Читать книгу Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage - Matthew Levering - Страница 8

As I have emphasized, behind the creation of the cosmos stands God’s purpose to accomplish the wondrous marriage of God and his people. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik tells the story that when he was a boy, his Rabbi told him, “the Almighty waits for mankind to appear and kneel before Him, recognize His kingdom and kingship, and give him the crown. This great event of coronation will occur at some point in the future; we do not know when and how. . . . Then the whole world will find its redemption.”86 This crowning of God as King is not merely a case of inferiors (humans) recognizing their true superior (God). Rather, it will be the consummation of an intense and ages-long romance instigated by God, fulfilling the human person’s deepest yearnings for communion with God (and each other). As Soloveitchik puts it, “There is a romance between man and God. Man has an uncontrollable, powerful longing, an invisible craving and desire to unite with God, to be close to Him, to submerge in Him.”87

But is this desire for intimacy with God actually a good thing for human beings? If the graced purpose of creation is the marriage of God and humankind—and Soloveitchik suggests that such profound intimacy does indeed constitute the original purpose, although he does not use the term “marriage”88—is the pursuit of this purpose something that humans should desire? In a rather flippant manner, Hans Küng has called into question the desirability of such intimate union with God: “Does a reasonable man today want to become God?”89 It may be that the lack of desire partly comes about because we know that we are sinners, unworthy of intimate communion with God. Recall the response of the prophet Isaiah to seeing a vision of God (YHWH) enthroned in glory. Far from rejoicing, Isaiah responds in agony: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5). It may also be that, as Jon D. Levenson says, we have lost a proper understanding of love: “where love is understood as primarily a sentiment, the dimension of deeds and of the service that the deeds bespeak is lost or radically transformed.”90 Levenson justifiably fears that the sentimental notion of love has resulted in “the perception that all talk of God’s love or of loving God is, at base, a treacly thing that appeals only to the emotionally weak,” making of religion a mere “crutch.”91

All this is troubling. Even more troublingly, however, it may appear from Scripture that God has acted like an abusive husband toward his covenantal bride whom he professes to love. Levenson observes, “The severity of the punishments that Hosea’s symbolic wife is to endure has understandably attracted the attention of feminist scholars.”92 It may seem that “the dominant position of men is reinforced by God’s role as husband,” even if the male citizens of Israel were “expected to identify . . . also with Israel as God’s wife.”93 In the prophecy of Jeremiah, God complains bitterly against the spiritual adultery of his people Israel.94 Indeed, God threatens to punish Israel in ways that are drawn from the cultural language of powerful husbands threatening unfaithful and powerless wives.95 At the same time, promising restoration, God assures his people, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel!” (Jer 31:3–4). God will do this even though the people of Israel broke their covenant with him—a covenant so intimate that, as God says, “I was their husband” (Jer 31:32). Not only was God their husband, but God in his “everlasting love” and “faithfulness” still is their husband. God will act to place this relationship on an everlasting foundation.

In Hosea’s prophecy, similarly, God warns of a coming tribulation, a dire punishment of his people’s spiritual adultery. The prophet describes God threatening his unfaithful “wife” by stripping her naked and having no pity upon her children.96 Yet, God also promises Israel that “I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:19–20).97

The Letter to the Hebrews says bluntly, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31). In our fallen condition, few people cross the boundary of death lightly, and perhaps even fewer lightly give over their lives to the will of God. Yet, Thomas Joseph White is correct to affirm that nonetheless “the human person is marked by longings for the infinite. Each human being has a hidden natural desire to see God”; we can be satisfied by nothing less than God.98 These longings have to do with the kind of creatures that we are, with the graced call to an intimate dwelling with God that we received from the beginning and to which the whole of Scripture testifies.99 In his Confessions, Augustine perceives that “you [God] have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”100

Yet, what if the God who reveals himself through the prophets is not worthy of our love, because he is terrifyingly abusive? Can we still desire the eschatological marriage of God and his people? In response, this chapter proceeds in two steps. First, I survey the New Testament scholar Brant Pitre’s popular book on Jesus as the Bridegroom Messiah who fulfills the marriage covenant promised by God to Israel through the prophets. In this section, I also draw upon Scott Hahn’s work on covenant and kinship, since it influences Pitre’s perspective. Second, I set forth the concerns of the Old Testament scholar Gerlinde Baumann in order to give full force to the fact that the prophets at times portray God in the role of a dominant male who threatens or implements violence against an unfaithful wife or woman. In the face of this abusive imagery, I suggest a twofold solution.

First, I retrieve the allegorical exegesis of such passages advocated by the Church Fathers (notably, in the present chapter, Jerome). Second, I take note of historical-critical research that shows that in its original historical context this imagery primarily indicated the importance of women for the survival of the people. The people of Israel—including the men—were represented by a woman in the prophetic imagery in part because the very survival of the people depended upon women bearing and raising children. Sadly, the people were represented by the image of an adulterous woman (among other images) because in their covenantal relationship to God, the people “are neither a devoted bride nor an obedient son. They are, rather, a people acting like a wife who flagrantly and chronically cheats on her husband, manically pursuing sexual gratification at the expense of covenantal fidelity, or like a son who ungratefully and obstinately refuses to serve his loving, giving father.”101 The Scriptures of Israel portray not a mutually loving marriage between God and his people, but rather an unfaithful people and a faithful God. Levenson comments, “The love, then, between the divine husband and the nation that is his wife is real but only in the past and in the future. . . . The marriage is an ideal recollected from the idyllic past and a possibility promised for the restored future. It is not the current reality, but reality it surely is and shall be again.”102

These points are not likely to change Baumann’s mind, since the presence of abusive imagery is enough to convince her that Scripture is not inspired by the living God. But I suggest that this approach should suffice to redirect attention to the main point of the prophetic texts, which is—as Pitre says—the everlastingly glorious, entirely unmerited, and supremely fulfilling marriage of God with his people. This marriage is inaugurated, though not yet consummated, by Jesus Christ.

I. Brant Pitre’s Jesus the Bridegroom

Brant Pitre emphasizes that far from being impersonal or aloof, as we sometimes fear the invisible and immaterial God must be, the God of Israel wishes to draw his people into a relationship so intimate with him as to be comparable only to the most intimate human relationship, marriage.103 In a brief opening chapter, Pitre argues that “from an ancient Jewish perspective, the God who created the universe is a Bridegroom, and all of human history is a kind of divine love story.”104 What does this have to do with the Torah, which recounts that God gave Moses a law at Mount Sinai? Upon marrying a bride, no bridegroom would simply hand her a set of rules.

Nahum Sarna has pointed out that covenants, in the ancient Near East, carried legal weight and served to confirm the behavior owed by the two parties (typically unequals) to each other.105 Pitre, indebted to Scott Hahn’s Kinship by Covenant, adds that “[f]rom a biblical perspective, a ‘covenant’ was a sacred family bond between persons, establishing between them a permanent and sacred relationship.”106 For his part, Hahn focuses attention on the ways in which the covenants involve God, as Father, welcoming his people into a relationship of sonship with him. With good reason, Hahn focuses on the biblical “drama of the development of the covenant relationship between father and son, that is, between God and his people.”107 He points out, among other things, that in Exodus 4:22, God calls Israel his “first-born son,” and in Exodus 19:5 God exhorts Israel that if it keeps the covenant (whose stipulations God reveals at Sinai), Israel “shall be my own possession among all peoples.” When Israel seals its covenant with God through Moses in Exodus 24, God calls the elders of the people up the mountain to behold him and eat and drink in his presence as his family.108

Hahn develops these points for the purposes of a broader account of priesthood in ancient Israel, but what I find important is the “familial shape” that he identifies in each of the covenants found in Scripture.109 To show the way in which “kinship bonds were extended by covenant to outsiders,” Hahn draws upon the work of Old Testament scholars such as Frank Moore Cross and Dennis McCarthy.110 As Hahn notes, “In a kinship covenant, kinship bonds are extended to bind two parties in a mutual relationship based upon a joint commitment under divine sanctions.”111 Not all covenants are kinship covenants, but Hahn makes a persuasive case that it is the “familial or relational dimension that integrates and binds together the other dimensions of the covenant that scholars over the past century have identified (i.e., the ethical, cultic, social, juridical, and theological dimensions).”112 The basic kinds of covenants—kinship, treaty, and grant—can be illumined in Scripture by the relationship of God as Father to his people Israel, whom he covenantally unites to himself as his son.

Pitre takes up Hahn’s insight by remarking that at the covenant at Sinai (sealed in Exodus 24), Moses threw sacrificial blood on the altar and on the elders, thereby symbolizing that “the Creator of the world and the twelve tribes of Israel are now in a ‘flesh and blood’ relationship—that is, they are family,” which explains the ensuing covenantal meal in God’s presence.113 By turning to the prophets of Israel, however, Pitre takes things a step further. He explains, “From the prophets’ point of view, what happened at Sinai was not just the giving of a set of laws, but the spiritual wedding of God and Israel,” so that God becomes Bridegroom and Israel becomes Bride.114 Among the prophetic passages that he cites are Jeremiah 2:2, where the Lord recalls Israel’s “love as a bride”; and Ezekiel 16:8, where the Lord recalls that “I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you . . . and you became mine.” In Hosea, too, God looks back to the days when he redeemed Israel from Egyptian slavery and Israel answered him as his bride; and God looks forward to restoring and renewing this marital relationship once and for all: “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband.’ . . . And I will betroth you to me for ever” (Hos 2:16, 19).

The point for Pitre is that these prophets present Israel, at the time of the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 24), as God’s youthful bride, with God in the role of covenantal Bridegroom. The covenant establishes not simply an adoptive sonship (with Israel becoming the son of the divine Father), although it certainly does establish such a relationship. Even more fundamentally, the covenant establishes a relationship that is so intimate as to be comparable to the love, mutuality, and friendship of a marriage.

