The Radicalness Of The Mosaic Phenomeon Cannot Be Separated From the Social Outcasts And Have-Nots, Strangers, Foreigners, etc.

 Given the social setting of most churches in America, these matters may give us serious pause. It seems probable that the radicalness of the Mosaic phenomenon cannot be separated from the social setting of the hapiru.

I'll break in here to note that "hapiru" sometimes "habiru" means a number of things, none of the top drawer, high-class, or rich. Slaves, common laborers, people who hired themselves out - such as the Children of Israel were in Egypt, or it can mean outsiders, invaders, insurgents, though it doesn't say so in the dictionary I checked the meaning with, I got the feeling it can mean "foreigner" "illegal aliens". Not your respectable white-collar kind of people who won't be used on FOX or be presented badly as NPR gives Republicans their say. Not your college educated guy who brags about trying the recipe he found in the Sunday Times.

From that it may follow that the freedom of God and the politics of justice are not so easily embraced among us, given our social setting and our derivative religious interestedness. We know enough to know that our best religion is never disinterested. Here I mean only to raise the difficult point that Mosaic, prophetic religion also is not disinterested. And, indeed, that tradition of ministry can hardly be understood or practiced without embracing the interests it serves.

All of that is by way of introduction to the emergence of a deep problem in the faith and history of Israel. The revolution, both religious and political, of Moses was able to sustain itself until the year 1000 B.C. as a viable social reality. That is no mean feat when we reflect on the difficulties of maintaining recent revolutions in our own history, for example, the American, French, Russian and Chinese. By the time of Solomon in 962 (after forty years of shrewd and ambiguous leadership from David) there was a radical shift in the foundation of Israel's life and faith. While the shift had no doubt begun and been encouraged by David, the evidence is much clearer and unambiguous with Solomon. The entire program of Solomon now appears to have been a self-serving achievement with its sole purpose the self-securing of king and dynasty. It consists in what Alberto Soggin calls a program of state-sponsored syncretism, which of course means the steady abandonment of the radicalness of the Mosaic vision. It includes:

(1) A harem, which in addition to serving as a way of political marriages likely reflects a concern for self-generated fertility. (The purpose of a harem in terms of self-securing may be understood quite in contrast to the fortunes of the midwives of the Mosaic period [Exodus 1:15-22]*.)

(2) A system of tax districts in which the displacement of clans and tribes made state control more effective. (Indeed, the deliberate eradication of the tribal perception was essential to the statism of Solomon.)

(3) An elaborate bureaucracy which, in imitation of the larger empires, served to institutionalize technical reason. (And of course technical reason is inherently conservative and nearly immune to questions of justice and compassion.)

(4) A standing army so that armaments no longer depend on public opinion and authentic national interest, not even to mention the old notion of the rush of God's spirit.

(5) A fascination with wisdom which, in addition to imitating the great regimes, represented an effort to rationalize reality, i.e., to package it in manageable portions.

All of these things in the Solomonic moment transpired under the effective umbrella of the Jerusalem temple, surely the quintessence of Canaanization in Israel. George Mendenhall has rightly characterized the Solomonic achievement as the "paganization of Israel," that is, a return to the relgious and political presuppositions of the pre-Mosaic imperial situation - which is to say that the Solmonic effort was not only abandonment of the revolution but a knowing embrace of per-prophetic reality. (It is worth noting how our perceptions move. The very developments that Mendenhall describes as "paganization" are those that in another context Gerhad von Rad and others, including myself, have termed "Enlightenment." It is worth recalling this in order to see that more than one reading of the data is possible. Indeed, my own reading of it, from the perspective of the prophetic tradition, is very different from what I have done in other circumstances from a quite different perspective.)

I suspect that as fine and skilled a writer as Walter Brueggemann noticed that his own shifting and altered perception of this event in the history of Israel, shifting in time and in context, is matched by the shifting of the character of the government of Israel and, indeed, in the modern revolutions, though those tend to go bad pretty much immediately. I would count the period in which the American and French revolutions betrayed their alleged ideals, before the revolution was achieved in the American revolution (slavery, various other gross inequalities and evils which the founders and leaders of the revolution and the colonies wanted to maintain for their benfit) to almost as fast, as the French revolutionaries, like their American counterpart, mostly aristocratic, educated modern men started vying with each other for power and started killing each other in their various factions, not to mention the terrible bloodshed of the revolution, itself, the revolutionary rationalist cruelty and Chinese revolutions which, being modern, high-speed and scientifically rational, magnified the cruelties of the late 18th century in speed, numbers murdered and ruthless efficiency.

The lessons for the United States as our own quasi-democracy decays and dies - a victim of a glut of liberties to indulge our worst weaknesses such as lying and stealing, or, rather those of the elites, not our own hapiru, which seem to be deprived of the nourishment that could be theirs if they took this lesson more seriously, itself discouraged by our own Solomonic elite, right and left and in the middle.

Each of those five listed corruptions under Solomon have their counterpart in Trump America, including, of course, the last one, the packaging of ersatz reality into manageable, easily advertised and peddled packages. Like political ads, packaging political bromides which means that power flows out of the ad budget of the two parties and the two campaigns, the others there to play spoiler, mostly for the opposition to Trump.

You thought I was going to go for the easy one, the harem. Well, in a week that began with the legacy adulterer, Don jr. and his adulterous FOX liar girlfriend banshee, it was tempting to but I thought this one was more in line with this morning's post. 

 

*  15And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah; 16and he said: ‘When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, ye shall look upon the birthstool: if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.’ 17But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men-children alive. 18And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them: ‘Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men-children alive?’ 19And the midwives said unto Pharaoh: ‘Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwife come unto them.’ 20And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty. 21And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that He made them houses. 22And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying: ‘Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.’

 

Jewish Publications Society 1917