Читать книгу The Struggle to Define God - Robert A. Butterfield - Страница 5

The Hebrew Bible includes a vast collection of protest literature of two types: protest against abuses that occurred before the Babylonian exile (586–538 BCE) and protest against abuses that occurred after this exile. This book focuses on the second type of protest. But before getting into a discussion of this second type, it is useful to say something about the first type.

The northern kingdom, Israel, from its earliest beginnings until its destruction by the Assyrian empire in 722 BCE, was a weak state oppressed by more powerful neighbors. The southern kingdom, Judah, was even weaker and was destroyed by the Babylonian empire at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. Not surprisingly, much of the Hebrew Bible’s protest is directed against foreign enemies. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews1 who had survived the Babylonian exile became monotheists, so that, when they edited the history of Israel and Judah—found in Deuteronomy through 2 Kings—they also protested vigorously against polytheism, against the Israelite or Judahite kings who had tolerated or even promoted polytheism, and against the social ills that they believed derive from polytheism. This first type of protest is found not only in Deuteronomy through 2 Kings but also in the books of the eighth-century prophets, especially Amos, Hosea, and Micah, and in the books of the sixth-century prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.

When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, they forced Jerusalem’s religious and literary elite into exile in Babylon. Fifty years later, upon returning to Jerusalem after the exile, this elite undertook the project of re-building the city walls and the temple but also, importantly, of converting the entire population of Judah to monotheism. In this monotheism project, Jewish intellectuals—whether those who had returned to Jerusalem or those who had chosen to remain in Babylon—were generally united, but as the project evolved, dissent arose over theological issues. The Hebrew Bible does not mention any such schism among Jewish intellectuals in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile, but the only plausible way to explain the production of texts like the books of Ruth, Jonah, and Job or the story of Rahab, which criticize key elements of the monotheism project, is to assume that Jewish intellectuals were divided into a very conservative main faction, who argued for a just and punitive God and who in this book will be referred to as the “hardliners,” and one or more liberal factions, who argued for a gracious God and who will be called the “liberals.” The second type of protest comes from these liberals. The aim of this book is to define God through an analysis of these liberal texts and to reflect on the relevance of that definition not only for postexilic Judah but also, and especially, for the modern world.

What gives these four liberal texts such importance is that, besides contributing to an understanding of God’s grace, they underscore the fact that God has much more inclusive intentions than the hardliners ever imagined. That is, God loves and seeks to embrace all human beings—not only a particular ethnic group or gender. The message of these liberal texts is that the community and the world are blessed when, in imitation of God, the community lives by grace and rejects xenophobia, misogyny, and other forms of prejudice.

Because the northern kingdom was polytheistic and rife with corruption and with every form of social injustice, it is not surprising that protest arose against those abuses. Before the Babylonian exile, the southern kingdom was also polytheistic and corrupt, and that sad state of affairs produced a good deal of protest, too. But when the Jerusalem elite returned from exile in Babylon toward the end of the sixth century BCE, the situation in Judah improved dramatically. Specifically, the elite launched a program of religious purification and national unification based on loyalty to the one God and on worship in the re-built Jerusalem temple. This program was quite successful, as evidenced by the adoption and continuing vitality of monotheism among Jews in the postexilic period, roughly 538—350 BCE. Given this success, it seems reasonable to infer that this period was marked by a great meeting of the minds among Jews on matters both social and theological. However, as mentioned above, such was not the case. The best starting point for understanding why dissent arose is to explain the way that the hardliners viewed the history of Israel/Judah and the world.

The worldview of the hardliners was formed in Babylon, where they reflected on the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple—and on their own exile—and concluded that God was punishing them for centuries of polytheism. Extrapolating from that observation, the hardliners believed that the whole history of Israel followed the pattern set forth in the book of Judges—Israel sins, God punishes, Israel repents, and God forgives and rewards. Until sometime during the Babylonian exile, the Jerusalem elite had themselves been polytheistic, had wallowed in corruption and in all the other social diseases caused by the worship of false gods, and had been thoroughly disloyal to the God of Israel. It was the elite’s exile experience that helped them—finally—to recognize the God of Israel as the one true God. Significantly, their exile experience also gave them a sense that they held the key to defining God. The elite came to believe that they deserved all the divine punishment that they had endured. But in Babylon they had sincerely repented and “paid their dues,” so that now, according to the time-honored pattern of divine behavior, the hardliners believed that God was in turn forgiving them and blessing them.