How do the laws given to Moses fit in with this portrait? Who would give his wife a set of laws as a wedding gift? Pitre notes that the laws are not mere arbitrary rules; rather, they describe the contours of an intimate relationship. At the core of this relationship is the commandment against idolatry. To be covenantally married to God means to know the one to whom one is married; and Israel is covenantally married to the one Creator God. When Israel worships other gods, therefore, Israel treats them as only God should be treated. Just as the prophets depict God as loving Israel so much as to be Israel’s Bridegroom, wishing to draw Israel into perfect intimacy with himself, so also the prophets depict Israel as not simply God’s Bride but as God’s unfaithful Bride, due preeminently to the sin of idolatry, but also due to Israel’s other sins that undermine its relationship with God. The paradigmatic biblical example of Israel’s idolatry is its fashioning and worship of a golden calf—symbolic of an Egyptian god. As Pitre points out, what the people do after worshiping the golden calf is part of the problem: they “sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play” (Exod 32:6). In his commentary on Exodus, Thomas Dozeman notes that the meaning of this verse is that their worship “quickly devolves into ritual chaos, suggesting a sexual orgy.”115 After explaining what the Hebrew words discreetly convey, Dozeman remarks further: “The manufacturing of the golden calf already violated the altar laws in 20:22–26. Now the sexual orgy of the people further violates the more specific prohibition against ascending an altar, lest one’s nakedness is uncovered (20:26). Exodus 32:25 adds to the chaos of the ritual, describing the people as ‘out of control.’”116

In pagan worship, temple liturgies and sexual orgies were not uncommonly linked; thus when the Bride of YHWH worships a false god, it is not surprising to find this action linked to sexual acts outside of marriage. The prophets describe this situation in terms of spiritual adultery. Pitre cites a number of prophetic texts to make this point. Examples include Isaiah 1:4, which describes Israel as “estranged” from the Lord, having “forsaken” him; Isaiah 1:21, which describes Israel as “a harlot”; Jeremiah 2:32–33, which compares Israel to a “bride” who has become adulterous; Jeremiah 3:20, in which the Lord complains that “as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so have you been faithless to me, O house of Israel”; and Ezekiel 16:17–18, in which God describes his bride Israel as a “harlot” who took his gifts and made idols out of them. God sums up his charge against Israel in terms of failure to be his faithful bride. Desiring a relationship of profound covenantal intimacy and faithfulness with Israel, God instead is forced to condemn Israel: “Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband!” (Ezek 16:32). No wonder that when God wants to symbolize this situation, he commands Hosea to “take to yourself a wife of harlotry” (Hos 1:2) and to “love . . . an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (Hos 3:1). Hosea obeys the Lord’s command, thereby acting out the situation of God and Israel. Beyond mere condemnation, Hosea is preparing for the day when Israel will truly be God’s faithful Bride: “in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My Baal.’ . . . I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:16, 20). The knowledge will be so intimate as to be comparable to the sexual “knowledge” of husband and wife.

Pitre’s book focuses on the coming of the Messiah, as the “Bridegroom God of Israel” whose purpose is to establish the marriage of God and his people once and for all.117 Pitre is looking ahead, then, to the fulfillment of God’s promises. The purpose of God’s dealings with his people is to make us sharers in his life, not to intimidate us with rules and punishments. Pitre again cites numerous prophets to indicate the promise of God to renew forever his covenantal marriage with his people. In addition to Hosea 2:16–20, he mentions Isaiah 54, where the Lord promises that he will not permit to endure the breach in the covenantal marriage caused by Israel’s sins. Isaiah proclaims, “For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name. . . . For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. . . . In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you” (Isa 54:5–6, 8). It has seemed that God would abandon Israel, because of the punishment of exile caused by sin; but God, as Israel’s covenantal husband, will restore his bride to her dignity forever, with “everlasting love.” Likewise, Pitre cites Jeremiah 31, where God recalls the “covenant which they [Israel] broke, though I was their husband” and where God promises a new covenant that will forever ensure that Israel obeys God’s covenantal law and enjoys the blessings of covenantal marriage: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:32–33). Lastly, Pitre cites the promise of God in Ezekiel 16, one of the chapters in which (as noted above) God condemns Israel as a spiritual adulterer. In this chapter, God promises dire punishment, but God concludes with words that foretell the full renewal of the covenantal marriage in perfect mercy: “I will remember my covenant with you [Israel] in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant” (Ezek 16:60).

Rightly, then, Pitre speaks of Israel’s God as “not a distant deity or an impersonal power, but the Bridegroom who wants his bride to ‘know’ (Hebrew yada’) him intimately, in a spiritual marriage that is not only faithful and fruitful, but ‘everlasting’ (Hebrew ‘olam).”118 This restoration of the covenant will redeem Israel not merely juridically, but by truly renewing and perfecting God’s people in a profoundly intimate relationship with him. God never ceases to be the Bridegroom, even though his bride—as a sinful people (like all the peoples of the world)—turns away from him. The very purpose of the biblical story of salvation is for God to bring about a marriage of God and humans that is unbreakable and whose intimacy cannot be exaggerated. The goal of human history is for the Bridegroom to take to himself his pure Bride, bringing about the spiritual consummation of the ineffably glorious marriage.

In this regard, Pitre adds that “ancient Jewish interpreters also read the Song of Songs as a symbolic description of the future wedding between the Bridegroom God and his chosen people.”119 Jacob Neusner remarks in the introduction to his translation of the Song of Songs Rabbah (composed around 500 AD), “The sages who compiled Song of Songs Rabbah read the Song of Songs as a sequence of statements of urgent love between God and Israel, the holy people.”120 The Song of Songs appeared to the Rabbis to be a dialogue between God the Bridegroom and Israel the Bride. Neusner states that “Israel’s holy life is metaphorized through the poetry of love and beloved, Lover and Israel.”121 Pitre cites two sayings of Rabbi Akiba (c. 50–135 AD), in which Rabbi Akiba condemns any merely sexual reading of the Song of Songs and, furthermore, argues that the Song of Songs is the holiest of all the texts of Israel’s Scriptures. This is because it portrays the very center of all Scripture: the desire of the Bridegroom Creator God for spiritual union with his covenantal people Israel.

Pitre notes some parallels between the Song of Songs and the Torah/Psalms that ancient Jewish interpreters found to be significant. For example, in Song of Songs 1:7 and elsewhere, we find reference to “you whom my soul loves”; this reference led interpreters back to Deuteronomy 6:5, where Moses commands Israel to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Lest this connection seems a stretch, Song of Songs 1:4 offers the possibility of a similar connection. It states, “The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exult and rejoice in you.” In Psalm 118:24, we are commanded to rejoice in the day the Lord has made. Song of Songs 1:7 also asks the beloved where he pastures his flock; and this query was linked by the interpreters with Psalm 23’s presentation of Israel as God’s flock: “The Lord is my shepherd” (Ps 23:1). Again, Song of Songs 6:3 states, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he pastures his flock among the lilies.” The interpreters drew a connection to the Lord who is Israel’s shepherd and who has promised to be Israel’s and to take Israel to himself: “I will take you for my people, and I will be your God” (Exod 6:7). For the validity of these connections, Pitre cites the Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis. In her commentary on the Song of Songs, Davis contends that the Song of Songs “is thick with words and images drawn from earlier books. By means of this ‘recycled’ language, the poet places this love song firmly in the context of God’s passionate and trouble relationship with humanity (or, more particularly, with Israel), which is the story the rest of the Bible tells.”122

Pitre adds that, in fact, the bride in the Song of Songs is described in terms of the Temple, the city of Jerusalem, and the land of Israel. Furthermore, he points out that the Song of Songs “never actually describes the consummation of the marriage.”123 In this regard the attitude of the bride in the Song of Songs, ever losing and seeking her Bridegroom, is summed up by the concluding verse of the Song of Songs: “Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountain of spices” (Song 8:14). As Pitre notes, Jewish interpreters saw this as descriptive of the day of the restoration of Israel, when the people of Israel would be finally gathered in Jerusalem to offer proper worship. On this day, the Bridegroom will restore Israel by forgiving its sins and consummating the spiritual marriage of God and Israel.

In the above discussion of the marriage of God and Israel, Pitre is preparing for the main chapters of his book, which treat Jesus as the Bridegroom Messiah of Israel. When he turns to this theme, he first directs attention to John 3:28–29, where John the Baptist says, “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom.” In the Gospel of John, as John the Baptist makes clear, Jesus Christ is the bridegroom of Israel, the one who comes to consummate the marriage of God and his people. In articulating this point, Pitre is indebted to Jocelyn McWhirter’s The Bridegroom Messiah and the People of God: Marriage in the Fourth Gospel.124 Agreeing with Gilberte Baril that the Gospel of John presents Jesus as “the bridegroom of the Messianic nuptials,” McWhirter emphasizes that “all Christians should be able to accept and appreciate this [marriage] metaphor since John does not use it to reinforce oppressive gender roles.”125

Earlier in the Gospel of John, John the Baptist identifies Jesus as the “Lamb of God” (John 1:36). Along these lines, as noted above, the book of Revelation teaches that the consummated Israel, the Bride prepared for her Bridegroom, is “the wife of the Lamb” (Rev 21:9), the wife of Jesus Christ. When the Seer is given a vision of the new creation, he reports the following: “And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people’” (Rev 21:2–3). The great promises of the Old Testament prophecies are echoed here and fulfilled by God.

In a vision near the beginning of the book of Revelation, the Seer identifies Jesus as a “Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Rev 5:6). He is worthy of worship, which attests to his divine identity (see Rev 5:13). Thus, Jesus is the divine Bridegroom who accomplishes what God has promised to do for Israel in his covenants and prophecies. Jesus extends the marriage of God and Israel to include the nations in covenantal Israel, now reconfigured around the Messiah.

Is this perspective on the Messianic marriage of God and humanity found solely in the Johannine literature? According to Pitre, the answer is no. The accounts of the Last Supper in the Synoptic Gospels indicate that Jesus intended to inaugurate “the new wedding covenant spoken of by the prophets.”126 In all three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus at the Last Supper speaks of the wine as his covenantal blood: his “blood of the covenant” (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24) or “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). In Matthew’s and Mark’s Last Supper accounts, Jesus makes it clear that his blood will be spilled for the forgiveness of sins; and, indeed, Luke makes this clear as well, even if not necessarily in the Last Supper account. Pitre connects this with Exodus 24, where Moses seals the covenant at Sinai between God and Israel by throwing the sacrificial blood of animals upon the altar and upon the people (as noted above). In addition, Jesus’ talk of “the new covenant in my blood” alludes to the covenant promised by Jeremiah 31, where, as Pitre has already pointed out, God refers to himself as Israel’s “husband.”

