The Sins of Scripture (26 page)

The synagogue replaced the temple during the Exile. The scriptures were made central to Jewish identity and to Jewish worship. The Torah, now in its newly revised Yahwist/Elohist/Deuteronomic/Priestly version, had to be read in its entirety in the synagogue on the Sabbaths of every single year. The holy days that are interspersed in the Jewish calendar were designed to recall the Jewish heritage. Passover was a liturgical remembrance of the Exodus. In the Josiah reforms it could be celebrated only in Jerusalem. In the Exile it became a family rite with the hope that someday—perhaps next year—it could be celebrated in Jerusalem (Lev. 23:5–8). Shavuot or Pentecost, which means fifty days after Passover, celebrated and recalled the giving of the law to Moses at Mount Sinai (Lev. 23:15–21). It was a twenty-four-hour vigil for which the long Psalm 119, a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the law, was written. Rosh Hashanah or Jewish New Year was, according to the priestly writers, set for the first day of the seventh month of the Jewish year (Lev. 23:23–25). Its purpose was to provide a liturgical time to pray for the kingdom of God to come, and with it the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral lands. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was to be observed on the tenth day of the seventh month, when the sacrificial lamb was slain and its innocent blood sprinkled on the people so that they could, in a phrase that Christians would later borrow, be made clean by the blood of the Lamb, speaking yet again to that human need to be at one with God (Lev. 23:26–32). Then the eight-day celebration of the harvest called Sukkoth or Tabernacles would begin on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. There were other, minor holy days, but these were the major ones that the priestly writers incorporated into the Torah in their massive revision of the epic story of the Jews.

The priestly writers also edited the text of their epic to make certain that the
ancestors
of the Jews had observed the rules which the priestly writers were developing as the marks of Judaism. This means that the Noah story had to be edited to make sure that Noah could carry out ritualistic sacrifices without ending the existence of an entire species of animals who were supposedly on board in a single pair consisting of one male and one female. So for the purposes of sacrifices, seven pairs of some animals were put on board (Gen. 7:2). The story of manna falling in the wilderness was edited to assure us that God did not work on the Sabbath. God sent two days’ supply of manna on the day before the Sabbath so that the Jews in the wilderness did not have to violate the Sabbath by gathering the manna on the day of rest (Exod. 16:4–5).

So the Torah, the Jewish epic, achieved its present form. It is surely a human epic filled with human passion, human ignorance and human insight. It defined the people who created it. It gave to them a past that enabled them to claim their history. It projected them into a future that enabled them to live in hope. It did what epics are designed to do—namely, it interpreted life. That is not an insignificant accomplishment.

The Torah was the anchor of the scriptures and for the Jews the holiest part of the sacred story. The story was, however, still not complete. We must now chronicle the rest of its development, which was destined to include an expansion of the narrative from simply a tribal story of the Jews to a universal story of the human race. This transformation is an exciting chapter in human religious history.

THE PROPHETS, THE WRITINGS, THE DREAM

W
hile the epic of the Jewish past was being shaped into the Torah’s guiding force, the life of the Jewish people continued to move in history. This meant that the sacred story expanded not only with the revisions we have chronicled, but with new adventures that had to be absorbed. Present history, however, never achieved the status of the past. So to make something have great value for the Jews one still had to locate it in the Torah. That foundational story, though reflecting the editorial changes of a much later period, nonetheless began with creation, moved through the patriarchs, and closed with Moses. According to the Torah, however, Moses never entered the Promised Land (Deut. 34). He died after only having seen from the mountaintop the vision of that land flowing with milk and honey. The Torah was, however, destined to remain the most sacred part of the defining epic of the Jewish people.

However, to keep their developing post-Moses past inside the corporate memory of the Jews, the works of a group of people called the “former prophets” were next added to their sacred story. The writings of the former prophets—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings—were designed to give to the epic some sense of Jewish history between the death of Moses and the defining moment of the Exile.

This work was further supplemented by the fact that beginning in the eighth century before the Common Era yet another movement arose inside Judaism that was destined to change the character of the Jewish people and to stretch dramatically their sacred story. It was led by reformers called by the Jews the “latter prophets,” but outside Judaism this movement, which came to be called simply the prophetic movement, was regarded as so distinctively different from anything that developed in Judaism before that the word “prophet” tends to be reserved for these figures without any reference to their earlier antecedents. How was it that Judaism alone produced this string of incredible figures who would make a contribution to the world unparalleled among any ancient people? That is a question that we need to address. The prophets provided the bridge whereby the God of the Jews could emerge into being the universal God that the people of the Western world began to see. So it is essential to spend a brief time looking at how those reformers shaped the sacred epic.

