We might see the construction of a temple in Jerusalem after the return from Babylon as a viable historical basis for the beginning of the Bible’s formation. This argument, however, refers to specific metaphors and intellectual ideas in the Bible. It particularly refers to what they imply about the world that created them. The argument is not adequate for dating the traditions historically. At most it gives us an earliest possible date some time after a community had been formed around Jerusalem’s temple. This community came to understand itself variously as having returned from exile, being the remnant of ancient Israel, or by understanding itself as the new Israel. This process could possibly have been as early as c, 450 BCE or as late as the Maccabean period. Neither the return from exile nor the construction of the second temple under Ezra and Nehemiah are periods or events known to us from evidence. Known to us from tradition, not history, they are not entirely viable as historical contexts.
In this question of the possible historical contexts of the Bible’s formation, we are compelled to begin, not from theory, but from the foundation of what is historically known about the tradition. This begins with the contexts in which our traditions have come to us. Only from secure contexts, where we know that the biblical tradition certainly existed, can we enter tolerably into the more speculative earlier periods of its formation. The Septuagint version of the Old Testament, whose origins we can reasonably date to the second century BCE or later, is not entirely a translation of the Hebrew Bible we know. Some of the traditions in the Septuagint are not found in the Hebrew Bible. Some books, like the Books of Maccabees, never existed in Hebrew but had been originally written in Greek, Yet others, like the Greek version of Samuel, should be described as variants of the traditions we find in the Hebrew Bible.
In II Maccabees 4, we find an interesting reference to a collection of texts that had been saved by Judas Maccabee from the wars. Whether this is a plausible and accurate depiction of some known library is uncertain. It could just as well be a fictional reference to traditions known. It might be read as supporting II Maccabees’ view of Jewish tradition and of the Maccabees’ role in protecting the ‘traditional’ way of life in Hellenized Palestine. The additional mention in II Maccabees 4 of the legendary library of Nehemiah as having been lost some time in the distant past is perhaps only a reference to a tradition otherwise unknown among the Nehemiah legends. It implies that the author of II Maccabees knows of no stable collection of written tradition that had survived the Maccabean wars intact. In this chapter of II Maccabees, dedicated to a recounting of the survival of tradition past, neither the traditions of Ezra’s law-giving nor that of Nehemiah’s library are any longer accessible. Only Judas Maccabee’s efforts preserved what is now seen as a fragmented past. In itself, this text offers us a serious argument against understanding the final formation of the Bible much earlier than the end of the second century BCE. This is the appropriate date for the original text that II Maccabees claims to epitomize. Perhaps, our Bible should not be dated before some time in the first century BCE, when II Maccabees itself seems to have been written. Its writer, at least, knows no such Bible.
The Hebrew Bible that we know underwent a considerable revision some time after the rededication of the Jerusalem temple in 164 BCE. We know this because the chronology it uses, beginning in Genesis, is based on a scheme of a great year of 4,000 years that reaches its fullness with this rededication. The legends of Ezra and Nehemiah are also centred in this national ideology of the temple in Jerusalem. This theology has its first secure context in the intellectually charged movement of nationalism that followed the Maccabean revolt, and that centred itself in the traditions around the temple at some time after this rededication. This gives us a reasonable earliest date for the beginning of a comprehensive collection of the tradition. It is also first in the historical context of the Hasmonean state, created by the Maccabees, that Palestine possesses the national coherence implied by the development of a library, and which is so marked by the language of self-conscious ethnicity. Unlike many earlier periods in Palestine, we know that the Hellenistic period was both creative and literate. The development of tradition, an aspect of intellectual history, requires no broad chronological spectrum. It is both synchronic and diachronic. It is also first in this period that we have found texts similar to what we find in the Bible. The texts that have been found in Qumran show that the biblical tradition is already well advanced by the late second century BCE, and they show that at least the Book of Isaiah has been completed in all its 66 chapters. These texts also give evidence that much of the biblical tradition is still in the process of completion.
When we turn to the tradition itself for an understanding of its formation, our earliest possible context for the onset of the process of tradition collection must be placed with the identification of the bearers of this tradition as ‘Israel’. Greek influence in the collective tradition need not necessarily lock us into the Hellenistic period. This understanding of ‘Greek’ influence reflects an artificial contrast by early scholarship between Greek literature and that of the ancient Near East. Arguments of derivation, however, are fragile and tendentious. Palestine, on the Mediterranean fringe of the Persian world, comes into contact with the Aegean world at least from the onset of hostilities between the Greek city-states and Persia. What we like to define as Greek thought is better viewed as a specific regionalization of an intellectual understanding that reflected perceptions of reality found not only in Greece, but across the entire ancient world. What each region developed was its own geographically particular literature: in far-off India as in Egypt, in Babylon as in Syria-Palestine, in Old Persia and in Anatolia. Both Hebrew and Greek reflect a comparable world-view from at least the fifth century.
For purposes of clarity, I would suggest that we think of the earliest sources of the Bible as reflecting one of three categories:
a) Surviving fragments of the past. These are traditions and fragments of traditions that come from intellectual contexts that were both earlier and independent of the texts in which they have been collected. Some of the materials collected can be shown to preserve or reflect original contexts that can be recognized by us as belonging to very early periods. Some of these – such as a small number of sayings or prayers that have been collected in Leviticus, the Shem and Ham genealogies we find in Genesis, as well as the genealogy of Ishmael, the story in Numbers about the prophet Bileam, the dynastic list of Israel from Omri on, perhaps the dynastic name of a ‘House of David’ in Jerusalem, as well as aspects of the destruction account of Samaria – have known roots even as early as the Assyrian period. Many motifs found in the Psalms, such as in Psalm 89 – in fact, entire stanzas of song – demonstrate a clear continuity of song and poetry in the region dating back at least as early as the poetry found on the cuneiform tablets of ancient Ugarit of Late Bronze Syria. Perhaps the earliest elements of biblical stories can be found in the many collections of names – especially in the collections of Genesis 4 and 5 – some of which are otherwise only known from Bronze Age texts. Not only the flood story, but both the garden story and the creation account of Genesis 1 offer variants of motifs, themes and episodes closely tied to Late Babylonian traditions or to the Gilgamesh and Adapa stories of yet earlier times. There are also many structural and thematic similarities between the collections of narratives that we find from Joshua to II Kings and the ethnographic tales that had been collected by the fifth-century Greek writer Herodotus. There are many more such fragments of traditions collected in the Bible.
b) The world-view of exclusive monotheism. These are traditions and aspects of the tradition that reject forms of syncretism. They reflect an intolerance of alternative religious expression, and they favour a universalist and exclusive monotheism. It is as yet uncertain that this intolerance is entirely due to the adoption of the sectarianism implicit in the Bible’s theology of the way. Already by the late second century BCE, however – to judge by many of the Dead Sea scrolls – intolerant forms of sectarianism seem to have begun to distinguish and define communities which had accepted the tradition as their own. From as early as the Persian empire’s efforts under Xerxes to centralize the government’s control over religious ideology by banning some religious associations, many more pluralist ideas were perceived as a threat to the dogma the empire supported. Such discriminating intolerance becomes commonplace in ancient texts. Perhaps the originally Greek concept of the essential spirituality and individuality of the human person found a platform in Asia in which the gods, perceived as individuals, became implicitly competitive. This could be seen as the dark side of the story of a God without a people seeking a people without a God.
More than one recent book of biblical scholarship has explored the possibilities of radical political parties forming around a Taliban-like fundamentalist core of religious bigots. This work is very promising. Slogan-like references to ‘Yahweh Alone!’ as a rallying cry for such groups echo through many of our texts, and might well reflect such socially destructive movements. The historical existence in the Persian province of Jehud of a discriminating, potentially intransigent, and intolerantly repressive movement against dissidents might be inferred from parts of Ezra. Certainly the tradition was quickly understood as reflecting a world-view of exclusive monotheism, intolerant of the beliefs of others. Josephus’ accounts of John Hyrcanus’ military conquests of Palestinian regions not only echo II Kings’ stories about ‘good King Josiah’, they also underline the social and historical realities of forced conversions in a religiously politicized environment. When historicized, the world-view of exclusive monotheism could be well epitomized by the metaphors in the Psalms about Yahweh and his messiah at war with the nations and the powers of the ungodly. Such metaphors form a slippery slope, and end in a personification of both good and evil, as in today’s commonplace demonization of the foreigner and Islam in both Europe and the Americas.
The Aegean world’s deep-rooted merchant’s penchant for syncretism, with its inevitable tendency to see a plurality of religious expression as essentially an ordinary issue of commerce, met a surprisingly bitter and reactionary resistance in Palestine. For many, Yahweh represented the sole signification of the heavenly spirit. In contrast to the Persian empire’s common language of a universal ‘God of heaven’, the Seleucids’ indifference to local Palestinian traditions of expression, and their general lack of discrimination in the world of divine metaphor, encouraged radical intolerance and the perception of the ‘dangers’ of syncretism as foreign. This became a rallying cry of traditionalists and nationalists against the empire. Hellenism could be demonized as an all-pervasive power that threatened Palestine’s very existence. In this straggle, language, tradition and God were seen to be at risk. The ideology of such exclusive monotheism led historically to political independence behind the armies of the Maccabean insurrection. Their success marked many in Palestine with a sharply distinctive national consciousness for the first time.