Along these lines, the New Testament scholar Joseph Fitzmyer observes in his commentary on Luke 22:20 that “[t]he ‘new covenant’ is an allusion to Jer 31:31, the promise made by Yahweh of a pact that he would make with ‘the house of Israel and the house of Judah.’”127 Fitzmyer grasps the cultic or sacrificial implications of Jesus’ words, but he does not make the connection that the purpose of the sacrificial action (the spilling of Jesus’ blood) is to establish once and for all the covenantal marriage of God and humanity. Instead, Pitre draws upon a book published in the 1930s that makes the point that Passover itself was nuptial and therefore Jesus’ Passover action is intended to be nuptial as well, with respect to the marital union of God and his people.128

In addition to the Synoptics’ Last Supper accounts, Pitre has recourse to the parable of the Sons of the Bridechamber, found in Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5. In Mark 2:19, Jesus responds to the people who question him about why his disciples do not fast: “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.” The same point is made in this parable in Matthew and Luke. Jesus adds that “[t]he days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day” (Mark 2:20). This, too, is a clear reference to the future events that will happen to Jesus. Pitre cites the New Testament scholar Adela Yarbro Collins to argue that Jesus intends to make clear that his very presence among his disciples means that there is preparation for an imminent wedding.129 Pitre also clarifies the meaning of οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ νυμφῶνος, which the RSV rather misleadingly translates simply as “wedding guests.” The literal translation of this phrase is “sons of the bridechamber,” an expression that is not found in the Old Testament but that appears in Rabbinic texts. The “sons of the bridechamber” are not simply all invitees to the wedding, but rather they are particular friends of the bridegroom who help to prepare him for the wedding and who attend upon him at the wedding. If the wedding of God and Israel has finally arrived in the Bridegroom Jesus, then it makes sense that Jesus’ disciples do not perform the normal fasting required by Jewish law or custom.

Why should we think that Jesus, in describing himself as the “bridegroom,” has in view a marriage of God and his people consummated on his Cross? As we have seen, Pitre has already suggested that this is the implicit meaning of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper about “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). Admittedly, examination of the passages in the Old Testament that explicitly foretell a Messiah indicates that (in the words of the New Testament scholar Morna Hooker) “[t]here is no precedent in the Old Testament for referring to any ‘messianic’ figure as a bridegroom, but the image is used of God (Isa. 54.4–8; 62.5; Ezek. 16.7ff.).”130 Pitre’s point about the Messianic “bridegroom,” however, holds firm when the explicitly Messianic passages are canonically combined with the passages that depict the restoration of Israel in terms of God’s promise fully to establish the covenantal marriage of God and his people. In claiming for himself the status of the “bridegroom,” Jesus in the Synoptic accounts of this parable also points toward his Cross, through his reference to the day when the “bridegroom” will be “taken away” from his disciples. Pitre unpacks the connection of the day of the Cross with the day of the consummation of the marriage between God and his people. Specifically, Pitre states that during the seven-day wedding celebration that was characteristic of Jewish culture at this time, “[o]n the night of consummation, the bridegroom would leave his friends and family and enter into what was known as the ‘bridal chamber’ . . . in order to be united to his bride, not to emerge again until morning.”131

The high point of the seven-day wedding feast, then, was when the bridegroom left his friends; and this is precisely what Jesus says that he will do. Thus, Pitre concurs with the New Testament scholar Craig Keener’s remark (about Matthew 9:14–17) that “Jesus is the groom of God’s people in the coming messianic banquet. . . . The ‘taking’ of the bridegroom, of course, is a veiled reference to the impending crucifixion.”132 The bridal chamber of the marriage of God and humanity, therefore, is the Cross, where Jesus spills his “blood of the covenant.” By means of this action, Jesus renews and perfects the covenantal marriage of God and his people that was sacrificially sealed at Sinai but to which Israel could not live up. In this action, Jesus takes on the role of Israel’s bridegroom, a role that only God can truly have. Pitre cites Joseph Ratzinger on this point: “Jesus identifies himself here as the ‘bridegroom’ of God’s promised marriage with his people and, by doing so, he mysteriously places his own existence, himself, within the mystery of God.”133 As Pitre observes, this is one of Jesus’ clearest claims to divinity. Jesus Christ is God come to consummate his marriage with humanity. In making this argument, Pitre includes smaller details such as the crown of thorns (Mark 15:17; Matt 27:29; Luke 22:11) that Jesus wore on the Cross, since a Jewish bridegroom wore “a crown on his wedding day.”134 The fact that on the day of his crucifixion, according to John 19:23, Jesus was dressed in a seamless robe also relates to Jesus’ status as Israel’s bridegroom. In accord with the covenantal signification of marriage, a Jewish bridegroom dressed like a priest, and the high priest’s robe was seamless (see Exodus 28:31–32).

If Israel could not live up to the demands of this marriage—namely the demands of holiness—how can Christ’s bride the Church live up to these demands? On the one hand, humanly speaking the members of the Church are sinners and cannot live up to the demands of holiness. But on the other hand, Jesus’ sacrificial blood on the Cross accomplishes the forgiveness of sins and provides an ongoing fount of reconciliation for his people. Furthermore, as Pitre remarks, the “blood and water” that come forth from the crucified Jesus’ side in John 19:34 has been read as a parallel with the coming forth of Eve from Adam’s side; and the Church comes forth from Christ’s side when from Christ’s side symbolically flow the mysteries of baptism and the Eucharist. Pitre finds, therefore, that the Church is permanently married to Christ in holiness precisely insofar as Christ is continually giving the Church “supernatural life.”135

Similarly, although the New Testament scholar Raymond Brown thinks there is likely no connection to the Genesis account of Eve coming forth from Adam’s side—and although he considers that baptism and the Eucharist likely are only a secondary symbolic meaning of the text—Brown agrees that the water and blood symbolize supernatural life. In light of John 7:37–39, the water stands for the “living water” that is the Holy Spirit and that is poured out only when Jesus has been “glorified” by shedding his blood on the Cross for the forgiveness of sins.136 It is evident that for John, as for the Letter to the Ephesians, the Church has its origin and its sustenance in nuptial holiness in Christ the Bridegroom’s sacrificial dying for his Bride: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her” (Eph 5:25–26). In light of Ephesians 5, Pitre concludes that “the day of Jesus’ crucifixion is his wedding day”—the prophesied marriage of the divine Bridegroom with his Bride “in an everlasting marriage covenant.”137

Pitre adds that the wedding, while begun, is not yet complete, since the Bride is not yet fully perfected and the full number of the elect has not yet been gathered. The Cross of the risen and ascended Lord continues to wield its saving power in the world, sanctifying believers. As Pitre says, not only will many persons continue to come to faith while the world endures, but also “those who have come to faith in the Bridegroom and become members of his bride have often ‘soiled’ their wedding garments through sin and acts of spiritual infidelity.”138 In this light, Pitre points out that the end of the world should be viewed not merely as a cataclysm but as the joyful fullness of the marriage between God and humanity made possible by Christ and his Spirit.

Lest the analogy of marriage seem to break down here—since Christ either consummated it on the Cross or he did not—Pitre notes that in ancient Judaism “one of the duties of the bridegroom was to prepare a home for his bride, so that when the wedding was finally consummated he could take her from her own family and bring her to live with him.”139 Pitre has in view John 14:2–3, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself.” With respect to this passage, his interpretation concurs with that of the New Testament scholar Adeline Fehribach in her book The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom.140

In Pitre’s analysis, then, a tension emerges between the “already” and the “not yet,” a tension that characterizes the New Testament’s eschatology as a whole. Already, through his Cross and Resurrection, Christ has accomplished the perfect marriage of the divine Bridegroom with his people (Israel reconfigured around the Messiah, now with the Gentiles included). But the marriage of God and humanity, though in this sense accomplished already by Christ, awaits its full accomplishment as, over the course of ongoing history, the full number of the elect is brought in and the members of the Church are sanctified by the power of his Cross and Resurrection. Thus, even though the marriage of God and humanity is accomplished by Christ when he is “glorified” on the Cross (as Pitre says), it is also correct to add—as Pitre does in light of the book of Revelation—that “all of human history is headed toward the wedding supper of the Lamb and the unveiling of the bride of Christ.”141 The Christian understanding of the end of time is not about destruction but rather is about the glorious “‘unveiling’ (Greek apokalypsis) of the bride of Christ. Just as an ancient Jewish bridegroom would lift the veil of his bride on their wedding day, so too at the end of time Jesus will unveil the glory of his bride, the New Jerusalem.”142 Among the characteristics of the Bride are perfect holiness, perfect peace, perfect worship, absence of corruption and death, and the fact that the blessed “shall see his face”—the face of God and the Lamb (Rev 22:4), the face of the Bridegroom who has everlastingly married his beloved people.

Pitre brings his book to a close by displaying the theme of the covenantal marriage of God and humanity as it informs the teaching of the Church Fathers—especially their teaching on the sacraments and the religious life—as well as the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and recent popes. Rather than tracking his discussion of the Fathers, let me simply draw attention to the passages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that Pitre quotes. First, as has been one of the main points of Pitre’s book, the Catechism states that “[t]he entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church” (§1617). Second, the Catechism states the following: “The nuptial covenant between God and his people Israel had prepared the way for the new and everlasting covenant in which the Son of God, by becoming incarnate and giving his life, has united to himself in a certain way all mankind saved by him, thus preparing for ‘the wedding-feast of the Lamb’ [Rev 19:7]” (§1612).143 Both of these quotations come from the Catechism’s section on the sacrament of marriage.

At this stage, however, we must turn again to our original question.144 In the prophetic books of the Old Testament, it certainly can seem as though God the lover is also God the abuser. Let me now examine why this is so.

II. YHWH the Abusive Male?

What are we to make of passages such as the following?

•“The Lord said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet; the Lord will smite with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts” (Is 3:16–17).

•“Lift up your eyes and see those who come from the north. Where is the flock that was given you, your beautiful flock? What will you say when they set as head over you those whom you yourself have taught to be friends to you? Will not pangs take hold of you, like those of a woman in travail? And if you say in your heart, ‘Why have these things come upon me?’ it is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and you suffer violence” (Jer 13:20–22).

