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The Lie With The Ring Of Truth – R.R. Reno

April 27, 2012

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3.4-5

Did God say … ?
The subtle serpent creates a disorienting atmosphere of uncertain questions. Is it “this tree” or “any tree” that God has fenced with a commandment not to eat of its fruit? What did God actually command? And why? What are the real consequences of transgression? The ambiguity is crucial. As the self-defeating perversion of goodness, sin is ugly and repulsive. Transgression can only allure in a world of distortion and dreamlike fantasy, where what is real becomes malleable, capable of seeming to be what it is not. The robbery won’t require any killing, the thief imagines. The one-night stand won’t lead to any bad feelings. The lie is for the best.

Our lives are full of gauzy pictures that our imaginations conjure in order to make the ugliness of sin look more appealing. This is why deception and the lie loom so large in Christian thought about Satan. We can consistently desire what is bad when we imagine that it will add up to something good, a mental open t it wi s only possible if we are deceived about reality. As Gregory of Nyssa writes, “Good is in its nature simple and uniform, alien from all duplicity or conjunction with its opposite, while evil is many-colored and fairly adorned, being esteemed to be one thing and revealed by experience as another” (On the Making of Man 20.3).

Or as St. Paul writes, “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” 2 Corinthians 11:14). In the garden, the serpent’s distortion has the effect of throwing doubt on the divine plan. “Is this not, he seems to be saying, “the garden of joy? You are surrounded by food for life, and yet you are commanded not to fully enjoy it? Is this the sort of God you obey, one who promises life and yet requires renunciations, one who claims to give blessings but always ends up placing limits and making demands?”

These questions have been repeated many times. A Jew is not to eat` pork or shrimp, and what are we to think? Does God wish to cut us off from the good things in life? St. Paul inveighs against fornication, and what are we to think? Is God so opposed to sex and the human capacity for pleasure? Is not the whole scheme of divine commandment, a diminishment of life that cuts us off from the bounty of creation, condemning us to endless sackcloth and ashes?

The woman’s response is corrective, but the serpent’s opening gambit produces an echoing exaggeration. She recounts that God forbade eating from the tree in the middle of the garden, and she then adds, “Neither shall you touch it” Unsettled by the distortions of the serpent, the woman wants to return to the reality of God’s commandment, but her grasp is unsteady. It is as if Satan’s insinuation has taken hold on her imagination. She begins to assume the role of lawgiver herself, puffing up as one giving orders and establishing rules. It is an untenable position of pride: “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do; you shall not add to it or take from it” (Deuteronomy 12:32).

Midrash is a traditional Jewish style of reading. It involves a supplemented retelling, that interprets by way of added emphasis, color, and dramatization, as I have done above. The skeleton of the biblical story is retained, but flesh is added. Midrash, however, is not unique to Judaism. These few verses depicting the original transgression provide the basis for an extensive tradition of Christian midrash. Milton’s Paradise Lost provides one of the most famous examples. But there is nothing uniquely poetic or premodern about the tendency to fill out the story of the fall.

Modern biblical critic Gerhard von Rad produces exegesis in this genre, and he does so with a panache for inventing motives and emotional responses that shed light on the psychology of sin (1972: 88-90). These examples of creative retelling are not surprising. This short portion of biblical text combines narrative realism with economy of expression, a’ combination that positively invites the reader to fill out the story with more detail. Here, then, the literary form matches the ambition of Genesis. The suggestive brevity of the verses invites us to interweave our many and diverse thoughts about the nature of sin into our reading. In the silences of the text we find a place for our own knowledge of the concrete form of human wickedness, and in so doing we vindicate the traditional view that this story tells us about the original sin.

And the woman said…
Perhaps the serpent arrives on the scene more ignorant than wise, and he opens with a clever question designed to provoke the woman to betray crucial information. “I’ve heard that all these trees are off limits. Is it true?” he asks. “No,” says the woman, “with God as my witness, I was told to refrain from eating the fruit of the one tree in the middle of the garden.” “Oh, I see;’ he responds. Now, with this missing piece of information, the lawyer can proceed, knowing just where to focus his attention. “You foolish woman;’ he says to himself, “you have given me what I wanted to know, because you could not restrict yourself to a simple `yes’ or `no” (Matthew 5:37). Eve is too eager, too chatty, too forthcoming. She allows herself to be lured into a discussion with the evil one about the substance of God’s commandment. “Do not throw your pearls before swine”warns ,Jesus (Matthew 7:6), and that seems to be exactly what Eve does. “Such is the evil of idly and casually exposing to all and sundry the divine mysteries,” John Chrysostom observes in his extraordinarily rich reading of Eve’s transgression (Homilies on Genesis 16.6 in FC 74.211).

This might seem a fanciful reading, but the larger scriptural witness suggests otherwise. A negligent, careless tongue looms large in the biblical concern about sin, much larger than most Christian readers realize. Restraint of the tongue is the object of two of the Ten Commandments: do not take the LORD’S name in vain, and do not bear false witness. James identifies the control of the mouth as the key to vice and virtue (James. 3:2-5) and warns that “the tongue is a fire” (3:6). Sin has made our tongues “a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8). The Pastoral Epistles place great emphasis on the properly trained tongue, one that knows when to be silent and when to command and teach according to the sound doctrine.

This larger biblical concern about the tongue and its dangers forms the background for Chrysostom’s portrayal of Eve as the original gossipy housewife, whose wandering, undisciplined tongue leads to the original human sin. It is not prideful self-assertion that is the source. For Chrysostom, the root sin is negligence, expressed most clearly in the easy familiarity of neighborhood gossip. For in gossip we treat other people’s lives as occasions for entertainment and titillation, as opportunities to express complacent superiority or to express a burning envy.

With Chrysostom’s interpretation, therefore, we see an important aspect of our sinful selves. We are not hyper-alert seekers after advantage, men and women who puff ourselves up with arrogant self-importance. More often than not we are somnolent, lazy, and complacent folks who drift along with the crowd. We don’t rush off to join the devil’s party. Instead, we wake up one day and find that, after an unthinking, offhanded career as a fellow traveler, we have signed a loyalty oath as full members.

There is no one right way to read the story of the first sin. The early monastic tradition developed a list of seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. Under the influence of Augustine, Western Christianity has tended to presume that pride is the cardinal, original sin. But the early monks who lived in the Egyptian desert often thought otherwise. For some greed loomed large. They observed a deep human fear of dependence upon God that manifested itself in a perennial desire to accumulate some small margin of protective, sustaining property. For others, a languid, despairing, spiritual pessimism (sloth) was the deepest problem we face.

We should not be surprised that the Christian tradition has not settled on a single account of material form of the primal sin. The scriptures themselves equivocate. Proverbs 16:18 gives St. Augustine his favorite text: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” But Wisdom of Solomon 2:24 teaches, “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” (St. Augustine harmonizes these verses by supposing that the devil’s pride causes him to envy, God’s supremacy.) In 1 Timothy 6:10 we read that “the love of money is the root of all evils.” And 1 John 2:16 gives a threefold formulation (drawing on Ezekiel 24:21) that has been used to probe the deep sources of sin: “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.”

This diversity should not trouble, because it reflects a deeper, formal truth about sin. Transgression is, at root, a spectral romance with nothingness. It is epitomized by idolatry, devotion to an image powerless to deliver on its promises. Lacking an underlying truth or reality, our actual sins take countless forms without ever coming into focus as instances of some deeper, more stable, more fundamental form of life.

As a strange, impossible love of nothingness, sin always twists itself toward some semblance of reality. Sin is the perverted love of a finite good, and therefore has no stable, fundamental form. For this reason, there is no one way to characterize the original sin in Genesis 3.

You will not die…
The serpent’s deceiving promise is a primordial lie. It is to the ears what an idol is to the eyes: a fantasy about the power of life. As a promise, the lie is a claim about the future, a faux covenant. In the subtle, indirect, and deceiving form of a negative claim, the serpent seems to promise life: “You will not die.” “Have no fear,” he implies. “Do as you please. You can have what you want right now — and at the same time you can have the fullness of life in the future. You can have the lovely fruit, and it will provide you with all the happiness you seek.” At root, this lie, and the covenant it implies, is like the golden calf at the base of Mount Sinai. It is like Mammon, whom we so often serve. It is like the ideological totems of modern men and women. Satan’s lie always takes the same form. It creates the illusion that there is some path to fullness of life other than obedience to God’s commandments.

Evil is negation, and pure evil is complete privation or negation. Therefore, pure evil cannot exist, not even as a possibility. As a result, the lie can endure only in the mind of the woman and tempt her if it somehow participates in truth, as do all believable lies. And indeed Satan’s lie does. When they eat the fruit, neither the man nor the woman drops dead. The LORD, who has said, “In the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17), seems to be shown the purveyor of falsehood, while the serpent speaks the truth.

The seeming truth of Satan’s lie rests on the equivocal meaning of life and death. God creates the man and the woman for a purpose: to enter into his Sabbath rest. Spiritual life and death turns on our acceptance or rejection of that divine purpose established in the beginning. Moses’s exhortation to the Israelites restates the choice that Eve faces in the garden: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendents may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him” (Deuteronomy 10:19-20).

Christ presents the same choice to all the nations: “In him was life” (John 1:4), he is “the bread of life” (John 6:35), and his words “are spirit and life” (John 6:63). Christ gives his flesh over to death for the sake of “the life of the world” (John 6:5 1), and in his resurrection death is “swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). In this way, from Eve onward the original choice of life or death is recapitulated again and again: “He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son of God has not life” (1 John 5:12).

The serpent’s lie was brilliant and effective, because it shifts the focus of human concern. He directs attention to what the woman already possesses: the gift of physical life that she shares with all living things. “What you have now you shall not lose;’ he promises, and in a strict sense he speaks truthfully. But the strict sense of Satan’s promise is not the implied sense. “You shall not die” conjures the promise that we will have life abundant. The deception thus breaks the bond between “life and godliness:’ and the lie turns our attention away from “him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3). The serpent’s lie tempts the woman to believe that what matters most is sentient, bodily existence: “Take the fruit. It’s not going to kill you!”

The lie remains effective to this day. St. Augustine makes a distinction between two dispositions toward things: use and enjoyment. To use something means to see its finite goodness and its role in God’s larger plan or purpose and then to love it contingently, that is, not for its own sake but for the sake of God’s plan. To enjoy, by contrast, means to embrace something as our final rest and ultimate purpose, to love it for its own sake. God alone is our proper rest, and thus we are created to enjoy him alone, and others in him, while we are to use created reality to attain that end. But we are tempted to rest in countless finite goods, and the temptation is strong, because, as Satan promises, we really can love them and live in them for their own sake — at least for a while.

My professional success is genuinely rewarding. The five-star chef cooks wonderful food. Patriotism is a noble sentiment. All of these finite goods make life better in the short and medium term. “The tree was good for food” (Genesis 3:6), and its apple does not kill Adam and Eve — or us. In fact, an apple might satisfy our hunger and keep the doctor away. Thus, it’s very easy to think that apples and other finite goods are what make life worth living. The lie works because it has a ring of truth.

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The Fall – R.R. Reno

April 26, 2012

The Fall by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo.

Sin is crouching at the door (Genesis 4:7)

The Serpent Was More Subtle.
On the sixth day God creates “the beasts. . . and the cattle.. . and everything that creeps upon the ground” (Genesis 1:25). Yet, now appears something “more subtle” and seemingly of a different order. Just who or what is the subtle serpent? The voice of the tradition is unequivocal: it is a worldly form of Satan, the fallen angel. The modern historical-critical tradition rejects this reading; von Rad is typical: “The serpent which now enters the narrative is marked as one of God’s created animals…. In the narrator’s mind, therefore, it is not a symbol of a `demonic’ power and certainly not Satan. What distinguishes it a little from the rest of the animals is exclusively its greater cleverness.” So which shall it be: demonic power personified or the animal trickster of folklore?

At the very minimum, Jewish and Christian readers expect this verse to cohere with other parts of the Bible. For example, Job 1 portrays an interaction between God and Satan that sets up another scene of temptation. God allows Satan to afflict Job in order to tempt him to curse God (Genesis 1:6-12). Wisdom of Solomon 2:23-24 interprets the original temptation along similar lines: “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” The New Testament only reinforces the presumption that temptation and transgression come from the devil.

In Luke’s Gospel, Satan and the demons are closely associated with serpents and scorpions (10:17-20), and in John of Patmos’s vision of end times, the power of Christ is depicted as dethroning “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelations 12:9). Even when the image of the serpent is absent, the link between Satan and temptation is clear. In the New Testament scene that recapitulates the circumstances in Genesis 3, Satan tempts Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13).

Scripture interprets scripture, and the weight in favor of reading the serpent as Satan is overwhelming. But we can do more than adduce intra-canonical warrants. It is useful to think through why there is such a strong consensus that a demonic power lay behind the original transgression.

The benefits of pursuing this question are significant. We not only understand Genesis 3:1 more fully, but we also develop a deeper, more intelligent grasp of why angels and demons become so important in the later books of the Bible and why so many later theologians developed systematic accounts of non-bodily, spiritual creatures.

The way forward is not obvious. As Origen notes, “In regard to the devil and his angels and the opposing spiritual powers, the Church teaching lays it down that these beings exist, but what they are and how they exist it has not explained very clearly.” [On First Principles preface.6 in Origen: On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth ( Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 245.]But Origen, however tentative in his speculations about Satan, gives him a central role in the cosmological drama of fall and redemption. The role is emphasized in the many later scriptural passages that implicitly comment on Genesis 3:1. As the larger tradition affirms again and again, evil and the possibility of transgression begins with the angels.

It is very important to see that this view of the origin of evil is not the product of an ancient view of the world as bounded by a heaven above and a spiritual realm below, the so-called three-tiered universe often adduced by modern scholars as a sufficient explanation for early Christian (and Jewish) interest in angels and demons. The devil is not a mythological figure invented by a pre-scientific, credulous spiritual imagination.

On the contrary, the idea of a fallen angel helps biblical readers of Genesis 3 in two ways. First, a reference to Satan immediately conjures a cosmos-wide power, and this helps dramatize the cosmos-wide scope of the divine plan and the sinful resistance to it. Second, the concept of the devil serves as a placeholder for the most extreme possible negation of the divine plan that is consistent with the belief that God is the all-powerful and all-good creator of everything out of nothing.

Let us begin, then, with salvation history. In the broadest possible sense, if we assume that the serpent is not just a particular animal in the garden of paradise, but is instead a grand spiritual being who has already embarked on the deepest and widest possible rebellion against God, then at the very least we have succeeded in refraining a quite intimate and concrete story of temptation in Genesis 3 within a cosmic context. What the serpent says is not just a localized event.

Recourse to the devil inflates the significance of the events. The story is not merely about a serpent and a woman and a man. On the contrary, the garden scene depicts the ultimate adversary at work. The transgression, therefore, is infected with the depth and breadth of Satan’s prior rebellion. It is universally consequential, or as the terminology of traditional doctrine would have it, the sin is original.

One might object that this enlargement of the events in Genesis 3 does violence to the plain sense. But the objection ignores the context, which positively begs from a cosmic frame of reference. The seven-day account of creation that opens Genesis is part of the Priestly tradition; in contrast, the second account of creation of man and woman in Genesis 2 reflects the Yahwist tradition. The standard modern approach to reading these two accounts emphasizes their differences. The P writer provides an account of the architecture of the cosmos, while the J writer is more interested in the human-focused flow of history.

However, the two perspectives overlap. The Priestly material suggests a historical dynamism toward the seventh day (Genesis 2:2). Now we can see how an interpretation of the serpent as the devil opens up a cosmic frame of reference for reading the Yahwist. Instead of trying to give a conceptual answer to the question of how a particular event in the past can have universal consequences, the tradition gives an exegetical answer. The episode is cosmic in significance because the serpent is Satan, the primordial agent of rebellion.

Job, the biblical text most closely related to Genesis 3 in theme and situation, evokes a similar conclusion about the human condition. The main body of the book is highly particularized. Job’s flocks are stolen, his house destroyed, and his children killed. These personal tragedies trigger a long series of debates with Job’s friends about the justice of Job’s sufferings, debates that turn on whether Job is a righteous man.

