Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 38 ‹In the final part of the story, the Israelites flee, but the pharaoh changes his mind yet again and leads his army in hot pursuit. The escaping slaves come to the sea with the chariots of Egypt behind them. We sense that all hope for deliverance is about to vanish. ‹But here, the narrative shifts the level of the drama. It’s not primarily a conflict between the Israelites and the Egyptians but between the wills of God and the pharaoh and between their two different forms of power. To demonstrate that, deliverance is brought about by God’s action. ●Moses tells the people, “Don’t be afraid. Stand your ground, and see the deliverance the Lord will bring for you today.” Then he adds, “The Lord will fight for you. You have only to be still.” ●This is one of the most peculiar battle scenes in the Bible. In it, victory is not won by force of arms. The people of Israel are simply to stand their ground. What they need is a way forward, and that is what they are given. ‹Moses stretches out his staff over the sea, and the water parts. The people of Israel follow the path through to the other side. The Egyptian army follows, but halfway across, their chariot wheels get clogged with mud. Moses stretches out his hand, and the water flows back to its normal place, covering the Egyptians. ‹The narrative has culminated in a dramatic reversal. At the beginning, the pharaoh wanted the Hebrew children thrown into the Nile. In the end, his chariots are thrown into the sea. His efforts to keep the Israelites enslaved have failed, while God’s efforts to free them have succeeded. Suggested Reading Fretheim, Exodus. Langston, Exodus through the Centuries. Lecture 5—Moses and the Drama of Exodus 39 Questions to Consider 1. What are the main characteristics of Moses in the story of the Exodus? What are his strengths? What are his weaknesses? What sort of a leader is he? 2. What are the main characteristics of God in the Exodus narrative? What do you find most compelling? What do you find most disturbing? Why?

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 16—Isaiah on Defiant Hope 111 ‹We have seen Isaiah depicting scenes of conflict and military invasion. And in that traumatic context, people had to wonder what God was doing. Thus, Isaiah’s vision of hope identifies what he considers to be God’s fundamental passion—his “zeal.” ‹Isaiah lived in a situation that was deeply discouraging. But through his visions, such as that of the peaceable kingdom, the prophet insisted that God was not held captive by human conflict. Neither the Assyrians nor any other invading power could ultimately set the terms for the future. For Isaiah, God’s passion was for a future in which the patterns of destruction would be overcome, and society would be reoriented toward human well-being. Hope and Vulnerability ‹Chapters 36 through 39 give us episodes from the latter part of Isaiah’s career. Several decades have passed, and King Ahaz’s son Hezekiah is now on the throne. He is described as a religious reformer, emphasizing the central importance of Israel’s God. ‹Hezekiah also asserted Judah’s independence in the face of Assyrian domination. His political resistance triggered a violent countermove by the Assyrians, and their armies ravaged the country in 701 B.C. As the Assyrians closed in, their own records say that they had Hezekiah trapped in Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage. ‹Chapter 36 begins with an Assyrian official traveling from the besieged city of Lachish to Jerusalem. There, he ridicules Hezekiah and demands that he surrender. Ultimately, the official becomes arrogant and insists that Israel’s God is powerless to stop the Assyrian advance. ‹In chapter 37, Hezekiah turns to Isaiah for help. He asks the prophet to pray for the remnant of the country that remains, and Isaiah sends back a word of assurance. As before, the king should take no rash action. The Assyrians will hear a rumor and return to their own land. ‹Then, we find the prophet repeating the message of hope used earlier. The remnant that remains will send its roots deep into the soil and send shoots Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 112 upward to bear fruit. Jerusalem will be the center from which life will spring up again in the wake of devastation. ‹Finally, the Assyrians withdraw and Jerusalem is spared. The country would survive for another century. Suggested Reading Clifford, “Isaiah, Book of.” Tull, “Isaiah 1–39.” Questions to Consider 1. Many of Isaiah’s most famous visions use poetic imagery: wolves living peacefully with lambs, swords being turned into plowshares, the dawning of a new day. Why might readers find these poetic depictions of hope engaging? 2. At several points, Isaiah refers to God preserving a “remnant” of the people. In what kind of situation might that be heard as good news? In what kind of situation would it be heard as a threat?

