(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.

(Re)reading the Bible #1

Here is the first summary of the new Wood Hope Bible Study. It is a foundational study for Wood Hath Hope theology, discovering how the bible's voice finds its deepest self, growing and maturing over the course of its writing. Linda Lament at the Heart of the Psalms. 04/01/11


Christians are in crisis – trying to understand their role in history. Unlike previous crises in church history, this is not primarily a doctrinal issue. Christians are turning to the Bible one more time, with modern scholarship providing a fresh approach, to help them situate themselves in the world. The Old Testament is interpreted, as a revelation of humanity that is at least as important as the revelation of God. We understand God in a new way as we begin to understand ourselves. The Bible is a description of who we are as human beings. We have been told that the Bible tells us we are sinners - indeed lists all of our individual sins. Christ took these sins upon himself and saved us. These concepts are formal and legalistic. If the Bible is seen instead as a means of disclosing the way we are misconstructed as human beings, then it begins to mean much more. It becomes transformative. Understanding is part of being made new. Jesus is both the lens and the path through which we gain this revelation. He brings a radically new way of being human which is at the same time a new knowledge of ourselves and a new knowledge of and relationship with God. “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (MT:11 27). Outside the nonviolence of Jesus (which is his forgiveness) it is impossible to know God.

The Bible moves forward, but is always in tension with itself. So where is the best place to begin? The Psalms are hard to date. They include some of the oldest material in the Scriptures (from the reign of Solomon) but extend perhaps through the second century BCE– an arc of 800 years. They have the honesty and authenticity of a diary or a journal. They provide a witness to the emotional, existential experience of the people of that time. The Psalms are not so much about history or doctrine but about feelings.

They are a personal human response. The Psalms can be divided into three general categories:

1. Psalms of thanksgiving and praise. In these the author thanks and praises God for nature or for God’s protection and care of his people. Psalm 8 is an example of one of the nature Psalms – human beings are the crown of creation. “You have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor”

2. Covenant or Torah psalms. These psalms are about the Law God gave and the relationship between the people and the Law. They have a strong ethical sense, of what God requires of us. Psalm 15 is an example: “O Lord who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart”.

3. The Psalms of Lament– the most typical of the psalms, and the most powerful. They are a personal or communal crying out in lament or complaint. The psalms of lament begin our biblical journey. Psalm 3, 7 10 and 12 demonstrate the dominant themes and tones of the psalms of lament. They cry out for justice against the strong, powerful and greedy who oppress and do violence and think that God does not see. The psalms are not a political statement. They are cries of help addressed to God, asking him to act against the enemies of the people. The Psalmist trusts that God will hear his complaint and will act. If your God first revealed himself by setting you free from Egypt, then there is an assumption that your God is involved and is concerned about your situation. The psalmist’s entreaty depends upon an established personal relationship, one of justice. This was a radical belief.

Alphabetic writing began to be widely used in the area of Tyre and Sidon around 1100BCE and was already established by the time the Hebrews began recording their history. It was more expressive than hieroglyphics and cuneiform which go back at least two thousand years before this. Writing was used by the scribes in ancient Egypt and Babylonia for discursive wisdom-style literature (how to behave), and also to record business transactions, and provide diplomatic and governmental reports for the ruling elite. A few wrote about the difficulties of life. The “Babylonian Theodicy” (around 1000 BCE) is similar to the book of Job. It is a reflection on injustice. It concludes by deciding that the gods have set things up this way and that nothing can be done. “The gods gave perverse speech to the human race. With lies, and not truth, they endowed them for ever” Everywhere the gods collude with the powerful. There is no active God of justice intervening in the world for the poor and the suffering. The wise sought to evade the notice of the gods and the powerful who have them on their side, to avoid their wrath by remaining under the radar. Or by placating and serving the gods through cult and sacrifice and so keeping evil at bay and earning favor.

The Hebrew God of justice is a cultural anomaly. Humans are no longer pawns of the gods. For the first time there is an emotional connection to the divine expressed in terms of relationship which expects justice. Deep human emotion is valued. The writers are not afraid to express fierce anger at injustice because they know their cry is heard. God is expected to act because that is his character. There is at last a recourse to counter the “divine right” of the kings. Psalm 58 is perhaps one of the worst psalms in terms of violence and vengeance. It rails against injustice and calls upon God for vengeance: “Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods? Do you judge people fairly?” This person is not even addressing God. It is a critique against the mighty, a release of hatred and anger.

Emotionally it makes sense, an expression of the emotion that is released once the possibility of a just world emerges for the first time. The psalms thus express this emotion as a necessary stage in the process of becoming human. It is the first human rebellion against resignation and fatalism. Even in the psalms that rail against God himself, the anger is evidence of a relationship.

Anger only exists when one cares, when greater expectations are unfulfilled. The psalms of lament are also therefore a way of channeling and discharging violent emotion. This can be directed towards God or just as likely be reflected back upon the psalmist in terms of remorse. These are the psalms of repentance. In these psalms there is a recognition that we are the same as those we cry out against. Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143 are examples. Psalm 51 is the greatest of these. The call here is not for vengeance but for mercy. The psalmist has experienced a world with God’s presence of justice and human wholeness and now cries out to return to that place. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me”. There is also an implied solidarity with the rest of the human condition. The psalmist seeks to bring others to repentance. Above all there is a dependence on grace. Sacrifices bring God no delight, rather a broken and contrite heart. The last verses (18-19) are widely recognized to be additions, an editorial comment. They strike a dissonant chord within the text – illustrating its human composition.