The central premise is that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. The assumption is that our actions determine our destinies. Have I obeyed? Have I transgressed? As readers familiar with the book know, Job’s friends argue that Job must have transgressed. Job counter-argues that he has not. But for our purposes, the important point of the debate is more general. Throughout the back and forth of argument, all the focus falls on the human condition.

In a sense, Job and his friends live in the Yahwist strand of Genesis. The discrete details of our lives provide exactly the right frame of reference for thinking about the human condition. And yet, Job neither begins nor ends with this focus. Instead, the story opens with Satan approaching the LORD God in his heavenly court. He challenges God, suggesting that God lacks the ability attract spiritual loyalty without buying off the faithful with worldly rewards. The story ends with the famous divine appearance out of a whirlwind, an appearance in which God recounts to Job, not the details of his life and actions, but instead the divine acts of creation. In short, the cosmic perspective frames and contextualizes the human-focused concerns of Job and his friends.

The devil functions in the same way in the New Testament, Again and again St. Paul reminds his readers of the true scale of their struggle against sin. Worldly trials and temptations are not just local; they are afflictions of the devil. The faithful are to resist with confidence, for in due time the God of peace will crush Satan under their feet (Romans 16:20). This image of triumph draws on Genesis 3:15 — the divine prophecy that the children of Eve shall crush the head of the serpent.

In the same way, Hebrews uses the greater spiritual powers of angels and demons in order to frame the significance of the passion and death of Jesus. The one who was greater than angels was made lower in order to destroy what the writer calls “the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Luke’s Gospel makes a similar move when it evokes the intruding agency of evil: “Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot” (Genesis 22:3). The reader is put on notice. The events in Jerusalem, like the events in the primordial garden, have the gravest and greatest of consequences.

Our goal is not to try to reconstruct a New Testament angelology or demonology and transpose it back onto Genesis. The point is much simpler. When 1 Peter 5:8 warns that “the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour,” the effect is not to conjure up pictures of a trident-carrying, horned creature with cloven hoofs. Instead, this and other appeals to Satan function in the same way as the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, Zechariah, and Revelation, all of which portray our destiny in the context of more powerful forces.

Here a reading of the serpent as Satan begins to pay theological dividends. As we allow the image of Satan to guide our reading of Genesis 3, we learn something about the large biblical vision of human freedom. Although our actions are free and we genuinely shape the directions of our lives, we do not define the moral and spiritual atmosphere in which we live. As any mention of the devil reminds us, we are cast into a world already shaped by a creation-wide history of resistance to the divine plan. Our freedom is not pristine, unaffected, and uninfluenced by prior events. We must decide and act in circumstances beyond our control.

Of course, not every portion of scripture can be brought into harmony with every other part. The Bible is fundamentally heterogeneous and cannot be reduced to general theological principles. We should avoid the impulse to interpret scripture simply in order to draw out a theological point, even the very important point that human freedom is constrained by a larger contest between good and evil. Theological concepts are never fully adequate, and no single theological conclusion does justice to the plentitude of the scriptural text. For this reason, it is worthwhile to digress into some further, more technical reasons for calling the tempting serpent “Satan.” These reasons emerge out of the problem of theodicy, the conceptually difficult need to acknowledge the reality of evil while affirming the power and goodness of God.

We can best begin by considering the contrary interpretation. The text says the serpent was an animal — admittedly a strangely clever and talkative animal — and that is the end of it. [A talking animal is not sufficient reason to hypothesize about demonic (or angelic) agents. Balaam's ass talks, but the role of the ass is that of a sensible animal and not a spiritual being (Numbers 22:21-30).] With this approach we gain in literalism, but an immediate problem emerges. As human beings, our acts are voluntary or free insofar as they are motivated. An unmotivated act is accidental, not free. But as embodied rational beings, we are motivated by what we perceive and by conclusions we draw from our engagement with the world. As St. Augustine writes, “Nothing draws the will into action except some object that has been perceived.” [Augustine, De libero arbitrio 3.25.74. I draw this formulation from the translation provided in tt MacDonald's nuanced analysis of St. Augustine's approach to Adam and Eve's sin in "Primal ," in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 110-39 at 118]

If this is so, then the first transgression must have been motivated by something perceived in the garden. Perhaps it was the novelty of a talking snake. Perhaps it was the loveliness of the fruit. Perhaps the slipperiness of human language, a faulty memory, or the all-too-natural tendency of the human mind to be distracted led the woman to eat. Perhaps the natural affections and loyalty of the man to the woman led him to follow suit.

The point is not to specify the motive or cause. Instead, we need to see what is entailed in allowing the serpent to be just a clever snake. Because our freedom is embodied and responsive rather than purely spiritual and originative, if the serpent is just another bodily creature in the world, then the temptation toward primal sin follows as a consequence of the way God creates.

He makes us free in certain way, but the created order contains realities and impulses that are intrinsically tempting and out of balance: a talking animal such as the serpent, a lovely fruit, the bond of companionship, or some other feature of created, embodied existence. In short, if the serpent is just an animal, then sin emerges out of the human encounter with the natural order.

This conclusion immediately runs up against the problem of evil. The notion that the original transgression occurs as a result of our embodied freedom seems to contradict the biblical assertion that God creates everything and calls it good. Not surprisingly, then, the tradition reads Satan into this verse. There are (so the traditional train of thought presumes) free spiritual beings whose created free wills are not moved by their perception of other created realities. In their independence, these spiritual beings are capable of a pure choice, a choice unmotivated and uncolored by instinct and natural desire. For this reason, spiritual beings can make choices that are originative and not responsive. A spiritual being can choose evil without being motivated by anything God has created. Angels are, as it were, self-moved.

If we suppose the existence of an angel who has fallen, then we have a way out of the problem of evil in our reading of Genesis 3, or at least a way of giving a more subtle form to the problem of evil. [Here I follow Augustine's line of reasoning in his long digression at the beginning of his treatment of the fall in The Literal Meaning of Genesis 11] By interpreting the serpent as Satan, we have created exegetical space for a prior, purely spiritual choice of disobedience, one not motivated by the desire for something in the created world that is perceived as good. The fallen angel is motivated solely by his choice of evil, the darkness of a world without the supreme goodness of God (Genesis 1:4).

Of course, the pure freedom of the devil is a finite freedom. The devil is not a primordial being who exists before creation, and in this sense the devil’s freedom is part of the divine project from the outset. However, although the finitude of a purely spiritual freedom constrains its scope and consequences, finitude does not mitigate the capacity of a disembodied freedom to do and become something out of its own pure choice. In a certain sense, God is still on the hook.

But for God’s creation of the angels, none would have fallen. Yet the important point is secure: no aspect of creation other than freedom itself is implicated as the reason for an angelic fall. The devil falls strictly because of his choice and not because of any other feature or quality of the created order. This allows us to say that the first transgression, the fall of the devil, occurs in creation, but not because of creation. “It was,” writes St. Augustine, “an evil arising not from nature but from choice” (City of God 11.19).

These suppositions about the finite spiritual freedom of fallen angels open up conceptual space for an interpretation of Genesis 3, and this allows us to pursue a reading that avoids the problem of implying that the ordinary conditions of our embodied freedom lead to sin. Interpreted as Satan in bodily form, the serpent in the garden can be understood as the vehicle for the intrusion of a more original evil choice into our world of embodied freedom. Aspects of creation (e.g., the attractive tastiness of the apple) are obviously implicated in and serve as the medium for transgression, but we need no longer presume that created goods trigger the first human sin.

Instead, Satan’s prior, purely spiritual, and self-directing choice influences Eve’s subsequent, embodied, and responsive choice. She is not thrown off balance by anything God has created. Her transgression turns on her response to a prior form of evil that is, in itself, an act of finite but pure freedom. Of course, Adam’s sin has precisely the same form. She hands him the fruit, and he responds to Eve’s prior choice. Once the infection is introduced it spreads.

The conceptual advantages of reading the serpent as Satan shows why it is terribly naive to imagine that the classical interpretation is motivated by a love of mythological figures. [The modern historical-critical tradition is hopelessly confused on this point. See, for example, Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11:.4 Commentary.. Unable to countenance "the mythological explanation of the serpent," Westermann concludes that the origin of evil must be a purely human phenomenon. Westermann is apparently unable to imagine that biblical readers (including readers whose writings would subsequently be incorporated into the canon) would develop interpretive hypotheses in order to avoid contradicting basic theological convictions about the nature of God and creation. Von Rad also falsely assumes that classical demonology is mythical and summarily rejects the traditional reading of the serpent as Satan by insisting that the narrative treats temptation as "a completely un-mythical process.” The dichotomy works only if one supposes that hypothetical or inferred beings are by definition mythical, but this is absurd, since it would make a great deal of scientific and mathematical reasoning mythological.]

To read the serpent as Satan is not to think of the snake as a wicked elf or a rebellious satyr. On the contrary, the traditional exegesis of the serpent as Satan resolves the dilemma posed by a literal reading of the story. To suppose the serpent to be Satan’s worldly guise allows us to coordinate the strong affirmation of the intrinsic goodness of creation in Genesis 1 with the narrative disobedience, resistance, and rebellion of Genesis 3.

At this point we should step back and consider an obvious objection. The reading of the serpent as Satan may help us with the difficulty of affirming the intrinsic goodness of God’s creation. The hypothesis of an angelic fall allows us to assert that freedom alone can pervert itself; it cannot go awry simply as human freedom engaged in response to created goods. Yet this approach, we might worry undermines human responsibility. If the fall is triggered by Satan’s earlier choice, then how can we be held responsible? It would seem that the original sin is the devil’s fault, not ours. And if this is the case, doesn’t the entire Pauline economy of guilt in Adam and forgiveness in Christ collapse?

The objection is helpful, because it forces us to be clear about the nature of our embodied freedom, as well as more attentive to what scripture actually says about our roles in both the empire of evil and the reign of Christ. It is certainly true that we are free participants in the divine plan — for good or for ill. However, transgression is like Caesar’s army crossing the Rubicon. Our freedom does not determine us all at once. It sets us down a particular path. More important, in crossing any number of moral and spiritual Rubicons, we are like soldiers deciding to follow, not generals leading their legions. Our freedom is real; we must decide to move our feet in one direction or the other.

But that freedom is reactive and responsive, not executive or commanding. We need a leader to trigger our movement. This is why human freedom never provides a sufficient explanation for the march toward sin — or the countermarch toward righteousness. Humans seem capable of a depravity — and righteousness — that far exceeds our ordinary capacities, which is why ordinary language stretches toward adjectives such as “demonic” and “saintly” when describing human extremes. We can follow much further than we can lead.

There are scriptural and commonsensical reasons for thinking of human freedom more on the model of an enlistee than an officer. Joshua ends with a re-statement of the choice that determines us. We cannot create endlessly new and different paths into the future. On the contrary, we must decide whom to follow: “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:14-15). We are free to switch loyalties, but we cannot invent new armies and new objectives. With exactly the same underlying assumptions about the human condition, St. Paul insists that our choice, which recapitulates the original choice of Adam and Eve, is about whom to serve and not an invitation to brainstorm about the good life. “You are slaves of the one whom you obey, writes Paul, and in Adam we are conscripted into the army of sin (Romans 6:16).

The gospel stories evoke the same view of freedom when they portray the good news as a challenge to “the powers” that hold us in their thrall. We seem always beholden to a prior evil that gives us orders that we willingly obey, and Christ frees us by giving counter commands. Mammon leads us one direction; God leads us in another. When Paul says that “for freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1), he does not mean that we can opt out and wait for a third option. We are freed from sin precisely because we are taken captive in Christ. In him we serve the life-giving master.

Thus an appeal to Satan in our interpretation of Genesis 3 reinforces a general Biblical claim about our created condition. Our freedom is always a matter of whom we obey, and in sin we seek a perverse fulfillment of our natural desire for obedient service. Promethean self-direction is a fantasy, for we are not created with the capacity to serve ourselves. We can only serve that which is greater, which is why the supposition that the serpent is Satan fits nicely with the larger biblical tendency to see the fundamental form of sin as idolatry. The perverted human will follow the false gods, false leaders, and false promises, all the while imagining them to be the source of life.

The view of human freedom as a decision about whom to obey finds ample confirmation in everyday life. We cannot follow our instincts, but we can follow the idea of following our instincts. We cannot live as natural men and women, but we can follow a philosophy of natural existence. We cannot live only for ourselves but we can adopt the principle of egoism. By St. Paul’s analysis, in sin we pervert rather than undo or destroy the purposes for which human nature was created. We live a distorted facsimile of covenant. We are “slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe” (Galatians 4:3).

We were created to know and worship the living God, but in our blindness we serve dead idols (Romans 1:21-23). Thus, when we introduce the greater power of Satan into our interpretation of Genesis, we are not understanding human responsibility for sin, nor are we compromising the Pauline vision of salvation history. Instead, we are bringing our reading of the fall into conformity with the New Testament account of our slavery to sin. Sin is a perverted obedience, a false following, a deceived discipleship. To suppose the serpent to be a form of Satan helps us see the true form of our slavery to sin — and by contrast to see the obedient form of our participation in Christ.

Although there are strong reasons in support of a traditional reading of the serpent as Satan, neither scripture nor the classical theological tradition gives Satan an ongoing, central role in the unfolding of the divine plan. St. Paul observes “sin came into the world through one man” (Romans 5:12) and that the divine campaign against the entire empire of evil is conducted through “that one man Jesus Christ (Romans 5:15). While we may not be commanders in the cosmic conflict, salvation history turns on our loyalty. Although the possibility of evil should be traced back to the purely spiritual freedom of fallen angels, we need to be careful. The origin of evil should not be confused with the location of its ultimate conflict with goodness. The centers of government may have been in Richmond and Washington, but the tide of the Civil War turned at the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

For Gregory of Nyssa, the human focus of the scriptural story is clear from the outset, and he explains why God fittingly chooses our embodied freedom as the place to work out his redemptive plan. Our amphibious existence as both embodied and free places us at the center of the cosmic drama. “God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, Gregory writes, “and, by an inspiration from Himself, He planted life in the work. of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supra-mundane” (Catechetical Orations 6 in NPNF 5.480).

The human creature has a unique role. We are what angels and demons can never be: a hybrid of body and spirit that participates in all aspects of the created order. Through us, therefore, God can reach into all the corners of his creation. Neither pure spirit nor mere body, we are at the crossroads of reality. The future of the cosmos is in the hands of whichever army controls this strategic point.

Thus, for all the biblical concern about demons and for all the theological principles that warrant the hypothesis of the devil, focus falls on the human. We live out our loyalties in the quotidian realities of everyday life. It is here and now that we do the work of Satan, and it is here and now that we encounter Christ, who has the power to free us from the thrall of our own past choices, from the primordial choice of Adam and Eve, and from the original wickedness of Satan. We do the most to defeat the devil and sanctify the world when we focus on our core competence: obedience to the call of Christ in the midst of human affairs.

Posted in Genesis, R.R. Reno, Scriptural Exegesis, The Old Testament, Understanding Sin | Tagged an evil arising from choice, Genesis 3, human freedom, Job and His Friends, our created condition, Satan, the first transgression, the origin of evil, The Serpent, the traditional exegesis of the serpent as Satan | Leave a Comment »

Time Fulfilled – N.T. Wright

December 27, 2011

Branchini Madonna, 1427 Giovanni di Paolo. Giovanni di Paolo combines for us two pictorial types of the Virgin here: the Madonna of Humility, who sits on the ground, and the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, who wears a crown and an ermine cloak. Scattered throughout the picture are symbolic references to the Virgin and to Christ: thistles on Christ’s drapery allude to His Passion; pomegranates foretell the promise of the Resurrection; roses and marigolds refer to Mary; and cornflowers relate to Christ and heaven.The artist has inscribed his own prayer around the Virgin’s halo: “Protect, O Virgin, the man who has painted thee.” This panel originally hung in the Branchini family chapel in the Church of San Domenico, Sienna.

Jews in Jesus’ day and Jews in our own day have a very special sense of time. Time is moving forward in a linear fashion, with a beginning, a middle, and an end — unlike some other visions of time, in which everything is cyclical, going around and around and constantly returning to the same point. The Jewish view of time is part of the Jewish view of God and creation: God has a purpose for his good creation, a purpose to be worked out in time. Indeed, the Jewish people think of themselves as living within the long story of how that purpose is to be worked out.