•“Thus says the Lord God, Because your shame was laid bare and your nakedness uncovered in your harlotries with your lovers, and because of all your idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you loathed; I will gather them against you from every side, and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness. And I will judge you as women who break wedlock and shed blood are judged, and bring upon you the blood of wrath and jealousy. And I will give you into the hand of your lovers, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty places; they shall strip you of your clothes and take your fair jewels, and leave you naked and bare. . . . Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have enraged me with all these things; therefore, behold, I will requite your deeds upon your head, says the Lord God” (Ezek 16:36–39, 43).

•“Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband—that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a parched land, and slay her with thirst” (Hos 2:2–3).

•“Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts. And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, ‘These are my hire, which my lovers have given me.’ I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them. And I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals, when she burned incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord” (Hos 2:9–13).

•“Behold, I am against you [Nineveh], says the Lord of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a gazingstock” (Nahum 3:5–6).

•“Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans! For you shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal, put off your veil, strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers. Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will spare no man” (Isa 47:1–3).

With regard especially to Nahum 3 and Isaiah 47, Gerlinde Baumann argues that it is a simple matter: “YHWH appears as the rapist.”145 Drawing on the work of Majella Franzmann, Baumann adds that although “[t]he image of YHWH as rapist can be explained from the context in which the texts originated,” nonetheless “[t]his kind of male God-as-rapist image has been handed down for thousands of years without being subjected to any kind of fundamental critique.”146

Is this claim true? I note that in Jerome’s commentary on Nahum 3:5–6, Jerome first emphasizes that Nahum 3 and Ezekiel 16 are using a “metaphor of an adulterous woman” that is not meant to be taken literally.147 Specifically with respect to Nahum 3:5, where the Lord appears to be describing himself in an act of rape, Jerome hastens to make clear that one would be profoundly misinterpreting the passage if one interpreted it along such lines. On the contrary, says Jerome, in Nahum 3:5 the Lord intends to communicate the following: “although you do not deserve it, I will make you see my virtues, precepts, and words, which you have hidden behind your back. For I commanded that my words should always be moving before your eyes, and should be bound and hanging down.”148 Far from refusing to subject “to any kind of fundamental critique” the “male God-as-rapist image” found in Nahum 3:5–6, Jerome insists sharply that God must not be thought of as a male rapist. For Jerome, the real meaning is that God, as “the true doctor [who] comes from heaven” (namely Christ), will show Nineveh his “virtues, precepts, and words.”149 It may seem that such an interpretation is quite a stretch, but this is precisely the point: Jerome, subjecting the seeming “God-as-rapist image” to a “fundamental critique,” insists upon reading it in an allegorical sense.150

Likewise, in his reading of Ezekiel 16, Jerome proposes that the fornicating “Jerusalem” stands for all of us who pass from one sin to the next without repentance. Tropologically, the “brazen harlot” of Ezekiel 16:30 is none other than “every Christian soul that has abandoned the worship of God, indulged in vices and excess, and having pursued a worldly life, has not done well even in that respect, but has both lost the wealth of religion and has not received the riches of the world.”151 Interpreting Ezekiel 16:38–40, where God promises to gather Jerusalem’s “lovers” and allow them to see her naked, strip her bare, and destroy her by stoning and the sword, Jerome first postulates that the literal sense must not be understood as signifying a real woman, nor can the metaphor be limited to adultery. Rather, this is a “metaphor of an adulterous and homicidal woman, who not only fornicated against her own husband, but also killed her children.”152 The metaphor has in view the Babylonian exile, as well as the future destruction of the (second) Temple. In the metaphor, says Jerome, the killing of children stands for rejecting “good thoughts” given by God and instead choosing to “[turn] away unto evil works.”153 Moreover, lest we get the wrong idea even about this metaphor, Jerome develops a tropological reading which makes clear that Ezekiel 16 is not about women but rather is about “every soul” who has received a gift from God but who chooses instead to worship “demons and contrary powers.”154 Jerome insists upon not attributing to God any violating action toward any woman.

Along similar lines, Mark Sheridan has observed that John Chrysostom is constantly concerned that readers of the Old Testament will read literalistically and assume that the portrayals of God’s anger, threats, and abusive actions toward men and women are meant to describe the character of God or what is permissible for God.155 Chrysostom fears that believers will imagine that God is bodily, that God commits (or desires to commit) acts of brutality, and/or that God has human passions such as anger. According to Chrysostom, God only allows vivid and potentially deeply misleading metaphors to be used about himself in Scripture because God wants to get through to dull readers and to alert them to seek for a spiritual meaning. It is this deeper spiritual meaning, and no other, that must be gleaned from metaphors that otherwise would demean God.

For Baumann, the difficulty is not answered by these positions, since Baumann’s concern is why God permitted abusive metaphors to be used in Scripture even if they were always meant to signify allegorically.156 In Hosea, she finds that “a parallel is drawn between land and ‘woman/wife’ in order to denounce the ‘whorish’ behavior of both. Divine punishment of ‘woman’ Israel follows, stated in images of sexual violence, but also in metaphors applying to the land and its fertility.”157 Jeremiah 13:22 is likewise impossible for her to accept, given that she thinks that the meaning that readers will receive is “unmistakable,” namely that YHWH “acts against Jerusalem in the role of a perpetrator of sexual violence.”158 As Angela Bauer says, “The image of God the rapist haunts theology and biblical interpretation.”159

Along similarly critical lines, John Barton remarks that “biblical texts do . . . portray God as having a dark side.”160 In his view, the prophetic literature depicts a two-faced God. He warns, “Commentators have always been tempted to fudge the issue of just how unjust the God of the prophets is when evaluated in human terms—and not simply in our terms . . . but in the moral terms the prophets themselves apply to human conduct. The God of the prophets is often no ‘nicer’ a character than the God of Joshua and Judges [who commands genocide].”161 Approvingly drawing upon the work of Andrew Davies, Barton draws attention to the passage from Isaiah 3 that I have quoted above: “Even if we grant that there is something wrong with the women of Isaiah 3:16–4:1, who take such pleasure in their jewelry and cosmetics, it is impossible to find any human moral principle that would justify the cruel and degrading punishment with which the prophet threatens them.”162

Yet, I think the point of the first chapters of Isaiah is far from unjust: God has abandoned Israel to her enemies, because Israel has become deeply corrupt. As God says in his law case against Israel, “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Every one loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them” (Isa 1:23). God adds that the “land is filled with idols” (Is 2:8)—as archeological evidence confirms was the case. In sum, I do not agree with Barton insofar as he implies that God’s abandonment of Israel—which follows from Israel’s abandonment of God—is unjust. The imagery of the smiting of the “daughters of Zion” (Isa 3:15) is paired with similar insistence that the men of Israel will be humiliated and punished. As God says through the prophet Isaiah, “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: ‘It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’” (Isa 3:14–15).

Baumann’s concern is a deeper one than Barton’s. She wonders how anyone could accept a Scripture as “holy” if it employs images that involve God violating women sexually or images in which God causes women to be publicly humiliated in the very ways in which men of the time caused women to be publicly humiliated. The fact that Jerome insists that such metaphors are meant to be interpreted tropologically or as allegories whose meaning is the opposite of what the metaphor implies, may seem only to confirm Baumann’s outrage. Baumann notes that from the outset of her research, “the center of my interest in the prophetic imagery of marriage was not YHWH the ‘loving husband.’”163 On the contrary, she always focused on the punitive imagery, which in her view predominates over love in the prophetic literature. She asks, “Is the complex of metaphors of sexual violence really inseparable from the prophetic marriage imagery?”164

This question is all the more urgent for her because she finds that in contemporary culture (she lives in Germany), women are subjected to misogyny and violence. In her (mistaken) view, “marriage is the relationship in which it is easiest for violent men to make women their victims.”165 There is also the problem of male fantasies about violence against women, fantasies that are regularly played out in pornography.166 Her fundamental point is that “[t]he version of God in which ‘he’ is presented, in connection with the prophetic marriage imagery, as a sexually violent male is just one of the many problematic sides of the biblical God-image.”167 Even if Israel, having abandoned God, deserved its punishment (namely, abandonment by God), how could a good God permit himself to be described in sexually violent and abusive imagery? As Cheryl Exum states, “Claiming that there is a suffering and loving god behind this imagery will not make it go away.”168 Like Baumann, Exum warns against trying to sidestep the problem by “creating a canon within the canon.”169

By contrast, other biblical scholars have argued that the metaphors must be read as metaphors (in light of the actual destruction brought about by invading armies) rather than as descriptions of acceptable behavior. Robert Carroll urges in this regard, “The voice I hear and read in Jeremiah 2–3 (and also in 5.7–8) is a voice expressing strong disapproval of the community or nation’s past behaviour as wild, uncontrolled and apostate. . . . The target of the mockery is the male society.”170 For Carroll, it is important to perceive that the metaphorical woman in the prophetic text is not intended to be a real woman, but rather to be a description of the corporate people. He states that “the only women in the chapter [Ezek 23] are metaphors. The narrative is not about women but about cities or communities represented by those cities. . . . [T]he use of metaphors of women for the community, nation, city and land in the prophets may have little to do with the representation of women as such.”171 The metaphors disturb us, but their original readers may not have understood them the way that we do, and, besides, they too would likely have been disturbed. Somewhat similarly, Else Holt thinks it possible to criticize the disturbing metaphors while retaining the overall portrait of God in the book of Jeremiah. She does not think that we have to “distance ourselves from” or repudiate the prophetic books.172 From the perspective of studies of trauma, Kathleen O’Connor suggests that the disturbing metaphors are understandable given the prophetic task of articulating and giving meaning to the extreme horrors that the people of Jerusalem and Judah experienced during the events that led to the Babylonian exile.173 This does not mean that today we need to approve the portrait of God as an abusive husband (or of Israel as a nymphomaniac), but we can appreciate some aspects of what the prophet was doing in his own context: dealing with trauma requires naming it boldly rather than repressing it.