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 15—Justice and Love in Amos and Hosea 105 ‹As he sees what is coming, God says, “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?” On the one hand, God can see that he must let his child’s rebellious actions take their course. Yet on the other hand, he can’t bear it, because doing so will be disastrous. ‹The passage ends with a note of hope. The prophet can see that Assyria will conquer, yet he holds out the prospect of a future that extends beyond the disaster. He pictures God calling his rebellious child once again. Suggested Reading Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction. Simundson, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah. Questions to Consider 1. The lecture mentioned a number of reasons for people to reject Amos’s message. What were some of the reasons? Given the opposition he encountered, why might his message have been preserved? 2. Hosea depicts God’s relationship with people in terms of marital imagery. What aspects of that image seem most appropriate? What aspects seem most problematic? 106 LECTURE 16 Isaiah on Defiant Hope I saiah is one of the most widely read prophetic texts in the Bible. It’s rather long, and its contents are rich and varied, but perhaps the one feature that has contributed most to its popularity are its visions of hope. Of course, the book has scenes of outrage at injustice and hypocrisy, which in the prophet’s eyes are destroying society. Yet the visions of hope also challenge the audience to resist the tendency toward despair—closing off the possibility of a different future. We will explore Isaiah 1–39, and as we proceed, we’ll ask how hope relates to five aspects of the prophet’s message: confrontation, purification, realism, passion, and vulnerability. Hope and Confrontation ‹In chapter 1, the prophet Isaiah pictures God bringing a lawsuit against his own people, summoning heaven and earth to serve as his witnesses. God contends that he’s been a dutiful parent, but his children have rebelled against him and acted corruptly; parent and children are now estranged. In Isaiah, scenes of peace and harmony can appear side by side with sharp words of warning and indictment.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 118 ‹In chapters 27 to 29, we learn that there were competing prophets, whose visions of hope were dramatically different. Some prophets said that despite the losses, the good times were coming back. The heart of their message was that no change was necessary. All people needed to do was resist any more Babylonian encroachments. ‹But Jeremiah said the opposite. He envisioned a future in which his people would have to survive even as institutions collapsed. They would have to forge an identity that could persist in the absence of a temple, a king, or a country. His vision of hope was counterintuitive. He said that the way into the future was through acceptance, not resistance. He insisted that people should accept Babylonian rule, and that would allow them to survive. ‹The Babylonians completed the process of conquest in 587 B.C. In the chaos that ensued, a group of people fled from Jerusalem to Egypt and forced Jeremiah to go with them. There, in Egypt, the prophet ended his career. He became a refugee. ‹As the old world vanished, however, Jeremiah promised that the nation would survive. The identity of the people of Israel and Judah would continue, though Jeremiah wore a yoke, like an ox, to make the point that people would find life by accepting loss; the old institutions were ending, and the only way forward was to shoulder a new reality.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 16—Isaiah on Defiant Hope 109 that initially seems absurd. He is to tell the people, “Go ahead; keep listening. You’ll never understand. Go ahead; keep looking. You’ll never really see.” God explains that the prophet’s words will make them cover their ears and close their eyes, because if they understood what was happening, they would turn to God and be healed. ‹These words were designed to function as a challenge. They’re meant to provoke people into replying that the prophet must be wrong, because they can understand. That’s why in chapters to come, the prophet will repeatedly call people to greater awareness of the situation. But when Isaiah asks how long he must persist in this work, God tells him he must do so until cities lie in ruins and houses stand empty; until the country has been ravaged and people have been sent away. ‹Yet these ominous words conclude with a cryptic image that holds out the prospect of new life emerging from the ashes. Isaiah pictures the nation as a tree that has been cut down, yet the stump remains. And where there is a stump, there are roots underground. The image suggests that just as Isaiah was purified by fire yet survived, so, too, would the nation, which might be devastated but would live on. Hope and Realism ‹We can see this idea developed in the next part of the book, chapters 7 and 8, which reflect a time when the Assyrian Empire was expanding. The kings of Syria and Israel—north of Judah—wanted to form a coalition to resist the Assyrian invasion, but King Ahaz, who ruled in Jerusalem, apparently refused to join them. Thus, they threatened to overthrow Ahaz’s government and replace him with a new king. ‹The threat raises profound questions about the way hope relates to realism. Isaiah tells King Ahaz not to take any rash action and things will work out, but that does not seem realistic to Ahaz. The prophet underscores his message by referring to three children with symbolic names. His meaning is that Judah will survive the Assyrian attacks, at least for now.