But already, in the opening of the Bible, there is another feature. When God made the world, he “rested” on the seventh day. This doesn’t just mean that God took a day off. It means that in the previous six days God was making a world — heaven and earth together — for his own use. Like someone building a home, God finished the job and then went in to take up residence, to enjoy what he had built.

Creation was itself a temple, the Temple, the heaven-and-earth structure built for God to live in. And the seventh-day “rest” was therefore a sign pointing forward into successive ages of time, a forward-looking signpost that said that one day, when God’s purposes for creation were accomplished, there would be a moment of ultimate completion, a moment when the work would finally be done, and God, with his people, would take his rest, would enjoy what he had accomplished.

One of the few things that ancient pagans knew about the Jewish people was that, from the pagans’ point of view, they had a lazy day once a week. From the Jewish point of view, it wasn’t laziness; it was the chance to celebrate time in a different mode. The Sabbath was the day when human time and God’s time met, when the day-to-day succession of tasks and sorrows was set aside and one entered a different sort of time, celebrating the original Sabbath and looking forward to the ultimate one.

This was the natural moment to celebrate, to worship, to pray, to study God’s law. The Sabbath was the moment during which one sensed the onward movement of history from its first foundations to its ultimate resolution. If the Temple was the space in which God’s sphere and the human sphere met, the Sabbath was the time when God’s time and human time coincided. Sabbath was to time what Temple was to space.

This sense of looking forward was heightened by the larger sabbatical scheme in which the seventh year was a year of agricultural rest and the seven-times-seventh year the year of jubilee, the time for slaves to be freed, for debts to be cancelled, for life to get back on track. As we have already seen in this book, the theme of jubilee ties in closely and naturally with the great all-encompassing theme of the Exodus. The jubilee was, as it were, the once-in-a-lifetime “exodus” that everyone could experience. We don’t know whether or to what extent the jubilee as set forth in Leviticus 25 was actually practiced in Jesus’ day. But it remained in the scriptures as a reminder that God’s time was being marked out week by week, seven years by seven years, half century by half century.

Matthew hints at all this in his own way, right at the start of his gospel, by arranging Jesus’ genealogy in three groups of fourteen generations (that is, six sevens), so that Jesus appears at the start of the Sabbath-of-Sabbaths moment. And, as we have seen, people in Jesus’ day were pondering, calculating, and longing for the greatest super-jubilee of them all, the “seventy weeks” (that is, seventy times seven years) of Daniel 9:24. The great Sabbath was coming! Soon they would be free!

Now, and only now, do we see what Jesus meant when he said the time is fulfilled? That was part of his announcement right at the start of his public career (Mark 1:15). Only this, I believe, will enable us to understand his extraordinary behavior immediately afterwards. He seems to have gone out of his way to flout the normal Sabbath regulations. Most people in the modern church have imagined that this was because the Sabbath had become “legalistic,” a kind of observance designed to boost one’s sense of moral achievement, and that Jesus had come to sweep all that away in a burst of libertarian, anti-legalistic enthusiasm. That, though commonplace, is a trivial misunderstanding. It is too “modern” by half.

Rather, the Sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God’s promised future, and Jesus was announcing that the future to which the signpost had been pointing had now arrived in the present. In his own career. He was doing the “God’s in-charge” things. He was explaining what he was doing by talking about what God was doing. The time was fulfilled, and God’s kingdom was arriving.

In particular, Jesus came to Nazareth and announced the jubilee. This was the time — the time! — when all the sevens, all the Sabbaths, would rush together. This was the moment Israel and the world had been waiting for. When you reach your destination, you don’t expect to see signposts anymore. Nobody puts up a sign on Capitol Hill pointing to “Washington.” Nobody needs a signpost saying “London” in Piccadilly Circus. You don’t need the Sabbath when the time is fulfilled. It was completely consistent with Jesus’ vision of his own vocation that he would do things that said, again and again from one angle after another, that the time had arrived, that the future, the new creation, was already here, and that one no longer needed the Sabbath.

The Sabbath law was not, then, a stupid rule that could now be abolished (though some of the detailed Sabbath regulations, as Jesus pointed out, had led to absurd extremes, so that you were allowed to pull a donkey out of a well on the Sabbath, but not to heal the sick). It was a signpost whose purpose had now been accomplished. It was a marker of time pointing forward to the time when time would be fulfilled; and that was now happening.

Notice how this theme then ties in with others we have already observed. If the Sabbath now has a purpose, it won’t be for rest from the work of creation, but rather for celebrating God’s victory over the Satan: “And isn’t it right,” asks Jesus, “that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the Satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). Victory in the real battle is closely connected with the healings that reveal that God is in charge. “My father is going on working,” declares Jesus, “and so am I” (John 5:17). And these things happen, of course, in the moment when the time is fulfilled. If Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious Sabbath.

But this means that the time of Jesus’ public career, taken as a whole, also acquires a special significance. He spoke about this special significance when he insisted that the wedding guests can’t fast while the bridegroom is still at the party. Something new is happening; a new time has been launched; different things are now appropriate. Jesus has a sense of a rhythm to his work, a short rhythm in which he will launch God’s kingdom, the God’s-in-charge project, and complete it in the most shocking and dramatic symbolic act of all. “Look here,” he says to those who have warned him that Herod wants to kill him, “I’m casting out demons today and tomorrow, and completing my healings. I’ll be finished by the third day. But I have to continue my travels today, tomorrow, and the day after that! It couldn’t happen that a prophet would perish except in Jerusalem” (Luke 13:32-33).

This follows hard on the heels of some sharp little sayings about God’s kingdom. It’s like mustard seed, which starts small and grows to a great shrub for the birds to nest in; it’s like yeast mixed into dough, transforming the whole lump. And, in a solemn warning that resonates with many similar ones, Jesus warns his hearers that they may one day see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets – and people from east and west, from north and south! — sitting down to eat in the kingdom of God, while they themselves will be thrown out (Luke 13:18-30). The time of Jesus’ public career is the time of fulfillment, the time through which God’s new creation, his earth-as-in-heaven new reality, is being launched, up close and personal. But this means it is possible to miss the boat, to lose the one chance. That is the warning that goes with the note of fulfillment.

Posted in Jesus, N.T. Wright, The Old Testament | Tagged New Testament Time, The jubilee, the Sabbath | Leave a Comment »

A Reflection on the Song of Songs (Shir haShirim)

December 6, 2010

An etching by Zely Smekhov and Hebrew calligraphy by David Moss from The Song of Songs

Following my post on Walter Brueggeman’s essay last week I was reading an article on the Song of Songs in First Things by Shalom Carmy, who is an Orthodox rabbi and the Chair of Bible and Jewish Philosophy at Yeshiva University. Brueggeman had quoted one biblical scholar, “[It] is a love poem that calls upon our deepest responses, on every level. The more its authors sing of love, the more they whisper of God;” Carmy’s essay was focused more on that ‘whisper of God” found in “the most poetic book of the Bible.”

For Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef, a scholar, teacher, shepherd and the revolutionary who led the Bar Kochba revolt over 60 years after the destruction of the Temple, in the year 132 CE, the Song of Songs (Shir haShirim ) was the holy of holies, analogous to the inner sanctum of the Temple. “Holiness was synonymous with intimacy and that is what Song of Songs tells us about, in a way unique among the books Scripture.”

Carmy notes: “[T]he great medieval Jewish commentaries bequeathed to us two models for interpreting Song of Songs. The first is more familiar, partly because it is found in the easily accessible commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra. This model reads the poem as a rendering of Jewish sacred history, from Exodus through Exile. The male Lover is thus God, and the female beloved is Israel.

The second model, championed by medieval and early modern philosophical and mystical writers, perceives in Song of Songs an allegory not for the people so much as for the individual on a spiritual journey. This approach is less popular, and its most influential exponent, Maimonides, presented his approach only in passing. His time-bound mix of Aristotelian philosophy and medieval mysticism, moreover, tended to obscure the existential dimensions of the interpretation and distance it from the common reader.”

It is this latter that I would heartily endorse as an approach to the Song of Songs: seeing it as part of our spiritual journey, while keeping in mind it also resonates as the life of a particular people summoned by God: “The history of God’s relationship with Israel and, by the same token, His relationship with the individual human soul, is a love story. Inevitably, such a story is not free of suffering, failure, misunderstanding, and unhappiness. Any external perspective on the story of a great love combines happiness and unhappiness, frustration and satisfaction. The external perspective will always have difficulty showing how these contradictions are overcome or even mitigated.”

Carmy tells us “the biblical texts dealing with the story of God and Israel display a mass of contradictory judgments: Was Israel faithful in the desert (Jeremiah 2), or disloyal from the start (Ezekiel 20)? Close reading can uncover fine and cogent distinctions, but it cannot dispel the plain impression that diametrically opposed evaluations of the relationship are being asserted, both true to the reality. Within short passages, God’s attitude toward Israel careens from one extreme to the other. In Hosea 1-3, for example, angry rejection gives way to unbreakable commitment. The overall impact of such pericopes is paradoxical and phenomenologically incomplete. The prophetic literature, partly because it concentrates on God’s action and partly because it is a literature of commands and demands, tends to speak in terms of binary oppositions — obedience and disobedience, faithfulness and betrayal.”

So in a sense we begin to see the rationale for the Song of Songs: it is a way of filling the gap that arises when “an account leaves out something essential about Israel’s relationship to God, just as it fails to comprehend fully the individual’s struggle before God. Without Song of Songs in the Bible, without Song of Songs in life, this gap would remain unfilled.”

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s (one of the previous century’s most exceptional and revered Jewish thinkers) masterwork is And from There You Shall Seek (first published in 1978). Carmy recommends this brilliant philosophical essay on the nature of the relationship between man and God as an eloquent and intelligent effort. In it, too, Rabbi Soloveitchik argues that these schools of interpretation (Song of Songs as (1) the history of God’s relationship with Israel and, (2) God’s relationship with the individual human soul) are not mutually exclusive. Soloveitchik neither claims nor desires to invent a new interpretation to replace these hallowed traditions. Yet his remarks in And from There You Shall Seek yield a fresh perspective, even to readers familiar with the prevalent views.

Here then is the core of Camry’s essay, which is a recommendation and explication of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s (the Rav, as Rabbi Soloveitchik was known to his disciples) masterwork. I hate it when the Boston Public Library doesn’t have a book, so I will have to buy it from Amazon.

“Song of Songs introduces Soloveitchik’s major theme: the human quest for God and God’s revelation to man. Without prelude he retells the story of an enigmatic Lover and his beloved revealing and concealing themselves from each other in the Friday twilight and arousing the astonishment of the “daughters of Jerusalem” who serve as a kind of chorus. Only at the end of the overture does he stand back from the story and frame it as an enactment of the Sabbath-eve recitation of the story of Creator and creation. Will they indeed come together?

From here the essay moves on to its philosophical core. It examines the variegated forms the human quest for God has taken — the realms of experience where human beings think they can discern Him and from which they distill all the familiar arguments and ways. He then turns to God’s encounter with man — those elements of religious reality that do not arise from the human quest but confront us with realities unsought and often unwelcome to us (most notably, revealed Law, the uncompromising imperative of Torah).

Out of these fundamental oppositions emerges a variety of experiences. On the one hand, our conception of God corresponds to our needs and desires, our loves and our fears — that is the God we search for and seek to contain in our experiential and intellectual categories. On the other hand, God is wholly other — when He reveals Himself, we cannot fully assimilate His otherness. Losing touch with this complex reality, we tend to imagine either that God is the image of our own love and fear or that God stands aloof as a remote, inaccessible, hidden being.

Traditional religious philosophy has given the word reason (in the widest sense of the term) to the human quest for God, and the word faith to the experience of the otherness of God. This opposition is commonly an intellectualized one. Reason and faith become epistemological tools: Some truths are seen as accessible to both; some, only to one or the other. Rabbi Soloveitchik transforms this hoary dichotomy by personalizing it. Reason in all its multiple forms is the human being’s seeking; revelation is God’s confronting. The drama of Song of Songs, of the lovers who seek each other passionately and nevertheless elude each other again and again, reminds us that life with God embraces both contradictory impulses. The imagery provides a model or analogy of religious experience rather than an allegory of it.

We should not dismiss Rabbi Soloveitchik’s strategy of introducing Song of Songs via Sabbath-eve prayer as merely a literary frame for his discussion. By rooting the encounter with God in a quasi-liturgical performance, the Rav insinuates into his essay, at the very outset, the idea that the personal encounter with God draws on, and embraces, concrete historical experience appropriated into a social setting. The philosophical quest for God is too often pictured as a solitary affair of logical argumentation or mystical culture. Soloveitchik weans us away from this narrowly cloistered conception. He brings the philosopher closer to the “Friday-afternoon Jew” reading.

The ability to come to grips with the flaws and lapses in a personal relationship marks the difference between regarding the relationship from the outside and sharing in its inner quality. The unique intimacy of Song of Songs is bound up with its expression of the human side in the divine–human dialogue. To bring philosophy closer to religious reality entails making room for the moments of failure, sin, and misunderstanding between creature and Creator.

In And from There You Shall Seek, Rabbi Soloveitchik is particularly attentive to the mystery of failure or deferred communication between the two parties to the love affair. His account of Song of Songs begins in medias res (vocab: In medias res is Latin for “into the middle of things.”). It does not describe the beginning of the relationship but presupposes it. The question is not how the two lovers met but whether they will overcome their separation — which foreshadows the insight, toward the end of Soloveitchik’s book, that the human search for God derives from prior acquaintance with the divine. While traditional allegories give specific explanations for the separation — the national-historical orientation in sin, the philosophical school in human cognitive limitations — these are not self-evident in the biblical text, and Rabbi Soloveitchik does not pursue them. Given the fact of separation and the desire of both parties to overcome it, the drama of Song of Songs and the focus of the Rav’s synopsis lie in the way the separation is experienced and the mystery of why it is not overcome.

Rabbi Soloveitchik is understandably circumspect in his description of the divine figure. He confines himself to descriptions found in the biblical text, and he refrains from supplementing them with psychological terms. When he speaks of the woman’s hesitation to respond to the divine Lover, however, his paraphrase provides an attempt to understand her from within:

I am asleep yet my heart is awake. The voice of my Lover, knocking: “Open for me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is filled with dew, my locks with drops of the night.” I have taken off my cloak, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I sully them? A moment later she rises to open the door but she has missed her chance; he has gone.
Song of Songs 5:2–3

These are the verses, to which the medieval philosopher Yehuda Halevi appealed when he castigated the Babylonian exiles for their failure to return to the land of Israel en masse when Cyrus’ edict allowed it. And The Voice of My Beloved Knocking is the title of a celebrated discourse on Zionism by Rabbi Soloveitchik.

Here, however, the Rav’s task is neither homiletic nor allegorical. And so he rewrites the woman’s unwillingness to stir: The cold of the moonless, starless night, deep weariness, laziness, and fear combine to paralyze her will and bind her legs. Why should she refuse to undo the latch and open the door to her lover? Hasn’t she been pursuing him, . . . suffering insults, blows, and spiritual torment on his behalf? . . . Does desire no longer permeate her being, is the urgency no longer alive within her?

The biblical text does not provide compelling evidence for the particular motives suggested by the Rav. The reference to her fear is an especially bold and unpredictable stroke. (Fear of what? That she will disappoint Him? That she will be disappointed? That she is deluding herself in waiting for Him?) In effect, Rabbi Soloveitchik is speculating about the reasons people forgo opportunities to get what they most want.

What is important in principle is not the details of this psychological reconstruction but the manner in which the poetry of Song of Songs enables the Rav to make personal and palpable what otherwise might have been an abstract philosophical disquisition.

For most of the past millennium, Jewish religious philosophers such as Maimonides have begun with the raw material of religious experience as found in the Bible and undertaken to present it in more abstract form — to purify anthropomorphic language and tone down the mythical connotations of religious imagery. Healthy religious thinking, on this view, needed to rise above concessions to the primitive imagination. And the philosophers could do so because they were able to rely on the backdrop of a living experience.