All this is a variation of the problem that also faces interpreters of passages such as Joshua 10:40, where Joshua’s destruction of “all that breathed” in the cities that he conquered is seen as obedience to God, “as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” How could a good God be one who commands Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam 15:3)? Indebted to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas suggests that actions against non-combatants, which appear to conflict with the Decalogue’s commandment against killing the innocent, may justly be undertaken in obedience to divine command, because God “is Lord of life and death: for He it is who inflicts the punishment of death on all men, both godly and ungodly, on account of the sin of our first parent, and if a man be the executor of that sentence by divine authority, he will be no murderer.”174 I consider this argument to be untenable. Certainly God is the “Lord of life and death,” but if he commanded Israelite soldiers to kill pregnant women and babies, God would be culpable for morally warping the soldiers who performed such heinous actions. Unlike the divine retribution caused by disease or natural disaster—in which the agent of the punishment is not a conscious agent—an intrinsically evil action has a distortive impact upon the person who carries it out. Thus, Church Fathers such as Origen were correct to infer that the human author has a purpose in attributing such commands to God (for example, to warn readers against becoming assimilated to the nations and their gods), but that in actual fact that living God revealed in Scripture could not have issued such commands.

With respect to publicly stripping a woman naked, Baumann points out that John Huehnergard’s studies of ancient Near Eastern texts indicate that “if a widow remarries she is to be deprived of the property of her first husband and leave his house naked. In Huehnergard’s opinion this stripping [an instance of which is found in Hosea 2:3] has a humiliating aspect: its purpose, however, is primarily the protection of the property of the family or clan.”175 Likewise, Thomas Podella has suggested that the lifting of the skirt, such as is found in Nahum 3:5, is connected in the ancient Near East to legal rites surrounding a divorce, so that it is less about humiliation than it is about indicating that a change of status has taken place.176 Baumann also recognizes that given the ancient Near East’s expectations for covenantal treaties, in the prophetic literature “[t]hreats of violence against women are . . . found within the framework of scenarios in which it is prophesied that a vassal, should he prove unfaithful, will be subjected to every kind of fearful punishment imaginable. Rape of women in the ancient Near East is therefore no more to be regarded as part of ‘normal’ life than are the other curses.”177 She adds that in the context of exile, there are ancient Near Eastern “iconographic witnesses to the fact that deported persons or prisoners in many cases had to strip or be stripped.”178

Alice Keefe argues that the disturbing imagery arises, in fact, from how profoundly women were valued in biblical Israel. She explains that women had in their power the very survival of the people: “The social character of sex in ancient Israel relates to the pragmatics of survival in a marginal agrarian frontier zone . . . where the survival and strength of the family group depended upon its size. . . . Such a culture would not likely abstract concerns about group strength and survival from its symbolic constructs about woman’s body and female sexuality.”179 With regard to the prophets’ symbolic references to the female body, Keefe urges that “in Israel the maternal body might also be considered a ‘natural place’ to display themes relating to fertility, procreation, lineage, kinship and covenant.”180 As she says, it is understandable and, indeed, powerfully resonant that “woman’s body” in biblical texts serves “as a sign for the social body,” as the prophets and other biblical authors employ “gynomorphic figurations of corporate identity indigenous to [their] world.”181 Keefe reminds us that when we are disturbed by the “metaphor of female sexual transgression” as an “image for the negation of Israel’s identity,” we need to realize that “[t]he adultery metaphor works in this way because it is also a maternal metaphor, and as such, it participates in and effects a reversal of another important dimension of the symbolism that is constitutive of Israelite identity—Israel as generative mother, symbol of the ongoing life of the people.”182 This perspective helps us to appreciate why such metaphorical imagery was employed in the first place, as well as its original positive intent.

This background gives some explanation to the use of such imagery in Scripture, so long as we do not thereby suppose that we are not meant to be disturbed by the imagery. Baumann remains unpersuaded that the imagery can be excused. If God can be said to behave in this way, how can men be told that they cannot behave in this way?183 This is obviously a problem that applies to genocidal violence as well.

I agree with Baumann that a God who engages in the ancient Near Eastern practice of physically humiliating and attacking rebellious wives is not an acceptable “God.” For scholars such as Exum, this means “doing away with . . . biblical authority” and with the notion that the biblical God is the “‘real’ god.”184 By contrast, I stand with Jerome and with the other witnesses to the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church’s spiritual—allegorical, typological, tropological—reading of parts of the Old Testament’s language. A cultural practice of physically abusing wives is being metaphorically attributed by the prophetic authors to God, but this cultural practice is not of God.185

This is similar to how many Christians have long interpreted God’s biblical commandments regarding the killing of all the persons living in a specific city. It is also similar to how many Christians interpret biblical portraits of God noisily “walking in the garden” or of God inflamed with jealousy and rage, desiring to slaughter his entire people until Moses talks him out of it (Gen 3:8; Deut 32).186 Such texts are read theologically in light of the overall biblical witness to the God who makes covenant with Abraham in order to bless Abraham’s descendents and ultimately the whole world.

What this kind of exegesis (“allegorical” or “theological”) does is allow the abusive metaphorical imagery to be read and understood in its fullest and most proper contexts, while valuing the value of the historical-critical clarifications brought by Keefe and others. Jerome knows that the God who reveals his love in the prophetic books and in Christ Jesus may (and does) justly punish his people—indeed the punishment (exile) is intrinsic to their idolatrous turning away from God—but this God would never abuse a woman, and indeed would never commit any evil action whatsoever. After all, “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and “God cannot be tempted with evil” (Jas 1:13). Quite rightly, Jerome uses his knowledge of the entire Bible to guard against misreadings of the abusive imagery that would turn the just God of mercy and love into the very kind of oppressive and sexually abusive god (prevalent among the nations) that he repeatedly reveals himself not to be.

Recall what happened when the young Augustine, inspired by Cicero’s Hortensius to seek wisdom about divine realities, applied himself to reading Christian Scripture. For Augustine as a young man, one of the problems with Scripture—especially the Old Testament—was that “[i]t seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero.”187 Cicero never thought of God as filled with the passions of jealousy and anger or as plotting actions of violence against women and infants. Later, Bishop Ambrose of Milan advised Augustine to read the Book of Isaiah; but Augustine “did not understand the first passage of the book” and put it down.188 Augustine’s response to the first chapters of Isaiah is easy to sympathize with, given Isaiah’s attention to the contemporary politics of his day and the dense culturally embedded style of his writing. But Ambrose’s influence won out. Augustine reports, “I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill (2 Cor. 3:6).”189

We may also recall Pope Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini, where he reflects upon the “‘dark’ passages” of the Bible, namely “passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”190 In addressing the problem, Benedict XVI proposes that “it must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages, and despite human resistance.”191 Thus, we should read the prophets’ application to God of the metaphor of a husband violently angry with his adulterous wife as the culturally conditioned mode of discourse that it is; it displays an unacceptable view of violence as permissible in such situations. God revealed himself through real human authors writing in particular cultural contexts. But by reading in context (i.e. historical context, the internal context of the prophetic book, and the context of the whole canon and the realities of what God has done in Christ), Christians can perceive that the import of the prophetic texts is not that God is an angry or violent being, but rather that God wishes to be united fully to his unfaithful bride (his people Israel) and that God will not abandon his unfaithful bride whose actions have imperiled the future of the covenant. Instead, with infinite mercy, compassion, and solidarity with sinners, God will ultimately reunite his bride to himself in perfect mutual love.192

III. Conclusion

In Christ, a human marriage becomes “a mystical participation in the spousal and sacrificial relationship between Christ and the Church,” so that we experience more profoundly the reality of the marriage of God and his people.193 But not all Christian marriages are good ones. Many women, and men too, have experienced physical violence within a bad marriage. In numerous cultures over the centuries, husbands have been explicitly allowed to abuse their wives physically.

Jerome’s approach recognizes the presence in Scripture’s plain sense of a wrongheaded depiction of God, since a central point of divine revelation is that God, while just, is not an oppressive and sexually abusive “god” like the ones found in Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman myth. As we saw, Jerome and other Church Fathers make clear that rape and violation are never justifiable and are infinitely far from the holiness of God. Such evil acts or even the threat of such acts may never be literally attributed to God.

Without referring to this patristic approach, Weems in her book Battered Love contends that the diversity of biblical portraits of God means that the image of God as husband can be relativized sufficiently to enable readers to perceive the difference between the “marriage metaphor” and the real “object to which it points (God).”194 Weems is also poignantly cognizant of the truth that, even despite the many hurtful and failed marriages that we see around us, “the marriage metaphor permits us to believe in the most unbelievable of all possible responses to our woundedness, namely, grace. . . . That we risk loving again those who have wounded us, and that others trust us to try again despite the fact that we have broken their hearts—this is grace. It is a breathtaking possibility.”195 The divine grace is rooted in God’s undiminished will to marry his fallen but still beloved people.

Given all this, we are free to read the prophetic texts as they were intended. Despite the images of “violence to the woman [Israel],” it is a truly glorious marriage of God and his people that prophetic texts such as Isaiah 54, Hosea 1–3, and Jeremiah 2–3 have at their core.196 The people of Israel look forward with yearning to the restoration and intimacy with God that will be brought about by this divine-human marriage. As Richtsje Abma states, “The promise that Yhwh will remarry Zion ([Is] 54:5) contributes to the comfort of Zion and is part of the reversal of her fortunes,” just as at the conclusion of Hosea 2 we see that “Yhwh is devoted to Israel” and in Jeremiah we find that “Israel is called to a new intimacy with Yhwh and to new conjugal responsiveness, a perspective that is endowed with promises and blessings.”197 Our sins cannot destroy God’s plan for the eschatological marriage of God and his people. Learning how to understand God’s scriptural word, we may continue boldly seeking the marital “depths of communion with God for which the human soul yearns” and which the God of Israel offers to us and triumphantly inaugurates in Christ Jesus, in merciful solidarity with sinners but also in his perfect justice.198

86. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 109. Describing the coming Messiah, Soloveitchik states that “everything good and fine and noble in man must be passed on to the Messiah. He will have the capacity for gevurah and hesed. He will be a hero with unlimited power and strength who will defend justice. He will also be a man of unlimited loving-kindness, humble and simple. All these capabilities, capacities, and talents will merge in beautiful harmony in the King Messiah. The Messiah will represent creation at its best” (Abraham’s Journey, 177).

87. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 22. The same insistence is at the root of de Lubac’s Catholicism. See my discussion of de Lubac and Gaudium et Spes in chapter 4 of my An Introduction to Vatican II.