Exclusive monotheism, logically a secondary and reactionary development in the intellectual history of ideas, lies close to the time of the formation of our traditions. The need to reject the dominance of the Seleucids defined itself as a need to affirm monotheism in exclusive and anti-Hellenistic terms. This created a large spectrum of political, religious and philosophical divisions within Palestine’s population that were not to be played out for some three centuries.
c) The world-view of inclusive monotheism. This belongs to the traditions within the Bible, and in other large composites of collected traditions, that express a specifically transcendent and universal monotheism. In contrast to exclusive forms, this monotheism included many polytheistic traditions and metaphors for understanding the divine. Such traditions self-consciously understand themselves as limited human expressions of what ultimately reflects a transcendent divine. The traditions, once collected, contributed to the development of a pluralistic world-view.
Wisdom literature in the Bible relates to the collections of torah and prophets much as commentary does to tradition. The specific collections that we have, such as can be found in the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms and Job, have a self-understanding as works of teachers about tradition. They bring us directly into the intellectual visions of the torah and the prophets from a perspective that looks back on a metaphor of ‘exile’. They centre us in a contrast between an old and a new Israel. It is through the inclusive monotheism of such unique texts as the poetic work of Isaiah 40–55, and especially through the central understanding of the divine as transcendent, that Israel’s and Jerusalem’s disastrous past was interpreted positively as an expression of imminent divine mercy in the world. Isaiah 40’s words of comfort to Jerusalem in exile have formed the focus within which the uncompromising description of Israel as unfaithful and rejected so often reiterated in the diatribes of Isaiah 1–36 is interpreted. The compassion of chapters 40–55 is found echoed in the only seemingly-merciless irony of the Immanuel prophecies of Isaiah 7–10. They rather offer a dramatic interpretation of God’s presence to contrast the narrative’s story of disaster with the grace given to the ‘repentent remnant’ with which the audience identifies, while the Old Israel epitomizes the role of the ungodly. This coherent vision of divine righteousness as expressed in forgiveness and redemption creates the tradition as a meaningful whole. The prophecy of doom and punishment pronounced to King Ahaz holds implicit the song of comfort and Jerusalem’s ultimate forgiveness.
In books like Job, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah, we find an intellectual boldness and excitement that is much like what occurred in the writings of Plato or Sophocles in Athens. The stock phrases of tradition and piety are confronted directly, and the small ambitions of men are openly ridiculed. Even the ambitions of the pious and the wise are open to ruthless caricature. Such a voice, critical of tradition and its gods, is centred in a growing contrast between the divinely transcendent and the traditional gods of ancient song and story.
The gods of tradition are drawn both from their stories and from their traditional roles in temples. Quite explicitly, they are portrayed as the gods that men have known. We glimpse this growing critical contrast already piecemeal in cuneiform literature of the sixth century BCE. This theology is implicit in the Neo-Babylonian dedication steles in the temple of Sin in Harran, and in the Persian propaganda of texts such as the Cyrus cylinder. In both of these texts, the king assigns himself the role of saviour of the gods. This is an ‘official’ theology that implicitly deconstructs the reality of the gods of tradition. Such a critical distance from gods is also implicit in some of the early Aramaic texts which refer to Ba’al Shamem and to the ‘God of heaven’. Such texts are marked by a philosophical and theological perception that is wholly different from a commonplace understanding of gods in their personal roles as story heroes and religious patrons.
From at least the twilight of the Assyrian empire in the seventh century BCE, the ancient world’s intellectual perception of reality was forced into a defining crisis. Such change found expression in a growing awareness of the patent irrelevance of tradition past. The crisis was resolved in different ways by different peoples, across the immense geographical distances of the ancient world. In the Aegean, the intelligentsia rejected the gods and the cosmology of a Homer and Hesiod as no longer tenable. This rejection of the stories of the gods is clearly stated by the early distinctions that separated collections of legends from history as research. In the fourth century, Plato portrayed the ideal philosopher as a servant of reflection. Wisdom, for him, began in self-knowledge. The Greek playwrights, with their hermeneutics of mockery, gave the popular fantasies about the gods a ruthless exposure.
This ‘twilight of the gods’ in Greek intellectual life is played out in different ways in the growth of classical literary traditions across Asia. All find their point of departure in such critical thought about the gods of tradition. These traditions come to us in the collected scriptures of Zoroastrianism, of Buddhism and of the Bible. Each also took its written form, some time between the third and the first centuries BCE. Critical thought was not a discovery confined to the West. Southwest Asia also had to confront gods with clay feet, and did so with varying degrees of agnosticism. In the biblical tradition, this intellectual crisis was resolved by making a clear and distinct affirmation of the reality of life and spirit. This was defined as the true abode of the divine. Through a transitory hold on life, a partial and fragmented understanding of knowledge, and a limited experience of light, our earthly existence shared in such divinity, if only in perceiving our own distance from the divine. This true world of spirit, transcendent and unknown, was contrasted with the known realities of the human world, including the gods of our making. Human experience was perceived, through the metaphor of a mirrored reality, as intrinsically partial and ultimately mistaken, reflective of the real world of spirit through misdirection. In the Semitic world, the crisis that had begun in an intellectual tradition that was no longer believable was resolved by contrasting the perceived and the contingent, as limited human perceptions of reality with an unperceived understanding of all that was beyond such limited possibilities of thought. Spirit was ineffable. Divine reality was not the gods that men created; it was beyond conception. Traditional understanding and religion were not so much false, as human.
For many, removing the mythology from traditional beliefs changed them. Traditional concepts of the divine were thrown into a polarized contrast with the limitations of human activity, including its prolific manufacturing of gods. This human tradition of god-making, was understood as fragile. It involved incomplete and often erroneous efforts to express realities that were intrinsically foreign to humans. The stories of tradition were not rejected, they were pitied. Metaphors of God as patron, one who determined the destinies of nations, even images of the heavenly court, could be understood as human stories about the divine realm which was at an infinite remove from humanity, with all its limited and personal religious preoccupations. It is just such an image of the divine that we find in the Book of Job, with its dramatization of traditional piety and its caricature of the gods of its story. It is not the bombastic creator-God, speaking from the whirlwind in chapters 40 and 41, who personates this philosopher’s God. Much more devastating is the brief submissive response in chapter 42, in which Job admits his ignorance of the divine. This is the heart of the drama. After having won the audience to support his cause, the plaintiff abandons it. Job’s understanding is much like the ironic declaration of Solomon, who, as philosopher king of Ecclesiastes, describes his lifelong search for the spirit as mere ‘chasing the wind’.
The theological revolution of inclusive monotheism doesn’t move from a world of polytheism and stories about the gods’ adventures to a vision of Mosaic monotheism in the faith of an all-powerful creator. That is a misunderstanding of biblical fundamentalism. It confuses the literary product of Exodus’ story-plot with the understanding implicit in its creation. We are confronted rather with a crisis of awareness, a shift from the too simplistic understanding of stories to a doubt in such a god’s existence. Recognizing that the world of gods was a world created by us was a recognition of human understanding as limited. Such awareness understands that we do not know God. This theology is at the heart of the torah. This is the Psalms’ ‘fear of God’ that is righteousness. This is the Bible’s self-knowledge that is the beginning of wisdom. The God of the Old Testament is the unknown God, the silent voice of Elijah, the God that Job knew only by hearsay. This is the biblical tradition’s God. This is why it is on the tradition itself, rather than on any of its particular metaphors about the divine, that the Bible’s attention is focused.
Such ideas are very much alive in the middle of the Hellenistic period. They had yet centuries to ran their course. In Palestine they had already had a long history. The military and administrative conception of the emperor as king of kings did not only correspond with Persian religious ideology of the transcendent God of spirit, Ahura Mazda. It also corresponded with the conquered peoples’ perceptions of the ‘God of heaven’ as understood in the distinct regions of the empire, as Marduk of Babylon, Sin of Harran, Ba’al Shamem of greater Syria and its biblical form, Elohe Shamayim.
Differences in concepts, which were no longer so much gods as referents to the divine and to the reality of spirit, are issues of translation. The divine evoked by such titles is hardly specific, multiple or personal. The divine world is no longer a world of gods, however much many people continued to identify their gods with the divine. Yahweh became the name and reflection of the divine. He was God for Israel: Immanuel. Gods belonged now only to a human world. They were divided by languages and by nations. It was people that needed this defining quality of names.
Somewhat in contrast to the Greek historians, philosophers and playwrights, the intellectuals of Asia chose to affirm the traditions of the past. They accepted them as expressions of true reality, perceived in limited human terms. This defining concept of inclusive monotheism finds its home in ongoing efforts to interpret polytheistic conceptions in universal and transcendent terms.