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 174 ‹The reversal continues when an angel appears to shepherds in the fields nearby. Interestingly, the angel transfers the title savior—which was often used for the emperor—to the child in the barn and says that the child’s coming signals peace on earth. It’s a move that shifts the claims of the emperor to the periphery while bringing people on the margin to the center, where they receive the message of God’s favor. Jesus’s Sermon at Nazareth ‹Chapter 4 of Luke marks the beginning of Jesus’s public activity and sets a direction for what is to come. Jesus goes to the synagogue in Nazareth and is handed a scroll, from which he reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ‹Then, Jesus adds, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The listeners are initially pleased because they assume they are the primary recipients of God’s favor. Yet Jesus is speaking about the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed—those who, by definition, are not at the center of things. Thus, as he extends God’s favor to those on the margins, those who see themselves as privileged feel displaced. And out of that sense of displacement, hostility will emerge. ‹From this point on, readers can expect that Jesus will be seen as a threat by traditional insiders but will be welcomed by those outside. The angry response he receives in Nazareth foreshadows the resistance that will lead to his death. Parable of the Good Samaritan ‹At the end of Luke 9, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, planning to cross the region of Samaria. The Samaritans were people brought by the Assyrians from other nations to colonize the area. These newcomers intermarried with local people and blended their religious traditions with those of Israel, but they did not identify with Jerusalem and its temple. Indeed, the Jews and the Samaritans viewed each other with suspicion.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 124 what kind of answer God will send him. God responds by telling him to write down a message on tablets. The message speaks of a vision that still awaits its time. But at present, the righteous live by faith. ●God’s comment about the vision that awaits its time seems to anticipate what is said in the rest of chapter 2. There, the point is that those who perpetrate violence will become the victims of violence. The oppressors may now have the upper hand, but they will not endure forever. Thus, at present, the righteous live by faith. ●This is a turning point in the text. Here, the prophet learns that faith is not the answer to his questions. Rather, faith is a way of life. Although he could expect the oppressors to lose out in the end, how long that would take was completely unclear. In the prophet’s context, the injustice remained real. And the more he tried to make sense of things, the more enigmatic they became. ●Habakkuk is unwilling to accept easy answers to difficult questions, yet he recognizes that one must also live on, despite the ambiguity. For Habakkuk, Habakkuk’s closing lines compare faith to the nimble movements of a creature who can negotiate barren landscapes and rocky slopes—a deer who moves surefootedly even in desolate and perilous places. Lecture 18—Babylonian Conquest and Exile 125 the alternative to faith is despair—and despair is ultimately debilitating. Thus, for him, faith is an act of defiance. It’s his militant commitment to life in a situation that could drain life away. ●He puts this defiant hope into poetic form in the final lines of the book, where he pictures a world that apparently holds no promise for the future: “a fig tree [that] does not blossom,” “fields [that] yield no food.” It’s a scene in which there is nothing that would warrant hope. ●Yet it’s precisely at this point that the prophet voices his defiance in a new way. He faces all the reasons that would make a person despair yet refuses to capitulate. Instead, he continues, “As for me, I will rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength.” Suggested Reading Hiebert, “The Book of Habakkuk: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” O’Connor, “The Book of Lamentations: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” Questions to Consider 1. The book of 2 Kings tries to identify reasons for the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the end of the Davidic monarchy, and the exile of the people. Why might people living after those events have thought it important to explain what happened? Can you think of modern analogies to such attempts to make sense of tragic events? 2. Lamentations and Habakkuk both respond to issues raised by the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem. How are their perspectives similar to each other? How are they different?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In Luria’s new myth, God began the creative process by going voluntarily into exile. How could the world exist if God was everywhere? Luria’s answer was the myth of zimzum (‘withdrawal’): the infinite En Sof had, as it were, to evacuate a region within itself to make room for the cosmos. This cosmology was punctuated by accidents, primal explosions and false starts, quite different from the orderly, peaceful creation described in P. But to the Sephardim, Luria’s myth seemed a more accurate appraisal of their unpredictable, fragmented world. At an early stage in the creative process, En Sof had tried to fill the vacuum it had created by zimzum with divine light, but the ‘vessels’ or ‘pipes’ designed to channel it had broken. So sparks of the primal light fell into the abyss that was not-God. Some of these returned to the divine world, but others remained trapped in the Godless realm dominated by the evil potential of Din, which En Sof had – as it were – attempted to purge from itself. After this accident, everything was in the wrong place. Adam could have rectified the situation on the first Sabbath, but he sinned and henceforth the divine sparks remained trapped in matter. The Shekhinah, now in permanent exile, wandered through the world, yearning to be reunited with the rest of the sefiroth. Yet there was hope. Jews were not outcasts, but essential to the redemption of the world. Their careful observance of the commandments and the special rituals evolved in Safed could effect the ‘restoration’ (tikkun) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jews to the Promised Land, and the world to its rightful state.34 In Lurianic Kabbalah, the literal, surface meaning of the Bible was a symptom of the primal disaster. Originally the letters of the Torah had been numinous with divine light and had come together to form the sefiroth, the secret names of God. When he was first created, Adam had been a spiritual being, but when he sinned his ‘great soul’ was shattered and his nature became more material. After this catastrophe, humanity needed a different Torah: the divine letters now formed words that related to human beings and earthly events while the commandments required physical actions to separate profane from sacred matter. But when tikkun was complete, the Torah would be restored to its original spirituality. ‘What pious men now enact in material performance of the commandments,’ Luria explained, ‘they will then, in the paradisical garment of the soul, so enact as God intended when he created man.’35

