God's Problem (16 page)

Critical historians have long thought that this description was composed after the fact, that Luke, writing after the fall of Jerusalem in 70
CE
, knew full well what had happened and what it was like. He does not, however, give a full account of the suffering inflicted upon the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem when the Roman general Titus laid the city under siege in an attempt to quell a violent uprising against Rome. We do have an account of what it was like during the siege, however, from an extrabiblical source, the Jewish historian Josephus, who was present at the siege and also knew Jews who survived it.

According to Josephus, things got very bad within the walls of the city: there were periodic bloody coups, daily murders, and massive starvation. The food shortage became so severe that family members were known to steal food from one another, from the very mouths of the weak. In the most horrendous account he provides, Josephus indicates that one woman, in the throes of desperate hunger, murdered her infant son and cooked him in her oven. She ate half of his body right away. When some men passing by the house smelled the roasting flesh, they came in to steal her meat. She showed them the half-consumed body and told them to go ahead and eat what was there. In horror they left her alone with the corpse of her partially eaten son, trembling as they went off to find food elsewhere.
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The siege of Jerusalem was cruel. This woman’s heinous act was cruel. She suffered; her son suffered. And this is only one of millions of stories of unfathomable sufferings, brought on by human beings against human beings.

Reactions to Suffering

How did writers of Scripture react when they, or others they knew, experienced horrible suffering at the hands of others? As you might imagine, there was a huge array of reactions, just as there is among people today: outrage, grief, frustration, helplessness. Some writers thought that suffering only made them stronger; some wanted God to avenge their pain by inflicting pain on others; others saw their
misery as a test of their faith; and still others saw it as a sign that the end of time would soon arrive.

Some of the most striking reactions occur in the writings of Jeremiah, a prophet that we have already briefly considered. Jeremiah is often called “the suffering prophet”
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because of the opposition and persecution he endured. Jeremiah wrote his prophecies, in part, during the time that the southern kingdom of Judah was under Babylonian attack. Many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem believed that the city was inviolable: that since God himself dwelt in the Temple in Jerusalem, the Temple built by Solomon some four hundred years earlier, God would protect it, and the people who worshiped in it, from any harm. Jeremiah took just the opposite view, arguing that the Temple would bring no security (see especially Jeremiah 7) and insisting that if the people wanted to survive the Babylonian onslaught, they should surrender to the enemy.

These were not popular teachings, and as a result Jeremiah suffered both verbal abuse and physical persecution. His reactions to his sufferings are found in a number of poetic “laments” scattered throughout chapters 11–20. Like others who have suffered horribly, Jeremiah sometimes wishes he had never been born (cf. Job 3):

At other times, Jeremiah prays for divine wrath to descend upon his enemies, who schemed evil against him in his complete ignorance:

Such reactions will sound familiar to avid readers of the book of Psalms, which contains a number of “laments,” that is, psalms that complain to God about the author’s suffering and implore him to do something about it, or express a sense of trust that he will do so. Many of these psalms drip with pathos, making them favorite biblical passages of those who themselves are overtaken by personal adversity.

Some of these Psalms are even more explicitly prayers that God will inflict horrible judgments upon the author’s enemies. These are not written by those who believe in turning the other cheek; they are eager for vengeance to be executed.