In biblical tradition, such inclusive monotheism is clear in what most scholars recognize as Hellenistic texts. For example, in Ezra 1: 1–3’s citation of the Cyrus decree, Elohe Shamayim, identified as Yahweh, the known God of Israel, charges Cyrus to re-establish his people by building a temple in Jerusalem of Judah. In this text, the author expresses an understanding of the people in the province of Jehud as the legitimate successors of neglected or forgotten Yahweh traditions from ancient Israel (that is, from Samaria). It also identities these traditions of Yahweh as traditions about God: Elohe Shamayim, This is exactly the identification that is carried out in the Pentateuch in the story of the burning bush. The God of the Bible is ‘God’, and Yahweh is his name. He is identified as the God of their fathers. Through such traditions, the name of the traditional deity of Palestine, Yahweh, is identified as old Israel’s name for the truly divine. The understanding of this old traditional deity is thereby transformed from that of a hardly-longer understood regional god of Palestine to the role of mediator of the Most High. Yahweh is presented as the name of the Most High, He is the ineffable God as Israel – with its human limitations – misunderstood him. As Immanuel, Yahweh becomes the cryptic cipher for the presence of the Most High in this world, who is recognized only by those who hear and understand. This is no longer a god of any cult, story, or oracle. The old storm deity of Palestine no longer exists. He has been transformed and reinterpreted in a new understanding. Yahweh, as a god, belongs to the traditions of old Israel, not to the faith of the new. As the name of God, however, Yahweh functions as mediator between the human tradition and the divine. He represents how people used to think about God who is ever transcendent and unknowable. The tradition is preserved, but radically transformed.
This enabled the collectors of the tradition to express their understanding of a universal world order under the transcendent deity Elohim. At the same time, they were able to preserve the personal aspect of the divine that had been basic to the traditional folklore of Palestine. This solution might be described as a form of Platonism, ridding us of the world of the gods as such in favour of a concept of universal transcendence. It also shares in a much more synchronistic Hellenism, understanding the existence of the world’s many competing gods as variable mistaken forms of the tradition’s merely human understanding. The Bible’s inclusive monotheism expanded understanding of the divine to include both the personal and the universal. This enabled the collectors of the Bible to pursue their primary goal of preserving a shattered and fragmented past through a reinterpretation that reflected their own world-view.
Theologians in the past have often arrogantly referred to stories as ‘mere stories’. To speak of the Bible’s stories was seen to implicate the Bible in lies. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that we have failed to realize the implications that in Genesis we have only stories. They are complicated stories, rich stories, profound and moving stories, but, none the less, stories alone. I do not begin to imply by this that some of the stories in Genesis are not religious or pious stories. They are – some of them. What I do mean to sty is that even these pious and religious stories have their first purpose in fiction.
For example, the story in Genesis 22, the sacrifice of Isaac, is clearly hagiographic, a saint’s story of the first rank. The story is didactic in intent throughout. Although the story may be read as a unit by itself, it fits its present context, within the larger Abraham chain of stories, exceedingly well. When Genesis 22 begins, the Abraham chain narrative is already essentially completed. The plot’s central promise to Abraham, has been fulfilled in the birth of Isaac, Genesis 21’s final tying up of so many of the intertwining threads of plot heightens the shock of Yahweh’s test of Abraham in its unexpectedness. After all this, in spite of Abraham and Sarah’s doubts and laughter, in spite of the pretensions of Ishmael’s mother, and in spite of the two-fold threat to Sarah’s sexual integrity and to Abraham’s life, God has finally fulfilled his promise to the patriarch in Abraham’s hundredth year. It is just then that the real test comes. It is entirely on Abraham’s trust in Yahweh, and on that trust alone – on Abraham’s belief that ‘God will provide’ – that the entire narrative hangs. The test is to be one of perfect obedience. Isaac is not merely Abraham’s only and beloved son. He is the fulfilment of God’s pledge to Abraham. The demand made of Abraham is that he must, with Isaac, also sacrifice the promise that Yahweh has made to him. That is the very basis of God’s special relationship to him.
It is extremely important for understanding the intention of the story to notice that we do not go on this journey of faith with Abraham. Abraham is alone. We watch the performance, but we are not participators in it. From the very start of the story, the audience is informed that Yahweh is only testing Abraham. This is a literary device. It is used with even greater effect in the Book of Job. There the audience is privy to the meeting of Yahweh’s divine council and overhears Yahweh making his bet with Satan. The religious sensibilities of the audience are being protected throughout, by their being clearly informed that the test is only that: a test. This story is of the same type as the medieval legends of the saints or the early Church’s stories about the martyrs. It is comparable to an imitatio Christi. It is a parable, ending with the implied: ‘Go, do likewise.’
The story of Abraham in Genesis 22, and the story about Joseph being guided by divine providence as well, are not hagiographic. They do not encourage the audience directly to have similar faith and trust, as the stories’ heroes had. It is true that we are led to admire and to focus on Abraham’s great faith, but it is an admiration as for a hero in a saga. Abraham’s faith is admirable in exactly the same way that Lot’s hospitality to the two strangers at Sodom in Genesis 19 is. It isn’t, of course, that Lot valued his daughters so little. Rather it is because he valued them so much, that they are offered to the townspeople for rape. The kind of admiration we, the audience, have in such stories is the awe and wonder of entertainment: an awe and a wonder that cannot survive if taken too seriously. It is in just such an unserious, unmoral but, nevertheless, reflective and theological way, that we admire – with horror but none the less with real admiration – Laban switching brides on Jacob, or Jacob’s own duplicitous bankrupting of Laban. So too do we admire Rachel’s quick wit and luck in feigning menstrual cramps, thereby limiting Laban’s search, and succeeding in her theft. This list can easily be extended. If these stories do something so serious as teach, they teach the way that most stories teach: by educating the emotions in a safe place and in a safe way. It is rash and foolish to jump to the conclusion that the protagonists of the stories of Genesis are intended to be emulated, or even that they are in any special way praiseworthy. They do, however, have their high spots. Certainly Joseph is always to be admired, except when he ‘narks on’ his brothers, or when he enslaves the people of Egypt.
The story of Abraham in Genesis 22, and the story about Joseph being guided by divine providence as well, are not hagiographic. They do not encourage the audience directly to have similar faith and trust, as the stories’ heroes had. It is true that we are led to admire and to focus on Abraham’s great faith, but it is an admiration as for a hero in a saga. Abraham’s faith is admirable in exactly the same way that Lot’s hospitality to the two strangers at Sodom in Genesis 19 is. It isn’t, of course, that Lot valued his daughters so little. Rather it is because he valued them so much, that they are offered to the townspeople for rape. The kind of admiration we, the audience, have in such stories is the awe and wonder of entertainment: an awe and a wonder that cannot survive if taken too seriously. It is in just such an unserious, unmoral but, nevertheless, reflective and theological way, that we admire – with horror but none the less with real admiration – Laban switching brides on Jacob, or Jacob’s own duplicitous bankrupting of Laban. So too do we admire Rachel’s quick wit and luck in feigning menstrual cramps, thereby limiting Laban’s search, and succeeding in her theft. This list can easily be extended. If these stories do something so serious as teach, they teach the way that most stories teach: by educating the emotions in a safe place and in a safe way. It is rash and foolish to jump to the conclusion that the protagonists of the stories of Genesis are intended to be emulated, or even that they are in any special way praiseworthy. They do, however, have their high spots. Certainly Joseph is always to be admired, except when he ‘narks on’ his brothers, or when he enslaves the people of Egypt.
It is not a good idea to believe in a god when he is a character in a story! Don’t think for a moment that the narrator of Genesis or his audience ever believed in or prayed to that kind of a god. This is the world that the teller has created for his representation of old Israel, where sometimes iron does float on water, and where sometimes God is awful. The understanding of God that the narrator implies can be likened to Joseph’s consolation he gives, weeping when his brothers ask him for forgiveness. What humans see as evil, God means for the good; in the case of the Joseph story – as with the greater story of Israel’s remnant – ‘to change it to good, that many may live’ (Gen, 50; 20).
I’d like to demonstrate this point about the characters of Genesis, whether gods or patriarchs, with some further examples. The issue becomes clearest to me when I think of the very positive character of Abraham in Genesis 14. In this story, Abraham has been called upon as a military saviour. He responds by routing the kings of the north in running battle. In winning this fight, he saves the kings of the Jordan plain, and rescues his nephew Lot in passing. Such is Abraham’s success. We have all read about such heroes, Abraham’s character is brought out in very few words in his conversation with the king of Sodom over the division of the booty, to which Abraham had full right, of course, as victor in the battle. After Abraham has given a tithe to Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, the king of Sodom addresses him; ‘Give me back the people, but keep all the goods for yourself.’ Abraham answers the king that ‘he would not take a thread or a sandal thong, or anything that is yours, lest you should jay: “I have made Abraham rich.” I will take nothing but what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who went with me; let Aner, Eshcol and Mamre take their share.’
A thematic parallel can be observed here between Abraham’s open-handed generosity and the generosity he had shown his nephew Lot, when he allowed him to choose the best land in chapter 13. In fact, it is this thematic parallelism that is one of the reasons for Genesis 14 being placed after the Lot story in the developing chain narrative that forms the heart of the Bible’s tradition about Abraham. However, the personality of Abraham as the hero of Genesis 14 is unique. This is not the fatherly generosity of the Abraham of Genesis 13, careful to avoid even the occasion for conflict, any more than Abraham is here the bunco artist of Genesis 12, who would sell his wife to get rich at the expense of the Egyptians, Nor is Abraham in Genesis 14 the holy prophet of Genesis 20, whose cowardice has to be excused by the narrator on the plea that Sara was, after all, his half-sister. Nor is Abraham in Genesis 14 the stoic, obedient servant of Genesis 22 – that horrifying saint – ready to kill his own son if his God should demand it. And Abraham of Genesis 14 is certainly not the doddering old man, waiting by the oaks of Mamre, whose heart was fall of welcome for a stranger. It is very difficult to see him as identical to the husband of Genesis 21, so helplessly torn by the conflicts of his wives as to accept the abandonment of his first-born son – even if it was on his God’s instructions. No, here in Genesis 14, we have a soldier hero, of the like of D’Artagnan or Robin Hood – ever careful of and generous for his friends and his men, but careless for himself. He could be likened to a Samson, or a David; even a Joshua on his better days. This is the stuff of which heroes are made. The potential for emulation is certainly there, but can we seriously think of these stories, or of stories such as that of Jacob using extortion against his starving brother, or deceiving his blind, dying father, as stories dedicated to simple moral teaching? That would both pervert them and destroy them as stories.
