In the past two years I've been re-reading the First Testament of the Bible, the Jewish scriptures and am finding that a closer reading of them, an honest reading of them on their own terms, shows they are incredibly subtle and unlike anything else I'm familiar with. Just about everything about the parts of it which are clipped and trimmed and distorted and presented dishonestly to show God as a blood thirsty and evil ego-maniac, read in their fuller context shows that, on the contrary, the God of the Jews is unlike that. Yesterday in the Catholic liturgy, the first reading was the passage from the Book of Samuel which showed that, chosen people or not, God wasn't some idol or magic talisman to be used by the Israelites to win their battles. He wasn't a cargo-cult god, he wasn't a god of national supremacy, he wasn't a god of war. The use of God in that way is endemic in the American right, the danger of that is contained in that passage, hearing this passage yesterday made me shudder.
When the troops retired to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why has the LORD permitted us to be defeated today by the Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the LORD from Shiloh that it may go into battle among us and save us from the grasp of our enemies.
If you know the story, you know how that ended. The meaning for the United States, today, intoxicated with American exceptionalism, the message couldn't be more relevant.
Today's reading is another that is especially relevant as the purported evangelicals of Iowa head into the caucus, not that they are going to take it any more seriously than the Israelites did in the Bible.
All the elders of Israel came in a body to Samuel at Ramah
and said to him, “Now that you are old,
and your sons do not follow your example,
appoint a king over us, as other nations have, to judge us.”
Samuel was displeased when they asked for a king to judge them.
He prayed to the LORD, however, who said in answer:
“Grant the people’s every request.
It is not you they reject, they are rejecting me as their king.”
Samuel delivered the message of the LORD in full
to those who were asking him for a king.
He told them:
“The rights of the king who will rule you will be as follows:
He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses,
and they will run before his chariot.
He will also appoint from among them his commanders of groups
of a thousand and of a hundred soldiers.
He will set them to do his plowing and his harvesting,
and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.
He will use your daughters as ointment makers, as cooks, and as bakers.
He will take the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive groves,
and give them to his officials.
He will tithe your crops and your vineyards,
and give the revenue to his eunuchs and his slaves.
He will take your male and female servants,
as well as your best oxen and your asses,
and use them to do his work.
He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves.
When this takes place,
you will complain against the king whom you have chosen,
but on that day the LORD will not answer you.”
The people, however, refused to listen to Samuel’s warning and said,
“Not so! There must be a king over us.
We too must be like other nations,
with a king to rule us and to lead us in warfare
and fight our battles.”
When Samuel had listened to all the people had to say,
he repeated it to the LORD, who then said to him,
“Grant their request and appoint a king to rule them.”
"You are old and your sons do not follow your example, appoint a king over us" If those words don't resonate, you're not paying close attention to the yapping of the media, who play the role of our degenerate elders. Read the warning of Samuel again and imagine life under Trump or Cruz or another Bush or any of the Republicans and translate it into American reality.
The disasters that came to people in the First Testament were inevitably a result of not doing justice, of not taking responsibility, of lying and cutting corners, so many cut corners eventually lead to snipping away the entire thing. The "gospel" of prosperity is a seductive message, the actual scriptures don't lay things out for such an easy sale. They tell the truth in all of its horrible and hard-sell reality.
I've made references at my blog to the subtle insights of Walter Brueggeman about the Hebrew Scriptures, and especially the passages about power, such as this one. Brueggeman delves into the scriptures that denote the problems of power and rule recorded there, especially under the reign of Solomon. Well, here, I'll just be lazy and give you the link: http://rmadisonj.blogspot.com/search?q=brueggeman
ReplyDeleteAnd my little recap doesn't do tribute to the scholarship and wisdom of Brueggeman. Of course, his understanding is not what you get from the peanut gallery, but it was this kind of exegesis (his, not theirs) that convinced me scripture is meant to be read by a community, not an individual, and that is was meant to be understood by a community, not someone who's only qualification is literacy.
And of course, as you point out, first you have to avoid the desire to cherry pick and proof text. But there is so much richness in the Hebrew Scriptures they also convinced me of the reality of God; no novelist or group of novelists could ever imagine so complex and complicated a set of stories as those; and they were written, not by Moses or a few named prophets, but by schools of people over centuries of time.
Far too much richness to be fiction and delusion.