Reading the OT #2
I’m building up to the problem of HEREM — the Hebrew word for a “devoted thing” that is to be destroyed because it’s offensive to the God of Israel. As someone pointed out in the previous comments, we’re searching for moral coherence. How do we hear these texts in a dangerous world where nuke-the-heretics is a popular battlecry? Is it permissible if you’re on the side of the RIGHT God? But then . . . isn’t that what everyone thinks?
Pauline scholar Michael Gorman has pointed out that Saul of Tarsus had precedent for his conviction that God would want the problem of Christian heretics remedied with violence, if necessary. He notes that “perhaps the most important precedent for Paul was Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron.”
He was so full of zeal — a true zealot! — that he drove a spear through an Israelite man and a Midianite woman to purify the people. As a result, God was so pleased that he promised him a perpetual priesthood (Numbers 25:13). “This was credited to him as righteousness,” according to Psalm 106, “for endless generations to come.”
Gorman responds:
“So Paul was fulfilling his obligation as a Pharisee to promote the Law and protect Israel from impurity by seeking to wipe out the new movement before it spread like cancer. He believed that this zeal, like that of Phinehas, was the basis of his right relationship with God — his justification. But this violent and exclusivist impulse would be challenged and, nonviolently, overthrown.”
How do we read these burn-the-heretic texts in light of what we’ve learned in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? (More on this later.)
How do we understand the (apparent) endorsement of slavery (e.g., “If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do” – Exodus 21:7) — texts that were so important to the pro-slavery crowd in the nineteen century?
What do we do with passages like the divine ordeal in Numbers 5 (which was common in cultures that depended on magic and supernatural intervention)?
Perhaps “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” has its limits. What I do like about the threadbare phrase is the back-to-scripture impulse behind it. For scripture is a guide for God’s people. It is, as I mentioned in the last post, “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in rightesouness.”
By the way, for new readers, here is a series I did on “How to Read the B-I-B-L-E”:
- – - -
Don’t miss this new year’s piece by Richard on certainty and dogmatism.
Mike,
I’ve been following this thread in the previous post, and I think (at the risk of jumping ahead) you hit the nail on the head with this: How do we read these burn-the-heretic texts in light of what we’ve learned in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?
Jesus is the only lens which has any hope of ever making those OT passages clear to us. How Jesus is the culmination of the curse against the Serpent, the covenants with Noah and Abraham, and Law of Moses, Melchizidek, etc. is the answer (I think). I don’t have it clear in my own mind, but if we try to make a coherent logic out of those passages leaving out Jesus, I think we will never get more than a strange, two-faced God whose morals we have to doubt to remain sane.
http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/446
For what it’s worth, the Phinehas tradition of justification by murder is also celebrated in 1 Maccabees 2, where it serves as the inspiration for the beginning of the Maccabean revolt (Judas’ father acts like Phinehas), and also in Ben Sira 45. Not only is Phinehas’ act credited to him as righteousness, it is also spoken of in the language of “atonement.”
Regarding reading the bible…
Over the weekend I was at a Think Tank of psychology of religion researchers. One of the topics of conversation was: What defines a fundamentalist?
It is not orthodoxy per se. People can affirm the Nicene Creed and still have very different ways of reading the bible.
This was my attempt at a definition: A fundamentalist is someone who doesn’t think they have a hermeneutic.
Because one you start observing the way you read the text you can’t go back, so to speak. Knowledge of your meta-reading processes moves you out of the fundamentalist camp.
Good stuff here, and I understand trying to read the OT through the lens of Jesus, but Jesus was right there when the order was given to kill the Amalekites, wasn’t He? He was right there when Moses was told to kill all the leaders and expose them in broad daylight to turn away the “fierce anger” of the Lord in Numbers 25. You can’t separate Jesus from what happened back then just like you can’t separate Jesus when Ananias and Sapphira were struck down in Acts 5, or when Herod was eaten by worms in Acts 12. The God of the OT and the Jesus of the NT are still One.