We would also do well to avoid seeing the God of Genesis or Yaweh, who plays a role in so many of these stories, as identical to the God or Yahweh of the theological tradition that uses these stories with purpose. In Genesis, Yahweh’s roles are as varied as the stories he appears in, though his function is ever that of old Israel’s god. I have a personal and quite horrific reaction, as well as a sense of resentment, toward a god like that in Genesis 22, if we must mix him up with belief in the God of the real world. Can this be? A God, who sees into men’s hearts, and then, for a game, would so pitilessly toy with a father’s deepest feelings? The story when read, not as an act of God but as a story, is wholly without objection. However, I ask those of you who are parents: If this were truly God, would you even want to forgive him if you were Abraham? And how would you feel, at the end of reading about Job’s trials, with your replacement set of children? Such a God of story needs a theological understanding and interpretation to remain viable. Although Genesis often offers hints at the significant difference between the God of its stories and the understanding of the divine implied by their author’s voice, a radical transformation of the explicit narration of the Pentateuch must wait for the theophanies of Exodus 3–6. Until then, we are dealing with the legends of old.
Gods are created, but the true God is unknown. This important maxim lies at the centre of the Bible’s theology.
The historicism implicit in the biblical theology movement of half a century ago is more modern than it is biblical. What is often referred to as the Bible’s history has, in fact, nothing to do with writing history in any modern sense. The biblical basis for the theological language of salvation history is not a history, but a tradition. It is interested neither in the past nor indeed in the future. Both are but reflections for reality, and, as such, other than reality. The most disorienting difficulty with such readings of the Bible, is that they attempt to transpose a perspective of reality underlying biblical traditions into peculiarly modern terms. They permit reflection on our reality, but not reflection on what was real for the writers of the Bible. It was once fashionable for theologians to demythologize the Bible’s story world – as if there were available modern equivalencies immediately at hand, with which we might translate the Bible’s mythos into our own way of thinking. This was closely linked to the Protestant ideal of making the Bible’s faith our faith. Strong was the confidence that the God of the Bible – or indeed Jesus – could somehow be translated and become our God, without substantial loss or distortion. This fundamental assumption (and I would say arrogance) of biblical theology had at its core a belief in the inadequacy of the world-view of the ancients. At the same time, it maintained a blind faith that this same primitive world’s religious perception could become a saving perception in our world.
History – an intellectual construct about events of the past and their meaning – has been, until very recently, an inescapable and fundamental part of our thinking and of our understanding of reality. It forms the crux of the distortions of neo-orthodox exegesis. Such a perception of reality, however, is far from the intellectual matrix of biblical tradition, Unlike events of history, events of tradition do not share in reality because of the uniqueness or singularity of their meaning, ‘Reality’ for the Bible lies quite far from both this world and its events. ‘History’, like all of the events of human affairs, is, for the ancient traditionist, illusory. It is like the whole of this material, accidental and refracted world in which we live. Events in time are seen as through a distorting glass. True reality is unknowable, transcending experience.
Tradition is important heuristically. It brings understanding. Its recitation evokes truth. It does not recount it. Reality is not part of this traditional world, which is rather a world of human creation. Not even the gods of the tradition are real in themselves. They are only manifestations of God, Yahweh is God for Israel. He is Immanuel: God with us, only significant because of his referent.
Rather than as history, the Bible’s tradition might better be expressed as reiterative and typological aetiology. I use the word aetiology with purpose. It is a story of the past that seeks to echo – through metaphor – the truth of what is known. The biblical stories about the faithless and shattered Israel, about its relationship to and its betrayal of its forgotten God, are hardly history, as we understand the word. The word history does not even exist in Hebrew. In the Bible’s many stories and collected songs, written to create a self-understanding among its readers as the saved remnant of Israel, the Bible does not address or try to understand an historical past. The so-called ‘deuteronomistic history’ for example, from Joshua to the end of Kings, is not driven by any effort to explain either Samaria’s or Jerusalem’s destruction by its story of a god protecting the nation whenever it is faithful to him and punishing it in turn whenever Israel or Judah abandoned Yahweh’s worship for that of his competitor Ba’al, as has been commonly claimed. This is not even the purpose of Kings. Such an interpretation confuses narrative plot and motif with theme and function. It mixes up occasion with purpose and significance. However black and white the evil and good of Judges and Kings might be, the simple-mindedness implied by this caricature should never be confused with authorial intent.
However much Josiah’s explicitly tragic opposition to Yahweh and his servant Pharaoh Neco might be associated with the sympathetic portrayal of the people mourning him in II Chronicles 35, neither Josiah’s death nor the portrayal of his goodness in Kings are refractions of any saving grace. Nor is the loss of Josiah in Kings a tragic loss in any classical sense of the word. However much the Book of Lamentations over Jerusalem’s destruction might be associated with Jeremiah’s passionate story,1 and with the people’s exile from Jerusalem, the history does not have mourning for its closure. Yahweh once destroyed Israel. Now he has destroyed Judah and Jerusalem with its temple and its king. He has not destroyed these that he might bring good out of destruction. Nor has he acted even because Israel and Judah were evil, but rather, more simply, he has done this by his choice and by his anger. This is not ‘salvation history’.
The ‘biblical view’ of this narrative does not understand Yahweh’s providence in terms of good rewarded and evil punished. That is a caricature attributed to one or other of Job’s friends. For Kings, Josiah was good King Josiah. All other kings were unfaithful to Yahweh. But Josiah was good. For him, one might expect divine grace. ‘Before him there was no king like him, who had turned to Yahweh with all his heart, soul and strength, following the whole of Moses’ Torah; nor did his like ever come again’ (II Kings 23: 25). Josiah’s goodness, however, nowhere determines the story’s outcome. Even more important, this is not a problem in the story. The narrative is not unresolved with Josiah’s death. Indeed, the Josiah story epitomizes II Kings’ perspective of Yahweh’s role in human history. It is in the form of a prophetic oracle that the death of Josiah acquires its context: ‘I will take Judah away from my sight as I did Israel; and I will also throw off this city that I have chosen: Jerusalem; and also this temple in which I had said my name would live’ (II Kings 23: 27)! The stated reason for this? Yahweh’s choice and anger. This also is not ‘salvation history’.
Unlike its tradition variant in Chronicles, the Book of II Kings does not present Josiah in any way as opposing God by attacking the Egyptian forces. The account is lapidary: ‘Pharaoh Neco, king of Egypt, went up to the King of Assyria to the River Euphrates, King Josiah went to meet him; and Pharaoh Neco killed him at Megiddo when he saw him’ (II Kings 23: 29), This is neither ‘salvation history’ nor any ideologically directed meaningful history. It does, however, reflect a perspective that bears looking into.
Neither promise and fulfilment nor reward and punishment are the root metaphors driving these narrative variants. Unlike the Josiah of Chronicles, the great ruler of Kings is not a Greek hero such as Oedipus, caught between the realities of his own greatness and divine purpose, however much his life, and the loss thereof, has been determined by fate. Josiah’s death in II Kings is not the death of classic tragedy. It reflects a uniquely biblical perspective: of human goodness destroyed, unmourned. Yahweh of Kings is not the God of Jeremiah’s restoration whom we meet in Jeremiah 33: 1–26. Nor is this God Chronicles’ transcendent deity, which has so much in common with the more positive, indeed polyannic, theology of Jeremiah. This God is not terribly far from Job’s Yahweh – that awful God of the whirlwind, in contrast with whom even the most innocent of men is but a worm. This is the same God whom those great agnostics, the implied authors of Ecclesiastes and Jonah, could not and would not understand. This is the God of the Saul stories and the God of the flood stories of Genesis: one who decreed both salvation and destruction for Israel. This was done not through justice nor for justice’s sake. In this author’s world, the fate of a man is insignificant in the face of divine will.
The closure of Kings, with its reassertion of the divinely arbitrary, disrupts any sense of the morally ordered world of justice of the sort that we find in Jeremiah and Chronicles, Yahweh’s moral disorder receives faint mockery in the narrative’s comparison with the human Evil-merodach’s contrasting mercy to the captive Jehoiachin.
In the traditions collected in the Book of Judges, we find a modest intensification of the murmuring theme of the wilderness stories. The leitmotif of Judges finds Israel less innocent than the wilderness chain does: ‘The people of Israel did what was evil in Yahweh’s eyes’ (Judges 2: 11; 3: 7; 4: 1; 6: 1; 13: 1). The ideological shift, however, is slight. The reiterated leitmotif remains that of backsliding Israel under Yahweh’s patronage. Again, the question of loyalty is paramount. It is not Israel’s behaviour but Yahweh’s response that is the one uncertainty that determines destiny, whether there be judgement or mercy. The pendulum of Judges 1–16 does not swing between the innocence and guilt of Israel, with Yahweh in a role of judge. Far from it. That is the theodicy problem as the character job would wish to pose it. Both Judges and Job’s implied authors, however, search to express a truth that does not depend on human perceptions, but on the divine, and therefore ineffable, perception of God. They need to close on the motif of unknowing.