Psalm 22 is arguably the greatest of all of the Psalms. It is the psalm that Jesus cries out on the cross. He cries out the opening words and in so doing invokes the whole psalm. Here the emotional pathway reaches its fullest development. The sense of being surrounded by persecutors and under threat runs through many of the psalms. But here there is no call for vengeance or retaliation. The end of the psalm invokes the absolute power of God to save and that the whole of the earth will turn to God and worship him. There is a realization that the only way that non-violence can work and justice still be done is by in some way dealing with those who have died. “To him indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust” (v29). There is a belief in a God that will reach down to death itself. Even after death the relationship with God continues. The thing that makes us retaliate is ultimately the fear of death. If the relationship continues in death then God breaks through the barrier that keeps us locked in injustice and the endless violence that is its counterpart.

Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Seven: What Signs Did He Give?

The last chapter returns to the theme of signs but played out in the historical figure from whom the whole effect originally stems.

It is very difficult to come to firm conclusions about the historical Jesus but if there is a real change in the core human structure, from violence to nonviolence, this cannot happen at the level of just a pretty story. It must come from a real human events with a real human being. We can only learn to be humanly different from someone who is a different kind of human!

Signs occur in the natural world...a bird in springtime sings its insistent song to attract a mate; geese talk endlessly, probably to ensure their collective co-operation. In all cases there is a neural response. Thus at some level "sounds plus meaning" exist in and frame the animal world.

Human beings have vastly expanded this ability via the mystery of purely symbolic language, to the point where you could say the human world is completely made of signs. The human world is completely an artificial world (a "humiverse"), which does not mean unreal or even unnatural. It is natural for human beings to produce or create their world through signs.. With Jesus there is the use of human signs to change our basic programming as human beings.

It is possible to track Jesus' ministry, life and death in terms of signs. His words and actions were all full of sign value, so much so that "sign" is the word that John's gospel chooses for Jesus' miracles. And are not his parables masterful stories each of which is a single sign of the kingdom? "What parable or sign shall I give for the kingdom of God?" A parable or mashal (in Hebrew) is a compelling form of words that runs alongside an experience (a byword, e.g. "like father like son") which can then offer the meaning of that experience. What was special about Jesus' form of words or bywords is that they upset established meaning and proposed a radically new one. His words did not run by you a meaning from the past, but a new meaning that came from himself. His bywords were "mywords"!

The Pharisees and the crowd asked for a sign, and Jesus refuse to give them one in response. This seems to contradict Jesus' communication through signs. But that refusal was itself a communication. It said that the semiotics or sign-system which shaped their demand came from the old world of meaning, rooted in violence. In the chapter this argument is grounded in Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist who in so many ways was Jesus' mentor but from whom he decisively broke. Even though Jesus was baptized by John (and even shared in his baptism ministry, John 3:22) he left him and at a certain point engaged in a long explanation of the difference between their ministries ( Luke &:18-35). VC demonstrates this difference to be explicitly in respect of violence: of the kingdom coming through violence for John, but not for Jesus.

John sends messengers from prison asking whether Jesus is "the one who is to come". In the context this does not mean the Messiah but the figure of Elijah who was to return before the direct intervention of God to establish God's kingdom. Elijah is the classic biblical figure of divine violence (viz. the slaughter of the prophets of Baal), and John and just about everybody else was hung up on the return of Elijah to sort things out before the final day of the Lord. Jesus refused this pathway, opting instead for a ministry of healing, welcome and forgiveness, and that's why John doubted him, having initially thought of Jesus in the role of Elijah! But rather than claiming to be Elijah Jesus identified with Wisdom, a figure of welcome and nonviolence. This is proven by Jesus' actual practice, many of his sayings, and his discourse on John and its ringing conclusion--"Wisdom is vindicated by her children...."

Thus Wisdom is the core sign by which to understand Jesus in the gospels and by which in all probability he understood himself.

Jesus did in fact offer a sign in response to the Pharisees--the sign of Jonah! (Matthew 16:4) The chapter lays out in detail how the whole story of Jonah has to be understood in the key of violence--Jonah's violent anger, the violent anger of God expressed in the storm and from which God relents, the violence of the Ninevites from which they repent, and again the remaining violent anger of Jonah. The great fish is both a monster of the deep--the realm of chaotic violence in Hebrew mythology--and then the transforming agency by which Jonah is saved and the Ninevites converted. The book of Jonah is in fact a Wisdom prophecy and a parable or mashal in its own right. Jesus' adoption of "the sign of Jonah" works on all the levels of the story, as well of course in the central image of Jonah's descent into the abyss of violence and its wondrous transformation through God's action. Jesus is the willing and forgiving Jonah.

In the light of sign of Jonah Jesus' death and resurrection become a profound and final disruption of the human order of meaning based in violence and violent death. In its place a new order of meaning is begun, after "the sign of Jonah." If this is the case it means that the change in the human order of meaning is ongoing; it is not yet complete. We are all virtually Christian!