Maybe we don’t fully grasp God’s hatred of sin, where not only the wicked suffer for it, but sometimes the innocent are caught up in His wrath as well. Could it be we need a deeper understanding of God’s justice? The Amalekites was a justice story. Achan was a justice story. Phinehas was a justice story. God’s honor among the people had been diminished (Numbers 25:11), the LORD’s anger burned, and people died. Sounds alot like Calvary.
How would those stories be reinterpreted in light of Jesus, considering Jesus was smack in the middle of one of those stories? How does one reinterpret an historical account? We can’t change the fact that they happened or that God was behind it, unless we’re saying the texts have been jacked with, and the Jews manipulated the text to justify themselves. Is that a point being made?
Good discussion.
Along the lines of ‘God said it, I believe it, that settles it’ … I heard an interesting point a couple weeks back about that phrase. A preacher commented that the biggest problem with the phrase is that it is not theologically sound. To be sound, it would say ‘God said it, that settles it’ — whether we believe it or not.
I thought the preacher made an interesting point … although I still struggle to see how that bumper sticker phrase serves a beneficial purpose. Would that phrase really change someone’s mind, if they weren’t already a believer? And if they are already a believer, isn’t this phrase like calling the sky ‘blue’?
Looking forward to your thoughts on reading the old testament.
You can’t separate Jesus from what happened…
Brian, I agree with this. If we do separate Jesus from it, we get an untenable genocidal God.
How would those stories be reinterpreted in light of Jesus, considering Jesus was smack in the middle of one of those stories?
I don’t have a clear answer in my own mind, yet, so I probably won’t satisfactorily answer this. But, what I do think is that, rather than reinterpreting the stories, we may need to reinterpret or revisit the story of Jesus and the implications of what he did and accomplished in his DBR.
Richard, that is a wonderful definition of a fundamentalist. I hope you’ll explore that more on your blog.
Mike, have you read “Yahweh is a Warrior” by Millard Lind? I have yet to read it, but he was an Anabaptist and pacifist, and his book was very influential on Yoder and Hauerwas in their understanding of Yahweh (as warrior) and Jesus (as suffering servant), etc.
Great topic to be discussing.
Great post and comments! Are you saying that “nuke-the-heretics” is a “popular battlecry” in our country and culture? I haven’t heard that coming from anybody here, unless it’s some whacky fanatics who are obscure and for sure in the minority…..therefore not falling under the heading of “popular”. Yes, I have heard it coming from other parts of the world, where Christians are viewed as the heretics.
I love Gorman’s insights!
DU
Re. the definition of “fundamentalist”: I don’t believe its quite as simple as that. The denotative meaning of the term is “someone who subscribes to The Fundamentals, pubished in the early 1900s. When it comes to connotations, a fundamentalist is most anyone who’s to the right of you.
Of course, we read the OT through our own personal lens, too. The OT is colored by this current day of culture and civility; the justice system we have in place with the absolute protection of rights – especially for the alleged suspect; and the myriad levels of punishment for all varieties of wrong-doing. I think it is hard to be raised in this environment and get a true grasp on the real evil being perpetrated in the OT.
Maybe Sodom/Gomorrah, the Amalekites, Achan, etc….were equivalent to cancer. How do we treat cancer in our OWN bodies? We want it out — completely! We will undergo surgery to get it completely cut out. We will even subject ourselves to the dangers and side effects of radiation and chemo to rid our bodies of cancer, and to keep it from ever returning.
I’m sure God knows what/who can/will destroy His children, and wants its complete removal. Don’t you?
“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” definitely has limits – even beyond what Brian rightly points out. The Bible says lots of things, written mostly in two languages and in several cultures, all different from English-speaking America, 2009 by thousands of miles and thousands of years.
I still have trouble with the proposal of scripture attributing to God the words of man – there has always been trouble when someone does that – and my default setting continues to be that the Bible communicates the word of God, whether it makes any man grit his teeth or not. (There is equal trouble in going the direction that every word in the Bible is pinpoint-scientific accurate and was meant to be.)
Personally, I’d be much more comfortable with a nice Santa-Claus-type God of the contemporary American variety who gives gifts to everyone – not the earlier, European kind who travels with Black Peter to switch naughty children and/or put coal in their stockings. But Jesus insists in Matthew 25 that God just can’t be Christmas-boxed up with those nice, comfy characteristics.