It is a demanding task put forward in Judges, but I think largely successful. The primary cycle of tales is linked with the first Book of Samuel by the inclusion of two dark stories in Judges 17–21, These are the story of Micah and the theft of his Levite by the Danites, and the story of a Levite and the rape of his concubine by the Benjaminites. These paired stories are set thematically within the perspective of I–II Samuel. With the help of a reiterated leitmotif, these dark tales are contrasted with an implied ideal of the monarchy: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes’ (Judges 17: 6; 18: 1; 19: 1), This allows the evil times of the Judges to lend introductory promise to the theme of kingship as the end of the anarchy of the Judges Judges 21: 25). Contrast is drawn between these ‘days of the judges’, the everyman-roles at the centre of these three intentionally black narratives now closing the Book of Judges, and what is ‘right’in expectation of the kingship narratives of the books of Samuel and Kings. The root metaphor of this tradition is specifically ‘righteousness’. That, however, is neither justice, moral uprightness, nor anything that man may know. What is in accordance with ‘righteousness’ is what is right in God’s eyes. The contrast is not between injustice and justice, but between a human and a divine perspective. This is the central theme of biblical tragedy, not morality.
The Book of Judges’closure finds its proper echo in the opening story of I Samuel. Following the traditional story pattern of the birth of a saviour, I Samuel 2: 12 introduces Eli’s sons as men ‘who do not know Yahweh’. The contrast of the boy Samuel with Eli’s sons establishes the context for Samuel’s role as saviour: one who ‘pew up in Yahweh’s presence’ (I Sam. 2: 21). Eli admonishes his sons. The issue is not one of human justice; how his sons dealt with the people they served. It centres on the contempt Eli’s sons have shown Yahweh (2: 17–25). The ideology of the tale is captured in verse 25, which refers to central themes of the Book of Job. The story is marked by its running discussion with wisdom literature. A proverb is set for the implied reader: the moral of the story and the principle, illustrated by Levi’s sons but narratively establishing Saul’s fate. If someone commits crimes against another man, there is hope that God will intervene, but if the crime be against God, nothing can help. Eli’s speech awaits its echo and its ironic reversal in the future David’s words to Saul that we find in I Sam, 26: 18–20. If it is God that seeds Saul against David, the problem can be dealt with by a sacrifice. If, however, men have turned Saul against David, they force David away from allegiance to Yahweh. These are issues of loyalty not justice. The ideology of both stories is constant: Yahweh’s patronage is the absolute by which all human endeavours are judged, Eli’s fault, however, is a human one – his sons. It cannot be dealt with by sacrifice.
The chain of stories opens gently in chapter 3. EH is as Yahweh to Samuel. Samuel believing Eli calls to him in the night, replies as servant to master: ‘Here I am.’ Eli – in his humility, the story’s epigone of the ‘righteous’ – recognizes that it is Yahweh who is calling to Samuel. In a wholly unembellished description of Yahweh, and in echoing contrast to Judges 17–21, Eli offers us a preview of David’s prayer of II Samuel 15: 26, which is so central to this story. He gives voice to the central truth of the greater story’s theology: ‘He is Yahweh; may he do what is right in his own eyes (3: 18)!’ Judges 17–21’s ‘days’ were days of anarchy, when men lived as if they were Yahweh. Such a life is the opposite of the Bible’s ‘righteousness’. The time of the Judges was hardly ideal. That was a dark time, a time of evil, when Israel had no king, no messiah to carry out what Yahweh saw as good.
An autonomous patron, one who does what is right in his own eyes, is the meaning of kingship in the West Semitic world. The politics of this world is one of patronage, not monarchy. To be a king is ‘to be one’s own man’. An equal constant of the West Semitic world-view, rooted in their understanding of the transcendent, is of the king as servant of God, who alone is patron. To be kingless – as in the ‘time of the judges’ – is anarchic and nihilistic. Righteousness is the affirmation of Yahweh’s patronage. This the story sets as the true mark and significance of Israel’s kingship. The tradition is not at all democratic or anti-monarchic. Both are misreadings of the tradition.
This view of Yahweh is common to the whole of biblical narrative. One need not search the obscure corners of the tradition to find the substance of this divine metaphor. The best and the most influential stories of the tradition have transmitted and created this understanding of the divine in our lives. In the episode of the Joseph story in Genesis 50 that we have already briefly discussed, the brothers of Joseph seek his forgiveness. They are afraid of his anger now that the restraining influence of their father can no longer protect them. Joseph’s answer in this most pious of biblical stories should change the way we think of piety! The brothers’ plea that Joseph forgive their sin is dismissed outright. It is irrelevant. What happened, Joseph tells his brothers, happened only because of God’s will, because he chose to save many people. What the brothers did – even their crimes against Joseph himself – is judged unimportant in God’s eyes. Joseph is the hero of this story, not because he was innocent and virtuous – one can only describe him as such by ignoring several of this story’s episodes – but because he consistently plays the role of Immanuel, through whom God carries out his will and is present in this world.
Again, in the story of the plagues of the Exodus tradition, one does not find a contest between a good Moses and an evil pharaoh, nor between an innocent Israel and demonized Egyptians. Like the prophets Isaiah and Jonah after him, Moses is feckless, and the Israelites ever backsliding and ungrateful. The Egyptians are faceless recipients of destruction, and the pharaoh, whose heart is hardened against his own judgement by Yahweh for the story’s sake, hardly worse than a fool. He is a helpless tool of the ironic fate that Yahweh wishes to visit on him. The power of such a metaphor resides in Yahweh’s freeing the oppressed and the enslaved. However, we should not pass silently over the hardly hidden motif that Yahweh created these same oppressed and enslaved for the sake of his contest with the pharaoh. Yahweh chose the oppressed and enslaved as his own, and therefore oppression and enslavement is their fate. The story hardly involves issues of social justice, and hardly demands independence and freedom for its audience. The proper words are rather loyalty and submission.
One of the great paradigmatic heroes of this understanding of the divine in biblical narrative is, of course, Abraham. Abraham is both Yahweh’s companion and the heroic exemplar of faith and righteousness. Here, I am not referring to any original Abrahamic tale – far better reflected in the Quran and appropriate to Ishmael – but rather the one we have in its specifically Jewish variant. The epitomizing tale is the peat test we saw in Genesis 22. The language of this narrative is sparse, and one does well to attend to it. The audience is not at risk in the narrative. This was done ‘to test Abraham’. That is, as in the story of Job, we are dealing with a wisdom tale. While the story reaches its plot resolution with Yahweh’s replacement sacrifice – the ram caught in the bushes – that is hardly the story’s dramatic centre. As a story, the plot never seriously entertains Isaac/ Israel’s death, however much it plays with such a motif for heuristic purposes. Not the audience but the hero Abraham must deal with the dread of the beloved’s death. Genesis 22 is a difficult, intellectual narrative. It barely touches upon the emotional and personal nuances of such a test. For that theme, one must read Kierkegaard1 or Job. Abraham, in his story, epitomizes sedaqah. This is normally translated as ‘righteousness’, but has a semantic range that emphasizes ‘understanding, reflection and philosophy’. This is the test. The audience’s attention and sympathy are drawn to Abraham, who plays here the same role as the God of II Kings for Genesis’ audience. This is his son, his only son, whom he will sacrifice for righteousness’ sake.
Walking up the mountain with his father, Abraham, Isaac asks his child’s question: ‘where is the lamb?’ – inescapably marked by the tradition of children’s questions from the aetiology of the Passover seder in Exodus 12: 26: ‘why do we do this?’ – not to draw the attention of the story to himself, nor to shatter the story with pathos for his innocence, but rather to mark with the simplicity of this exchange with his father the coherence and completeness of Abraham’s understanding and philosophy; ‘God will provide.’ Such is a true servant of God. Such is a divine understanding. The form of the test is nothing; the loyalty expressed everything.
In this world of biblical narrative, God is a God of mercy and of wrath, not a God of justice, Yahweh determines destinies; he causes hearts to harden and he causes repentance: as in Jonah’s Nineveh and in Moses’ Egypt. People are not ‘free’ nor is this world ‘democratic’. It is a world of mishpahot and beytim: that is a world of ‘families’ and ‘houses’, a world of belonging and loyalty. To be a Jew is to be, as one of the benei Yisrael, bound by an oath of allegiance to Yahweh as to one’s patron. Such ‘righteousness’ is not justice, but understanding: philosophy. Fate as decreed by the gods is not opposed to responsibility. It is rather a fundamental motif common also to the tragic heroes of Greek tradition. Accepting one’s destiny renders balance. This is equally expressed in the order rendered by the Egyptian goddess, Ma’at, and in the ‘peace’ and ‘grace’implicit in the Bible’s ‘righteousness’. In each of these traditions, such experience is attributed to divine grace.