For our own age, overly captivated by abstraction, the task of philosophical reflection is often to reverse the process and recover living experience — living experience of God, who transcends our human conceptions and confronts us as a philosophy-defying Other even as He addresses us and makes Himself available to us.

Because He is both the commanding Other and the intimate Partner, He conceals Himself from us even as He seeks our fellowship. Underlying the Jewish (and Catholic, may I add) ability to respond to God is the awareness of our own enigmatic destiny as individuals and as members of His people, at once creative and submissive, questing for Him and yet all too frequently failing to respond to His initiative.

All Scripture rehearses that intimate, holy story of revelation. Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”

I was much taken by this essay and will read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s masterwork before during and after my reading of Song of Songs. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Posted in Poetry, The Old Testament | Tagged And from There You Shall Seek, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Shalom Carmy, the Song of Songs | Leave a Comment »

The Song of Solomon – Walter Brueggeman

December 3, 2010

African Icons: Psalter, Song of Songs, Night Prayers above: King Solomon, Parchment, 15th century.

This love poem is introduced in canonical form as the “song of Songs” – that is, the superb Song of King Solomon. The linkage to King Solomon that vouches for the book as Scripture perhaps attests to Solomon’s reputation for “wisdom,” for it is possible to situate the text among wisdom teachings, as does Brevard Childs (1 Kings 3:16-28; 4:29-34) (Childs 1979, 573-79). Or perhaps the connection to Solomon is that he himself is reported to have had among his wives “seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines” (1 Kings 11:3), suggesting his sexual prowess:

If Solomon is evoked in the Song, thus giving it a legendary flavor, it is not so much Solomon-the-Wise that the author is calling to the bar, as Solomon-the-Don-Juan. With his thousand wives (1 Kings 11:3), Solomon appears as one who has known love in all its forms, as the paragon of love. (Lacocque and Ricoeur 1998, 237)

In either case, the connection of the book to King Solomon is surely secondary and, at the most, resituates the book in the royal apparatus and the timeline of Israel. The love poetry itself articulates common and recurring themes of romantic love that are known in every culture in every season. Indeed, it is most plausible that the song of Solomon has connections to Egyptian love songs

In any case, the book is love poetry of an unrestrained, passionate kind in which the erotic interaction of a man and a woman are brought to daring and imaginative speech. It is commonly assumed that the speaker is a man, a point exploited by David Clines in his argument that the poetry has an indulgence in male sexism (Clines). Conversely, Andre Lacocque has argued strongly that the voice heard here is a woman (Lacocque and Ricoeur 1998, 240-46). Tremper Longman judiciously observes, against Clines, that a judgment about the identity of the speaker is a highly subjective one.

The discussions of the gender of the author of the Song reveals more about us as commentators than it does about the Song. It relies on a theory of literature and of gender that believes that women and men are typecast in the way that they write. The irony is that the arguments on both sides are not coming from social conservatives, but they certainly feed the agendas of those conservatives. The most honest appraisal is that we do not know for certain who wrote the songs of the Song, man or woman, and in anv case it is a collection of love poetry, whether by men, or women, or both. It strikes me, though, that Clines is the most egregious of these commentators since his view relies on the supposition that no woman could have the interest in the kind of love that the beloved articulates
(Longman 2001, 9)

We know very little about any historical-critical data concerning the book. Great attention must be paid, however, to the long practice of interpretation of the poetry. On the one hand, it is clear that this is human love expressed erotically and without restraint. It is love of an innocent kind unrestrained by morality or even a suggestion of matrimonial context. It voices the most elemental delight in the presence with and embrace of the beloved. Indeed, Phyllis Trible has shown a way in which the Song articulates a “redeemed” love lyric that is a contrast with and correction of the brokenness of the narrative of Genesis 2-3, wherein the human couple failed to actualize this creaturely delight:

Thus far we have studied two portrayals of male and female in the Old Testament. Genesis 2-3 depicted a tragedy of disobedience; the Song of Songs, a symphony of eroticism.
(Trible 1978, 162)

Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a reference now lost to me, has suggested that the Song is a superb articulation of “creation theology,” for it celebrates the unquestioned “goodness” of creatureliness.

That human marking of the Song is without dispute. The reader of the book, however, must take into account, on the other hand, a second reading of the book that began very early in both Jewish and Christian interpretation, namely, that this love poetry concerns love between God and Israel or, derivatively, Christ and the church. This reading — long well-established — moves beyond the plain meaning of the poetry and finds in the poetry a daring theological articulation of the character of God and God’s inclination toward God’s creatures, read in an allegorical way. This reading has raised important methodological questions from a historical-critical approach, for such a mode of interpretation is disinclined to allegorical approaches in principle. Beyond the issue of method, moreover, this second reading assigns to God lustful inclinations that do not come readily to the thinking of conventional theology.

Paul Ricoeur, in his characteristically subtle and dense way, has understood the problematic of such an allegorical reading and seeks to escape the “plain meaning” of the text (Lacocque and Ricoeur 1998). That said, however, Ricoeur champions a “plurality of interpretations” (267) that takes the form of a “metaphorization” of the poetry (301). When a reader takes the book as a theological disclosure of the character of God, one is drawn to the prophetic images of YHWH as a husband who woos Israel, as a lover who woos Israel and becomes Israel’s husband, as in Hosea 1-3 and Jeremiah 2-3 or in pornographic distortion in Ezekiel 1 6 and 23. (See the verb of passion credited to YHWH in Deuteronomy 7:7; 10:15.) These prophetic texts open up, as Abraham Heschel has seen, a wide range of possibilities for the “passion of God,” a passion for Israel that may express itself in suffering love but that also is articulated and enacted in rage and wrath, most extremely in Ezekiel 16 and 23 (Heschel 1962).

Ricoeur, however, is quick to insist that the passion of YHWH for Israel in the prophetic texts and the erotic sense of God’s inclination in the Song Of Songs are quite distinct from each other and not to be equated. They are, however, interrelated, and the interaction between them illuminates both:

First of all, the metaphorization at work takes place in two opposed directions, in a mirror-like relation. For the Prophets, it is the love of God that is spoken through the nuptial metaphor. In the Song of Songs, the nuptial dimension of love first loses its erotic cloak thanks to those virtues of the poem discussed earlier, so as to reinsert them in new discourse situations, thanks to a shift in the place of utterance (the baptismal liturgy, for example). In this sense, bringing these texts near to one another gives birth to what we might call an intersecting metaphor: on the one side, the prophets “see” the love between God and his people “as” conjugal love; on the other side, the erotic love sung in the Song of Songs is “seen as like” the love of God for his creature, at least if we interpret it with reference to the Prophets’ language. This “seeing as” is the organon (vocab: a system of principles for philosophic or scientific investigations; an instrument for acquiring knowledge) of every metaphorical process, whether it works in one direction or the other.
(Lacocque and Ricoeur 1998, 301)

The articulation of such romantic passion means that we are invited in the poems to move even beyond the ethical perspective of the prophets to the erotic hunger of the Song as a disclosure of God. That is, if this text is theological disclosure, then it must be taken without weakening the force of the passion or diminishing the delight that God takes in God’s beloved, either by moralism or by institutional constraints. What is given us here is a God who is a true lover, one who loves with unrestrained delight and unqualified lust that constitute the fullness of self-giving.

It is no wonder that this reading of the text has been most fully appreciated in theological traditions informed by and open to a mystical dimension in which the “union” of Creator and creature is thinkable, conversely, this theological reading of the text is most resisted in a tradition that remains determinedly ethical (and resistant to the mystical) and insists on the sharp contrast of Creator and creature. The sharpest articulation of this contrast of which I know is the classic work of Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (1969). In this enormously influential work, the Lutheran bishop has classically argued that Agape (God’s utter self-giving love without avocation from the beloved) is totally and utterly distant from and opposed to Eros, which is characterized by the seeking for something for self from the beloved:

Already in the Old Testament there are suggestions that God’s love is not bound by the value or importance of its object “The LORD did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all peoples: but because the LORD loveth you. . . hath the LORD. . . redeemed you” (Deuteronomy. vii.7 f.).

Judaism, it is true, never dared to apply any such principle to God’s dealings with the righteous and the sinner; but Jesus goes the whole length. According to Him God’s love is sovereign in this matter also; indeed, it reveals its sovereignty most clearly of all in the fact that it directs itself to sinners. We only obscure the real nature of the fellowship with God, and make the relation between God and man less truly a relation of love, if we seek a basis for it in the idea that the sinner is better than the righteous.

We have therefore no longer any reason to ask about either the better or worse qualities of those who are the objects of Divine love. To the question, Why does God love? There is only one right answer: Because it is His nature to love.

We look in vain for an explanation of God’s love in the character of the man who is the object of His love. God’s love is “groundless”– though not, of course, in the sense that there is no ground for it at all, or that it is arbitrary and fortuitous. On the contrary, it is just in order to bring out the element of necessity in it that we describe it as “groundless”; our purpose is to emphasize that there are no extrinsic grounds for it. The only ground for it is to be found in God Himself. God’s love is altogether spontaneous. It does not look for anything in man that could be adduced as motivation for it. In relation to man, Divine love is “unmotivated.” When it is said that God loves man, this is not a judgment on what man is like, hut on what God is like.
(Nygren 1969, 74, 75—76)

Nygren’s simple and succinct affirmation of the matter is that “God is Agape” (1 John 4:16) and any compromise of this claim is dangerous and destructive of the claim of the gospel:

The idea of Agape can be compared to a small stream which, even in the history of Christianity, flows along an extremely narrow channel and sometimes seems to lose itself entirely in its surroundings; but Eros is a broad river that overflows its banks, carrying everything away with it, so that it is not easy even in thought to dam it up and make it flow in an orderly course. When the Eros motif invades Christianity however, its endeavor is to drive out and supplant the Agape motif.

The mistake is commonly made of representing Agape as a higher and more spiritualized form of Eros, and of supposing that the sublimation of Eros is the way to reach Agape. The thought of “the heavenly Eros” reminds us that that is not the case; for heavenly Eros may be a sublimation of sensual love, hut it is not itself capable of further sublimation. The heavenly Eros is the highest possible thing of its kind; it has been spiritualized to an extent beyond which it is impossible to go. Agape stands alongside, not above, the heavenly Eros; the difference between them is not one of degree but of kind. There is no way, not even that of sublimation, which leads over from Eros to Agape.
(Nygren 1969, 49-50, 52)

There is no doubt that Nygren’s thesis is congruent with the classical tradition of theology, especially in a Protestant trajectory. It is nonetheless clear that an important and continuing practice of theological interpretation in the church has not ceded everything over to that singular insistence. And therefore if the Song of Solomon is taken as seriously revelatory, we may entertain the thought that this literature bespeaks something of God that has been lost in what Nygren characterizes as the “small stream” of Agape. This alternative tradition, rooted in the voicing of human, creaturely, lustful innocence, dares assert that God’s self-giving finds in God’s beloved a deep delight for God. While such a claim can hardly be normative in Christian theology, it may be an important counterpoint to a theological accent that easily becomes excessively severe in the name of God who gives God’s self.

Thus it is likely, given the history of interpretation, that taking this poetry as a human love song (which it is) or to take it as divine disclosure is not an either/or. We read both at the same time precisely because, as John Calvin has seen, “knowledge of God” and “knowledge of man” are deeply intertwined. “Knowledge of man,” as Freud in his Jewishness unmistakably understood, is not available apart from sexual giving and receiving. For that reason, the truth of God’s self-giving love and the truth of human delight remain profoundly connected:

Many deeply religious works are to be read with the whole of our sensibility, including physical love, and great love poems call for a spiritual reading as well. For that matter, whether we adore with our hearts or souls is a matter for endless speculation. We do not know how we cherish, but only that we cherish. And the Song, with its great affirmation of love’s immortality, is a love poem that calls upon our deepest responses, on every level The more its authors sing of love, the more they whisper of God.
(Schulman 1989, 359)

In Jewish liturgical practice, the Song of Solomon is utilized in the Passover celebration, used as a resource to mediate the unmitigated joy that arises from YHWH’s profound commitment to Israel in the act of the exodus. That connection to Passover is of course broken in the familiar canonical sequence the Christian Bible. In the latter usage, the book is grouped alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, a triad that is all (a) poetic, (b) linked to Solomon and (c) associated with wisdom instruction. When attention is paid to canonical placement, it is clear that the two situations in Jewish and Christian canon suggest very different interpretive perspectives.

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The Suffering Servant of Isaiah by Walter Brueggemann

November 2, 2010

Michelangelo Isaiah, 1509

We may notice in particular one element of this poetry upon which many interpreters comment. There is no doubt that in this poetry “Israel” as the addressee is named and regarded as YHWH’s “servant,” as the one in covenant with YHWH and so bound in obedience to YHWH. Scholars have, however, identified four poems dubbed “Servant Songs” that came to be regarded as distinct from the usage of the term “servant” in the rest of the poetry (42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:13-53:12).

Because these four poems have been singled out by scholars, it has been thought that the person designated as “servant” in these poems (and only in these poems) is a special figure with a special relationship to YHWH and a special vocation from YHWH, quite different from Israel as “servant.” Scholars have used much energy to offer various hypotheses concerning this “special agent,” and, of course, Christians have found it convenient to suggest that the character in the poetry is Jesus in anticipation.
(North 1956; see Childs 2001, 422-23)

More recent scholarship, however, has moved to a consensus that these four poems are not to be separated from the rest of the poetry, and are to be taken in context along with the rest of the poetry. The important implication of this critical judgment is the conclusion that the “servant” in these four poems, like the “servant” elsewhere in the poetry of Second Isaiah, is none other than Israel (Mettinger 1983). It is to be recognized, moreover, that Israel with its special relationship to YHWH is also given a special assignment:

I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
(Isaiah 42:6-7)

I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
(Isaiah 49:6b)

That mandate, however, is not in fact a novum in Israel’s self-understanding, but is fully congruent with the mandate already given to Father Abraham to be “a blessing” to the nations. (See Genesis 12:3; Isaiah 51:1-3.)

Given that emerging interpretive consensus, it is nonetheless important to recognize that Isaiah 49:6 constitutes something of a problem for that interpretation

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel.
(Isaiah 49:6a)

The verse is a problem because if “Israel” is servant, it as servant has a mandate to “raise up, restore” Israel. Thus a commission for Israel to serve Israel. it is possible, while keeping this identity of the servant, to imagine a “pure, obedient, faithful Israel” with a mandate to a more inclusive Israel that needs rescue and restoration, While the point is awkward and leaves a hit of an enigma, this problematic is not an obstruction to the identity of the servant in these four songs as Israel. Childs has recently rearticulated the connection made in the tradition between this text and the church’s claim for Jesus.
(Childs 2001, 420-23).

It is sufficient in general to know that Israel now displaced and soon to be restored is the primal subject of Second Isaiah. The hints of a larger mandate to Israel in 42:6 and 49:6 situate Israel as a vehicle and agent in the service of YHWH’s larger governance of all peoples. Thus the anticipated restoration of Israel is for the well-being of Israel, but an Israel always related to the larger intentions of YHWH for the world.

It is clear, according to critical judgment, that Isaiah 40-55 constitutes a quite distinct literature. It is equally clear, however, that this distinct corpus is to be related, in the final form of the text, to Isaiah 1-39. That relationship is clearly a literary achievement. That artistic achievement of the final form of the text is not only literary, however, for the twinning of chapters 1-39 and chapters 40-55 constitutes a core Isaianic assertion concerning inescapable judgment reliably followed by generous restoration. Thus the two themes together constitute both Israel’s lived memory and Israel’s defining theological conviction. The shape of the book of Isaiah, as Clements and Childs have shown so clearly, is a theological shaping (Clements 1982; 1985; Childs 1979, 325-38). It is nonetheless a theological shaping that is completely resonant with Israel’s lived memory.