Bottom line, to me, is that scripture is a work of faith, sufficient to its purpose: communicating God’s justice and love and will for us by pointing to His Son. And His Son always points back to the Father.
Here at ACU we have the World’s Largest Bible. You should read the Old Testament stories in that thing.
Scary.
I should have addressed my response, above, to Brad, not Brian (no offense to either, just a typo). Sorry.
I’ve heard it suggested we read the Bible backwards – start with the NT then go to the OT. In that light, a scripture that helps me search out the OT for what God would say to me today is 2 timothy 3:15-17:
15And how from your childhood you have had a knowledge of and been acquainted with the sacred Writings, which are able to instruct you and give you the understanding for salvation which comes through faith in Christ Jesus [through the leaning of the entire human personality on God in Christ Jesus in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness].
16Every Scripture is God-breathed (given by His inspiration) and profitable for instruction, for reproof and conviction of sin, for correction of error and discipline in obedience, [and] for training in righteousness (in holy living, in conformity to God’s will in thought, purpose, and action),
17So that the man of God may be complete and proficient, well fitted and thoroughly equipped for every good work.
The only scripture available to Christians at the time of this writing was what we call the Old Testament. In the NT times we have no direct voice of God directing us to abolish nations and peoples – but under the OT that is the way God let His will be known and He doesn’t seem to be given to much explanation why He was to give these commandments.
I’m bumbling around here, but what I see is that we have a job of trying to see what teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, we can learn from delving into His Word, so that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work, as Paul said to Timothy.
This is probably oversimplification for the deep delving you’re looking for Mike. My training is much less ‘formal’ than that of the errudites on this board, my only choice seems to be to try to live by Occam’s Razor when studying His word – the simplest answers to my questions are often the closest to His truth, imho.
Justin wrote “I don’t have it clear in my own mind, but if we try to make a coherent logic out of those passages leaving out Jesus, I think we will never get more than a strange, two-faced God whose morals we have to doubt to remain sane.”
Interesting…That means everyone who lived before Jesus, including such revered figures as Mary and Joseph, thought God was two-faced and dubious morally.
Justin also wrote: “Jesus is the only lens which has any hope of ever making those OT passages clear to us.”
Interesting…So no one who lived before Jesus understood the Old Testament.
Brett, you said: That means everyone who lived before Jesus… thought God was two-faced and dubious morally… So no one who lived before Jesus understood the Old Testament.
You could be correct about some (or even most) people who lived prior to the 1st Century. However, I don’t think everyone could be assumed to think like that. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a compiled Hebrew scriptures extolling the praises of Yahweh as the Lord God of Israel. The writers of the Hebrew scriptures obviously thought well of God. And the LXX was canonized 400 years before Jesus, if I’m not mistaken.
Even so, I think two (of many) promises in Genesis–the promise of the Seed of the Woman to crush the head of the Serpent, and God’s covenant with Abraham to bless the nations–provide a vision and context in which to 1) expect a Messiah to set the world to rights, and 2) view the contemporary happenings between God and the world through a “Jesus” lens–Jesus being in their minds the expected Messiah (even if in incomplete knowledge or vision).
A Hebrew, or a Gentile who believed the Hebrew teachings, could view the Amelekite extermination, or Achan, or any of the other grizzly stories they heard or read about through the expectation that a good God, Yahweh, would send the Messiah to make those atrocities right.
So, I believe because of those promises, the Ancients had access to a “Jesus” lens, too, and thus could understand, at least in a limited way, the OT and not view God as two-faced or morally dubious. My opinion is that very few (mainly the authors of the scriptures and a few notable others) actually DID understand God that way and his message to the Hebrews, just as (again IMHO) very few understand now, but that isn’t necessarily the point.
And I’m not saying I truly understand, now.
One’s understanding of the nature of the text of the OT, or the NT for that matter, one’e presuppositions shape how we come to the text, how we regard it, how we read, what we think of its nature and authority. Presuppositions define not only the text and our interpretations, but us as well.
