesus, during his third temptation, replies to Satan ,“Do not put the Lord your God to the test ” quoting from Dt 6:16. Thus in the book of Job God is shown to be less than ideal, in fact to be very "human".. Why is this? What lesson is being taught about the meaning of "God"?


It is hard to put a date on Job’s composition. The reference to a Satan patrolling the earth could come from the Persian practice of organizing regular patrols as a way of controlling their empire. If so it indicates a date of around 500-350 BCE. Job was not an Israelite. He came from the land of Uz and his name can be translated as “enemy”. This fact signals early on that the book is reasoning outside the accepted framework of the Law. It is Job, the enemy and foreigner, who is relentlessly shown to be righteous and blameless.


Job, covered in sores, sits silent among the ashes until three friends, hearing of his troubles, show up to comfort him. After seven days Job starts to speak. The central part of the book is made up of a series of speeches. Job speaks first, then each friend, with Job replying to each in turn. This cycle is repeated three times – so Job has 10 speeches, the friends three each (the final speech of the third friend is missing, presumed by most to have been lost). As the text progresses the friends become more irritated and their arguments and accusations more forceful and direct. Their arguments are basically the same: These misfortunes are not happening by accident. Job must have sinned to have lost God’s favor. They urge him to admit his guilt. Job remains steadfast in the declaration of his innocence.


After the three friends have exhausted themselves a new character is introduced – Elihu, a young man. He is angry that Job’s friends have been unsuccessful in their attempts to convince Job that he is guilty. He also makes two speeches that this time are not answered by Job. Who is Elihu? His name means “He is God”. It is almost as if everyone, including God, is ganging up on Job. When everyone is scapegoating a victim, the manufactured god of unanimous human violence emerges. Elihu sets the stage for Yahweh who finally appears on the scene and speaks to Job out of the whirlwind (40:6). He also gives two speeches but these do not actually answer Job’s complaint. Rather they are an account of the majesty and power of God evident in nature. He describes the Behemoth (hippopotamus) and the Leviathan (crocodile). He lists all of the stuff that he can do that Job cannot. The response doesn’t work. It rings hollow in the light of all that has gone before. It sounds majestic (even pompous) and believable, but remains inadequate.


In his speeches, Job constantly asserts his innocence. He stands alone, yet has the courage to continue. He addresses his complaints to God (not Yahweh here like in the frame story, but “El”). In 9:15 Job protests that God is beyond justice. “Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him; I must appeal for mercy to my accuser”. If Satan is the accuser, then God has become Satan. And God is on the side of the mob, the same as the mob: "He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me. They have gaped at me with their mouths; they have struck me insolently on the cheek; they mass themselves together against me. God gives me up to the ungodly, and casts me into the hands of the wicked...he has set me up as his target; his archers surround me." (16:9-12)


In 9:22 he says that God destroys both the blameless and the wicked. This is an ironic commentary on the psalms and the Deuteronomic God. Deuteronomy is the classic book of reward and punishment. “You must therefore be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn to the right or to the left. You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you are to possess” (Dt5:32-33) Later, Ezra and Nehemiah would appropriate the Deuteronomic view. They saw the Exile as God’s punishment for the people’s transgressions, and exhorted the people to get it right this time. The Pharisees, also adopted this concept of reward and punishment, creating a hedge around the Law to safeguard against any unintentional transgressions. The same thinking (reward and punishment) is evident in certain strands of Christianity today – for example in prosperity preaching.


Job, in contrast, is saying that God does bad things to bad and good people alike. It would be a return to the arbitrary fatalism that existed before the psalms, except that Job rails against God personally. Job has no confidence in the trustworthy character of God displayed in the psalms, who acts justly because his nature demands it. Job is struggling to make sense of the problem of innocent suffering together with blame-the-victim theology, while maintaining a belief in a personal God who intervenes on behalf of his people. Job protests to God about God. He is profoundly questioning the nature of God. In the same way Psalm 22 cries out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” It is almost like God has disappeared in these texts. Both Job and Jesus have put God to death – the God constructed by humans. Job implicates this humanly created God in the exclusion, blaming and scapegoating of the innocent. Job cries out for a different kind of God.


What then is the way through in Job?


Job begins to talk about a third party in his dialogue with God. Someone who will stand on his side against God. It occurs in three places in the text, gradually becoming more developed. At 9:32-33 “For he is not a mortal, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together. There is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand on us both”. Here Job expresses his wish for an impartial umpire to act between him and God. Humans have no recourse against the divine: he needs someone else who can arbitrate. In 16:18-21 this wish becomes more concrete – a belief that he has a witness in heaven. A witness who is not God. “O earth do not cover my blood; let my outcry find no resting place. Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high.” It is his innocent blood crying out from the ground that is the source of his belief. In 19:23-27 belief is transformed into knowledge. “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side”.


The figure of the redeemer (“go’el”) or the avenger of blood appears elsewhere in the Old Testament (in Numbers and Deuteronomy). It was an institutionalized role in nomadic/tribal cultures before the establishment of civic law. If someone is killed then someone has to avenge the spilled blood. This was usually the duty of a close relative. The blood can then lie quiet. Ruth is also the go’el . She doesn’t kill, but marries the cousin of her dead husband and in so doing redeems the line of her dead husband. God is called go’el in 2nd Isaiah – Redeemer. In this text God comforts his people – he will not let their blood disappear. Job was probably written after 2nd Isaiah and there is the possibility that the idea of a redeemer may have been seeded in the mind of the author from that text. Here in Job, with his relentless defense of innocence against the mob, and with God siding with the mob - the Redeemer suddenly appears. Someone will stand upon the earth to defend the scapegoat.


The book of Job ends with Job’s response to God’s justification speeches. “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth” 40:3-6. “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:1-6). The irony and sarcasm of the earlier chapters appears to be closed down in the final frame of the story and it is usually interpreted as Job’s confession for doubting God. The Hebrew is actually better translated as “I reject and regret dust and ashes”. (See note in New Interpreters Study Bible). If read this way the preceding verses retain their irony and the sense of “But now my eyes see you” becomes instead “I see through you”.


Job’s wealth is restored and now it is his friends who are on the receiving end of God’s wrath. "For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7).Thus the frame story tells us, amazingly, Job is in the right! Moreover, Job now prays for his friends to God – adopting the role of the redeemer. The book of Job shows us that the truth lies with Job and his pathway.


It is a perfect example of the "(re)reading" the bible, of the bible re-reading itself, revealing the underlying flaws of the Deuteronomic understanding of God. Jesus later assumes the mantle of Job – both as innocent victim and as redeemer. He asserts that God is not a God of violence that sends punishment to the bad and good indiscriminately– rather God sends his rain to fall on the good and bad alike without reservation, without expectation – as pure grace.