88. Soloveitchik holds that after their sin, “Adam and Eve heard the footsteps of the Holy One walking out of the universe. God broke the intimate relationship that was supposed to be realized by Adam. The purpose of the covenant concluded with Abraham was to restore the intimacy that God wanted to prevail between Him and man. At Sinai, the covenant embraced not only one individual but the whole community. The ideal is to extend the covenant even further, to the rest of the world” (Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 164–65). For background to the marriage metaphor in Judaism, see Satlow, “Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism.” Satlow summarizes: “In the Hebrew Bible, the metaphor of God as the husband or lover of Israel or Zion occurs not infrequently. . . . [Yet] Jews in antiquity by and large ignored, or even subverted, the biblical metaphor that compares the relationship of God to Israel as a husband to wife” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 14). Satlow explains this shift in part by pointing out that the metaphor seemingly “gives God the right to take other nations as ‘co-wives’” and also that the metaphor “implies a degree of intimacy between God and Israel that is not always compatible with an asexual and transcendent understanding of God” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 17; cf. the cruder position of Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus). He adds that the shift may also be a response to Christianity’s emphasis on the marriage metaphor.

89. Küng, On Being a Christian, 442.

90. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.

91. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.

92. Levenson, The Love of God, 99. In particular, Levenson draws attention to Gerlinde Baumann’s work, which I also discuss at length. Levenson emphasizes that the men hearing Hosea’s prophecies would have identified not with God but with the wife, symbolic of the whole Israelite nation. He quotes Phyllis Bird, who writes, “It is easy for patriarchal society to see the guilt of the ‘fallen woman’: Hosea says, ‘You (male Israel) are that woman!’” (Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot,’” 89, quoted in The Love of God, 100). Levenson also quotes Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s remark, “Through this imagery, the people of Israel are enabled to feel God’s agony. . . . As a result, the image of God as betrayed husband strikes deep into the psyche of the people of Israel and enables them to feel the faithless nature of their actions” (Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 147, quoted in The Love of God, 101). In accord with my own emphasis in this book, Levenson adds: “The grand finale of Hosea 2 is God’s promise to re-betroth his wife whom he divorced, or seemed to divorce, and the prediction of the redeemed cosmos that marriage to her is to inaugurate. The passage thus adds a strong note of expectation, the expectation of nothing less than a transformed world when the Lord and Israel have resumed their intimacy” (The Love of God, 104). For the fundamental problem, however, see Collins, What Are Biblical Values?, 96: “Neither prophet [neither Hosea nor Ezekiel] is inciting violence against actual women. But the force of the metaphor depends on the credibility of the literal meaning. Readers are expected to agree that this is an appropriate way to deal with an adulterous woman, at least in principle. . . . These metaphorical passages are not representative of the view of women in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, and they were never meant to be prescriptive for the treatment of women. Nonetheless, they provide language that lends itself to supporting abusive views of women.”

93. Frishman, “Why Would a Man Want to Be Anyone’s Wife?,” 44. Bromiley offers some cautions in this regard: not only is it true that “the prophetic understanding of God as the husband of Israel obviously does not conform to the actual situation in normal human marriages,” but also “[s]ome prophets do not use the comparison with marriage at all. Even in those who do, it occupies only a relatively small amount of space. Hosea, for whom it has a shattering significance, still uses his lively poetic imagination to describe the people not only as an unfaithful wife but also as silly doves (7:11), a stubborn heifer (4:16), and even a half-baked cake (7:8). For Hosea, Israel is also a luxuriant vine (10:1) and a refractory child (11:1). Ezekiel can also give very realistic depictions of the actual sins and idolatries committed by the people (see 8:7). Jeremiah, too, uses the metaphor of disobedient children (3:14) and an implied comparison with scattered sheep (3:15) in the very same context in which he speaks of the unfaithful wife. God himself appears not only as the faithful husband of unfaithful Israel but also as the good shepherd (Jer. 23:3; Ezek. 34:11), the father (Isa. 64:8), the liberator (Isa. 40), and the mother (Isa. 66:13)” (Bromiley, God and Marriage, 33).

94. As will be clear, I read the biblical texts as a canonical unity formed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. By contrast, for a historicist view of the biblical texts, see for example Muir, “Accessing Divine Power and Status.” See also Troeltsch’s “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.” Soloveitchik aptly observes, “When we study the Bible, we must be concerned about two things. We must understand the semantics of the word, and we must understand the spiritual message of the Bible. There is an enormous literature of biblical criticism, and the problem with that literature is that it completely misses the spiritual message” (Abraham’s Journey, 17).

95. For critical discussion, see Shields, Circumscribing the Prostitute; Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors.

96. Peggy L. Day warns against “reconstructing alleged social reality” on the basis of such biblical texts, and specifically she shows that it is a mistake to conclude from texts such as Hosea 2:4–5 that “prostitutes and adulteresses in ancient Israel were stripped naked as a punishment for engaging in these activities” (Day, “Metaphor and Social Reality,” 63). See also Day, “Adulterous Jerusalem’s Imagined Demise.”

97. For a sharp critique of Hosea, see Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 206–68. In an effort to redeem the prophetic text, Moughtin-Mumby states that “we could argue that it is Israel who has taken the initiative to break the relationship with YHWH, leaving him to plead for her return, rather than YHWH who is banishing his passive wife. On this reading, the relationship between YHWH and Israel remains a deeply unhealthy and damaging one, and Israel is left playing the far from ideal role of ‘prostitute’, underscoring just how problematic is this troubling text even for resistant readers” (Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 266). Sadly, the practice of physical abuse of wives by husbands is explicitly permitted (though also limited) by the Qur’ān: see al-Kawthari, Al-Arba‘īn, 97–98.

98. White, The Light of Christ, 273. See also Kerr, Immortal Longings, although White and Kerr differ regarding Henri de Lubac’s particular understanding of the natural desire.

99. Mark J. Boda remarks that the entirety of the Old Testament (joined by the New) reveals “God’s plan to form a redemptive community” and “God’s plan to transform all creation” (Boda, The Heartbeat of Old Testament Theology, 8).

100. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, I.i.1, p. 3. See also Keating, Deification and Grace; Hofer, ed., Divinization.

101. Levenson, The Love of God, 113.

102. Levenson, The Love of God, 114.

103. Thomas Aquinas describes marriage as the greatest friendship: see Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Book Three: Providence, trans. Bourke, ch. 123, p. 148.

104. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 8.

105. Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 134.

106. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 10. See Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 337.

107. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 338.

108. See Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 139–41.

109. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 172.

110. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 41. See Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel”; McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant; McCarthy, “Notes on the Love of God in Deuteronomy.”

111. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 37.

112. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 31. Hahn’s proposal is quite complex, and all its elements need not be correct to ground the basic validity of his insight. In terms of the complex details of his proposal, a significant element is his sharp distinction between a “Sinai” covenant (broken by the Golden Calf incident) and a “Deuteronomic” covenant. He argues that “God’s initial relationship with Israel at Sinai was a kinship-type covenant, with an emphasis on mutuality and familial relationship,” whereas in the post-Golden Calf Deuteronomic covenant “Israel’s father-son relationship with God remains intact, but it takes on the character of a master-servant relationship, like that between a suzerain and rebellious vassal” (Kinship by Covenant, 32). I see much less disjunction, but I can understand why he arrives at this view.

113. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 11.

114. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 11.

115. Dozeman, Exodus, 704.

116. Dozeman, Exodus, 705.

117. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 17.

118. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 19.

119. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 20. See also Levenson, The Love of God, 125–42. Levenson points out that within the larger biblical context, “the question of the identity of the speakers takes on greater urgency than when the book is viewed in isolation. Who, in this larger framework, could these two passionate lovers possibly be? Let us put the question in terms of the rest of the Hebrew Bible: Where in that set of books do we find an intense love in which the lovers are separated much of the time, the male of the two is not continuously accessible, the identities of the lovers seem to shift in various situations, powerful external forces oppose and threaten the romance, and the consummation of the relationship seems to be continually, maddeningly postponed? Put that way, the question nearly answers itself: the only such romance is that of God and Israel. To be sure, not every detail matches up, and much imaginative interpretation is necessary to sustain the identification. That very process of imaginative interpretation, though, is highly productive theologically and spiritually” (The Love of God, 132). Levenson differentiates between allegory and midrash, arguing that the latter is in no way arbitrary. He concludes, “Without the application of the Song of Songs to the Torah, the depth and power of their [God and the people Israel] libidinous passion might never have come to expression. And without the application of the Torah to the Song of Songs, the deeper spiritual import of erotic love would surely have gone unnoticed” (The Love of God, 134).

120. Neusner, Israel’s Love Affair with God, 1.

121. Neusner, Israel’s Love Affair with God, 3.

122. Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, 231; cited in Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 23. See also Levenson, The Love of God, 137–38: “When, at the literal level, Moses was anointing the tabernacle and its accoutrements, transferring them from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred, he was enacting, at the midrashic level, the consecration of Israel to God as his bride—a condition that in the rabbinic mind has survived both the tabernacle and the temple that it foreshadowed, and has defined the Jewish people through all their generations. The tabernacle served as the chuppah, the marriage canopy, for the wedding of God and Israel. . . . This is, of course, a theological ideal and not at all an accurate description of the historical facts, as the prophetic and many other biblical and postbiblical texts painfully attest. But it is an ideal with a potent and enduring capacity to inspire behavior, to provoke repentance—and to ignite the love of God among Jews. Within the marital metaphor as these Talmudic rabbis extended and developed it, the Torah, both as narrative and as law, becomes a site of intense erotic passion. Its narrative tells of God’s and the Jewish people’s falling in love with each other, of his proposing marriage and her accepting the proposal, of the wedding itself and the intimacy and deepening commitment that followed it.”

123. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 26.