Their safe return from exile, the successful reconstruction of the city walls and the temple, and the security they enjoyed under the protection of the Persian empire all seemed to confirm the understanding that the hardliners had of the way God operates in history. Moreover, in their view, the consistency with which God had followed this pattern of behavior—not only in their recent history but in the days all the way back to Noah—convinced them that this divine behavior was much more than a mere pattern; it was God’s very nature. Thus, for the hardliners, God was above all a just and dependable God, whose behavior was predictable because God always acted according to the principle of punishing sinners and rewarding those who do good works. In other words, the hardliners believed in a God who repays good for good and evil for evil.2 This was their definition of God. In this understanding of God, the rich are being rewarded by God for being good, and the poor are being punished for being sinners.

It was one thing for the hardliners to adopt such a theology themselves but quite another for them to induce the rest of the Jews to accept it. The hardliners had considerable prestige and influence among Judah’s inhabitants, but these other Jews, amounting to about three-fourths of Judah’s population, had never been exiled—had never had such a transformational experience—and thus had remained polytheists just as before the Babylonian exile. For this reason, there were important differences in attitude and opinion between those who had gone into exile and those who had remained in Judah. For example, the hardliners were motivated by a zealous desire to make all Jews practice exclusive loyalty to the God of Israel, understood as the God of retribution, lest the Jews sin again and invite another divine punishment. But many Jews, including some who had converted to monotheism, were understandably less enthusiastic, or simply had other ideas, the most important of which are developed in the four texts studied and which form the crux of the struggle to define God.

One fundamental idea came from polytheism. A polytheistic system provides gods for every problem or purpose and assumes that these gods can be propitiated by means of appropriate offerings and that all gods can be thus influenced. No god is thought to be so principle-bound and inflexible that he or she will not forgive and bless upon receipt of the right offering. To a polytheist, the notion of a god who is moralistic and judgmental, to the point of being impervious to propitiation and unfailingly committed to a policy of punishment, is very strange indeed. Thus, in postexilic Judah, whose history up until that time had been characterized by polytheism, the popular mind experienced a cognitive dissonance between already existing conceptions of gods and the predictably punitive God espoused by the hardliners. This was especially so since the idea of a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, was not unknown among the Jews. Thus, even a Jew who had converted to monotheism might have cause to find fault with the theology of retribution, and many other Jews also had reason to dissent.

A more important reason for Jews to reject such a theology was the simple fact that the history of Israel and Judah was replete with examples of evil people who got rich and of good people who remained poor. Such a state of affairs was a clear contradiction of the theology of retribution, according to which God feels obliged to reward the good and to punish the bad. Hence even a casual observer of society could readily recognize that the theology of retribution was far from being a satisfactory definition or explanation of God.

The central objective of the hardliners was not only to practice their new religion themselves but, especially, to impose it upon the great mass of Jews, in order to make of them a cohesive community loyal to the one God, as the hardliners understood God. An important question, then, was how to build such cohesion, especially since many Jews had reason to remain indifferent or even to be actively uncooperative. One answer was for all the elite—not just the hardliners—to favor texts that pictured all people of Israelite/Judahite ethnicity as one big family. The patriarchal narratives, which depict all Israelites as descending from Abraham, provide just such a picture. Another answer was to educate, build group solidarity, and shape patterns of behavior. Celebration of the newly inaugurated liturgical festivals and of the Sabbath itself did exactly that. Still another answer was to promote commitment to the Torah. Toward this end, the elite sponsored public readings from the Torah and urged the population to pledge allegiance to it.3

For centuries before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians, the temple had been royal property dedicated to making round-the-clock sacrifices to a whole pantheon of gods, who, so ran the reasoning, had to be appeased in order to insure national security. Thus, the temple performed a governmental function and was not intended to attract or engage the average citizen. After the Babylonian exile, when the elite re-built the temple, they made the important political decision to re-brand the temple as the organizing center of national unity, a place for all Jews to congregate and celebrate.