The third section of the book of Isaiah is chapters 56-66, which for reasons now obvious are termed by scholars “Third Isaiah.” It is the judgment of most scholars that this material reflects a community occupied with issues very different from those in chapters 40—55, and so it is judged to be a later literature. The apparent context of this literature is after the return and restoration anticipated in Second Isaiah, in a context where the community had to work out disputed internal questions of social life and religious practice It is common to locate this literature somewhere between the building of the Second Temple (520-516), on which see Haggai and Zechariah, and the restoration of Ezra and Nehemiah after 450 B.C.E. Commonly scholars prefer a date earlier rather than later, thus soon after 520. That date is not very long after the hypothetical date of Second Isaiah, but places the literature in a very different social-historical circumstance

Whereas Second Isaiah is preoccupied with emancipation from Babylon, Third Isaiah is concerned with internal communal life and the tensions that must have arisen among the parties that we might label “liberal and conservative “In chapter 56, for example, there is a dispute about inclusion and exclusion in the community and in chapter 58 there is a debate about what constitutes a proper practice of religious “fasting.” The chapters apparently reflect disputed negotiation in the community that became the earliest form of Judaism after the great restoration from exile had been accomplished.

It turned out that the “facts on the ground” in restored Jerusalem were modest and shabby when contrasted with the lyrical anticipations of Second Isaiah. The community reflected in Third Isaiah had to deal with the frustrations and disappointments that so sharply contrasted with the earlier lyrical expectations. In the midst of’ Third Isaiah, special attention might especially be given to chapters 60-62, which voice a lyrical power that compares favorably with that of Second Isaiah. These chapters in grand lyrical fashion anticipate future well-being for Israel. These chapters include familiar formulations, most especially 61:1-4, which is reiterated in Luke 4:18-19:

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
     because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
     to bind lip the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
     and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,
     and the day of vengeance of our God;
     to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion –
     to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
     the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will he called oaks of righteousness,
     the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
     they shall raise up th.e former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
     the devastations of many generations.
(Isaiah 61:1-4)

Beyond these expectations, the lyrical promise of 65:17—25 voices the most sweeping anticipation of the “new age” when YHWH’s rule is fully established, a promise that is the basis for the immense and final promise of the NT in Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelations 2 1:1-2)

While the cosmic scope of “new heaven and new earth” is the furthest reach of biblical hope, along with them is the promise of a “new Jerusalem” that will be ordered by YHWH’s presence in terms of justice, compassion, and neighborliness. The culmination of the book of Isaiah with “new Jerusalem” (65:17-25; see 66:10-13 as well) brings closure to the Jerusalem theme that dominates the entire book of Isaiah. Thus First Isaiah, in sum, bespeaks the destruction of Jerusalem as the judgment of YHWH; Second Isaiah anticipates restoration of Jerusalem, and Third Isaiah struggles with the shaping of the Jerusalem to come.

The sequence of First, Second, and Third Isaiah attracts the interpreted memory of Jerusalem as destroyed, expected, and reorganized. The traditioning process thus has ordered material into a coherent interpretive pattern that has risen out of and with respect to many different circumstances. Having noted the sequence of First, Second, and Third Isaiah, however, it is equally important to notice that in the final form of the book an overture articulates all of these themes at the very outset:

How the faithful city
     has become a whore!
     She that was full of justice,
righteousness lodged in her –
     but now murderers!
Your silver has become dross,
     your wine is mixed with water.
Your princes are rebels
     and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe
and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan,
    and the widow’s cause does not come before them.

Therefore says the Sovereign, the LORD of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel:
Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies,
     and avenge myself on my foes!
I will turn my hand against you;
     I will smelt away your dross as with lye
     and remove all your alloy.
And I will restore your judges as at the first,
     and your counselors as at the beginning.
Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness,
     the faithful city.

Zion shall be redeemed by justice,
and those in her who repent, by righteousness.
(Isaiah 1:21-27)

This brief précis traces the entire history of Jerusalem as it is to be lined out in what follows in the book. The entire book of Isaiah concerns YHWH’s “love-hate” relationship with Jerusalem, a city punished by YHWH in anger and then (but not until then) loved to newness by this same YHWH.

Critical study of the book of Isaiah characteristically attends to the details of specific texts that have arisen from many hands in many circumstances. Such critical study, however, offers an understanding of the book of Isaiah that is fragmented and piecemeal. As a consequence, the major and demanding interpretive issue of the book of Isaiah concerns the relationship of the parts to the intent of the whole. The parts show the community of Israel in a series of crises. The whole brings all of those parts into coherence in terms of YHWH’s governance. When taken all together, it is clear that the gap between 39:5-8 and 40:1-11 is the pivot point between YHWH’s judgment and YHWH’s generous mercy. When taken in this way, we are able to see that the book of Isaiah is an unmistakable embodiment of Clements’s thesis concerning the thematic shaping of prophetic books:

In such fashion we can at least come to understand the value and meaning of the way in which distinctive patterns have been imposed upon the prophetic collections of the canon so that warnings of doom and disaster are always followed by promises of hope and restoration…

We must see that prophecy is a collection of collections, and that ultimately the final result in the prophetic corpus of the canon formed a recognizable unity not entirely dissimilar from that of the Pentateuch. As this was made up from various sources and collections, so also the Former and Latter Prophets, comprising the various preserved prophecies of a whole series of inspired individuals, acquired an overarching thematic unity. This centered on the death and rebirth of Israel, interpreted theologically as acts of divine judgment and salvation.
(Clements 1977, 49, 53)

The relationship between critical attentiveness to the parts and canonical attentiveness to the whole constitutes a major interpretive opportunity. Having said that, I conclude by commenting on three texts that have exercised important influence on Christian interpretation of Jesus. As Sawyer has made clear, the book of Isaiah has been an important biblical textual source for Christian interpretation (Sawyer 1996). It is for that reason important to notice the particular reinterpretive moves characteristically made in Christian interpretation:

The text of Isaiah 7:14 has been an indispensable basis for the NT assertion of the “virgin birth” of Jesus that has loomed so large in Christian tradition. The text, of Isaiah 7:14 itself concerns Isaiah’s word to King Ahaz in a particular political-military crisis. The prophet wants to communicate to the king that within two years (the time when the baby born to the “young woman” can tell right from wrong) the threat to Jerusalem from the north will pass. In context, the prophetic word has no particular interest in the young woman or in the mode of the birth of the child, but only in the age of the baby in order to indicate the passage of time.As is often noticed, the Hebrew term for “young woman” in the verse does not of itself indicate “virgin” so that the text itself is not germane to the later theological claim of “virgin birth.”
It is the case, however, that the Hebrew term ‘almah (“young woman”) was rendered in the Greek translation (in a translation well before the Christian era) as parthénos, that is, “virgin.” From that rendering it was an easy step for the Gospel of Matthew to take up the Greek version and reread the text with reverence to Jesus and his birth from a “virgin.”The move from the OT to the NT via a Greek translation means that the text has taken on new, Christological meanings that are nowhere present in the intent or on the horizon of the eighth century prophet. As a consequence, the text has taken on a quite different “second meaning” that has served the church in powerful ways, but that stands at a distance from the Hebrew of the book of Isaiah.

It is important to appreciate that the text is capable of a “second meaning,” but especially important to distinguish that “second meaning” from what is appropriately a “first meaning” in the crisis of King Ahaz. It is not necessary to deny the force of such a “second meaning,” but great confusion and mischief has been wrought by an uninformed propensity to merge these two quite different meanings into one, whereby “doctrinal” needs have blatantly overridden “historical” readings. By honoring such “double meanings” it becomes unnecessary (a) to have “doctrinal” readings that override “historical” meanings or, conversely, (b) to have “historical” readings that deny “doctrinal” meanings. The text is deep enough to carry both options, provided we are thoughtful and critical enough to host them both.
Isaiah 40:3-5 stands at the very beginning of Second Isaiah with its promise of return and restoration, just after the gap of destruction following 39:5-8. These verses in 40:3-5 are a part of the initial act of poetic imagination whereby it is declared that Jerusalem has “served her term” of punishment (40:2). In order to move the imagination of Israel beyond exile in Babylon, the poet imagines a great triumphal procession home on a newly constructed road (already anticipated in Isa 35:8-10).The procession led by the victorious YHWH who has just defeated the gods of Babylon is a procession out of exile and into well-being. The metaphor of procession bespeaks a complete reversal from suffering to well-being, from displacement to homecoming, a turn in historical circumstance effected by the powerful reality and intentionality of YHWH.It is remarkable that this vision of homecoming is taken up as an introductory formula for all four Gospels in the NT (Matthew3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4-6; John 1:23). In each case the quotation is used to situate John the Baptizer as a forerunner of Jesus. By placing this text at the beginning of the Gospel narrative, it is clear that the tradition interprets the coming of John and then of Jesus as a mighty reassertion of the rule of God (= Kingdom of God) who will lead God’s people out of exile into well-being. There is, of course, no question that Isaiah 40:3-5 had the NT figures in purview. In the reuse of the text in the NT nonetheless, the church’s testimony to Jesus attests Jesus as the one who will lead God’s people safely to well-being In that movement, moreover, all flesh will see the glory of YHWH disclosed in the person of Jesus
The so-called “Servant Song” in Isaiah 52:13-53:12, as argued above, features Israel as the one who suffers and who saves through suffering. The identity of the servant, however, is covert and enigmatic enough to allow for another reading. This emancipated possibility of alternative interpretation was, not surprisingly, taken up by the early church which found in the text an anticipation of Jesus (Acts 8:32-33):The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.
(Acts 8:34-35)The faith of the early church, here voiced through Philip, found the Servant Song to be an acceptable characterization of the person and vocation of Jesus. The early church exercised immense interpretive imagination and was able to make connections between the compelling reality of Jesus and the poetic openness of the Isaiah text. The resultant interpretive use of Isaiah 53 went well beyond what might have been intended in the “historical” articulation of the text.

All three of these texts, 7:14; 40:3—5; and 52:13-53:12, have particular meanings in “historical” context that are reasonably clear. In canonical usage, nonetheless, the text moves readily beyond such “historical” intentionality to make illumination of Jesus that the early church found credible in terms of Jesus and available in terms of the book of Isaiah. Thus it is clear that in the canonical shape of the book of Isaiah itself, and in subsequent appropriation by the early church in the NT, the book of Isaiah is particularly generative of new waves of interpretation, each of which has been received in the interpretive community as a legitimate future from the text. It is clear that the text itself provides some of the impetus for such generativity, an impetus readily seized upon by the community of the continuing interpretive process.

Even though the text itself is boldly venturesome in new meanings and even though the subsequent Christian community moved even further in new meanings, it is clear that on the whole the interpretive tradition has not moved far from the initial intentionality of the Isaiah tradition itself. That tradition is focused on YHWH’s judgment against Jerusalem and against the people of Israel and then is focused on the restoration of Jerusalem and the reconstitution of the people of Israel as the people of covenant. This twofold tradition of judgment and promise appears in many modes in subsequent interpretation but continues with the fundamental conviction that the judgment and rescue of YHWH continually impinge upon the historical reality that is lived in the world over which YHWH the Creator presides.

Posted in The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann | Tagged Isaiah, The Suffering Servant | 1 Comment »

The Book of Isaiah by Walter Brueggemann

November 1, 2010

The Prophet Isaiah by Rafael

Reading the Book of Isaiah can be a wonderful exercise in Biblical structure and development. Walter Brueggemann is the best guide one could ever hope for. May I suggest that you read through this overview and then come back to it after your first pass through Isaiah. I have another post following that will deal with just the Suffering Servant sections of Isaiah and how the interpretations of the NT have subtly (or not so subtly, depending on your point of view) influenced its readings. I always need help when I read the Bible and Walter Brueggemann is one I am greatly indebted to.

About the painting: Perhaps not so well known then as his Madonna’s or his magnificent Vatican frescoes, Raphael Sanzio also executed a stunning fresco of The Prophet Isaiah in Sant’Agostino in Rome in 1511-12. The donor patron of Isaiah was the Head Chancellor of the Papal Court, Johannes Goritz of Luxemburg. Ruffled by what he considered to be an exorbitant price for the painting by Raphael, Goritz solicited Michelangelo for his opinion of its worth. Michelangelo looked at the painting of his chief rival with its powerfully rendered figure of the prophet. Rarely one to acknowledge the genius in others, Michelangelo simply replied, “For that knee alone, it is worth the price.”

The book of Isaiah is the beginning book of the Latter Prophets. Consequently it stands, in the Hebrew ordering of the books, back-to-back with Kings, the last book of the Former Prophets. That interface, not visible in the conventional ordering of books in the Christian Bible, is fortuitous because the books of Kings and Isaiah are together preoccupied with the destiny of Jerusalem. The books of Kings end with an account of the sorry end of the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians and the ensuing deportation and exile. The book of Isaiah, in its turn, is a meditation, albeit in complex configuration, about the destiny of Jerusalern into the crises of exile and the promise of Jerusalem out of exile into new well-being.

The book of Isaiah, according to most scholars, is rooted in the actual prophetic personality, Isaiah, “son of Amoz,” whose conventional dates for life in Jerusalem are perhaps 742 to 689 B.C.E. (1:1):

It is difficult to locate the prophet in the context of Jerusalemite society The superscription of the book (Isaiah 1:1) places the prophet in the Jerusalemite prophetic traditions by referring to his prophecies as a vision (hazôn), but the title “visionary” (hazeh) is not applied to him. Isaiah’s father, Amoz, is otherwise unknown, so there is no evidence that the prophet inherited a priestly or prophetic position. There is some support for the traditional scholarly view that Isaiah was an upper class Jerusalemite who grew up in the city.

The prophet seems to have known and had access to members of the royal court (Isaiah 8:2; 22:15-16), and he apparently had no difficulty gaining an unofficial audience with the king (Isaiah 7:3). The location of Isaiah within Jerusalem’s central social structure may also he suggested by the “wisdom” language that he sometimes uses. At the very least this language may indicate that the prophet was educated at the royal court or in the temple, although our knowledge of Israelite “wisdom circles” is not presently sophisticated enough to permit us to assume that there was a Jerusalemite “wisdom group” of which Isaiah was a member.

In addition to seeing Isaiah as part of the central social structure, some scholars have argued that he was actually a cultic prophet. These arguments are usually based on the prophet’s temple vision (Isaiah 6) and on his general upper class Jerusalemite background, but the book provides insufficient evidence to establish a cubic setting for his activities. It therefore seems best to accept the traditional view that Isaiah was an upper class Jerusalemite who was part of the city’s central social structure but not necessarily a part of its religious establishment.
(R. Wilson 1980, 271)

If we accept such a conventional judgment, Isaiah lived through a series of public crises in Jerusalem related to the pressures of the rising and then powerful Assyrian Empire, and he had important access to the royal establishment in Jerusalem. Isaiah’s work there, in both harsh judgment and buoyant promise, was to insist that the public life of Jerusalem could not be properly understood or practiced except by reference to YHWH who is the ultimate sovereign of public history, the pretenses of Assyrian imperialists notwithstanding.

In the long book of Isaiah, however, the actual words from the eighth-century prophet arc judged by scholars to be relatively few; no critical scholar, moreover, believes that the book as a whole is “authored” by the eighth-century prophet. Rather, the book of Isaiah, while rooted in the person of Isaiah, has emerged only through a long, extensive, and complex traditioning process, perhaps through a continuous succession of “disciples” of Isaiah who continue to articulate the general interpretative trajectory of the person of Isaiah (see 8:1), but who in fact were themselves powerful interpreters capable of generating new articulations. To some extent the literature of the book of Isaiah is simply a continued meditation upon the destiny of Jerusalem, a meditation that occurred in something like separated, random acts of responsiveness to new issues of faith in new circumstances; at the same time, however, it is clear that the final form of the text has some rough intentionality that gives the whole of the book a suggestive coherence.

Once the notion of the “authorship” of the eighth-century prophet is given up as it is for most interpreters, critical scholarship for over a century has held to the view that the book of Isaiah is constituted into three quite distinct parts that reflect different historical circumstances, different modes of literary articulation, and consequently, different theological vistas.

In this discussion I will review that long-standing critical discussion because an intelligent read of the book is served by these well-established distinctions. At the same time, however, the reader will want to notice that in more recent scholarship this threefold distinction in the book of Isaiah has been understood in a much more coherent, dynamic, and intentional way. As a result, we will consider in turn the longstanding critical consensus in the book of Isaiah and more recent holistic understandings that depend upon the critical consensus but move beyond it in important ways.