To understand this perspective, we need to resist the demythologizing with which medieval scholasticism has domesticated these concepts in its effort to adopt them as its own. This is not a divine ‘justice’. An ethics of justice implies not only responsibility, but an assertion of an ability to determine one’s own future. It implies a rule by law, not the personal subservience and obedience that is ever implicit in biblical tradition. The word ebed, ‘servant’ is the central term that is expressive of piety in the whole of the ancient Semitic world, where law, as we know it, never existed.
The absence of a legal tradition is hardly accidental. The patronage structure of Levantine society precluded the development of a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy that is implicit in legal justice systems undermines the kind of despotism that is characteristic of the ancient Semitic world. The early cuneiform codes, so well represented by the famous Hammurapi stele, are aspects of royal propaganda, not of rule by law. They illustrate the king’s claim to be patron throughout the land. It is his will that establishes right order. That is what is meant by despotism, not rule by law. This well-known stele presents the king, Hammurapi, in his role as the servant of the god Shamash, to whose patronage and justice Babylon is ultimately indebted.
The traditions collected in the Bible’s ‘Book of the Covenant’ (Exodus 21: 2–11) and in the so-called ‘Holiness Code’ of Leviticus 17–26, the miscellaneous collections of tradition that are found in Deuteronomy 12–26, as well as the many collections of ‘commandments’ as in Exodus 20: 2–17, Deuteronomy 5: 6–21 and elsewhere, certainly belong to a form of wisdom tradition, which pragmatically epitomizes divine ascendancy. These were never laws governing the decisions of any courts or judges. They do not express the will of any legislature or assembly of the governed. They are so far from law that they do not even deal with the interests of kings or of states. They belong wholly and entirely to a storied language of metaphor. They belong to the impractical realm of philosophy’s ivory towers.
Nor does the torah ever pretend to be law. Such legalism belongs to the language of critics, even to early Judaism’s self-criticism expressed by a Paul. The metaphorical function implicit in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern traditions of divine patronage marks the entire concept of justice with religious piety. Not equity but submission is its governing principle. The ideological basis for such language rests not on an idealistic and rationalistic balance of justice and mercy, but rather on the emotions of trust and faithfulness that govern commitments. It rests on behaviour-governing concepts, of honour and on the need for personal acceptance. These are all aspects of patronage, arbitrary and wilful. They proceed from decisions both of people and of gods.
A very informative story refraction of such aspects of totality and permanence in commitment in this world, structured by patronage, is found in Genesis 27: 1–45, the tale of Isaac’s deathbed blessing to his sons. Once Isaac has given his blessing to Jacob – however deceived he had been and however dishonest Jacob was in obtaining this ‘declaration of destiny’ – once given, it cannot be gainsaid. This is not a world of contracts governed by fairness, justice and mutuality. In the real world, one would speak of such personal and emotional values that are expressed in Isaac’s speeches in the context of omertà, a value by which one is inescapably bound to one’s word. In story, however, such motifs as fate and destiny come immediately to hand. The power of a story’s romance is never to be underestimated. In a society bound by such commitments, any world of law, governed by principles of fairness and justice, is pale and impersonal in contrast. It is hardly evocative of truth or expressive of the personally divine.
The role of the king in bringing about justice for his subjects is a motif that is as old as the image of the king as shepherd of his people. It is also as comparably personal. From Hammurapi to Solomon, the image of the just king is that of the enlightened king, inspired with divine wisdom. As Hammurapt’s laws were not his own, but came to Hammurapi as the gift of Shamash, so too, Solomon’s celebrated role as just king takes the form of the inspired judge able to discern divine truth, as in the story of I Kings 3: 16–28. The brilliant, if brutal, humour of Solomon’s decision to cut the disputed child in two epitomizes such royal justice as divine. We ignore its brutality and admire its brilliance; ‘All Israel heard of the judgement which the king had given, and they wondered at him, perceiving that his was a divine wisdom: creating justice.’ And this is the crux of the matter, justice. In the Bible, it remains in the realm of metaphor. It is an act of hesed (divine ‘grace’). It comes from divine patronage. Justice is created.
As the aetiology of wisdom, is Solomon’s vehicle, and that of the Psalms is David’s, law properly belongs to Moses. Exodus 18: 13–27 is a fine origin story for law in the tradition of biblical Israel It should not go unnoticed that in this tale, Moses is hardly wise. If anything, Moses’ role is the opposite of Solomon’s. Moses plays the ‘dumbling’. The task he takes on, mediating between God and all the people, is an impossible one. The plot’s problem is the difficulty of delegating judgements that are divine. As a Moses story, it is bold, touching as it does the theme of Moses as the sole mediator of torah from within a post-Mosaic perspective. From the secure position of the implied reader, Jethro’s solution has only the appearance of solution. It is an aetiology for human judges or court-appointed ministers. They shall handle everything that is unimportant Moses and God will then be free to deal with what is crucial and intrinsic to the administration of divine justice. It is a wonderful example of double reflection. The story plot’s problem is resolved, but that of the story’s referent – that which had won the story its audience – stands ever the more unresolved and demanding as the larger tradition enters the quest of the absent torsi. The crux of the problem is the same root metaphor that Exodus shares with I Kings 3’s story of Solomon’s request for wisdom. This is the metaphor of biblical Israel under Yahweh’s patronage. Justice as a given and known factor of human experience is denied. Justice is the will of God . . . And God knows what that is!
It is a very demanding literary project that the Bible sets for itself. The despotic and patronage-dominant ideology of the Old Testament is unbending in this recurrent and reiterated motif of Yahweh as ultimate patron. I hope that my third example will make this clear. It is, for historicism, a most troubling motif: of the king as unjust. While the leitmotif of I Samuel’s so-called bad King Saul has led otherwise critical historians to speculate about an historical king of ancient Israel as a way of explaining the transmission and preservation of the Saul tradition, the literary world to which I Samuel belongs functions quite apart from such an assumed historiography. In fact – as the story presents itself – Saul is not a bad king, and certainly not unjust, as people and kings go. Not even the author of Chronicles – that ancient literature’s enemy of the fallen and champion of the successful – can be described as ‘anti-Saul’, whatever the commentaries may suggest. At the height of the tradition’s contrast between the heroic David and the murderous Saul in I Samuel 24 and 26, David does not kill Saul, because Saul is Yahweh’s messiah. Saul, expressing himself with evocative compassion, is moved to recognize David as his ‘son David’ (I Sam. 24: 16 and I Sam. 26; 21, 25). The story plot does not entirely ignore David’s concern about Saul’s attempt to kill him. The rhetorical thrust of the story moves David to complain most adamantly of a quite different issue, David’s problem is not that Saul sought to murder him, but rather that Saul was driving him away from his allegiance to Yahweh (I Sam. 26: 20). It is this argument that wins Saul over and leads to his repentance. It is this argument that is close to the heart of our implied author.
One of the most strikingly classical aspects of this story of Saul is that there is no interest in ‘bad King Saul’. Neither his madness nor his murderous hatred lead to his rejection. Those are human passions we all are well aware of. In fact, throughout, the story line is as sympathetic to such dark passions as any Greek tragedy. As in classical tragedies, Saul’s most horrible deeds, rather than determining his fate, come as a result of his fate. Fate overcomes him, with but the slightest connivance on his part. Saul has nearly as little control over the inexorable evil of his destiny as Moses of the Pentateuch had over his wilderness death. His responsibility is there, but the story is not interested in it. The story in Samuel is not about a good King David and a bad King Saul. The story is about Israel and kingship and Yahweh. It is not about the past; it is about who is the true king of Israel. There is but one true answer, and this answer is neither anti-Saul nor pro-David. They are but servants of God – his messiah. The true king of Israel is ever Yahweh in his temple.
The story begins with an echo of the wilderness’murmuring motif: Israel asks the Moses-like Samuel for a king to succeed him. As in the Moses tradition, these demands suggest a rejection, not of Samuel, but of Yahweh (I Sam. 8: 7–9). The motif of kingship is marked with the shadow of rebellion. The people implicitly deny Yahweh as their true king. Now they ask for a king. A storm of thunder and rain interrupts to show us how wicked this demand was. We must remember that Yahweh had already accepted this request. This marks Yahweh as a character in the story, not as its implied author. If Israel and their king fear and serve and listen to Yahweh, all will be well. However, if they do not listen, but turn against this word of Yahweh, Yahweh’s hand will be against both them and their fathers. Here, Israel’s future destiny determines the fate of the tradition’s past! Kingship’s destiny has already determined the fate of Saul in our story. Narrative time here is neither linear nor progressive, but reiterative and typological.
One is hardly surprised that in Saul’s inaugural saving deed as king for Israel in I Samuel 13 he sets out to destroy the Philistines. The story’s central plot resides in the contrast between Saul’s innocent naiveté and chapter 12’s demand that Israel and its king listen to Yahweh’s command. Saul is rejected before he has properly begun. Saul’s great lesson is simply put: his kingdom shall not continue, Yahweh seeks rather a man who will do what seems right to Yahweh (I Sam. 13; 14).
The motif is reiterated in chapter 1 S’s victory over the Amalekites, to which the closure of Saul’s story refers (28; 15–19). However, in the story itself in I Samuel 15, Saul defeats the Amalekites and completely destroys ‘everything that was worthless and despised’ (15: 9). Saul is quite explicitly the good king, the good general. He spares Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the cakes and lambs. Yahweh, however, is hardly pleased at such appropriate and reasonable behaviour. In this anger of Yahweh, the narrative sharply and harshly distinguishes between the dual royal roles of ‘king of Israel’ and ‘servant of Yahweh’. In the closing scene of this episode, when poor, hapless, innocent Saul declares to Samuel: ‘May you be blessed by Yahweh; I have accomplished this command of Yahweh’ (15: 13), he was hardly aware that he was undone.