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But now the Haredim were creating a Bible-based counter-culture in diametrical opposition to the rationalized efficiency that had helped to slaughter six million Jews. Yeshivah study had nothing in common with the pragmatism of modernity: many of the laws studied, such as the laws of temple service, could no longer be implemented. The repetition of the Hebrew words that God had spoken on Sinai was a form of communion with the divine. Exploring the minutiae of the law was a way of symbolically entering the mind of God. Becoming familiar with the halakha of the great rabbis was a way of appropriating the tradition that had so nearly been destroyed . Zionism had originally been a secular ideology, a rebellion against religious Judaism that was reviled by the Orthodox for profaning the land of Israel, one of the most sacred symbols of Judaism. But during the 1950s and 1960s, a group of young religious Israelis began to develop a religious Zionism based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. God had promised the land to the descendants of Abraham, and this gave Jews a legal title to Palestine. The secular Zionists had never made this claim: they had tried to make the land their own by pragmatic diplomacy, working the land, or by fighting for it. But the religious Zionists saw life in Israel as a spiritual opportunity. In the late 1950s, they found a leader in R. Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982), who was by then almost seventy years old. According to Kook, the secular state of Israel was the kingdom of God tout court ; every clod of its earth was holy. Like the Christian fundamentalists, he interpreted literally the Hebrew prophecies about the Jews’ return to their land: to settle territory now inhabited by the Arabs would hasten the final Redemption and political involvement in the affairs of Israel was an ascent to the pinnacles of holiness. 56 Unless Jews occupied the whole land of Israel, exactly as this was defined in the Bible, there could be no Redemption. The annexation of territory belonging to the Arabs was now a supreme religious duty. 57 When the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights during the June War of 1967, Zionists saw this literal fulfilment of a scriptural imperative as proof positive that the end time had begun. There could be no question of returning the new territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Radical Kookists began to squat in Hebron and built a city at nearby Kiryat Arba, even though this contravened Geneva Conventions that forbade settlement in territories occupied during hostilities. This settlement initiative intensified after the October War of 1973.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Scripture is not able to provide certainty on this type of question. This is also the case with the question of scriptural violence. There is indeed a great deal of violence in the Bible – far more than there is in the Qur’an. And it is unquestionably true that throughout history people have used the Bible to justify atrocious acts. As Cantwell Smith observed, the Bible and its interpretation must be seen in historical context. The world has always been a violent place and scripture and its exegesis has often fallen prey to contemporary aggression. Joshua was presented by the Deuteronomists fighting with all the ruthlessness of an Assyrian general. The Crusaders ignored the pacifist teachings of Jesus and signed up for an expedition to the Holy Land because they were soldiers, wanted a militant religion and applied their distinctively feudal ethos to the Bible. The same is true in our own time. The modern period has seen violence and slaughter on an unprecedented scale and it is not surprising that this has affected the way some people have read the Bible. But because scripture has been so flagrantly abused in this way, Jews, Christians and Muslims have a duty to establish a counter-narrative that emphasizes the benign features of their exegetical traditions. Interfaith understanding and cooperation are now essential to our survival: perhaps members of the three monotheistic faiths should work together to establish a common hermeneutics. This would consist of a sustained critical, moral and spiritual examination of the problematic texts themselves, the way they have been interpreted throughout history, and an in-depth examination of the exegesis of the people who exploit them today. Their significance in the tradition as a whole should be defined clearly. Michael Fishbane’s suggestion that we construct a ‘canon within the canon’ to moderate the religiously articulated hatred of our time is extremely apposite. The Bible is indeed a witness to the danger of raging orthodoxies – and in our own day, not all these orthodoxies are religious. There is a form of ‘secular fundamentalism’ that is as bigoted, biased and inaccurate about religion as any Bible-based fundamentalism about secularism. There are good things and bad things in the Bible. The kabbalists were acutely aware of the flaws of their Torah and found inventive ways to qualify the harsh predominance of Din . There was a similar debate in the Bible itself. In the Pentateuch, P’s message of reconciliation opposed the stridency of Deuteronomy. In the New Testament, the battles of Revelation are juxtaposed with the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount. In the early fifth century, Jerome railed savagely against his theological opponents, while Augustine pleaded for kindness and humility in biblical debate, just as, later, Calvin was horrified by the polemical diatribes of Luther and Zwingli. The canon that is selected to counter the prevailing enthusiasm for biblical aggression should, as Fishbane suggested, make this alternative Word more audible in our divided world.