In the critical consensus, it has long been held that the literature pertaining to Isaiah of the eighth century (then called “First Isaiah”) is limited to Isaiah 1-39, because after chapter 39 there is an immense break — literary, historical, and theological — before chapter 40. In sum, we may say that chapters 1-39, rooted in the eighth-century prophet, is concerned with the crises of pre-exilic Jerusalem in the period 742-701. As soon as we have said that, however, it is clear that the material is much more complex than such a historical connection, for chapters 1-39 contain many other matters as well that are not linked to the eighth century.

In rough outline, we may see that First Isaiah consists in six quite distinct textual units, of which only three are directly connected to First Isaiah, chapters 1-12; 28-31; and 36-39.

The most important materials for the eighth-century prophet are found in chapters 1-12, which harshly anticipate YHWH’s judgment upon Jerusalem for Torah disobedience (1:2-6; 2:6-22; 3:1-4:1; 5:1-7, 8-30). Two features in this material are especially noteworthy. First, the harsh judgments announced by the prophet are roughly matched by promises that anticipate that after the judgment of YHWH upon the city, there will be a renewal and restoration. That renewal and restoration does not in any way soften or diminish the judgment to come, but asserts that judgment is not the ultimate prophetic word to YHWH’s city.

The promises in 2:1-4; 4:2-6; 9:1-7; and 11:1-9 are voiced around a series of different images concerning the Holy City, the temple, the monarchy, and new creation; all of them, however, testify to YHWH’s capacity to make new immediately upon judgment. Thus we may imagine that chapters 1-12 are organized in a pattern whereby these four promises become the antidote to the condemnations that precede them.

Second, in chapters 7 and 8 it is to be noted that King Ahaz is treated as a model of unfaith. The famous dictum of the prophet in 7:9 articulates faith as readiness to trust YHWH in desperate circumstance, in this case the threat of war against Jerusalem by its nearest neighbors. Ahaz is portrayed as a distrusting king who does not have faith in YHWH, but who imagines he can, by his own policies, secure himself. Thus the king stands in total antithesis to the radical form of well-being voiced and offered by the prophet.

It is important to recognize that chapters 1-12 with the patterned variation of judgment and promise constitutes, in nuce, the theology of the final form of the book. The whole of the book of Isaiah provides the scenario of the descent of Jerusalem into exile and death and the promised ascent of Jerusalem to new life and well-being. This pattern is already evident in chapters 1-12, in either the prophet’s own sense of hope beyond judgment or, more likely, an editorial pattern of the completed tradition.

The second unit of text commonly assigned to the eighth-century prophet is chapters 28-3 1 with an addendum in chapters 32-3 3. This text, usually assigned to the time of Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son, again features the prophetic voice speaking in the midst of great public issues urging the king to practice policies rooted in YHWH’s rule. It is especially to be noticed that the series of oracles regularly begin with hoi, conventionally translated “woe” but in NRSV variously rendered as “Ah, Oh, Alas” (28:1; 29:1; 30:1; 31:1; 33:1; see the same usage in 5:8, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22; 10:1).

The term is portentous of coming death. Thus when the oracles are introduced with this startling term, the intent is to place the listening community in jeopardy. This corpus of text, then, concerns the community of Jerusalem when it is not responsive to the will of YHWH. Likely chapters 28-31 represent the rule of Hezekiah in crisis as a counterpoint to the same tone used during the rule of Ahaz.

The third text that is closely linked to the eighth-century prophet is chapters 36-39, a unit of text that is closely linked to the parallel narrative of 2 Kings 18-20 and is, perhaps, appropriated from there with only slight variation. This third unit of text linked to the eighth-century prophet, however, is not a series of oracles as are the other two, but a narrative that exhibits quite intentional editorial work. The unit consists in powerful prophetic theology offered as three speeches in the mouths of Assyrian diplomats (Isa 36:4-10, 13-20; 3 7:8-13). In response to these three political-theological challenges, the text offers a prayer by King Hezekiah (37:15-20) and an oracle by the prophet Isaiah that offers assurance to Israel that the Assyrian threat is no match for the assurance of YHWH (37:22-29; see also vv. 6-7). The outcome of this exchange is an insistence upon YHWH’s rule, the specific expression of which is the wondrous rescue of the city of Jerusalem from the Assyrian armies (37:36-38), a rescue rooted in YHWH’s loyalty to David as voiced by the prophet:

Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not conic into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the LORD. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.
(Isaiah 37:33-35)

This oracle is the most complete expression of YHWH’s commitment to the Jerusalem establishment and apparently expresses Isaiah’s own deep commitment to that theological claim. It is, of course, impossible to know whether these words are from Isaiah or represent the theological intention of the traditioning process. In any case, Christopher Seitz has considered the function of this material in the developing tradition of Isaiah (Seitz 1991). He has proposed that AEaz and Hezekiah form, for the traditioning process, a contrast of bad king and good king. Seitz has, moreover, suggested that Isaiah’s commitment to “Zion theology” — the conviction that YHWH will stay faithful to the Temple City through thick and thin — has provided the impetus for the continued force of the Isaiah tradition beyond the life of Isaiah and beyond the crisis of Hezekiah:

The growth of Isaiah tradition was not the consequence of some internal suitability that distinguished Isaiah from other pre-exilic prophetic collections or made secondary supplementation intrinsically more appropriate. Rather, it was the existence of Heilsprophetie in the form of oracles (1) limiting the role of Assyria as agent of divine wrath and (2) expressing final divine concern for Zion, that set Isaiah traditions off as unique among pre-exilic prophetic collections.
(Seitz 1991, 146)

It is clear in all three units of text (1-12; 28-31 plus 32-33; and 36-39) that the tradition of Isaiah insists upon the powerful rule of YHWH in the midst of deeply problematic public affairs. As much as any of the prophets of ancient Israel, Isaiah is the voice of an insistent “public theology,” an assertion that YHWH’s rule matters consistently to policy and to practice.

Alongside these three sections of First Isaiah that are connected to the person of Isaiah, the corpus also includes three other units of text that may he understood as growths in the tradition that are congruent with Isaiah’s perspective, in particular the conviction concerning YHWH’s commitment to Jerusalem. It means that judgment is not the last word, but that YHWH will bring shalom in the environs of Jerusalem:

1. Chapters 13-23 constitute a distinct corpus, which, as we shall see, is closely paralleled by “Oracles against the Nations” in the other prophetic hooks as an assertion of YHWH’s sovereignty over all the nations. The pattern for this genre of text is the naming of a number of nation-states and the pronouncement of a prophetic lawsuit against them, thus insisting that even non-Israelite peoples are fully subject to the rule of YHWH and are under judgment when they do not conform to that rule. John Barton has nicely suggested that such “Oracles against the Nations” assume that all nations know about YHWH’s rule and demands, and need not appeal to the commands of Sinai, thus issuing some form of “natural theology” (Barton 1979).

The ground for judgment against the nations appeals to the knowledge of all concerning the will of the Creator God without reference to Sinai, a tradition that in later Judaism is connected to the covenant of Noah. (See Isaiah 2:1-4 as the “Torah of Zion” as distinct from the “Torah of Sinai” as a guide for all nations.) The corpus of Isaiah 13-23 concerns a range of nations, but the most important is the oracle of chapters 13 and 14 concerning Babylon. The oracle is an assertion that even Babylon, that great superpower, is subject to the will of YHWH.
This is of particular interest because Babylon was not and could not have been on the horizon of eighth-century Isaiah. In a later dine (the sixth century), however, and in the latter part of the book of Isaiah, Babylon is the great oppressor against Israel (Chs. 46 and 47) and the great defier of YHWH. Thus chapters 13 and 14, already in First Isaiah, look ahead to the later part of the book and offer the passionate assurance that even barbaric Babylon is subject to the will of YHWH. Thus the oracle, along with a series of poems concerning other peoples, asserts YHWH’s rule and thereby offers hope for Israel that the God who loves Israel is the God who will judge all barbarian nations, including especially those who abuse Israel.

2. The second textual development beyond the eighth-century Isaiah is in chapters 24-27, often termed “Fourth Isaiah” or the “Little Apocalypse of Isaiah” (commonly thought to be the latest development of tradition in the book of Isaiah) The distinguishing feature of this material is that it lacks all reference to context and dating and makes sweeping cosmic claims for YHWH, the effect of which is to assert YHWH’s sovereignty both as harsh judgment (24) and then as hope (25-27) While the rhetoric is well beyond that assigned to the prophet himself, it is easy to see how this radical insistence on sovereignty is congruent with the claims of the prophet himself even though the material surely comes later.

The most remarkable feature of this material is that it articulates a conviction of the resurrection of the body, thus the sure vindication of those who suffer faithfully, so that not even the reality of death can match the power and fidelity of YHWH in 25 6-8, YHWH is portrayed as the great rival of “death” who will defeat and swallow death

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
     a feast of rich food, a feast of welt-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
     the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
     the sheet that is spread over all nations;
     he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
     and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
     for the LORD has spoken.

In Isaiah 26:19, moreover, the poetry anticipates joyous resurrection:

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.
Oh dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

These assertions constitute a novum in Israel; they are, however, consistent with the Isaianic conviction that YHWH’s sovereignty finally cannot be defeated, not even by the enemies of YHWH in the world or the enemies of YHWH in the cosmos.

3. The third unit of text in Isaiah in 1-39 that goes beyond the prophet is found in chapters 34-35, which anticipate the recovery of Jerusalem and the glad return of exiles from the deportation. It is clear that the envisioned return of chapter 35 has parallels to Isaiah 40 and following, so that the material is regularly seen as an introduction to the material of 40-55 that celebrates restoration and the homecoming of Israel.

It is clear in these latter texts (Isaiah 13-23; 14-27; and 34-35) that the tradition has moved well beyond Isaiah of the eighth century. That prophet had evoked and voiced the miraculous deliverance from Assyria in 701, but this belated section has moved well beyond the cries of 701 to the greater crisis of 587:

One approach to understanding the growth of the book of Isaiah as a whole involved the possibility that a correlation was seen to exist between 701 and 587 events It is appropriate at this juncture to return to the puzzle of Isaiah’s growth, with the possibility that a correlation between 701 and 587 events gave rise to the extension of Isaiah tradition beyond the lifetime of the prophet to the events of the exile and beyond.
(Seitz 1991: 118)

The prophet in the eighth century had shown that the deliverance of Jerusalem in 701 from the threat of the Assyrians was a gift of YHWH. Now the faith of the prophet is turned to the more difficult case of 587. Even here, insists the tradition of Isaiah, YHWH’s will for the good of Jerusalem will last through the crisis of 587 to effect a coming glorious well-being. Thus the crisis of 701 is taken to prefigure in an inchoate way the greater crisis of 587. While the loss cuts deeper in the latter crisis, as Israel generally conceded, the assurance is the same; the same God who was faithful in 701 stands faithful yet again.

It is this deep conviction that evokes the extension of the book of Isaiah beyond the dire prediction of 39:5-8 concerning the power of Babylon. The good news of 40:1 that follows immediately after 39:5-8 in the text did not come soon or immediately. It did, however, come next as divine promise after the oracle of threat. It was spoken because YHWH’s ultimate will for wellbeing in Jerusalem is pervasive in the tradition of Isaiah. The hook in its final form does not dwell ultimately on judgment; it looks beyond judgment to coining well-being that is the gift of YHWH. The anticipation of that coming gift of well-being from YHWH is the work of the remainder of the book – well beyond the eighth century — to which we now turn.

Thus First Isaiah (chs. 1-39) is a complex body of text, rooted in Isaiah of the eighth century (1-12; 28-31; 36-39), but with an ongoing tradition that moves past the crisis of 587, anticipating homecoming for exiles (34—35), the reassertion of YHWH’s rule over the nations (13—2 3), and ultimately the vigorous exercise of YHWH’s sovereignty over all recalcitrant forces . . . including the power of death (24-27). While the tradition rooted in eighth-century Isaiah concerns the judgment of YHWH upon Jerusalem, the developed tradition looks beyond that judgment to the rule of YHWH that assures shalom for Jerusalem and for the entire earth over which the God of Israel — the creator of heaven and earth — reigns.

This developing tradition of anticipated well-being prepares the way for “Second Isaiah” (also termed “Deutero-Isaiah”), the middle portion of the book of Isaiah in chapters 40-55. It is a long-held view of scholarship that these chapters constitute a quite distinct tradition,

different in literary style and genre wherein this text is much more lyrical in its articulation than First Isaiah,
different in historical circumstance as this text is preoccupied with the fall of Babylon (46—47) and the rise of Cyrus the Persian (44:28; 45:1), and
different in theological vista as this text moves decisively toward monotheism, voicing the God of Israel as the sole God, the creator of heaven and earth.

The scholarly title Second Isaiah recognizes that this material is in the book of Isaiah and perhaps is connected to First Isaiah. The title also asserts by “Second,” however, that this is very different material addressed as the word of YHWH to Israel in very different circumstance.

The text likely reflects the great upheaval in the Fertile Crescent as the Neo-Babylonian Empire (present-day Iraq) of Nebuchadnezzar came to its rapid demise at the hand of the rising eastern power of Persia (present-day Iran) under the leadership of Cyrus. This text is conventionally dated to 540 B.C.E., with the claim that the Persians will defeat Babylon and that consequently Cyrus will soon thereafter permit the first Jerusalem deportees to return home (in 537; see 2 Chronicles 36:22-23; Ezra 1:2-4).

Thus the theological anticipation of this poetry that YHWH would enact a mighty miracle that permitted the end to exile is fully commensurate with the historical occurrence of Cyrus, who initiated new colonial policies that restored aspects of local autonomy and local governance. This convergence of theological claim and historical happening is characteristic of the Bible. In this case, moreover, this literature, in poetic assertion, makes the claim that it is precisely YHWH who has summoned, evoked, authorized, and dispatched Cyrus, so that the new Persian policy is said to be at the behest of YHWH’s own intentionality for the restoration of Israel after exile (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1). As Childs has suggested, the “new thing” that YHWH does here is restoration after the “former thing” of destruction and deportation (see 43:16-2 1) (Childs 1979, 325-33).

The poetry of Isaiah 40-55, in a variety of daring rhetorical strategies, gives voice to the new historical intervention of YHWH. Thus we may understand Isaiah 40:1-11 as an assertion that YFRVFI, in divine counsel among many angels and other heavenly messengers, has declared of Jerusalem that “her penalty is paid” (40:2), and so dispatches a “herald” — perhaps the poet, Second Isaiah — who will announce the “gospel news” that “your God” is taking an initiative (40:9), that “your God reigns” (see 52:7). Thus we are to understand that between 39:5-8, which anticipates deportation to Babylon, and 40:1-11, which anticipates restoration from Babylon, there has been a long historical caesura.

In the gap between these texts have come (a) the destruction of Jerusalem anticipated by the prophet already in the eighth century, and (b) the deportation of Jerusalem citizens. The gap between 39:5-8 and 40:1-11 is deeply freighted with the reality of loss, suffering, and dismay; that gap, moreover, is elemental for understanding the book of Isaiah, for it is the dramatic, dynamic connection between displacement and restoration that gives structure to the book of Isaiah (respectively in chapters 1-39 and chapters 40 and following) and that articulates the fundamental message of the book, namely, that the judgment of YHWH is real but penultimate and is followed by YHWH’s will for restoration that will follow according to YHWH’s “plan.” (See Isaiah 5 5:6-9 on the “plan” of YHWH that entails restoration and well-being.)

The poetry of Isaiah 40-55 is designed, with immense imagination, to give credible lyrical articulation to the resolve of YHWH to enact restoration for Israel and well-being for Jerusalem. To that end, the articulation of 44:21-45:7 is perhaps the centerpiece, focusing upon Cyrus as YHWH’s agent for rescue. Prior to this text, the poetry includes great doxologies that celebrate YHWH’s singular power as Creator (Isaiah 40:12-23; 42:10-13; and 43:16-21), lyrical assaults upon and humiliation of rival gods who are shown to be impotent (41:21-29), presumably the gods of Babylon, who would keep Israel enthralled but who are unable to do so, and pastoral assurance of YHWH in the form of salvation oracles guaranteeing that YHWH will he with and for Israel (41:8-13; 43:1-7).