Samuel and the story is not kind to Saul’s victory. Saul is stopped in mid-sentence as Samuel demands to know: ‘Do you want to know what Yahweh told me?’ (15: 16) This tragic story is not about any personal hubris of Saul. It is about the hubris of the way of humanity that Saul represents. Even yet, the humility and goodness of Saul’s personal character does not allow him to recognize his fate. Even so, when Samuel tells Saul that he has disobeyed and has done what Yahweh understands as evil (v. 19), Saul does not understand it this way; for he has ^utterly destroyed the Amalekites’, to the benefit of the people. Saul, in good conscience, sacrifices to Yahweh. Saul is again condemned, and the story turns to its horrific, three-fold humiliating closure. Saul begs forgiveness that he might worship Yahweh. The first two of these pleas are refused (vv. 25–29). The kingdom is to be torn from Saul: ‘Yahweh is not a man that he should repent’ (v. 30). Saul, however, is a man and does repent, admitting his sin. He abandons his request for forgiveness: only that he might worship Yahweh. So Samuel turns back that Saul may worship. The story closes inexorably: ‘And Samuel hacked Agag into pieces before Yahweh in Gilgal.’ Unquestionably, Saul is rejected not because of any wrong that he has done, nor even because of any personal failure. He is rejected because he has done what he understood to be right. Such understanding is evil in Yahweh’s eyes! It is the very theme of these stories that what is good and what is evil stands apart from human perceptions of justice and the right. Loyalty and allegiance are fundamental to this concept of a personal God. Sin is epitomized by apostasy and betrayal. True belief is submission and unquestioning obedience to the divine will.
If biblical studies is capable of critically clarifying its theology, we must be willing to maintain its integrity with both the past and the text. This is not after all our theology but the Bible’s. It is the theology of our tradition. It is foundational to our religious self-identity, and it has created our language and the character of our metaphors. While acknowledging the great value of the intimate qualities of this language that involves the divine as personal, it is no longer obviously true for us any more. It is our past. It plays, however, a substantially dysfunctional role in our theological language today. The twentieth century’s disquieting experiences with just such personal and absolute religious values intrinsic to despotism, should make us all hesitate before affirming such a perception for our God. Such traditions as these have a dark and even monstrous potential, of which this century continues to give us too many examples.
It is more than passingly interesting that, in discussions about the theme of justice and the Old Testament, the Book of Job is a favourite text. This may not be an altogether fortunate choice, if one wishes to promote thoughts of justice. Job can be a very explosive text for theology. The text does ask, why do innocents suffer? For that alone, it becomes a very modern text. It also asks whether God himself is just. Nothing is more modern nor more necessary today than asking that question. In our world, however, a world that needs justice if we are to survive the totalitarian potentials of the modern state and its dehumanizing fictions of nationalism, Job answers questions about justice in a very unsatisfying way – at least if one reads the surface of the text.
The greatest line of this book that is filled with great lines is, I think, given to Job’s wife. She is the one, perhaps the only, truly feminist heroine of the Bible, She has none of the arrogance or long-winded nonsense of Job’s friends. Nor is she inclined toward her husband’s intellectual fecklessness. She has neither wish nor intention to talk – indeed, how silly – to God about justice. From the standpoint of justice, Job has only one chance for integrity, and it is the one that Satan has bet on and that his wife recommends to him: ‘Curse God and die!’ (Job 2: 8) Justice has a stake in the right of the individual, while patronage supports the personal in Job’s story, Job, chooses not his own truth, but the truth of human selflessness. His virtue is specifically in not cursing God. For him, the righteousness of God is of greater value than justice. It is Yahweh who wins the bet, and Satan, having bet on Job’s integrity as a person, loses. Job shows himself to be the perfect servant in his acceptance of whatever misery God sends him.
It is in the image of this, Job’s virtue, that the story’s die is cast. This is certainly one of the reasons that the miserable love this great poem. Not only does it help one submit to senseless suffering, but one gains permission in the poem’s reading to give voice to all the resentment that suffering injustice brings, but that good breeding does not permit. All the lavish richness with which Job’s seemingly endless stream of poetry is marked, however, does not hide a very unsatisfactory closure, Job never gets the hearing in which Yahweh answers him. When Yahweh does respond to the victim of his glorification, the volume of his rhetoric silences Job. Job is reduced to an abject state of humiliation; ‘I had heard of you only by the hearing of the ear. Now, however, my eyes see you. And so, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.’
Job’s justification, if we are to call it that – and no modern can – resides in his admission that he did not understand whom he was dealing with. With such a story surface, the modern reader might well wish to go back to the speech of Job’s wife: ‘Curse God and die’. Certainly, one might be forgiven the wish that Satan had won this wager. If justice were the stake, this particular Yahweh would hardly deserve this Job as his servant. The cost of reader identification with the suffering hero of the book casts a cloud of doubt and suspicion over the entire enterprise. It demands a reflection that is not entirely unintended in the book’s formation. The Book of Job indulges in a deconstructive laughter that peeks between the lines everywhere that Job’s great whirlwind of a God echoes the piety of Job’s friends! Is this message – not of the story’s surface but of the story’s sedaqah – a true understanding of the divine in our world? What, then, is the whirlwind demon’s message about the divine? Is it truth? Or caricature?
The two theophanies of Exodus 3 and 6 can be described with much justice as the heart of the Pentateuch. They are at the heart of the tradition’s effort to express the sense of the transcendent as present in this world, the one single theme that dominates the torah. These passages have also been at the centre of the historical-critical controversies over the composition of the Pentateuch for more than a century now. Unfortunately, our problems are not solved by dismissing the earlier critics. The final form of the text so central to more modern literary critics is nearly impenetrable as a story. One can hurry by the difficulties in some levelling translations and paraphrases, but in Hebrew we do not have a story at all here. The call of Moses from Exodus 3; 1–7: 1 has so little coherence and makes so little sense that the question whether narrative sense was ever intended in this text is patent. Why the text had been formed is a question that must take precedence over those related to narration.
The problems begin with the divine characters of our narrative. In Exodus 3, we find ourselves with Moses at the mountain of Elohim, where a messenger of Yahweh appears to him. In the very next verse, this divine character in our story is referred to both as Yahweh and as Elohim. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual situation in the biblical stories of the Pentateuch. It brings to mind immediately the ‘messenger of God’ in the form of a cloud that we find in Exodus 14, who next morning and five verses later (v. 24) seems to be identical to Yahweh in a pillar of fire and cloud. Less confusing is the passage In Exodus 23: 20–33. Closing the so-called covenant code, a deity speaking in the first person as ‘Yahweh your God’ promises to send his messenger to watch over Israel as a kind of heavenly enforcer, offering a godfather’s protection. This future messenger is clearly identified with the divine speaker. This is helpful to us, since in Exodus 3 a similar identification seems to be taking place, where the ‘messenger of Yahweh’/messenger of God’/or Yahweh of the theophany’s opening, explicitly identifies himself with the God of Moses’ father, as well as with what possibly are the various gods of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moreover, Exodus 23: 25’s ‘Yahweh, your God,’ could be a very interesting variant of modes of having a deity of one’s own, which also underlines our text’s distinction between the noun Elohim and the name Yahweh.
The reference to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Exodus 3 forces us to concern ourselves with the patriarchal stories of Genesis 16 and 21, where we find that some of the same patterns of narrative pertain. In Genesis 16, the saving ‘messenger of Yahweh’ is synonymous with Yahweh, but also with a ‘God of seeing’ in the closing naming aetiology, who in turn is identified by Hagar as ‘God’!
Whatever our understanding, and whatever solutions we might suggest to the variance and fluidity of the divine protagonists in these early Pentateuchal stories, the regularity and consistency in the patterns of usage discourage us from seeing these variations as either insignificant or as accidental. Nor is the problem easily resolved by assigning different divine characters to different story sources. What is striking about both the Genesis and the Exodus analogies to the theophany stories of Exodus 3 and 6 is that the story episodes in which the divine names are found are much more coherent in their plots than a jumbled complex of distinct sources would allow.
The inclusion of these other stories in Genesis and Exodus within the interpretive literary matrix of Exodus 3 and 6 can also be argued on thematic grounds. Not only is the pool of divine characters shared in common, not only are they dealt with in similar, seemingly disjunctive ways, but all of these stories present at the heart of their narration a common plot motif: that of naming and identifying one or other traditional deity with God. Whether this traditional deity is in fact a God of the real historical past of Palestine, like Yahweh, or whether it is only a God found in story, like El Ro’i and perhaps El Shaddai, is irrelevant. Our effort should be to understand the intentions of the formers of the tradition. The variant nuances of this identification are, nevertheless, very relevant. They mark each story with its unique and surprising perspective.
