“Aha” Moments with the Bible
I’m trying to read the Bible cover-to-cover in 90 days. I have generally dismissed such feats as spiritual or academic bravado, but the discipline of daily reading big chunks of scripture has forced me to confront and rethink some of the themes of the Bible.
1. The biggest theme is just the absolute theological poverty of the Deuteronomistic history. This is the view that God punishes Israel for their idolatry, and rewards them for following God’s commands. It makes sense only as a coping strategy for dealing with national tragedy. People saw their sanctuary burned, their best and brightest led away in exile, and they had to struggle with the question, “If we are God’s chosen people, why has God abandoned us to this terrible fate?” Answer: “We were unfaithful.” So they recast history to explain their guilt. This is the same approach televangelists use to explain hurricane Katrina or 9-11.
2. Problem is, this theology makes God look like a jerk. Even if you buy into the Deuteronomistic view of history, you have to face the fact that God is someone who goes back on a promise. Listen to this one: “YHWH will bring you back in ships to Egypt by a route that I promised you would never see again; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer” (Deut 28:68). It’s a sort of reverse Exodus, and a powerful image. But it makes God out to be duplicitous. So God is a God who goes back on promises. Oh, and there’s this: “He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins” (Josh 24:19). Together with the terrible consequences outlined in Deuteronomy 28 (which include starving people eating their own babies, and mothers eating their own afterbirth), and the language about Israel itself becoming “utterly destroyed” just as they supposedly destroyed their enemies, it’s pretty clear that what we’ve got are multiple authors with different views of God. This view, by the way, is firmly repudiated by Jesus in Luke 13.
2.5 The penalty for serving other gods is… serving other gods (Deut 25-28).
3. At the same time, there are some amazingly progressive passages about fairness and social justice. Aliens receive the same law as Israelites (Deut 27:19), and God is especially concerned with the poor, widows and orphans. Micah 6:8 is anticipated by Deuteronomy 10:12-22.
4. God eats blood. No, seriously. The life of a creature is in its blood, and blood is always to be returned to God. If innocent blood is spilled, it contaminates the land. Blood has to be spilled according to certain rules to avoid contamination and remove contamination. This affects everything from menstruation and birth to murder to the worship of pagan gods with blood offerings.
5. Though God does not ask for or condone human sacrifice, human beings are sacrificed: in enemy towns dedicated to destruction as an offering to God, in the killing of the priests who offer incense in improper ways. The priests who die from God’s fire make their utensils holy (Num 16:36-38). The firstborn of Egypt are killed by God and through their deaths the firstborn of Israel are made holy (Num 3:13).
6. When Rahab hangs the crimson thread in her window, the language is almost parallel to the Passover (Josh 2:17-19). Stay in your house, and this marker will spare you from death. With the crossing of the Jordan that follows, it’s almost a chiastic structure.
7. When the High Priest dies, those who have shed innocent blood accidentally can leave the cities of refuge and return home. Presumably this is because the death of the High Priest resets the sin meter, and the land is pure again. In this way, the High Priest himself becomes a sort of atoning sacrifice (Num 35:28). I had never connected this idea with the imagery of Jesus as High Priest in Hebrews 5. The author doesn’t make this connection, but I think it’s pretty powerful: the death of the High Priest means the murderers can go home. The death of Jesus means we murderers are set free from the avenger of blood.
8. I stumbled across another Vulgar Bible item: Joshua 15:13-19 details the story of Othniel’s daughter. The story seemed odd, so I checked the New Interpreter’s Commentary. Apparently, it may be a story about diarrhea.
9. Yet another historical and theological contradiction: Joshua 21:43-45 is a comment about how God was completely faithful in giving all the land promised to Israel. Except—and this is an important observation which has a direct impact on the current Israeli / Palestinian conflict—it did NOT extend from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, as mentioned in Josh 1:4. Since there are currently right-wing paramilitary Israelis who identify themselves with the Israelites in Joshua who claim that God has given them all the territory from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, I think it’s pretty significant that this passage says the job was done when it was half-done. To me, this reaffirms that there is no justification - political or religious - for continued Israeli settlements in the West Bank. You cannot use the Deuteronomistic history as a charter for contemporary politics.
10. The Jerusalem priesthood was very careful to maintain a monopoly on religious life. Any sacrificial center outside Jerusalem, even if it was ostensibly dedicated to YHWH, was a potential threat (Joshua 22). Exodus 31 even reflects the concern by giving the artisans who work on the tabernacle a hierarchy: first Bezalel of Judah, and then Oholiab of Dan—because the sacrificial center in Dan in Israel competed with the Temple in Jerusalem in Judah.
11. Reading the way the Exodus history was constructed makes me more aware of how our own history is constructed. The mythological aspects of the Founding Fathers, and stories of How the West Was Won, and the tragic and religious language used to describe the Civil War, all spring from the same impulse. We make our history into religious history in part to justify our place in it. It doesn’t mean the ideas and events are not true. Just that the stories always have an agenda. For example, textbooks describe the genocide of Native Americans as the tragic but inevitable price of progress.
To me, this makes the Hebrew Bible more compelling and authoritative. What I find astonishing is how multiple views of history and perspectives of God manage to find their way into the text, and how the whole document manages to become holy not in spite of those contradictions, but because of them. Passages like Joshua 23:7 and Deuteronomy 23:3, which forbid marrying foreign women, stand side-by-side with the book of Ruth. As I’ve said before, if you want a Holy Scripture that’s completely consistent, unambiguous, dictated by a divine being to a single author, the Koran or the Book of Mormon may be a better option for you. If you choose the Bible, you’re in for a mess.