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Instead he wanted justice to ‘flow like water, and integrity like an unfailing stream’. 25 From this early date, the biblical writings were subversive and iconoclastic, challenging prevailing orthodoxy. Isaiah of Jerusalem was more conventional; his oracles conformed entirely to the royal ideology of the House of David. He had received his prophetic commission in about 740 in the temple, where he saw Yahweh, surrounded by his Divine Assembly of celestial beings, and heard the cherubim crying ‘holy [ qaddosh ] holy, holy!’ 26 Yahweh was ‘separate’, ‘other’ and radically transcendent. Yahweh gave Isaiah a grim message: the countryside would be devastated and the inhabitants put to flight. 27 But Isaiah had no fear of Assyria. He had seen that Yahweh’s ‘glory’ filled the earth; 28 as long as he was enthroned in his temple on Mount Zion, Judah was safe, because Yahweh, the divine warrior, was once again on the march, fighting for his people. 29 But the northern kingdom enjoyed no such immunity. When the king of Israel joined a local confederacy to block Assyria’s western advance in 732, the Assyrian king TiglethPileser III descended and seized most of Israel’s territory. Ten years later, in 722, after another rebellion, the Assyrian armies destroyed Samaria, Israel’s beautiful capital, and deported the ruling class. The kingdom of Judah, which had become an Assyrian vassal, remained secure, and refugees fled to Jerusalem from the north, probably bringing with them the E saga and the recorded oracles of Hosea and Amos, who had foreseen the tragedy. These were included in Judah’s royal archive where, at some later date, scribes combined the ‘Elohist’ tradition with J’s southern epic. 30 During these dark years, Isaiah was comforted by the imminent birth of a royal baby, a sign that God was still with the House of David: ‘A young woman [ almah ] is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call ImmanuEl [God-with-us].’ 31 His birth would even be a beacon of hope, ‘a great light’, to the traumatized people of the north, who ‘walked in darkness’ and ‘deep shadow’. 32 When the baby was born, he was in fact named Hezekiah, and Isaiah imagined the entire Divine Assembly celebrating the royal child, who, like all the Davidic kings, would become a divine figure and a member of their heavenly council: on his coronation day he would be called ‘Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  This was not a literal, historically accurate account of creation. When the final editors put the extant biblical text together, they placed P’s story next to J’s creation narrative, which is quite different.63 In the ancient world, cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre. People recited creation myths at a sickbed, at the start of a new project, or at the beginning of a new year – whenever they felt the need for an infusion of the divine potency that had, somehow, brought all things into being. P’s story would have been consoling to the exiles who felt that Yahweh had been ignominiously defeated by Marduk, god of Babylon. Unlike Marduk, whose creation of the world had to be repeated annually at New Year in spectacular rites in the ziggurat of Esagila, Yahweh was not obliged to fight other gods to create an ordered cosmos; the ocean was not a frightening sea-goddess like Tiamat, who fought Marduk to her bitter end, but simply the raw material of the universe; the sun, moon and stars were not deities but mere creatures and functionaries. Yahweh’s victory did not have to be renewed: he finished his work in six days and rested on the seventh.64 This was no bombastic polemic, however; there was no taunting, no aggression. In the ancient Near East, gods usually created the cosmos after a series of violent, terrifying battles; indeed, the Israelites told stories of Yahweh slaying divine sea-monsters at the beginning of time.65 But P’s creation myth was non-violent. God simply spoke a word of command and one by one the components of our world came into being. After each day, God saw that all he had made was tov, ‘good’. On the last day, Yahweh confirmed that everything was ‘very good’ and blessed his entire creation,66 including, presumably, the Babylonians. Everybody should behave like Yahweh, resting calmly on the Sabbath, serving God’s world and blessing every single one of his creatures.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In exile, the scribes pored over the scrolls in the royal archive. The Deuteronomists added passages to their history to account for the disaster, which they attributed to Manasseh’s religious policies.50 But some of the priests, who in losing their temple had lost their whole world, looked back to the past and found a reason for hope. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Penateuch ‘P’, though we do not know whether P was an individual or, as seems more likely, an entire school. P revised the JE narrative and added the books of Numbers and Leviticus, drawing upon older documents – genealogies, laws and ritual texts – some written down, others orally transmitted.51 The most important of his sources was the ‘Holiness Code’52 (a collection of seventh-century laws) and the Tabernacle Document, a description of Yahweh’s tent shrine during the Israelites’ years in the Sinai wilderness, which was central to P’s vision.53 Some of P’s material was very old indeed, but he created an entirely new vision for his demoralized people. P understood the Exodus story very differently from the Deuteronomists. The climax was not the sefer torah but the promise of God’s continual presence during their desert years. God had brought Israel out of Egypt simply in order ‘to live [skn] among them’.54 The verb shakan meant: ‘to lead the life of a nomadic tent dweller’. Instead of residing in a permanent building, God preferred to ‘tent’ with his wandering people; he was not tied to one place, but could accompany them wherever they went.55 After P’s revision, the book of Exodus ended with the completion of the tabernacle: the ‘glory’ of Yahweh filled the tent and the cloud of his presence covered it.56 God, P implied, was still with his people in their latest ‘wandering’ in Babylonia. Instead of ending his saga with Joshua’s conquest, P left the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land.57 Israel was not a people because it dwelt in a particular country, but because it lived in the presence of its God.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But modern literary criticism acknowledges that our inner world is created by fragments of many different texts, which live together in our minds, one qualifying another. Our moral universe is shaped by King Lear, Moby Dick and Madame Bovary as well as by the Bible. We rarely absorb texts whole: isolated images, phrases and gobbets live in our minds in myriad, fluid groupings, acting and reacting on one another. Similarly, the Bible does not exist in our minds whole and entire but in fragmentary form. We create our own ‘canon within a canon’ and should deliberately ensure that our selection is a collection of benign texts. The historical study of the Bible shows that there were many contesting visions in ancient Israel, each claiming – often aggressively – to be the official version of Yahwism. We can read the Bible today as a prophetic commentary on our own world of raging orthodoxies; it can provide us with the compassionate distance to realize the dangers of this strident dogmatism and replace it with a chastened pluralism. The main thrust of Fishbane’s work has been to show how the Bible constantly interpreted and corrected itself. Isaiah had envisaged all the nations making their way to Mount Zion, the city of peace, saying, ‘Come, let us go up to the mounain of Yahweh . . . that he may teach us his ways . . . since the Law will go out from Zion, and the oracle of Yahweh from Jerusalem.’ 78 When Micah quoted these words, he also looked forward to a universal peace when the nations would speak gently to one another. But he added an astonishingly daring coda. Each nation, including Israel, ‘will go forward, each in the name of its own god’. It is almost as though Micah foresaw our own time of multiple visions converging on a common truth, which for Israel had been expressed by the idea of their god. 79 Christian exegetes have continued to see Christ at the heart of the Bible. In his biblical theology, the Swiss Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) drew on the notion of incarnation. Jesus, like scripture, was God’s Word in human form. God is knowable and can express himself in terms that we can understand. But we have constantly to wrestle with these difficult but indispensable texts. The Bible presented archetypal stories of encounters between God and human beings, which helped readers to see the divine as an ideal dimension of their own lives. They can seize the imagination, in the same way as King Lear or Michelangelo’s David.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  50 But some of the priests, who in losing their temple had lost their whole world, looked back to the past and found a reason for hope. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Penateuch ‘P’, though we do not know whether P was an individual or, as seems more likely, an entire school. P revised the JE narrative and added the books of Numbers and Leviticus, drawing upon older documents – genealogies, laws and ritual texts – some written down, others orally transmitted. 51 The most important of his sources was the ‘Holiness Code’ 52 (a collection of seventh-century laws) and the Tabernacle Document, a description of Yahweh’s tent shrine during the Israelites’ years in the Sinai wilderness, which was central to P’s vision. 53 Some of P’s material was very old indeed, but he created an entirely new vision for his demoralized people. P understood the Exodus story very differently from the Deuteronomists. The climax was not the sefer torah but the promise of God’s continual presence during their desert years. God had brought Israel out of Egypt simply in order ‘to live [ skn ] among them’. 54 The verb shakan meant: ‘to lead the life of a nomadic tent dweller’. Instead of residing in a permanent building, God preferred to ‘tent’ with his wandering people; he was not tied to one place, but could accompany them wherever they went. 55 After P’s revision, the book of Exodus ended with the completion of the tabernacle: the ‘glory’ of Yahweh filled the tent and the cloud of his presence covered it. 56 God, P implied, was still with his people in their latest ‘wandering’ in Babylonia. Instead of ending his saga with Joshua’s conquest, P left the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land. 57 Israel was not a people because it dwelt in a particular country, but because it lived in the presence of its God. In P’s revised history, the exile was the latest in a sequence of migrations: Adam and Eve had been expelled from Eden; Cain condemned to a life of homeless vagrancy after murdering Abel; the human race had been scattered at the Tower of Babel; Abraham had left Ur; the tribes had emigrated to Egypt, and eventually lived as nomads in the desert. In their latest dispersal, the exiles must build a community to which the presence could return. In a startling innovation, P suggested that the entire people observe the purity laws of the temple personnel. 58 Everybody must live as though he were serving the divine presence. Israel must be ‘holy’ ( qaddosh ) and ‘separate’ like Yahweh, 59 so P crafted a way of life based on the principle of separation. The exiles must live apart from their Babylonian neighbours, observing distinctive rules of diet and cleanliness.