Rick Warren, who will pray for the nation and our new president on January 20, has been accused of hating gay and lesbian people. Does Rick Warren “hate” gay people? I don’t think that he does. However, his understanding of the text of the OT places him in the position of one who sits in judgment of this group of people, and not only because of what the OT says about homosexuality,but because of how Warren’s understanding of the OT forces upon him (without thought of new insights or understandings since these ancient texts were created) certain conclusions about human existence.
In Warren’s hermeneutic it is a matter of “the Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it.” (That sounds very familiar!) Question: is the Bible equal to God?
What a worthwhile conversation to have. Thanks for starting it, Mike.
I am wondering a couple of things:
1) What can we learn from the Jews’ example of engaging their own text(s) on this and other matters? Their ability to honestly wrestle with texts — in a way that makes us uncomfortable, even sounding disrespectful — as well as their ability to live as a peaceful, minority people among the nations for two thousand years without losing their identity seems a valuable resource for understanding these texts.
2) There are numerous reasons why HEREM makes us uncomfortable, but to what extent should we push against finding ways to assuage discomfort brought on by the text? Don’t misunderstand me: the passages of genocidal zealotry, authorized and approved by God, are horrifying. But I want to remember who we are: members of the most powerful nation/empire in history, and mostly members of the most powerful race in that nation. We share, and generally feel guilty about, our past violence against other peoples (“white guilt” or “liberal guilt”). So it makes sense, particularly in a world where al-Qaeda exists, why we would be especially sensitive to these kinds of violent texts.
But what can we learn from how powerless Christians throughout history have interpreted these texts? What do Christians even today from South America, Africa, India, China, and the Middle East think of the exodus and conquest? of HEREM? of Phinehas?
I don’t think that will solve it, but I think it could help.
Larry, I always love reading your thoughts. but I do not think you really can know what Rick Warren really believes on this matter.
re: Is the Bible equal to God? God gave us the Holy Scriptures…inspired…written down for us to know more about God. David knew the importance of the Scriptures he had and said, “Thy Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee.” It is only through the Scriptures that we know God and His will.
It’s not the Scriptures I have trouble with and can’t explain that bother me…it’s those I do understand and fail to live up to that are my problem.
Does Bible = God, Yes! “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God.” “I am the way, the truth and the life,” etc.
The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it … TRUE!
Okay, before you all start hating me, first … I’m new here, so please be gentle. Also, read on …
The problem with the people who SAY they “believe” the bible, actually haven’t read it carefully as Mike suggests. For example, the letters to Timothy make it plain that PAUL wrote them, and that he wrote them specifically to Timothy, a preacher. He didn’t write them to ME, or to US (otherwise, we’d have to go to Troas and find a coat and some parchments).
The problem is one of pronouns … all the docs of the bible were written TO someone else, none of it TO us. But it was written FOR us! It’s like hearing my parents yell at my sister. It’s not TO me, but I can definately learn from it.
What if we call the first 39 books the “Jewish Testament” instead of the “Old Testament”? It was never TO me or my other gentile friends … my ancestors were (sadly) worshipping trees back then!
Now when reading about slavery or sacrifice or tattoos, I’m reading the words of an old man (80-120 years old) named Moses who’s introducing Yahweh to a group of people who have been nothing more than a rapidly growing tribe of slaves, and now this invisible God, whose name they haven’t even known … is going to make them into a nation, and GIVE them a whole chunk of land? The 400 year old legends about Abe and Jake are true?
This has everything with us learning about how God introduced Himself and gave laws for a primitive people. We can learn about HIM through His word … not a bunch of stupid rules.
PS:
Sorry if I offend. I’m passionately in love with the Torah, and thrilled to find Mike’s blog and see that he’s studying this. It should be great.
Also, “slaves” are not “slaves.” there are many different kinds of slavery, and (as I’m sure Mike will get to) not ALL forms of slavery are “authorized.” Again, this is TO them, only FOR us.
Terry, you are correct, I can’t know Rick Warren’s thoughts. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. I do believe that he is “boxed in” to his position from the start by his presuppositions about the nature of the Bible. He would tell you that the call is not his but God’s. How does he get there? By starting with the overriding assumption that everything in the Bible is eternally true, completely inspired and direct from God for every generation. His presumptions determine his conclusions and leave no room for debate or even nuiance. Thus, “God said it, I bellieve it, etc.” That was my real point that I obviously didn’t make well enough.
