Sunday, January 21, 2018

These are the laws of a passionate God

The modern cultural practice, I'd say the basic requirement of club membership in everything from high-brow to low-brow would-be intellectualism, is to hold the Biblical Hebrews in the Old Testament and, these days, Christians as well*, to severe standards of judgement that aren't practised much on any other people or nation or ideological grouping.  That's so ingrained that people do it automatically, needing no actual knowledge of the texts or what they actually said, the ersatz erudition that's based in is passed on in secondary, tertiary. . . many degrees of separation from the actual texts, often not based in reading but on what people hear on TV and radio, in movies and even plays.  The general character of utter stupidity of online atheist babble on that is about as good an example of where that ends up as any.

The passage I posted Saturday from Marilynne Robinson's great and, I hold, essential essay,  The Fate of Ideas: Moses ended in her promise to demonstrate that the centuries long slamming, which has only intensified, against the "Jewish God" as described in the Old Testament is false.   It's a very long argument because it can only be made by reading the texts and the historical narrative those are set in, as Marilynne Robinson points out later in her essay, every single accusation of wrong doing made against the Israelites and their God is known by it being confessed in their holiest Scriptures.  This section of the essay presents a number of those passages.   I will break into Ms. Robinson's text to point some things out.   There will be one more, much shorter excerpt from the essay in this impromptu series, before I return to Brueggemann.   If you want to see this as a long, voluntarily given advertisement for the book, When I Was A Child I Read Books and, in fact, all of her essays, I won't object, at all.

Ah, but the people Moses brought out of slavery invaded and took the land of the Canaanites!  The Israelites are much abused these days for their treatment of the Canaanites.  The historicity of the invasion stories as they occur in Joshua is questionable; archeology does not confirm them.   Nor does the book of Judges, which names the peoples “the Lord left” in Canaan;  Philistines, Sidonians, Hivites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, and Jesubites (Judges 3:3-5).  The Israelites may well have been Canaanites themselves, or a mixed population of those who were slaves in Egypt rather than a tribe or people.  The number of those who left Egypt may have been small and grown in retrospect, like the French Resistance.  Possession of Canaan was never complete.  Other inhabitants, for example Hittites and Philistines, were also invaders.  Ancient Near Eastern records often describe the defeat of enemies as their extermination; in fact the only known mention of Israel in Egyptian writing, dated about 1230 BCE, boasts that “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.”    In any case, whatever happened in Canaan, a violent epic was made of it which is the basis of much vilification of “the Jewish God.”

As ancient narrative, and as history, this story of conquest is certainly the least remarkable part of the Bible, and a very modest event as conquests go, the gradual claiming of an enclave in a territory that would be utterly negligible by the lights of real conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar or even Ashurbanipal.  The suggestion that God was behind it maybe makes it worse than the campaigns of self-aggrandizement that destroyed many larger and greater cities, though it is not clear to me that it should.  A consequence which follows from God's role in the conquer of Canaan, asserted with terrible emphasis in Leviticus and elsewhere, is that God will deal with the Israelites exactly as he has dealt with the Canaanites, casting them out of the land in their turn if they cease to deserve it.  Abraham is told in a dream that possession of the promised land will be delayed an astonishing four hundred years until, in effect, the Amorites (that is, Canaanites) have lost their right to it.  We Anglo-European invaders do not know yet if we will have four hundred years in this land. 

Furthermore, as they approach Canaan, the Hebrews are told that they may not take any land of the Edomites or the Moabites because God has already given those people their land, having driven out former inhabitants. (Deuteronomy 2:4-11).  This is not the thinking of racial supremacists, or of people who believe they alone have God's attention.  Certainly it implies that God honors righteousness in those outside the Abrahamic covenant – otherwise the Canaanites could not have held the land while they did.  In any case, only ignorance can excuse the notion that European learned aggression and tribalism while pursuing the Bible.  The Peloponnesian Wars by themselves are a sufficient demonstration of that point. 