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  78 When Micah quoted these words, he also looked forward to a universal peace when the nations would speak gently to one another. But he added an astonishingly daring coda. Each nation, including Israel, ‘will go forward, each in the name of its own god’. It is almost as though Micah foresaw our own time of multiple visions converging on a common truth, which for Israel had been expressed by the idea of their god. 79 Christian exegetes have continued to see Christ at the heart of the Bible. In his biblical theology, the Swiss Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) drew on the notion of incarnation. Jesus, like scripture, was God’s Word in human form. God is knowable and can express himself in terms that we can understand. But we have constantly to wrestle with these difficult but indispensable texts. The Bible presented archetypal stories of encounters between God and human beings, which helped readers to see the divine as an ideal dimension of their own lives. They can seize the imagination, in the same way as King Lear or Michelangelo’s David. But it was impossible to extract definitive ‘essentials’ or ‘fundamentals’ of God’s revelation in the Bible. Theology could ‘never be more than a reflection in words and concepts, never capable of being brought to a close . . . never be completely pinned down’. 80 But scripture was still authoritative, and everybody, including the Pope and the hierarchy, was subject to its summons and critique. Catholics had a duty to challenge the Church if they saw it departing from the spirit of the gospel. Hans Frei (1922–88), a convert from Judaism who became an episcopal priest and a professor at Yale, noted that in the pre-critical world, most readers assumed that the biblical stories were historical, even if they were chiefly concerned with figurative types of exegesis. 81 But this consensus broke down during the eighteenth century: after the Enlightenment, some saw the biblical narratives as purely factual, forgetting that they were written as stories. The author’s use of syntax and vocabulary were supposed to affect the way we understood these tales. Jesus was certainly a historical figure, but when we examine the gospel narratives of the resurrection, for example, it becomes impossible to decide what actually happened. Like the Jewish exegetes, Frei believed that the Bible must be read in conjunction with a sustained reflection on our own times. The juxtaposition of the gospel and current events should not lead to facile interpretations, but enable us to enter more deeply into the complexity of each. The Bible was subversive. These stories must not be used simply to back up the ideology of the establishment, but we should expose the hopes, claims and expectations of our time to the gospel story and examine, deconstruct and refashion them accordingly. More recently, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), formerly Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard, stressed the importance of understanding the Bible historically.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Michael Fishbane, currently Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, believes that exegesis could help us to retrieve the idea of a sacred text.77 Historical criticism of the Bible makes it impossible for us to read the scriptures synchronistically any longer, linking passages widely separated in time. But modern literary criticism acknowledges that our inner world is created by fragments of many different texts, which live together in our minds, one qualifying another. Our moral universe is shaped by King Lear, Moby Dick and Madame Bovary as well as by the Bible. We rarely absorb texts whole: isolated images, phrases and gobbets live in our minds in myriad, fluid groupings, acting and reacting on one another. Similarly, the Bible does not exist in our minds whole and entire but in fragmentary form. We create our own ‘canon within a canon’ and should deliberately ensure that our selection is a collection of benign texts. The historical study of the Bible shows that there were many contesting visions in ancient Israel, each claiming – often aggressively – to be the official version of Yahwism. We can read the Bible today as a prophetic commentary on our own world of raging orthodoxies; it can provide us with the compassionate distance to realize the dangers of this strident dogmatism and replace it with a chastened pluralism. The main thrust of Fishbane’s work has been to show how the Bible constantly interpreted and corrected itself. Isaiah had envisaged all the nations making their way to Mount Zion, the city of peace, saying, ‘Come, let us go up to the mounain of Yahweh . . . that he may teach us his ways . . . since the Law will go out from Zion, and the oracle of Yahweh from Jerusalem.’78 When Micah quoted these words, he also looked forward to a universal peace when the nations would speak gently to one another. But he added an astonishingly daring coda. Each nation, including Israel, ‘will go forward, each in the name of its own god’. It is almost as though Micah foresaw our own time of multiple visions converging on a common truth, which for Israel had been expressed by the idea of their god.79