The cumulative effort of this poetry is to establish YHWH as powerful and compassionate toward Israel, and to expose the other gods who will ill for Israel as impotent and irrelevant. The poetry creates a world of stunning possibility for Israel, a world that counters in powerfully imaginative ways the presumed world of Babylon that seeks to keep Israel helpless and in despair.

After the pivotal “Cyrus texts” of 44:21-45:7, there are vigorous assertions of YHWH’s power and sovereignty, celebrations in anticipation of the defeat and humiliation of Babylon (46) and the defeat and humiliation of Babylonian gods (47), and a vigorous announcement of YHWH’s fresh resolve to act boldly and in new ways on behalf of Israel after a time of dormancy, silence, and absence (51:9-16; 54: 1-17). The upshot of the whole is to arouse Israel in exile to new hope and possibility (51:17-23; 52:1-12), and to initiate a departure from Babylon that will match the earlier exodus departure from Egypt (52:11—12). It is conceded that YHWH has indeed abandoned Israel (54:7-8), but now, after that hiatus, YHWH is back in engagement on behalf of Israel.

It is worth noting that in 40:9 and 52:7, the poetry uses the term hasar (“good tidings”) which became the decisive term for “gospel.” It is in this literature related to this particular historical crisis that the poet begins usage of the notion of “gospel,” that is, news of the reassertion of YHWH’s governance, news that is good for this community, helpless and in despair, now enlivened by God’s intended intervention. This usage, of course, is fully congruent with the usage made in the New Testament concerning Jesus’ announcement of the new rule of God (Mark 1:14-15) and Jesus’ persistent enactment of that new rule of God.

Posted in The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann | 1 Comment »

The Flood Narrative — Walter Brueggemann

September 1, 2010

The Genesis Flood, ceiling Sistine Chapel

The flood narrative of Genesis 6:5-9:17 occupies both a disproportionate amount of space in the larger text of Genesis 1-11 and a pivotal theological position in that corpus. Three critical concerns should be acknowledged at the outset:

There is perennial interest in the question of the “historicity” of the flood, expressed especially in recurring claims that the ark of Noah has been found (Bailey 1989). These questions are at bottom fertile, because it is probable that in many different social contexts there were experiences of floods that evoked “flood stories,” but no one of which can therefore claim to be the flood that is remembered in our text. Thus even the discovery of the ark would only indicate the confirmation of “a flood,” which in any case is not in doubt, but such a find would still be well short of “the flood.”

There is no doubt that the flood narrative, as presented in the book of Genesis, has important literary antecedents in the Near East, especially in the Gilgamesh Epic. The recognition of such literary antecedents re-contextualizes the “historical” question, and permits us to focus instead upon the intention of the interpreters who took over the extant flood tradition and utilized it as a means of voicing Israel’s faith.

The flood narrative has been a primary arena in which scholars have traced distinct literary sources, one source using the name of YHWH and one clearly avoiding that name. Thus most of the commentaries dissect the narrative into two literary sources, and no doubt there is ground for such distinctions. Bernhard Anderson, however, has shrewdly shown how the final form of the text weaves the sources into an artistic whole with 8:1 at its pivot point in an intricate design: “But God remembered Noah” (Anderson 1994, 56-74). It is that divine remembering that turns the narrative away from the destructiveness of the flood toward restoration and renewed fidelity on the part of God.

Anderson’s analysis provides a way to move beyond these several critical questions that have claimed a disproportionate amount of interpretive energy to the theological exposition that bears Israel’s canonical intentionality. Indeed, it may be argued that the flood narrative articulates the primary claims of Israel’s faith in nuce.[vocab: In a nutshell]

1. The theological premise of the flood narrative is YHWH’s speech of judgment consisting in an indictment of a failed creation (Genesis 6:5, 11-12) and a divine judgment whereby God resolves to “blot out” all creation (6:6-7) and “make an end of all flesh” (6:13). The release of the mighty floodwaters is a function of the divine resolve to terminate. The waters are the forces of chaos (see Genesis 1:2) that in this narrative function as obedient tools of God’s negative intention. Thus the narrative begins as a conventional account of judgment enacted.

2. The speech of judgment and its ensuing enactment are, however, decisively disrupted by God’s notice of Noah (and his family), who stands in God’s favor (6:8) and who is rescued because of Noah’s righteousness (6:9). Noah and his family constitute a decisive exception to the general destruction. Thus the identification of the righteous remnant becomes a decisive qualification in the general destruction. The chaotic waters are eased and withdrawn as “God remembers Noah.”

3. God’s willingness to nullify the threat of the flood and to reestablish well-being in the earth as God’s creation arises from the presence of Noah. As a consequence, God promises “never again [to] curse the ground” (8:21). Indeed that curbing of the negation is matched by a positive guarantee of the rhythms of creation:

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.
(8:22)

It is astonishing that the turn from divine judgment to divine assurance is not accomplished by any human repentance or resolve; the inclination of the human heart as “evil” at the outset (Genesis 6:5) continues to be “evil” at the end (8:2 1). Nothing has changed in the inclination of humanity. All that has changed, decisively changed, is God’s resolve to remain the faithful creator in spite of the condition of creation. That is, God is shown to be more fully gracious and positively inclined toward the earth.

4. The second conclusion to the flood narrative in 9:8-17 also revolves around God’s promise that “never again” will the flood destroy the earth. The rainbow as a reminder to God who might otherwise forget, assures creation of God’s “everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth” (9:16). Patrick Miller writes of this text:

The natural environment is secured in covenant with human and natural creatures. The covenant with Noah restores and secures the creation for the benefit of the creatures, animal and human. Human treatment of the natural world, therefore, is a matter not only of the attitude toward the creation, but also how humankind receives the promise, which it shares with the animal world. The nations are a part of the created order, the outcome of the blessing of God in the completion of creation. The restoration of the creation after the Flood involves also the restoration of humanity as a part of that creation and of the renewal of the blessing (Genesis 8:17; 9:1, 7) through the lineage of Noah (Genesis 9:19). So also the establishment of covenant with Noah is an establishment of covenant with all of humankind. ‘The text makes this point repeatedly and thus with much emphasis. The universal covenant with humankind as a way of perpetuating and maintaining the creation incorporates the nations of which Israel is a single part.
(Miller 1995, 165-67)

Thus in both proposed literary sources (identified as J and as P), the dramatic movement is the same:

	Judgment	Assurance
J:	Genesis 6:5-7	Genesis 8:21—22
P:	Genesis 6:11-13	Genesis 9:8-17

The dominant story line concerns God’s change of mind, and God’s readiness to nullify God’s plan to destroy (see Jeremiah 18:1-11: “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.)

The mitigating factor is Noah, who is perhaps a harbinger of faithful Israel, but such an identification of Noah with Israel of course is nowhere explicit (see Ezekiel 14:12-20; Hebrews 11:7). It is impossible to overstate the cruciality of Noah for the dramatic movement of the text. In the end, however, the decisive and most interesting character is not Noah but the God of Israel who freshly embraces creation.

In its present location in the text, the flood narrative is hardly less than another creation narrative, because of the way in which God reorders the world away from chaos, just as happened in chapter 1. The flood narrative, thus, is a crucial text for articulating the deep tension and defining contradiction between the recalcitrance of creation and the will of the Creator. Rolf Rendtorff comments:

Chapter 9, in particular vv. 8-11, serves as a solemn confirmation of that promise. What God has just declared will be the content of his berith (The Hebrew word “covenant” is berith): not to bring a flood over the earth again and not to destroy living beings again. But before that confirmation, God makes it clear that this world is no longer “very good.” God reconfirms his blessing of fertility (v. 1), but immediately he adds that peace no longer prevails between human beings and animals (v. 12), or among human beings, so that a strict commandment is needed to prevent murder (vv. 5-6).
(Rendtorff 1993, 127-28)

The flood story culminates in a recognition that God’s faithful commitment to creation and to human community has prevailed, thus assuring that the world has a future. The genealogies before and after the flood narrative are articulations of continuity that survive even through the chaotic disruption. While the story of the world as God’s creation is momentarily disrupted by the chaotic waters, that disruption does not and cannot prevail against the intention of YHWH to maintain the “family line” of humanity. This reassurance of continuity in the face of threat in Isaiah 54:9-10 later becomes an assurance cherished by exiles in Israel who faced a threat and a dislocation of their own.

It is evident that the process of interpretation in Israel has been able to articulate, through these diffuse materials, a steady theological affirmation concerning the interface of God’s good sovereignty and the sustained recalcitrance intrinsic to creation that resists the purpose of God and that recurringly places the world in jeopardy. Given the peculiar “mythical.” antecedents of this text and given the large themes now carried by these texts, it is not surprising that these texts, over long generations of interpretation, have become fertile materials for rich, diverse interpretation. The transposition of these ancient materials into a relatively coherent theological statement is unmistakably a powerful act of imagination, that is, canonical imagination. It is evident that while the continuing act of communal imagination is decisive, that definitive act did not terminate imaginative interpretation that continues, perforce, in both Jewish and Christian communities.

Posted in The Old Testament, Theology, Walter Brueggemann | Tagged Genesis, the Flood Narrative | 1 Comment »

The Creation Texts by Walter Brueggemann

August 31, 2010

Hieronymus Bosch, The Creation. c. 1504-1510.

While Genesis 1-2 draw a lot of interpretive attention because they stand first in the biblical text, in fact they need to be understood in terms of an older, already extant liturgical tradition on creation. The primary and proper context in which Israel articulated its creation faith is in doxology, the public, liturgical practice of lyrical, poetic utterance whereby Israel sings its awe and wonder about the glory and goodness of God’s creation (see Psalms 19, 104, 145, 148). Our term “creation stories” is to be understood in the context of that exuberant liturgical tradition.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
This text is a solemn, stately, ordered, symmetrical text that is more like a liturgical antiphon than it is a narrative. It has close affinities to the well-known Enuma Elish, an older Mesopotamian account of creation.. As indicated, however, the creation text with which the Bible begins has been shaped and reshaped as a vehicle for Israel’s faith. Among the many possible interpretive dimensions of the text, we may call attention to the following:

1. It is widely agreed that Genesis 1:1-2 constitutes a remarkable premise for creation, namely, that disordered chaos (expressed in Hebrew onomatopoetically as tohu wabohu) was already “there” as God began to create:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. (Genesis 1:1-2)

That is, God did not create “from nothing,” but God’s act of creation consists in the imposition of a particular order upon that mass of undifferentiated chaos. For much of the Bible, the energy of chaos (antiform) continues to operate destructively against the will of the Creator, and sometimes breaks out destructively beyond the bounds set by the decree of the Creator (Levenson 1988). It is an interesting example of “imaginative remembering” that much later, in 2 Maccabees 7:28, the tradition finally asserts “creation out of nothing,” a view that since then has predominated in later church traditions of theological interpretation. The insight of the text as we have it, however, is a recognition of the intrinsic contradiction to God’s will, that is present in the “stuff” of creation itself. Thus the Creator makes creation possible, not by a single act, but by the endless reenactment and reassertion of a sovereign will over the recalcitrant “stuff” of chaos.

2. The peculiar role and character of human persons in creation has been especially important to the derivative theological traditions:

The “male and female” together are created to govern creation (1:26-28). This elemental assertion of the equality of men and women is at the tap-root of the Bible. This assertion has of late been an important claim for the emergence of theological feminism in an effort to subvert longstanding and deeply entrenched patriarchal assumptions that fail to recognize a God-given equality.

The “male and female” together are in “God’s image” (1:27). This latter phrase is not at all developed in the Old Testament, but has become central in subsequent articulations of theological understanding of human personhood. While the phrase “image of God” is open to many interpretations, it is plausible that it refers to the exercise of human sovereignty over creation as a regency for God’s sovereignty (Barr 1968-1969; Bird 1997, 123-54; Børresen 1995). This role for human persons bespeaks both human freedom and human responsibility for the care of the earth.

The notion of “image of God” is reinforced by the imperatives that follow, “subdue and have dominion” (1:27-28). These verbs have often been understood to mean that the man and woman in the image of God are free to use the earth as they wish without restraint (White 1967). Contrary to that notion that the Bible is thus a warrant for environmental abuse and exploitation, Wybrow has shown that the “rape of the earth” has emerged, not from the Bible and this imperative, but from the impulse of Enlightenment autonomy that lacks any covenantal restraint (Wybrow 1991). More plausibly than that misconstrual, which has been given wide articulation, this pair of imperatives intends that human persons in human community should be responsible for the care of the earth and its boundless, God-given fruitfulness for the benefit of all creatures. Thus the imperatives bespeak not unrestrained, indulgent freedom, but a mandate for the community to take responsibility for the well-being of the earth.

3. The sustained affirmation of this liturgy of creation is that the world (all of heaven, all of earth) is willed by and seen by God to be “good,” that is, lovely, beautiful, pleasing (1:10, 12, 18, 21). This reiterated affirmation that we imagine to be a congregational response to a priestly litany, culminates in verse 31 with the intensified phrase “very good.” This affirmation of the goodness of creation has been decisive for the Jewish and Christian traditions as a foundation for a life-affirming, world-affirming horizon with a determined appreciation of the good of the material world in all its dimensions . . . including sexuality and economics. This tradition will have nothing to do with world-denying, world-denigrating, or world-escaping religious impulses that characterize too much popular faith in U.S. culture.

4. The liturgical characterization of creation in Genesis 1 culminates in Genesis 2:1-4a with the authorization of Sabbath as a God-given, God-practiced, God-commanded observance. The day of cessation from work declares that God’s creation is, at root, an unanxious environment for life that is not defined by energetic productivity or self-preoccupied consumption, but is defined by the peaceableness that has confidence in the reliability of the world as God’s creation without excessive exertion on the part of God or of humankind.Thus Sabbath is the discipline of pause that celebrates the world as God’s good place for life, and that relishes the human role in creation as “image of God.”

5. The creation narratives appeal to a common stock of cultural myths and liturgies, with particular reference to Babylonian materials. The use of these materials, however, is an act of powerful subversion whereby the narratives of dominant culture are utilized to voice a claim alternative to the claims of the dominant cultural materials.

The Sabbath became, in the developed traditions of Israel, a primary mark of Jewish life even as it continues to be. Because this text is commonly dated to the exilic period, it is likely that Sabbath became a distinctive mark of Jewishness in the exile when faith was practiced in an alien or hostile cultural environment. Sabbath became the lived testimony of Judaism that the “rhythms of cessation” as trust in the Creator constitute a mighty alternative to the frenzy of production-consumption that marks the world when it does not know that the world belongs safely to the God who has called it “very good.”

It is a widely held assumption of scholarship that this text — along with the Pentateuch — reached its final form during the sixth-century exile. In that context, the claim that the world belongs to the God of Israel is a mighty and daring alternative to the dominant, easily visible claim that the world is governed by Babylonian gods. Thus the liturgy of YHWH’s goodness connects the character of the world to a particularly Jewish vision of God, articulated through the various interpreted points noted above. The text makes large theological claims to be sure, but it functions in and through these cosmic claims to sustain the specific community that relies on this imaginative tradition. That is, its purpose is concretely existential. Given that canonical reality about the final form of the text, it is self-evident that the text is not about “the origin of the world” as that phrase is usually employed, and thus it has no particular connection to the “creation versus evolution” debate or, more broadly, to the issue of “science and religion.” Such expectations of the text, in my judgment, completely miss the point and function of the text in its original setting or in its durable canonical articulation.

Genesis 2:4-25 (together with 3:1-24)
It is clear that this “second creation narrative” is quite distinct from the first, and that it characterizes the origin of the world in a very different way. The two accounts have in common an accent on YHWH’s originary enactment of the world, and on the human creature as the “chief creature” who is responsible for the well-being of all creation.

This text, as the first creation text, has been material that has generated an immense amount of imaginative tradition. We may note three matters in particular from that imaginative tradition.