But even with many government-sponsored activities designed to build solidarity and conformity, the elite in general found it difficult to make the Jews into a cohesive community that would be absolutely loyal to the God of Israel. The hardliners had even more trouble getting Jews to adopt the theology of retribution, especially because the hardliners felt that their theology required the banning of foreign wives. That policy seemed rather strange and harsh to most Jews, because they still thought of themselves mainly as what their name suggests—that is, as inhabitants of Judah—and for centuries the inhabitants of Judah had been free to marry whomever they pleased, including polytheists and women from any of the many and various ethnic groups that lived in or around Judah.

Not surprisingly, then, social tensions and dissent arose when the hardliners announced their plan to ban foreign wives in order to create a religiously pure community. Thus, women deemed “foreign” became the object of the hardliners’ xenophobia. By “foreign,” the hardliners meant “polytheistic” or “coming from an ethnic group whom they especially disliked.” Labelling certain wives as foreign and banning them—even if those women had deep roots in Judah and had always been considered perfectly acceptable members of the community—was patently misogynist and xenophobic. Presumably, this policy of banning foreign wives was hugely unpopular. It sought to ban wives and mothers who, it can well be imagined, were much loved by their family and friends and had much to contribute to the community. Hence, the decision to ban wives whom the hardliners deemed “foreign” was sure to produce a backlash.

Significantly, this policy singled out women as the cause of Israel’s disloyalty to God and thus reflected a strong misogynist bias. By contrast, no matching policy was aimed at banning men who had polytheistic tendencies, even though men were capable of being every bit as disloyal to God as could women. This ban suggests that the hardliners viewed women as by nature particularly threatening and dangerous—a view of women that is in fact predominant in the Hebrew Bible. But, given that the northern kingdom was polytheistic throughout its history and that Judah was also polytheistic until sometime after the Babylonian exile, there was no political or religious justification for such a misogynistic policy until after the exile, when the hardliners decided to turn the project for monotheism into a project for religious and racial purity, too. Only then—and not before—did misogyny serve any political purpose. Thus, by implication, misogynist attitudes were introduced into the biblical literature by the hardliners.

The hardliners were also rather condescending. Ezra 4:1–3 implies that the hardliners considered themselves to be the sole arbiters of this new monotheism. The hardliners also sent their agents out beyond Jerusalem and into the diaspora in order to impose conformity on other Jews.4 The power with which the hardliners imposed their views is best seen in the fact that they were able to make the theology of retribution predominant in the Hebrew Bible. Only the books of Jonah and Job present an alternative view. The hardliners felt superior, not only for being the privileged class in Jerusalem but also for having had the important experience of exile. Their hubris consisted especially in considering themselves to be the only ones who could define God and this new monotheism. Yes, God had spoken to them in Babylon, but they assumed that God had spoken only to them. Such absolutism and smugness virtually guaranteed dissent.

Thus, despite the conformity and unification usually associated with the period 538–350 BCE, it is really not surprising that considerable dissent arose against the theology and policies of the hardliners. What is surprising, however, is that this dissent assumed—not the form of riots and demonstrations—but the elegant form of great literature. The hardliners, it should be remembered, were quite adept at producing literature and were in fact responsible for the final form of Genesis through 2 Kings, as well as 1 and 2 Chronicles. There could not have been a more effective and appropriate way for dissenters to upstage, rebut, or educate the hardliners than to produce protest literature that in subtlety and refinement matched or even surpassed the literature produced by the hardliners.

The liberal literature to be explored in this book includes the following: the story of Rahab in Joshua 2 and the books of Job, Jonah, and Ruth—all of them works of extraordinary ingenuity and sophistication, and all dating from the postexilic period.

The objective of this exploration is, first, to show how these texts define God and how their definition of God influenced postexilic Judah, and then—importantly—to explain how their definition of God speaks to the current situation in the United States of America.

1. Scholars disagree about when the inhabitants of Judah can be called Jews, but the Hebrew word for “Jews” is the same as the Hebrew word for “inhabitants of Judah.” Thus, in this book, the term “Jews” will be used to mean “anyone living in Judah.” This term is not to be taken in a religious sense unless so specified.

2. Butterfield, 49–50.

3. Ibid., 67–68.

4. Schama, 40.