I tend to identify a man named Nathan as the founder of this movement. His story is told in 2 Samuel. Nathan is introduced in chapter 7 of that book as a prophet who encourages David to be about the task of planning for the building of the temple. Nathan delivers the word that this project, however, is to be David’s dream, not his fulfillment. The temple is to be built by David’s son. But then in chapter 12 of 2 Samuel Nathan establishes the role of the prophet as one who speaks for God in the citadels of power.

It was Nathan who confronted David, the king, when David entered into his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and subsequently arranged for the murder of her husband, Uriah. Kings in that time were normally thought to be able to have anything they wanted. Nathan would give birth to the idea in Judaism that even the king was bound by the moral law of God. Armed with nothing more than his moral courage and a sense of divine righteousness, he stood down the most powerful king in Jewish history and bore witness to the fact that the Jewish way of life did not exempt kings from the judgment of God. It is one of the most dramatic stories in the Bible.

Nathan approached the king seeking permission to tell him a story of a grave injustice. A rich man who owned many flocks lived near a poor man who had only a single ewe lamb. This single little lamb was a family pet, eating and sleeping with the owners almost as a member of the family.

One day the rich man had a guest for whom it was required that he prepare a banquet. Instead of going to his own flocks for a lamb to slaughter, he went to the home of the poor man and took his pet lamb, which he killed, dressed, roasted and set before his guest.

When David heard the story he was filled with wrath and said, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” (2 Sam. 12:5).

Nathan, then staring straight into the king’s eyes, said, “Thou art the man”(v. 7, KJV).

David, in a precedent-setting act that established the power of the prophets, publicly repented and accepted the judgment and the punishment pronounced on him by Nathan. The Jewish nation would never be the same.

Elijah in the eighth century institutionalized that prophetic role when he took on King Ahab and his wife Jezebel (1 Kings 17ff.). In time the prophetic movement produced a group of people known as the “writing prophets,” who are unique in the history of the world. It was these prophets whose works were ultimately grafted into the biblical story, bringing a whole new dimension to that still growing epic. The tribal history of the Jews was now joined by penetrating prophetic insights into the meaning of life itself.

A man named Isaiah was the most dominant figure in the movement. He served as the advisor to several kings in Jerusalem in the generations before the fall of that city to the Babylonians. Jeremiah came next and was the prophet who lived at the time of Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians. As we mentioned earlier, he was probably a force behind the Deuteronomic revision of the Jewish epic. He portrayed himself as a weeping, depressed, somewhat tragic figure who watched his nation collapse. Ezekiel the priest/ prophet then took up the torch. He went into captivity in Babylon and was, as we have noted, the major player behind the priestly revision of the Jewish epic that was instrumental in guiding the Jews through the Exile without losing their identity.

Other voices, whose writings were shorter in length but not necessarily in power, began to walk in this pathway of writing giants, adding their penetrating voices to the expanding text of the Jewish epic story. A man named Hosea led this tier of prophets. He was the prophet who saw in his own domestic crisis a new insight into God. He was also the prophetic figure who made love the central meaning of God. His work served to draw his nation beyond the level of survival and into the life of serving and caring. It was an enormous step in spiritual development.

Then came Amos, who drove the values of the Jewish epic into the social arena. Amos suggested that human justice was nothing but the worship of God being lived out among the people and that divine worship was nothing but human justice being offered to God. He too added a new dimension to the Jewish epic: the poor were never allowed after Amos to be invisible.

Next came Micah, who pretended that he was something like a “country lawyer” called to put Israel on trial for unfaithfulness. The case was tried before a jury of the mountains and hills, so that God, the Judge, could utter the ultimate command for Jewish worshipers: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness [mercy], and to walk humbly with your God?” (Mic. 6:8). The Jewish epic was becoming something more than just a collection of national self-serving heroic tales.

Two other prophetic voices deep in the Hebrew tradition would exercise enormous influence upon these people and would in the process elevate the epic of the Jews to new dimensions. Both were unnamed prophets whose writings got attached to the scrolls of earlier prophets, and so they are called respectively Second Isaiah and Second Zechariah. Both planted the seeds that were to become dramatically influential later in Jewish history.

Second Isaiah, whose writings are believed to constitute chapters 40–55 of the present-day book of Isaiah, developed a mythological figure that he called the “Servant” of the Lord or sometimes the “Suffering Servant.” This figure, most scholars believe, was designed to be a theological symbol for the whole Jewish nation—the embodiment, if you will, of a new and dramatically different vocation for the Jewish people. This prophet saw no hope for the restoration of the popular Jewish dream of power and earthly grandeur. The Jewish epic was destined to be bent by this writer in a remarkably different direction. The role of the “Servant” was to bring wholeness to human life by absorbing life’s pain, accepting life’s abuse and entering life’s evil. He would drain the anger from people’s souls with all of its destructive power and restore the world to health. No ancient epic had ever conceived of such a role for any tribal people. The Jewish epic was developing a pathway in uncharted waters. The creation of this image of a national hero inside the Jewish epic would lay the groundwork for people hundreds of years later to interpret the memory of Jesus as living within a legitimate expectation of the Jewish people, for Jesus and this “Servant” figure were destined to be deeply intertwined.