124. McWhirter, The Bridegroom Messiah. McWhirter argues that the Gospel of John “alludes to four biblical texts about marriage. One involves similarities between Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4:4–42 and the story about Jacob and Rachel in Gen. 29:1–20. Two others evoke the Song of Songs. Mary of Bethany perfumes the reclining Jesus in a scene reminiscent of Song 1:12, and Mary Magdalene seeks and finds her missing man as does the woman in Song 3:1–4. A fourth allusion is the first to occur in the Gospel narrative. In John 3:29, John the Baptist declares, ‘He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. . . .’ This saying recalls Jer. 33:10–11: ‘In . . . the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem . . . there shall once more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom . . . and the voice of the bride’” (The Bridegroom Messiah, 3–4). In McWhirter’s view, the author of the Gospel of John “considered Jer. 33:10–11, Gen. 29:1–20, and the Song of Songs appropriate for illustrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus because of their messianic significance. According to the conventions of first-century exegesis—conventions based on a belief in the theological unity of Scripture—they can be interpreted as messianic prophecies in light of Ps. 45, which celebrates the wedding of God’s anointed king” (The Bridegroom Messiah, 4). See also Cambe, “L’influence du Cantique des Cantiques”; Hengel, “The Interpretation of the Wine Miracle at Cana,” 101–2; Feuillet, Le Mystère de l’amour divin dans la théologie johannique, 231. For approaches similar to McWhirter’s—with the drawback, however, of devoting only a few pages to the topic—see Baril, The Feminine Face of the People of God, 92–97; Schneiders, Written That You May Believe. In her approach to Jesus’ messianic status, McWhirter is particularly indebted to Juel’s Messianic Exegesis.

125. McWhirter, The Bridegroom Messiah, 4, 11; Baril, The Feminine Face of the People of God, 93.

126. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 49.

127. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, 1402.

128. See Chavasse, The Bride of Christ.

129. See Collins, Mark, 198–99.

130. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 100.

131. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 90. Regarding the bride-chamber, Pitre directs attention to Psalm 19:4–5 and Tobit 6:15–17.

132. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 300; cited in Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 91–92.

133. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 252; cited in Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 94.

134. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 103.

135. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 112.

136. See Brown, The Gospel According to John, 949–52.

137. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 113.

138. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 115.

139. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 117.

140. See Fehribach, The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom. More generally, Fehribach’s feminist perspective differs from Pitre’s.

141. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 121.

142. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 123.

143. The two quotations come from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cited in Jesus the Bridegroom, 137.

144. In Sexual and Marital Metaphors, Moughtin-Mumby affirms “the inability of the prophetic texts to reverse their own negative sexual and marital metaphorical language,” despite their clear attempts to do so and, somewhat more hopefully, “their astonishing tendency to undermine themselves, unravelling their own assumptions and rhetoric, leaving themselves all but impotent” (274–75). In her view, positive meaning emerges from these texts only when the women are viewed as (often strong, resistant, ungeneralizable) individuals, as for example when we recognize that the figure of the prostitute takes “on an astonishing range of different guises in the prophetic text, repeatedly liaising with different literary frames to breed a striking variety of associations, including animal instinct, ruthless entrepreneurship, absurdity, nymphomania, cultic defilement, lust, misunderstanding, the desire for control, and uncontrollability, to name just a few” (Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 275–76).

145. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. See also Sanderson, “Nahum,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, 217–21, at 221: “To involve God in an image of sexual violence is, in a profound way, somehow to justify it and thereby to sanction it for human males who are for any reason angry with a woman.” For historical background to Nahum’s “presentation of the Judean/Assyrian crisis” and the manner in which Nahum’s feminized Nineveh is the object of Yahweh’s sexual shaming and abuse, see Chapman, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, 103–10.

146. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. Baumann directs attention to Franzmann, “The City as Woman.”

147. I am employing an unpublished translation by Sr. Albert-Marie Surmanski, of Jerome’s Commentarium in Naum, with thanks to Surmanski for the privilege of using her work.

148. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.

149. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.

150. By contrast, see the remarks of J. Cheryl Exum: “In describing God’s treatment of his wayward wife, the prophets rely upon a rhetorical strategy that encourages the audience to identify and sympathize with a male-identified deity. This is the privileged point of view, the ‘I’ that condemns the ‘you,’ the other, whose view is not represented. . . . When readers privilege the deity, which most readers of the Bible still do, they are forced into accepting this position, for to resist would be tantamount to challenging divine authority. This is the position taken almost without exception by biblical commentators, who, until recently, have been almost without exception male. Typically these commentators either ignore the difficulties posed by this divine sexual abuse or reinscribe the gender ideology of the biblical texts; usually they do both in their ceaseless efforts to justify God” (Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 114–15). She cites Wolff, Hosea, 34, 38, 44; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 248–49. Exum goes on to argue, “The contributors to The Women’s Bible Commentary show the difference reading as a woman makes. The authors of the entries on the prophetic books all wrestle with the implications of biblical violence against women and struggle to find ways of dealing with it. . . . What distinguishes their work from that of their male counterparts is their recognition of divine sexual violence as a problem and their honesty about it. One looks in vain in the standard commentaries for responses like these to the violence against women in the prophetic corpus” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 117–18, referring to The Women’s Bible Commentary).

151. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 175.

152. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 177.

153. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 179.

154. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 178. For a contrasting approach, see Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16.” Dempsey recognizes that “imagery and metaphors relating to women are used to communicate to Ezekiel’s audience and to the text’s (re)readers an ethical message: God will not tolerate injustice” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 72), but she emphasizes that “Yhwh in his anger said and did some despicable things to Jerusalem as her husband. Although Yhwh is willing to forgive and restore the covenant with Jerusalem, despite the fact that there is no mention of remorse on Jerusalem’s part, it seems a bit presumptuous on Yhwh’s part to assume that Jerusalem would take him back. After all, he has been verbally and physically abusive to her” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 76).

155. See Sheridan, Language for God in Patristic Tradition, 42.

156. Similarly, Exum states, “The fact that this is metaphorical violence does not make it less criminal. Indeed, it is extremely injurious: because God is the subject, we—that is, female as well as male readers—are expected to sympathize with the divine perspective against the (personified) woman. . . . Sexual violence of which God is the perpetrator and the nation personified as a woman is the object, along with its destructive implications for gender relations, is there. It cannot be dismissed by claiming that it is only ‘metaphorical’, as if metaphor were some kind of container from which meaning can be extracted, or as if gender relations inscribed on a metaphorical level are somehow less problematic than on a literal level” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 101–2; 119). I see her point, though I do think that the fact that it is metaphorical makes it less problematic. She draws attention to such studies as Gordon and Washington, “Rape as a Military Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible”; Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel; and Ellwood, Batter My Heart. For metaphor’s destructive potential, see also Bal, “Metaphors He Lives By.” See also, for Bal’s broader project, her Lethal Love.

157. Baumann, Love and Violence, 223. Alice A. Keefe surveys a number of feminist readings of Hosea, and she criticizes these readings for assuming the correctness of the standard scholarly view that interprets Hosea as attacking the Canaanite fertility religions. Against the standard feminist scholarship on Hosea, she denies that Hosea “is misogynistic literature which assumes and depends upon a view of female sexuality as something intrinsically negative” (Keefe, Woman’s Body, 154). After all, “the redeemed Israel is still a woman” in Hosea (Woman’s Body, 154). Indeed, she observes that “in a social context [such as ancient Israel] where the individual is not the primary locus of human meaning and value, body, sex and gender will carry meanings which are quite distinct from our own and the equations most central to feminist analysis will not necessarily hold” (Woman’s Body, 158). Furthermore, by contrast to modern understanding of sex and sexuality as a private matter, “In a kinship-based society, sexual reproduction, material production and the maintenance of social power constitute intersecting and coordinate dimensions of a unitary sphere of cultural activity. . . . Rather than sex and the society signifying two separate spheres of human activity, in biblical literature, sexual activity carries profoundly social and political meanings” (Woman’s Body, 159).

158. Baumann, Love and Violence, 223. For a less condemnatory perspective, in dialogue with Baumann and others, see Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’.”

159. Bauer, Gender in the Book of Jeremiah, 116. Bauer warns that “the pull of a long interpretive tradition that sides with the voice(s) of prophet/YHWH against the people/Israel, that sides in most instances with the male against the female, surrounds emerging [feminist] counter-readings. It continuously threatens their erasure, as textual and intertextual levels diverge. It is contemporary feminist and womanist voices that have been critical of dualistic patterns confining women. Yet not so Jeremiah. Israel of the past is remembered as ‘bride’ being ‘holy’ to YHWH (Jer. 2:2–3), or promised to be ‘Maiden Israel’, dancing in the future (Jer. 31:4). By contrast, the people of the Jeremianic present are accused of acting as a promiscuous woman of uncontrollable sexuality, defiled and defiling (e.g., Jer. 2:20–22, 23–25, 33–34; 3:1, 2–3, 6–10, 19–20), while at the same time rape, a crime of uncontrolled sexual violation, is presented as ‘justified’ (e.g., 13:20–27). It is contemporary female voices that call for the embracing of ambiguities. Not so Jeremiah. . . . It is contemporary (fe)male voices that search for fluidity of gender, transgression of traditional gender roles, and flexibility of identities, and hear the male prophet speak in a female voice. Not so Jeremiah” (Gender in the Book of Jeremiah, 162–63). It seems to me that the main point of Jeremiah about sin and redemption has been lost here.

160. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 262; cf. 265. He directs attention to Wettstein, “God’s Struggles.”

161. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 251.

162. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 249. See Davies, Double Standards in Isaiah, 133. For an opposed viewpoint, discussed appreciatively and at length by Barton, see Lindström, God and the Origin of Evil. Barton comments that “[t]here is considerable controversy about the idea of Yahweh as the source of evil. . . . Lindström would say that though Yahweh is presented as the source of punishment and destruction for the wicked (which may include Israel), to call these things ‘evil’ is to beg the question: precisely because they are sent by a good God they are not seen as evil by the Old Testament writers, but as good” (Ethics in Ancient Israel, 257). After pointing out that Lindström’s book is weakened by the fact that he only deals with passages where the language of “good” and “evil” occurs, Barton concludes that “I believe Lindström is right to argue that the general tenor of the Old Testament is to stress the justice of Yahweh, and to seek to reduce elements of arbitrariness in human experience of the divine. This seems to be the case even in works that evidently arose out of the experience of disaster, such as Lamentations” (Ethics in Ancient Israel, 260).

163. Baumann, Love and Violence, ix.

164. Baumann, Love and Violence, ix.

165. Baumann, Love and Violence, x.

166. See Morrow, “Pornography and Penance,” 62–84.

167. Baumann, Love and Violence, 2.

168. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122.

169. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122.

170. Carroll, “Desire Under the Terebinths,” 288.

171. Carroll, “Desire Under the Terebinths,” 106. For various contemporary approaches to biblical metaphor and to metaphor more broadly, see for example O’Brien, Challenging Prophetic Metaphor; Foreman, Animal Metaphors and the People of Israel, 4–29; van Dijk-Hemmes, “The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech”; Kittay, Metaphor; Donoghue, Metaphor; and the essays by numerous notable scholars in Sacks, ed., On Metaphor.

172. Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,” 105.

173. See O’Connor, Jeremiah; see also O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World.

174. Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3.

175. Baumann, Love and Violence, 72; see Huehnergard, “Biblical Notes.”

176. Baumann, Love and Violence, 75; see Podella, Das Lichtkleid JHWHs.

177. Baumann, Love and Violence, 78.

178. Baumann, Love and Violence, 79.

179. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 159. She adds, “Indeed, as Lyn Brechtel argues, in such a group-oriented culture (as opposed to an individual-oriented culture such as the modern West), the very notion of salvation is intimately tied up with the meaning of woman and sex” (Woman’s Body, 159; referring to Brechtel, “What If Dinah Is Not Raped?”). Keefe concludes, “When feminist (and other) readers look at the inscription of female sexuality in the book of Hosea and see the female body only as an individual body sexually constrained by the powers of patriarchy, they overlook the corporate and corporeal dimensions of human meaning which were constitutive of the fabric of life in ancient Israel and which are at work in Hosea’s imagery. This limitation in interpretive vision may be traced to the indebtedness of feminist theory to the world-view of the Enlightenment with its inscription of the body as an object and possession of the autonomous and rational self. For feminist theory, embodiment has to do with individual bodies, and its thinking about the body is primarily concerned with the systems of ideology and power by which these individual bodies are signified and constrained. The female body then means the individual body, which occupies one of two subject positions: either liberated or oppressed (sexually and socially) within the structures of patriarchy. But in Hos. 1–2 one finds an imagination of the female body as a sign for the body social; this symbol needs to be read within the context of a world-view in which corporate rather than individual meanings of the human and human embodiment are primary” (Keefe, Woman’s Body, 160).

180. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 178. Keefe here is criticizing the viewpoint of Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism. As Keefe says, “The presence of menstrual taboos alone in ancient Israel is not sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that this was a misogynistic culture. One could, instead, argue on the basis of abundant textual clues that the primary association of woman’s body in ancient Israel was not with pollution or death, but with fertility, lineage continuity and life” (Woman’s Body, 178–79). Here Keefe is responding to the position of Bal, Lethal Love. Keefe finds Bal’s position to be overly one-sided. In this regard, Keefe agrees with Biale, Eros and the Jews. Keefe is not denying the reality of “patriarchal determinants of biblical texts” (Woman’s Body, 184).

181. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 184. Admittedly, says Keefe, “The possibility that woman’s body could have a symbolically positive and central location as a sign for the social body in ancient Israel does not easily occur to the modern reader, whose access to the text is filtered through some 2500 years of intensifying misogyny within which woman comes to signify the temptation to sin, the threat of chaos, and all that which is ‘other’ to the realm of the sacred” (Woman’s Body, 184). In my view, the connection of woman’s body (preeminently Mary) with the social body of the Catholic Church fits with Keefe’s analysis of Israel’s scriptural texts, and indicates that the past 2,500 years are more complex—though certainly not lacking in misogyny among some misguided Jews and Catholics. Regarding the ancient Near East, Keefe directs attention to Springborg, Royal Persons.

182. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 210. In the book of Hosea, as Keefe observes, “the condition and fate of the nation are figured in graphic images of maternal bereavement, the loss of female fertility, and the death of mothers” (Woman’s Body, 210). She adds that these “graphic images are certainly rooted in the realities of war which eagerly claims women and children as victims (see also 2 Kgs 8.12; 15.16; Amos 1.13). But more so, as a metonym for the devastation of war, the slaughter of children and mothers and especially, the slitting open of pregnant women, bespeak the more far-reaching corporate consequences of Assyrian invasion: the end of Israel. Mothers with their children figure the nation as a whole, such that their destruction is the nation’s. . . . Israel is a woman in Hosea’s metaphor not simply because women are wives, whose conjugal obligations to their husbands in patriarchal society are analogous to the demands of a jealous god, but because women are mothers, whose procreativity functions symbolically as a locus of intergenerational continuity, and hence of national identity. . . . The woman of fornications represents at once the wayward people and the land itself, the land then serving as a congruent metaphor of the corporate body. The identity between the woman and the fertile land is suggested again in Hos. 2, when the husband’s threat to strip his wife naked fades into images of drought and desolation upon the land” (Woman’s Body, 211–12, 214; cf. 216–17). Keefe’s conclusion is important: “In Hos. 1–2, the female body, the body politic and the fertile land intertwine in a dense symbolic complex that yields no unambiguous correspondences, but which evokes the reality of the contemporary situation as one of betrayal, bloodshed and ‘adulterous’ political and commercial liaisons. . . . Although the metaphor is predicated upon the legitimacy of patriarchal control of female sexuality, there is a depth dimension in this symbolism of woman that exceeds those determinations” (Woman’s Body, 217).

183. See Weems, “Gomer,” 100; cited in Baumann, Love and Violence, 99. See also Weems’s Battered Love, a book frequently referenced by Baumann. In addition, see Setel, “Prophets and Pornography”; as well as Thistlethwaite, “Every Two Minutes,”; Shields, “Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23”; Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109–10. Exum describes Ezekiel 23 as “the most pornographic example of divine violence,” where “the male author seems to take pleasure in picturing the sexual attentions pressed upon them by ‘desirable young men’ (vv. 12, 23): the handling of their breasts and their defilement by their lovers’ lust. He betrays a fascination with sexual prowess and an envy of other (foreign) men’s endowment, fantasizing his rivals with penises the size of asses’ penises and ejaculations like those of stallions” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109; cf. 124–25). See also Brenner, “Pornoprophetics Revisited”; Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes, On Gendering Texts, 167–95; Brenner, “Women’s Traditions Problematized.”

184. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122; cf. 126–27, where she celebrates Jerusalem’s insistence upon autonomy vis-à-vis this abusive god. On the positive side, Exum appreciates that male readers (that is, the majority of the intended hearers and readers) would have recognized themselves as “personified Israel” and therefore would have experienced being “placed in the subject position of women and, worse, of harlotrous, defiled, and sexually humiliated women” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123). However, the effect is somewhat bleaker when viewed as a whole, as seen in Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 161 (quoted by Exum in Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123n62).

185. See also Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,” 111. Regarding Jeremiah 2–3, she grants the offensiveness of the abusive imagery, but adds that the offensive passages “might even have been meant to be offensive from the beginning. . . . The implied—male—audience is supposed to be offended, emasculated by an imagery that turns them into wayward, nymphomaniacal, unfaithful women. This is how the metaphor is supposed to work by the implied author in a patriarchal society, based on honor and shame. The implied—male—audience is supposed to understand the message that God is still in control, but also that their God is a jealous and violent God. We might not like this picture—but the picture is there on purpose and we need to be able to understand its message” (“‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,”112).

186. For the historical development of biblical portraits of God, see Smith, The Early History of God; Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. See also his more theological work, How Human Is God?, in which he argues that issues such as the divine anger (for example) are caught up in a paradox, rooted in the difficulty of speaking adequately about God and about God’s relationship to us in the midst of sin and suffering: “On the one hand, images of the violent and angry God suffer in their limitations as they partake of our human language. On the other hand, these images capture helpful dimensions of what the divine is about” (43). In response to David R. Blumenthal’s Facing the Abusing God, Smith suggests that we proceed by recognizing that what we see in the prophetic texts involves the people’s effort to understand their intense sufferings during the conquest in relation to the covenant to which God remains faithful. He states, “Anger and love are strong, powerful emotions that reflect how deeply one feels about another person. In Jeremiah and Ezekiel, this is God and Israel, husband and wife, now suffering from their terrible breakup. Even anger, terrible anger, is part of this tragic love story. Yet even so, this story is never done, because God is never done; God recovers from the wounds inflicted by Israel, and so Israel does as well” (How Human Is God?, 52). Attending to the creation passages in the Old Testament, Smith notes that God the Creator is depicted in terms of his power, wisdom, and presence—and this context is the context of the covenant.

187. Augustine, Confessions, III.v.9, p. 40.

188. Augustine, Confessions, IX.v.13, p. 163.

189. Augustine, Confessions, V.xiv.24, p. 88.

190. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §42, p. 66. See Ramage, Dark Passages of the Bible.

191. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §42, p. 66.

192. Yvonne Sherwood points out that when Jerome and Augustine turn to the prostitute married by the prophet in the Book of Hosea, both of these Church Fathers insist that the prostitute (Gomer) became completely chaste prior to the marriage. See Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, 51.

193. See Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 155.

194. Weems, Battered Love, 119.

195. Weems, Battered Love, 114–15.

196. Abma, Bonds of Love, 29; cf. 257.

197. Abma, Bonds of Love, 257. Abma recognizes that in a certain sense this marital imagery is an “anthropomorphism,” but it is an anthropomorphism unlike other anthropomorphisms about God in Scripture (such as God having emotions, desiring to do wicked actions, having “a face, mouth, eyes, heart, hands, ears, feet and a voice,” and so on [Bonds of Love, 258]). The transcendent God can indeed unite a people to himself in an intimacy so profound as to be marital. As Abma says, “There is no shade of sexuality or procreation in the relationship with Yhwh . . . but there is intimacy between Yhwh and Israel. . . . God’s love for Israel implies that he takes pleasure in the people and in their being with him (Jer. 2:2). He enjoys Israel as his partner and does not want to lose her (Hos. 2:21–22). There is a sense of joy and delight in God’s partnership with Israel (Isa. 62:4). If there has been a temporary estrangement, a new and fresh start is made, indicating that Israel remains the partner after God’s heart” (Bonds of Love, 259). Israel lives “side by side” with God and enjoys “fellowship” and “companionship” with him (Bonds of Love, 259).

198. Ortlund, God’s Unfaithful Wife, 8.