1. Unlike Genesis 1:26-28, the male and female creatures in this second narrative are not created “equal in the image of God.” Rather, the man has priority and, according to this tradition, the woman is derivatively formed from his “rib” (Genesis 2:21-22). As might be expected, this narrative account has given grist for a compelling notion of “female subordination,” which has then been translated into model social relationships that privilege men and legitimate patriarchy. It is not surprising that this narrative point has attracted great interpretive attention with the rise of feminist consciousness. Phyllis Trible in particular has made a winsome case against “subordination,” a case that is of immense importance even though her analysis has not been received everywhere as persuasive (Trible 1978, 72-143). In any case, the contrast between 1:26-2 8 and 2:21-22 is noticeable and has provided impetus for ongoing interpretive engagement.

2. Chapter 3 is to be read along with chapter 2, In chapter 3, the key character alongside the man and the woman is the serpent who utters the “sly voice” of temptation that triggers disobedience and, consequently, exclusion of the human creatures from God’s garden. The particular dramatic development of the narrative is possible only because of the “commanding voice” of the serpent; and yet the narrative expresses neither curiosity about the serpent nor explanation for it. The serpent is a given in the narrative and consequently in the garden. . . a voice that seeks to contradict and counter the compelling, commanding voice of the Creator God.
The serpent, by verses 14-15, stands under a curse. What interests us, however, is the narrative affirmation that the serpent belongs to the creatures of the garden. Rendered theologically, this affirmation means that the seductive voice of evil is intrinsic to the creation; that is, the creation in principle is under siege from evil that contradicts the intention of the Creator. And this in a world called “good” many times in Genesis 1. Taken all together through a combination of antecedent sources, Genesis 1-3 asserts that the good world of God is in potential contradiction to the Creator, a reality sketched more fully in what follows in Genesis 4-11.

3. As many church people will know, Genesis 3 is the denouement of the creation narrative of Genesis 2. That narrative is understood in Christian interpretation as “the fall” whereby human creation (and ultimately all of creation) has fallen hopelessly and irreversibly into the power and into the habits of sin, so that human persons are irreversibly alienated from God and helpless to alter that condition. In this classical interpretation, human sin is not a series of specific, discrete acts, but it is a continuing strand of related decisions that cumulatively produce alienation from God and helplessness.

This understanding of the “fall” of humanity into the power of sin — a fall that prepares the way for the good news of the gospel — is rooted in the interpretive authority of Paul, especially in Romans 5:12-21, but see also 1 Corinthians 15:2 l-22, 45-49. Paul is paralleled in a recognition of the sorry state of helpless humanity in the near-contemporary Jewish apocalyptic of 2 Esdras (4 Ezra);

It would have been better if the earth had not produced Adam, or else, when it had produced him, had restrained him from sinning. For what good is it to all that they live in sorrow now and expect punishment after death? O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants. For what good is it to us, if an immortal time has been promised to us, but we have done deeds that bring death? And what good is it that an everlasting hope has been promised to us, but we have miserably failed? Or that safe and healthful habitations have been reserved for us, but we have lived wickedly. Or that the glory of the Most High will defend those who have led a pure life, but we have walked in the most wicked ways? Or that a paradise shall be revealed, whose fruit remains unspoiled and in which are abundance and healing, but we shall not enter it because we have lived in perverse ways? (2 Esdras 7:116-124 [v46-54])

That interpretive venture, deeply rooted in experience and deeply insightful of profound helplessness, received in turn more systematic articulation in Augustine, powerful exposition in Luther, and lyrical voice in Milton’s Paradise Lost. This common interpretive enterprise has impacted Western culture in powerful ways and has evoked profound probes of human character in both religious and secular modes.

This interpretive history is of interest for our study, however, precisely because the Old Testament itself features no such teaching about “the fall,” nor does the textual tradition of the Old Testament refer again to the narrative of Genesis 3. To be sure, the prophetic teaching of Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel assert that their contemporaries are hopelessly locked into recalcitrance against God; but nowhere in the Old Testament is that judgment articulated beyond existential disappointment about contemporaries into an ontological principle. The more characteristic view of the Old Testament concerning human sin and human capacity for obedience is expressed in Deuteronomy 30:11-14:

Surely this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too fir away…No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. The Old Testament of course knows about profound sin (see Psalms 32, 38, 51, 130). In these same Psalms, however, there is complete confidence in the readiness of God to forgive. Thus a great accent is placed on repentance with the characteristic affirmation that human persons can repent and that God is ready and able to forgive such repentance, without any lingering disability or alienation. In particular circumstances Israelis said to be beyond hope, but this is regularly a concrete, situational judgment, one never transposed into a more foundational theological claim.

Thus the dominant trajectory of interpretation around this question of sin is very different in Judaism and in Christianity. It is not the case that either interpretive trajectory can be said to be wrong. It is, however, worth noting that the dominant Christian interpretation has entailed an immense act of imaginative exposition beyond the narrative itself that makes no such universal claim out of the narrative of a particular case. In recent time, moreover, there are now probes among Christian scholars suggesting that the decisive interpretation of Paul by Augustine and Luther misconstrued Paul’s intention (E. P. Sanders 1977, on “covenantal nomism”). In any case, it is clear that interpretation is not finished, but is an endless, open-ended project for those who take the text seriously and authoritatively.

Posted in The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann | Tagged Genesis, image of God, male and female together, the Sabbath | Leave a Comment »

A Brief Theological “History Of The World” (Genesis 1-11)

August 27, 2010

1921 Latin Bible Illustration

Continuing with a series of reading selections from Walter Brueggemann’s An Introduction to the Old Testament…

The materials in Genesis 1-11 constitute an especially rich theological resource in. the Old Testament and are at the same time a particularly problematic section of the text. In their final, canonical form, these chapters function to frame the more concrete “historical” materials of the Old Testament in a cosmic perspective and, in sum, they constitute a brief theological “history of the world.” As such, they provide the complex, problematic environment in which Israel’s faith and life are to be understood.

Two long-standing critical problems need to be noted at the outset. First, it is evident that these materials have been appropriated by Israel from older, well-developed cultures. In some cases, we have available parallel texts that are older and which evidence the antecedents to the biblical texts. These texts, moreover, have been formed, used, and transmitted in the great cultic centers of major political powers. They functioned in those contexts, surely liturgically, as founding statements for society, authorizing, legitimating, and ordering certain modes of social relationships and certain forms of social power.

For a long period, since Hermann Gunkel, scholars have referred to these materials, both in the Old Testament and in their cultural antecedents as “myths.” The usage of that term does not imply “falsehood,” as the term might be taken popularly. Rather, after the manner of Joseph Campbell, the term refers to founding poetic narratives that provide the basic self-understanding of a society and its raison d’être, foundational formulations of elemental reality that are to be regularly reiterated in liturgical form in order to reinforce claims of legitimacy for the ordering of society.

The poetic narratives characteristically portray great founding events in which “the gods” are the key actors and the actions undertaken are primordial in that they precede any concrete historical data. The Old Testament clearly emerged in a cultural world where founding myths were commonly shared from one society to another. It is evident that Israel readily participated in that common cultural heritage and made use of the same narrative materials as were used in other parts of that common culture.

Second, as elsewhere in Pentateuchal studies, scholars have been able to detect several strands of tradition that, in the terms set by Julius Wellhausen, are recognized as the hypothetical Priestly (P) and Yahwist (J) sources (Wellhausen 1994). The entwining of these two interpretive strands operates in two quite distinct ways in this material. On the one hand, in the creation materials the two strands are kept distinct from each other, each complete in itself, so that Genesis 1:1-2:4a is assigned to the P source and Genesis 2:4b-3:24 to J.

The two creation traditions stand alongside each other, each with its own integrity. On the other hand, in the extended flood narrative of Genesis 6:5-9:17, the two strands are interwoven into a remarkable literary coherence with Genesis 6:5-8; 7:1-12; 8:20-22 forming the basis of J and 6:9-22; 7:13-16; 8:14-19; 9:l-17a the primary articulation of P. It is not necessary for us to delineate the two traditions in detail. It is enough to recognize that the final form of the text is complex, the outcome of a long-term traditioning process wherein different interpretive moments and perspectives rearticulated the ancient memory in terms usable in different contexts.

The prehistory of these canonically shaped chapters in terms of (a) antecedent materials and (b) diversity of sources of tradition is well established and is not in dispute. That prehistory while interesting, is not especially important for theological interpretation of the final form of the text beyond the important awareness that biblical literature did not exist in a cultural vacuum, but in lively engagement with its context.

The materials of these chapters are rich and varied and, no doubt, come from a variety of sources. The easiest distinction to make is between narrative and genealogy. The genealogies are present in chapters 5, 10, and 11. They reflect kinship groups as a way of establishing rootage and legitimacy. It is clear, however, that these genealogies are not to be taken simply as reportage on kinship, but that kinship is used in them metaphorically to characterize many other relationships, social, political, and religious.

Thus “kinship” is a way of speaking about networks of power, legitimacy, and loyalty. In some phases of scholarship these genealogies were unfortunately misunderstood when taken with uncritical literalness, when in fact they are reflective of many serious and defining relationships that are not those of either family or kin. The shockingly long life spans assigned to ancestors in chapter 5, moreover, strikes us as fantastic. When those ages are compared with the older sources, such as the Sumerian King List, it is evident that Israel’s version of these genealogies is sobered and drawn more closely to lived reality; as the life spans are radically shortened in Israelite versions.

The narratives of these chapters include a variety of materials, some of which have not been especially important for subsequent interpretive reflection. Some materials are “aetiologies,” that is, stories told in order to explain the cause or origin of something extant in culture (see Gen 4:17-25; 9:18-28). The brief narrative of Genesis 6:1-4, which seems to reflect a mythical tradition left in its quite primitive form, became, in a later time, a rich source of speculative reflection, but that reflection was not much connected to the normative traditioning of the faith community.

Primary accent in theological interpretation has been placed especially upon the creation texts of Genesis 1:1-2 :4a and Genesis 2 :4b-2 5 with its related narrative in 3:1-24, the narrative of Cain and Abel (4:1-16), the great flood narrative (6:5-9:17), and the account of the Tower of Babel (11:1-9). Each of these narratives reflects older ancient Near Eastern traditions, so that it is impossible to ask questions about “historicity.” Rather, these materials may better be understood as complex, artistic attempts to articulate the most elemental presuppositions of life and faith in Israel, attempts that understood the world in a Yahwistic way. The end result of the interpretative process is a text that provided an imaginative context for the emergence of Israel in the midst of older cultural claims, visions, and affirmations.

The key issue in reading these texts according to the central traditions of church interpretation is to see that the canonizing process of editing and traditioning has taken old materials and transposed them by their arrangement into something of a theological coherence that is able to state theological affirmations and claims that were not intrinsic to the antecedent materials themselves. It is useful to recognize and know something of the antecedent materials; the character of the antecedent materials, however, is not primary in the theological interpretation of the church. Rather interest for such interpretation focuses upon the materials as they have been transposed into a coherent and intentional theological statement, a coherence that is clear in its main lines, even though the transposition has not fully and everywhere succeeded in overcoming all the markings of the earlier versions of the materials.

We may suggest that the materials have been shaped in order to make the following statements possible:

The two creation narratives, in very different modes, articulate that the world (“heaven and earth”) belongs to God, is formed and willed by God, is blessed by God with abundance, is to be cared for by the human creatures who are deeply empowered by God, but who are seriously restrained by God. The creation narratives are an affirmation of the goodness of the world intended by God (see below).
The narratives of Genesis 3:1-24 and 4:1-16, immediately after the affirmation of creation, attest to the profound problematic that is inherent in creation. Creation is said to be recalcitrant and resistant to God’s good intention for the world. This deep, elemental disorder, narratively instigated by the serpent and rooted in disobedience, is enacted as human violence; it is, moreover, reinforced by the odd distortion reported in 6:1-4 wherein the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” entangle inappropriately.
The flood narrative sits at the center of this material as the great disruption of creation. The waters of the flood are understood to be the great primordial power of chaos that now endangers life on the earth at the behest of the creator God. That is, the chaotic waters are here not opposed to the will of the creator, but are an instrument of the will of the creator. It is a remarkable and deeply freighted (vocab: Be laden or burdened with: “each word was freighted with anger.”) moment when God is “sorry” for creation and resolves to “blot out” human beings, thus promptly proposing to abrogate the initial endowment of human creatures in the creation story (Gen 6:6-7).
‘While the flood itself is an assertion of God’s wholesale judgment against creation, the biblical narrative is primarily interested in the “exception” of Noah, “a righteous man.” With his family Noah becomes the survivor of the flood and the first of the new humanity that appears post flood and, according to Genesis 9:6, is still “in the image of God” (on which see 1:26; 5:1-2). Thus the deep disruption of the flood is not a total disruption. The flood narrative, for all of the destruction that it articulates, culminates in the divine promise that guarantees the working of creation in life-giving ways (8:22), and the divine promise of covenantal faithfulness toward the creation for all time to come (9:15-I 7).
The narrative material ends in the narrative of 11:1-9, a final statement of human arrogance that challenges God, and that evokes God’s harsh response. The four “narratives of contradiction”-Genesis 3, 4, 6:5-9:17, and 11: 1-9—articulate a steadily intensifying recalcitrance against the will of the Creator that each time evokes God’s harsh response (Miles 1995, 128-46). The generous will of the Creator will not finally be mocked and will not be overcome by creaturely recalcitrance.
For all of that narrative assertion of resistance to the Creator God, it is to be observed that, alongside a response of anger from God toward the disobedient, in these narratives God also acts graciously and protectively to curb the destructiveness enacted and evoked by the human creatures. Thus after the harsh judgment on the man and woman, God clothes the two of them in order to cover over their newly felt shame (Gen 3:21). After the expulsion of Cain, the murderer, God marks Cain in order to protect him from murder in turn (4:15). As noted, the destructive force of the flood willed by God is unexpectedly concluded with divine promises (8:22; 9:8-17).
This sequence of narratives ends stunningly with the concluding judgment of 11:1-9 without a compensatory counterpoint from God. As Gerhard von Rad has seen, it is as though the entire narrative complex is designed so that the reading community of faith is left waiting for the appearance of Israel into the world, an appearance accomplished by Abraham and his barren wife Sarah (Gen 11:30; 12:1-3) (von Rad 1966, 67).
The sum of these narrative parts constitutes a remarkable theological statement. What may have been various “myths of origin” is now transposed into a theological statement of divine judgment and divine rescue, rescue and judgment being the defining categories for the God of Israel and for God’s impingement upon the world in which Israel lives. In that transposed form, then, this material is no longer interested in “origins” and in the sort of generic religious questions that are endlessly fascinating. Now, rather, the text is an attestation to the main themes of Israel’s faith in God.
Having noticed that judgment and rescue form the focal points for God’s presence and activity in this material, it is important to recognize that while God readily enacts both judgment and rescue in completely free ways, alongside this theological pairing the sum of the material attests as well to the recurring disobedience, arrogance, and violence that profoundly contradict God’s way in the text.
The capacity to state in this (for Israel) “originary text” this elemental recalcitrance is an astonishing interpretive achievement. Thus the eleven chapters, taken all together, attest that the will and purpose of the Creator God is sovereign, but that sovereignty is deeply and categorically under assault from the outset. This assertion draws close indeed to the lived reality of the world, then and now, in which it is unmistakably clear that creation is in contradiction.
This way of beginning the Bible, moreover, by appeal to creation, prepared the way for the primal drama of the Bible, namely, redescription or the restoration and mending of a scarred, broken creation to the intent of the Creator. These chapters thus make a fundamental theological affirmation, but they also prepare the way for what is to come. In God’s own way God negates recalcitrant power present in creation to bring human creatures to obedience that makes the world livable. It is to be noted that the canonical traditions managed to make this claim precisely by the utilization of older, “mythic” materials that in their antecedent functions were remote from such claims and affirmations.

Posted in The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann | Tagged Genesis 1-11 | Leave a Comment »

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Archive for the ‘The Old Testament’ Category

The Lie With The Ring Of Truth – R.R. Reno

The Fall – R.R. Reno

Time Fulfilled – N.T. Wright

A Reflection on the Song of Songs (Shir haShirim)

The Song of Solomon – Walter Brueggeman

The Suffering Servant of Isaiah by Walter Brueggemann

The Book of Isaiah by Walter Brueggemann

The Flood Narrative — Walter Brueggemann

The Creation Texts by Walter Brueggemann

A Brief Theological “History Of The World” (Genesis 1-11)

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