Second Zechariah, whose writings are believed to constitute chapters 9–14 of the book of Zechariah, also wrote about a mythical figure, who once again was a symbol for the whole Jewish nation. Second Zechariah’s hero was called the “Shepherd King of Israel.” He was set upon by those whose greed for increased wealth led them into the business of buying and selling animals in the temple. When the traders were opposed by this “Shepherd King,” they rid the land of him for the sum of thirty pieces of silver, which, as guilt money, was hurled back into the temple (Zech. 11:4–14). This picture of Zechariah’s “Shepherd King” would be influential in shaping the Jewish epic, which in turn defined the Jewish worldview and the Jewish expectations. The work of both of these unknown figures would in time be understood quite differently from what the writers intended by simple believers, who did not recognize that epics were not created in a superstitious way. Instead of understanding that the memory of Jesus was simply interpreted through the lens of Second Isaiah’s “Servant” and Second Zechariah’s “Shepherd King,” these people began to suggest that the theistic God had inspired these unnamed voices to prophesy events that would take place in the future, events that Jesus would miraculously fulfill. The epic of the Jews was beginning to turn into magic, and what had come into being as tribal history was turning into the “Word of God.”

Is that view of an epic story even a possibility that we should entertain? Hardly! Epics are never literally true. They contain tales of supernatural power but are always designed to show divine favor being displayed toward the tribe that created them. What these unique Jewish prophets did, however, was to reveal that inside the people who created this original epic a new dimension of thought was emerging that was accompanied by a different value system unique in human history.

It was the destiny of this minority within the Jewish community to see the world from a universal perspective, to escape their tribal limits, to entertain global understandings, to seek transcendence and to transform national history into a vision of service for others instead of power over others. They were even able to allow their epic to reflect these minority positions. In time Jewish liturgies incorporated the Jewish epic into the worship life of the people, and they invested it with an aura of sacredness. But the important thing was, they incorporated it
all
. Yes, it included tales of Jewish grandeur, of great nations like Egypt being pulverized by the power of Israel’s God, of deliverance for the favored people accomplished by the mighty hand of their tribal protector, who could split great bodies of water to allow the favored ones to walk through the seas on dry land and then rain upon them heavenly bread to prevent starvation in the wilderness. It incorporated the national ambition to conquer the land of others, to make it their home, calling it the Promised Land. They even suggested in their epic that God had committed this land to them as the descendants of those ancestors who, they claimed, lived on that land hundreds of years earlier.

The sacred story of the Jews, however, also included the prophetic voices that saw love as the primary nature of God, saw social justice as the goal of God and saw the necessity of having the covenant marked not with power images exclusively but with their responsibility to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with their God. They also included in this far-reaching sacred story the divine calling to live for others, to absorb pain, to bear abuse, in order to drain the hostility out of life and thus to create wholeness. In these incredible portraits they heard the call of their God and knew that the word of their God had been heard in the midst of their sacred story. It never occurred to them to mask the warts or to diminish the evil that their epic included. Their genius was not that they were somehow pure or morally superior, but that they allowed minority voices to shape their national epic and to enable a different word to be heard in their epic than in any other epic in human history. They purged neither the evil nor the wonder from their history. That is why our Bible today still sends out such mixed messages.

To complete this brief but sweeping analysis of the forces that conspired to expand the Hebrew epic in such different directions, let me add that contrary to religious propaganda, some parts of this sacred story we call the Bible are not even inspiring. It includes some works written by petty people, who are by and large unknown because what they had to say did not transcend their day. I think of names like Nahum, Obadiah and Haggai, for example. Few people, even among the educated clergy, can cite one detail out of these biblical works.

There are also in this remarkable epic what might be called protest stories—that is, Jewish books written once more by minority voices, designed to counter the prevailing religious ideas. One of them sought to answer such questions as: Why do the righteous suffer? Why is the world not fair? The purpose of this writer was to counter the answers of popular religion, which asserted that God blesses the good and punishes the evil. If a good man suffers, is it proof that he has hidden sins? That was the common explanation. Not so said the unknown poet who told the ancient tale of a very good man named Job, who suffered calamity after calamity and who was urged by his “comforters” to confess his secret evildoing and to ask God to withdraw the divine wrath. Job refused, and his voice of protest brought into being a new understanding of both God and suffering.