Assuming that my readers are, for the most part, nonindigenous as I am,  I would like to raise the question that seems to me as relevant to ourselves as to Moses.  The movements of populations, that great mysterious fact, that always full of disruption and grief and regret and are as inevitable and irreversible as the drift of continents.  Say that my ancestors fled poverty or affliction elsewhere, as the old Hebrews did, and caused poverty and dispossession here.  Granting that they were invaders, they might still have drawn conclusions from hard experience about how society could be made just, w which were generous and laudable conversion of bitterness into hope.   The most beautiful laws of Moses, when they are noticed at all, are as if shamed and discredited by the fact that he brought his tired and poor to settle in a land that was already populated  We have learned to think of our own most beautiful laws in the same way.  Are disruption and dispossession somehow redeemed by contempt for their best consequences?  Clearly, it was the inspiration of Moses to exploit what might be called the culturelessness of people who had lived for centuries as outsiders in tradition-bound Egypt, in order to make a new nation with a  distinctive religious culture which would express itself in a new social order.  In the narrative, his laws are formulated before the entry into Canaan, implying that the vision of the society preexisted the society itself – and, indeed was like a prophetic vision, always still to be realized.  If the purpose of the law is the righteousness of the individual, it purpose is also the goodness of individual and communal life.  If each member of the community obeys the commandments, then all members receive the assurance that they will not be murdered,  that their households will not be robbed or disrupted, that they will not be slandered, their children will not will not abuse or abandon them.   The relation of law to prophecy, of prohibition to liberation, is very clear. 

I have never, in the many decades I've read things about the Jewish Scriptures, ever read anything more carefully, scrupulously, fairly sympathetic to the character of the Scriptures and those who composed, assembled and maintained them than this paragraph in this essay.   For that characteristic practice alone, Marilynne Robinson's essays should be considered essential reading.   I can't think of another essayist of the past century and likely longer whose essays more deserve that status in whatever canon whatever remnant life those who aspire to a life of the mind establish.  If that sounds like an advertisement for the book, I can't do it justice.

The laws of Moses assume that the land is God's, that the Hebrews are strangers and sojourners there who cannot really own it but who enjoy it at God's pleasure (Leviticus 25:23).  The land is apportioned to the tribes, excepting the priestly Levites.  It can be sold (the assumption seems to be that this would be done under pressure of debt or poverty) but a kinsman has the right to buy it back, that is, redeem it, and restore it to its owner.  In any case, in every fiftieth year the lands are restored to the tribes and households to whom they were first given.   Every seventh year Hebrew slaves were freed, each taking with him or her enough of the master's good to “furnish him liberally” (Deuteronomy 15:14 all quotations are from the Revised Standard Version).  In thee years also all debts are to be forgiven.  Obviously these laws would have the effect of preventing accumulation of wealth and preventing as well the emergence of a caste of people who are permanently dispossessed.  Furthermore, in every seventh year the land is to have a Sabbath, to lie fallow,  “that the poor of your land may eat;  and what they leave the wild beasts may eat (Exodus 23:11).   Others are to live on what it produces without cultivation and on what has been set aside (Leviticus 25:1-7, 20-23).  At all times people are forbidden to reap the corners of their fields, to glean after they have reaped, to harvest their vineyard sand their olive trees thoroughly, to go back into the field for a sheaf they have forgotten:  “It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.  You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt;  therefore I command you to do this” (Deuteronomy 24:21-22). 

As Walter Brueggemann said in the book I've also been going through, the liberation of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, their status as freed slaves is the center around which all of their morality revolves, the means of understanding their experiences in history and, as Marilynne Robinson demonstrates in this essay, their radical economics and universal egalitarianism, including even the "Stranger" among them and even their enemies and rivals.   I agree with her that there isn't any other such national literature anywhere I've encountered.

These laws would preserve those who were poor from the kind of wretchedness More describes by giving them an assured subsistence.  While charity in Christendom was urged as a virtue – one that has always been unevenly aspired to – here the poor have their portion at the hand of God, and at the behest of law  If a commandment is something in the nature of a promise (“Ten Commandment” is an English imposition, in Hebrew they are called the Ten Words), then not only “you will not be stolen from but also “you will not steal” would be in some part fulfilled, first because the poor are given the right to take what would elsewhere have been someone else's property, and second because they are sheltered fro the extreme of desperation that drives the needy to theft.  The law of Moses so far values life above property that it forbids killing a thief who is breaking and entering by daylight (Exodus 22:2-3).  Judgment in criminal matters is based on the testimony of at least two witnesses, and not, as in premodern European civil law, on judicial torture and self-incrimination, which often led to the deaths of accused who insisted on their innocence.  In very may ways Moses would have lifted a terrible onus of manslaughter from the whole civilization.  The benefits to everyone involved in terms of dignity and peace would have been incalculable.  

And it is certainly to be noted that no conditions limit God's largesse toward the poor.  They need not be pious, or Jewish or worthy, or conspicuously in need, or intent on removing themselves from their condition of dependency.  The Bible never considers the poor otherwise than with tender respect, and this is fully as true when the speaker is “the Jewish God” as it is when the speaker is Jesus.  What laws could be more full of compassion than these?  