The central perception of the divine behind the interrelated composition of these texts is the inclusive monotheistic perception of the divine spirit. This is the Elohe Shamayim that we find in Isaiah, Ezra or even, less majestically, in letters of the Persian period from the military colony of Elephantine. The variety of gods, and names of gods, that exist in this world, and the variety of gods that exists in the tradition, seemingly distinct from each other tnd differentiated by geography, by usage, by language, and by the individuality intrinsic in all human experience, all can be understood. They all, each in its own way, refer to the one ineffable divine. This power of spirit, expressive of the experiences of life’s transcendence, like the Yahweh of Job and Jonah, has an essence beyond human perception and a reality beyond human understanding. From the perspective of the late Persian or early Hellenistic world, our texts read very differently from the way we have been used to reading them.
Also important – but not so obvious – is the astonishingly complex and striking use of possessive pronouns, connecting the different protagonists of our stories in Exodus. The thematic and ideological purpose of this leitmotif is clear. The pronouns link the two variant theophanies of Exodus 3 and Exodus 6 into a common narration. The classic and clearest formulation of this motif occurs in the speech of Elohim in Exodus 6: 7, where it is neither complex nor intrusive but direct and integral. ‘I will take you for my people, and I will be your Elohim.’ This is the same Exodus episode in which Elohim has identified himself with the El Shaddai of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of the implied audience’s forgotten past. This passage closes with the confirmation that the land that had been promised, these patriarchs would become the property of the benei Yisrael. Here, the possessiveness of the language is emphatic as the implied audience of early Judaism’s new Israel joins the narrative.
The story of Exodus 3 implicitly takes part in an intellectual discourse with Exodus 6, about how the traditions warrant identifying old Israel’s God, who had long ago been Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’s deity, as manifestations, hypostases, of God himself. In this story, however, Elohim does not merely say that he was the same El Shaddai the patriarchs used to know. Rather, he is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. The first time that God identifies himself in the Moses story comes just before this verse. It is important to recognize that the theophany story has begun with a yet-to-be-identified Moses, He has been described as a shepherd of his father-in-law, a Midianite priest called Jethro. This Moses is not the same, but only a close variant of the Moses who had married the priest Eeuel’s daughter in chapter 2! When Moses turns aside to stare at the burning bush, the deity identifies himself as the God of Moses’ father – whether Jethro, Reuel or Moses’ own, unnamed father is a moot point. This self-identification of Moses’ family deity as the tradition’s God opens the plot-line about who the characters of the story are. This plot-line begins in Exodus 3:11 with Moses’ question: ‘Who am I that I should . . . bring the benei Yisrael out of Egypt?’ The question of identity continues to dominate considerable portions of chapters 4 and 5 as a leitmotif, and this question remains unanswered until Exodus 6: 14–26, when we are given genealogies for Moses and for Aaron.
The function of this metaphor and its play on the characters of the story’s identities is three-fold. In the story plot-line, it legitimizes and identifies the deity manifest. In its intellectual referent, however, it legitimizes and identifies the gods of the patriarchal stories and the gods of Israel’s ancestors as truly expressive of the transcendent divine. Finally, in bringing these elements together, the story accomplishes the emotional task of identifying the divine possessively. Their god – the god of their forgotten tradition – is God himself!
One is no longer surprised by verse 7, when Yahweh, picking up the motif of the people of Israel complaining of their slavery of chapter 2, refers to ‘my people’. Moses’ task is to bring Yahweh’s people (Ex. 3: 10) out of Egypt, He is instructed to describe this saving deity as ‘the God of your fathers’ in verses 13 and 15 in the episode, where Moses asks God his name, and is given the sound pun on the name Yahweh. In this passage, the affirmation of the ‘God of your fathers’, which includes these traditional deities as one with God, is not to be understood as a referent to the gods of Abraham or of the other patriarchs of Genesis. Like that theologically very different text of Joshua 24, it refers to other ancient ancestral deities of the greater tradition. In Exodus, however, the traditions of these gods are affirmed, not rejected.
This specific story-line, involving such complex differentiated language about the divine, is what drives the text. This is no accident of sources. Immediately following the Yahweh/Ehyeh pun of verse 14 (‘I am who I am’), where Elohim and Moses are the protagonists, Moses is instructed by Elohim in a variant of v. 14: ‘5ay this to the people of Israel; Yahweh, the Elohim of your fathers, the Elohim of Abraham, etc. has sent me.’ The third variation of this motif of identity, found in verse 16, ties the scene once more backwards to the affliction of chapter 2. It also refers forward to the land of Israel’s destiny predicated in chapter 23, It is Yahweh who is as their God for them. Once again, in verse 18, the complexity of this self-identity and association builds further. In the expansion of this motif, Elohim identifies himself in terms of Egyptian perceptions: ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews’ is identified as ‘our God’. This does not so much identify the Israelites as Hebrews, as it identifies ‘our God’ with a deity that the Egyptians will recognize.
Exodus 6, as already discussed, finds this theme of Israel’s bond with the divine at centre stage. It is similarly dominant in the closure of Exodus 23, where the implications are drawn out in the contrast between the gods of the legendary enemies of Israel, referred to as ‘their God’ and Yahweh, who is referred to as ‘your God’. The narrative as a whole closes in Exodus 24: 3–8, with the people freely accepting the commitment of this mutual adherence and the obedience it demands. The entire episode is closely linked with three successive and variant theophanies on the mountain: Exodus 19; 2–6 (where Moses goes up to God and where Israel is declared to be Yahweh’s unique possession), Exodus 20: 1–17 (the Tea Commandments) and Exodus 20: 22–23: 19 (a long miscellaneous collection of wisdom sayings). These passages are tied together not only by the interplay of language and metaphors about the divine. They link the language of the sending of the messenger episode of Exodus 23: 20–33 with the closing lines of the wisdom collection. In this way, the story’s ‘You will serve Yahweh your Elohim’ of verse 25 joins verse 19 in language: ‘The first fruits of the ground you will bring into the temple of Yahweh your Elohim.
In the closing speech of this greater tradition, in Exodus 23: 20–33, God, who identifies himself in the story as Yahweh, Israel’s God, promises to send his messenger to guide Israel. Further, echoing the greater tradition’s understanding of the historical disasters that had overwhelmed the lost ancient states of Samaria and Judah, this God warns: ‘Listen to him, and hearken to his voice. Do not betray him, for he will not pardon your crime. My name is in him.’ The prophetic function of declaring unforgiving condemnation on Israel’s future betrayal or rebellion is grounded in this story in the messenger’s possession of God’s name. What is God’s name? Moses had asked that question in chapter 3 and had been given an answer with the striking sound pun of verse 14: ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh (I am who I am): Tell the people of Israel ‘ehyeh has sent me.’ This echoes the folk aetiology of the pun of v. 12: ehyeh imak: ’I am with you’, which, echoing Immanuel (‘God with us’), is of singular importance in the understanding of Ehhim’s name in the closure of chapter 23. Yahweh’s messenger, in his role as Immanuel, will be with Israel. It is interesting that the story of chapter 3 does not need to interpret the pun. It is transparent to its intended audience. Verse 15 carries the plot forward by answering the question in a different way: ‘Yahweh . . . This is my name forever, and so I am to be remembered from generation to generation.’
With this passage in verse 12, most of the problems of Exodus 1–23’s organization fall into place and become readable. A third variant of this motif, in Exodus 7: 1, drives home the ideological issue that is at stake: ‘Yahweh says to Moses: See, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother will be your prophet.’ Aaron is here Moses’ prophet on the analogy of Yahweh as God’s prophet! Yahweh can be the guardian messenger of Exodus 14’s pillars. He can also be the prophetic messenger of Exodus 23, protecting and condemning Israel. He is so specifically as Yahweh, God’s name.
The burden of Exodus 3 and 6 within the literary context of Exodus 1–23 is to portray the old deity of Palestine past, Yahweh, and the stories about him, as a representation and expression of the truly divine. The narrative finds the ancient ancestral gods of Palestine’s history and tradition acceptable. They are both historically contingent and specific hypostases of the one true God, elohe shamayim the ‘God of heaven’. As Ba’al is god for the Phoenicians, so Yahweh is God as Israel knows him. This is what Exodus 6: 7; ‘I will take you for my people, and I will be your God’signifies: ‘As Yahweh, I am God for you.’ Here again Exodus 19 may be allowed to carry the interpretive weight of our story as God speaks to Moses as Yahweh; ‘You shall be my own possession among all peoples, because all of the earth is mine,’ a passage that finds echoing clarification in a context as distant as Deuteronomy 32: 8, in Moses’ song to the assembly of Israel: ‘When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and distinguished people, he fixed nations’ borders according to the numbers of God’s messengers. So Yahweh’s part was his people: Jacob his determined destiny.’ This traditional deity of Palestine’s ancient past, Yahweh, is by means of the Pentateuchal tradition (Genesis 17; Exodus 3–6; Exodus 23: 2Off.; Deut. 32: 8) reinterpreted and revivified as the divine messenger and prophet of Israel. That is, Yahweh is Immanuel; ehyeh imak. He exists as the heavenly divine with Israel: through his name.
In this form of inclusive monotheism, there is but one God for Israel: the God of heaven. The gods of nations and the gods of tradition alike are only human traditions. They are representations, manifestations, prophetic voices. They name the one universal spirit, who lies at the centre of the universe, beyond understanding.
1 Compare Jeremiah 44; 1–14 with II Kings 25: 22–24.
1 The reference is to Serem Kierkegaard’s commentary on this story in Purity of Heart.