Terry, I think that Warren has spoken enough about the issues that Larry is pretty safe in all that he wrote.
Concerning herem, slaughter, etc.: if we take seriously OT scholarship, then all these accounts are written from the perspective of the collapse of the nation of Israel. The Israelites naturally wondered how they could have avoided collapse, and the LORD’s faithful among them gave an answer: serve the LORD alone and purge from the nation all idolatrous influences.
I think that despair for the past and hope for the future at that crucial juncture re-wrote the Israelite history. Thus we have heroes of herem who may or may not have been heroes in their time and who may or may not have received God’s approval. We have stories of herem that don’t seem to correspond to other stories: Joshua has complete conquest where Judges does not. The scholarship points out a lot of such evidence.
But the tensions in the stories didn’t go unnoticed by the Jews, so later texts exhibited competing ideas. The slaughter of Esther competes with the graces of Jonah.
Like Jonah, Jesus criticizes the exclusivist, herem-seeking branch of Judaism. Those Jews concerned themselves with self-preservation for its own sake. Jesus taught self-sacrifice for the benefit of the nations, which was, indeed, God’s hope for Abraham’s children from the first covenant. That is how Jesus provides a “lens” for me. Parts of the OT itself pass judgment on exclusivism; Jesus is God’s imprimatur on that judgment — not by a decree, but by a life.
If you can’t accept scholarship, I don’t know how to help you here. If you can’t accept humanity shaping the scriptures, I don’t know how to help. You will have to undertake a journey and a struggle that I’ve seen but through which I am a poor guide. You will have to inspect your modern approach to the scriptures, especially the part that tells you to accept every verse a stand-alone data point of objective truth. To me the scriptures are true: they point the right way in the end, but not every word contributes to the true conclusion in the same way.
Even those who can accept scholarship and a non-atomistic view of the truth of the text might not be able to accept my understanding of the progress of Jewish faith or my resolution of herem. That resolution looks, even to me, a little too cut-and-dried. I’ve worked long and hard at it, but without the tools and knowledge of the really good theologians. So don’t pin my understanding on others who you think look like me. Mike, for instance, might end up in a quite different place when he’s done with this series.
Wow, I have much to say but I will try to be brief as I’m a newby on this blog.
First, a lot of this comes down to what you each think about the Sovereignty of God. For full disclosure, I come from the angle that God is Sovereign over all things and that he controls all things; including natural disasters and even (gasp!) sin? (read 1 Chroncles 10 – Scripture says Saul killed himself in verse 4, then in verse 14 it says that the LORD put him to death – so if suicide is a sin; did not God put Saul to death in His Sovereign poser by a sinful act?) something to ponder – but I do not wish to get sidetracked.
Nonetheless, ALL things are for His Glory to be made known to all creation: period. (Eph 1)
But here is something that could flip this entire conversation.
The question is not in our shocking manner, “how could God have done that?!” or “why did God do such things (herem)?!” but “how could God NOT continue to do that in the face of what humans are and we do!?”
Remember who God is. Holy.
We come from a perspective of sin. We are human. We are sinful. We are coming to these questions from an angle of sin.
God does not know sin; nor does anything that is unholy EVER enter his mind or come to pass by His Hand. This is the perspective of God. He is God. He is not sinful. He comes to creation from the perspective of complete holiness. EVERYTHING from the Hand and Mind of God is Holy – whether we think it is or not.
So, you have creation and you have man. You must go back to Genesis. Adam and Eve were given everything – that is, except one thing – and they chose to disobey God and sin by that one thing. Notice what happens: God told Adam that he would surely die if he ate of that specific tree. Now tell me; did not Adam deserve to be exterminated right then and there for his disobedience? Of course he did!; but God’s mercy was bestowed upon him.
Look at how MERCIFUL God is to creation! Every minute of every hour of every day He is blasphemed, disobeyed, spit upon by his creation who are by nature rebellious to Him and His Name! Why on Earth does he allow all of this to continue to exist!!!??? That is the amazing question.