You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.  Exodus 23:9

Through this passage you can see that all of those whited sepulchres in the Republican Party are in violation of a commandment as set in Scripture as the famous Ten they also violate while claiming them as their own. 

You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him.  Deuteronomy 23:15-16

Anyone who asserts the Biblical character of the U. S. Constitution has to do so while ignoring that the text as given by the slave-holding "founders" and their allies in the Northern commercial class was a blatant violation of this commandment.

You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in pledge Deuteronomy 24:17

You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brethren or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns;  you shall give him his hire on the day he hears it, before the sun goes down (for he is poor, and sets his heart upon it);  lest he cry against you to the Lord and it be sin in you.   Deuteronomy 25:14-15

If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open you hand to him, and led him sufficient for his need, what ever it may be .  . You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him;  because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and all that you undertake.   For the poor will never cease out of the land therefore I command you,  You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land.  Deuteronomy 15:7-8. 10-11

Then there is a Sabbath, the day in which one may not exploit and cannot be exploited, even by one's family or oneself   

Six days you shall labor and do all your work;  but the seventh day is a sabbath to the lord your God;  in it you shall not do any work,  you , or your son, or your daughter, or your manservant , or your maidservant, or your ox, or your ass, or any of your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates,m  that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you.  You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt,  and the Lord your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm;  therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.   Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Exhaustion was as endemic as malnutrition among the laboring classes of European cultures into the twentieth century.  Moses obliged manservant and maidservant, stranger and sojourner, ox and ass, to share in God's rest one day in seven.  This is profoundly humane, quite unexampled.  Some Christian writers on the Sabbath say this law was never applied to us, though historically many Christians have in fact sabbatized earnestly, one day late.   Jesus, in the manner of a Jewish prophet, criticized the way in which the Sabbath was observed in his time, clearly feeling it had become more demanding than restorative.  This is far from a rejection of the institution itself,  nor is it to be imagined that Jesus could have wished to deprive servants of their rest any more than widow and orphans and strangers of their sustenance.  Yet all this has been done in his name because he supposedly freed us from the burden of the law.  It seems to me fair to say that the loss of Moses was the defeat of Jesus, insofar as it was the hope of Jesus to bless and relieve the poor. 

These are the laws of a passionate God.  “Impassioned” is usually used by the Jewish Publication Society to translate the word other English translations render as “jealous.”  The Hebrew stem apparently means “to grow red.”  “Jealous” comes from the same Greek root as “zealous,” and the Greek worlds that derive from it are usually translated in the New Testament as “zeal” or “zealous”  IN the earliest English uses, for example in John Wycliffe's fourteenth-century translation of the Old Testament,  “jealous” often has that meaning, suggesting ardor and devotion.  In modern translations the Hebrew word is usually translated as “zeal” when the subject is a human being (as in 1 Kings 19:10) which must indicate an awareness of the wider meaning of the word.  But “jealousy” is virtually always imputed to God.  Jealousy has evolved into a very simple and unattractive emotion, in our understanding of it,  and God is much abused for the fact of his association with it.  Since translations are forever being laundered to remove complexity and loveliness, and since tradition is not a legitimate plea in these matters, one cannot help wondering how this particular archaism manages to survive untouched.  

T
hese are the claims of an almost supernaturally moral people who, in the midst of their hard scrabble life in a largely desert place, while under constant danger and attack, invasion, exile, at least one attempt by genocide under the earliest European's attempt to do so, maintained an incredibly elevated vision of God's morality and the moral and legal requirements that their experience of being oppressed placed on them when they were in a position to be oppressors.   I can't think of many other individual writers who maintained that practice, I can't think of any national group which did so as well.

I also can't think of anything that is more likely to establish egalitarian democracy in the United States or anywhere than this view of God and the moral consequences and laws that must emanate from that vision and which are determined by it. 

*  As Marilynne Robinson points out, Christians practiced an unfair and distorted reading of the Old Testament in the past, though I would say generally that was nowhere as bad as the secular practice that targets both of them.  Perhaps it is similar to how British and English speaking atheists adopted the Anglican line of anti-Catholic calumny with little modification to apply it to all of Christianity and Judaism as well.  Perhaps this is a different example of being ware of your harsh words because someday you may need to eat them.   Perhaps it's an example of what happens when Christians violate the Commandment against bearing false witness.

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