Look at it that way. Not that God was so “mean” and “hurtful” but look at how merciful God is to allow this all to continue in His patience so that we all can come to Him in repentance.
Luke 13 4-5 “Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
We deserve nothing but death; every one of us. God owes us nothing. We owe God EVERYTHING.
It’s more of a shock that He hasn’t taken every single one of us out in the blink of an eye like we deserve for our rebellion!
Ezekiel 18:25 “Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?”
Please forgive my numerous typos – I will be more careful and actually proofread before commenting next time.
Paul didn’t have anything good to say about homosexuality, perhaps Rick Warren got his ideas from the N.T.
This from Wasteland of Wonders:
The Apple
Well, fruit of some sort, but we’ll call it an apple for now, as that is the traditional image.
So, God creates Adam and Eve, with no knowledge of good or evil, right or wrong – they are truly innocent. He sticks them in a Garden, and for some reason creates a tree whose fruit gives you the Knowledge of Good and Evil (it’s not explained how this works, but we’ll take their word for it).
“DO NOT EAT OF THIS TREE, OR YOU’LL DIE.” says God.
Adam and Eve hear this and dutifully nod their heads. God goes off somewhere (he’s a busy guy) leaving these two alone.
Now, as Adam and Eve don’t have the faintest idea of right and wrong, they don’t know it’s a Bad Idea to disobey God (“Hey, God just told us not to eat that fruit!”, “So? What’s your point?”, “Erm… I don’t know. Save some for me!”) The only way they can gain this knowledge is by…. Eating from the Tree!
It’s like giving a bottle of bleach to a child who is too young to read the warning labels, and then being surprised when they poison themselves with it. To make matter worse, Adam and Eve were threatened with the punishment of death. How can this be any sort of threat? There was no death in The Garden (see above) – they had never witnessed it, and would probably have a hard time grasping the concept anyway. So, they were told not to do something (and had no way of knowing that disobedience was bad), otherwise something would happen to them (and they had no idea what that was, or whether it was a good or bad thing to happen anyway).. “We’ll die? What does that mean? Maybe it’s fun!”
It’s the original Catch 22 situation.
The kids
Adam and Eve had two children that we know of. Cain and Abel. When they grew up, Cain (or was it the other one?) went off and found a wife. Just where exactly did this woman come from?
And, for that matter, where did everyone else come from? Unless God had been creating loads of people on the sly, the only way for the population to develop from Adam, Eve and the two sons has to involve incestuous relationships.
Not a very good example for the rest of us, is it? (The same also applies when God trashed the world and left Noah and his small family to repopulate the world).
Sometimes I think we are like the men who sat around and discussed “what did God mean?” I then think about what God said “His ways are not our way” or God telling us “our smartest people are fools to him”. To me that means that when God speaks, I may not always understand exactly what He means. Like the Jews who debated on meanings and then issued rules to everyone from God. When Christ came we know he never broke a law but fulfilled it. But did he do things like the Pharisees thought he should. He did not, and He even knew what they were thinking and what was in their hearts. As a reader that , I cannot see anything that would even make me think that homoseuality was ever accepted. I could list all my reasons for this from scripture. But we are suppose to love the person and hate the sin. Does that mean that it is between the person and God? That seems foolish in that anything wrong I ever did, I could twist it so that God agreed with me in my mind and I was wrong. When I finally saw my own foolishness I was remorseful and prayed for forgiveness.
Guess I should of added, when someone who cared for me pointed out the error of my ways. I had to chew on it for a while but knew I was wrong. Thank heavens for those who have the backbone to point out to those that have accepted wrong thinking. They have the chance to repent.
The Wasteland of Wonders quote presupposes things we don’t know.
“Now, as Adam and Eve don’t have the faintest idea of right and wrong …” Really?
“There was no death in The Garden …” For sure?
Very good points. However, another can be added to the list: the use of instrumental music in worship. Since the OT allowed it and no mention of it is made in the NT, how can those who use it today justify it?
Whoops! My original post was intended for Part 1!
I’m still tuned in!