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  A number of prophets tried to mobilize the population to revolt. 50 A certain Theudas led four hundred men into the desert, promising that God would liberate them there. A prophet known as the ‘Egyptian’ persuaded thousands of people to congregate on the Mount of Olives in order to storm the Roman fortress that was positioned provocatively beside the temple. Most of these uprisings were savagely suppressed and on one occasion the Romans crucified as many as two thousand rebels outside Jerusalem. During the 20s CE, John the Baptizer, an ascetic prophet who may have belonged to the Essene movement, drew large crowds to the Judaean desert where he preached that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ was at hand. 51 There would be a great judgement for which Jews must prepare by confessing their sins, immersing themselves in the river Jordan, and vowing to live a blameless, honest life. 52 Even though John does not seem to have preached against Roman rule, he was executed by the authorities. John seems to have been related in some way to Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean healer and exorcist, who announced the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God at about the same time. 53 Anti-Roman feeling was especially rife during the great national festivals, and Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate in about 30 CE when he went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. But that did not end the Jesus movement. Some of his disciples were convinced that he had risen from the tomb; they claimed that they had seen him in visions and that his personal resurrection heralded the last days, when the righteous dead would rise from their graves. Jesus would soon return in glory to inaugurate the kingdom. Their leader in Jerusalem was Jesus’s brother James, who was known as the Tzaddik, the ‘Righteous One’ and had good relations with both the Pharisees and the Essenes. But the movement also attracted Greek- speaking Jews in the diaspora and, most surprisingly, a significant number of ‘God-fearers’, non-Jews who were honorary members of the synagogues. The Jesus movement was unusual in Palestine, where many of the sects were hostile to gentiles, but in the diaspora Jewish spirituality tended to be less exclusive and more open to Hellenistic ideas. There was a large Jewish community in Alexandria in Upper Egypt, a city created by Alexander the Great, which had become a major centre of learning. Alexandrian Jews studied in the gymnasium, spoke Greek and would achieve an interesting fusion of Greek and Jewish culture. But because few of them could read classical Hebrew, they could not understand the Torah. Indeed, even in Palestine, most Jews conversed in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and needed a translation (targum) when the Law and the Prophets were read aloud in the synagogue. Jews had started to translate their scriptures into Greek during the third century BCE on the island of Pharos, just off the coast of Alexandria.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But the most important narrative was the Exodus: the slaves’ Egypt was America, but one day God would liberate them: When Israel was in Egypt’s land, O let my people go! Oppressed so hard they could not stand, O let my people go! Chorus: O go down, Moses Away to Egypt’s land, And tell King Pharaoh To let my people go! The slaves used the Exodus story to raise their consciousness, to help them endure the dehumanizing conditions in which they lived, and to demand justice. The spirituals persisted long after the abolition of slavery by Abraham Lincoln; the Exodus story inspired Martin Luther King Jr during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and after the assassinations of King (1968) and Malcolm X (1965), the black liberation theologian James Hal Cone argued that Christian theology must become black theology, wholly identified with the cause of the oppressed and affirmative of the divine character of their struggle for freedom. 54 A single text could be interpreted to serve diametrically opposed interests. The more people were encouraged to make the Bible the focus of their spirituality, the more difficult it became to find a core message. At the same time as African Americans drew on the Bible to develop their theology of liberation, the Ku Klux Klan used it to justify their lynching of blacks. But the Exodus story did not mean liberation for everybody. Israelites who rebelled against Moses in the wilderness were exterminated; the indigenous Canaanites were massacred by Joshua’s armies. Black feminist theologians have pointed out that the Israelites owned slaves; that God had permitted them to sell their daughters into slavery; and that God actually ordered Abraham to abandon the Egyptian slave girl Hagar in the wilderness. 55 Sola scriptura could point people in the direction of the Bible, but it could never provide an absolute mandate: people could always find alternative texts to support an opposing point of view. By the seventeenth century, religious people were becoming acutely aware that the Bible was a very confusing book, and this at a time when clarity and rationality were prized as never before. CHAPTER 8 Modernity By the late seventeenth century, Europeans had entered the age of reason. Instead of relying on sacred tradition, scientists, scholars and philosophers were becoming future-oriented, ready to jettison the past and start again. Truth, they were beginning to discover, was never absolute, since new discoveries habitually undermined old certainties. Increasingly, truth had to be demonstrated empirically and objectively, assessed by its efficiency in and fidelity to the external world. Consequently, the more intuitive modes of thought became suspect. Instead of conserving what had been achieved, scholars were becoming pioneers and specialists. The ‘renaissance man’, with an encyclopaedic grasp of knowledge, belonged to the past.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The story of Johanan’s dramatic escape has obvious apocryphal elements, but the powerful image of the rabbi rising from the coffin outside the doomed city was prophetic, since Yavneh ensured the resurrection of a new version of temple Judaism from the ruins of the old. We do not know very much about the Yavneh period, however. 1 The coalition of scholars was led by the Pharisees, initially by R. Johanan and his two gifted pupils, R. Eliezer and R. Joshua, and later by R. Akiba. Long before the tragedy of 70, the Pharisees had encouraged the laity to live as though they were serving in the temple, so that each hearth became an altar, each householder a priest. Yet the Pharisees had continued to worship in the real temple as well and never imagined that Jews would one day have to manage without it. Even during their years at Yavneh, they seem to have believed that Jews would be able to build a new temple, but their ideology was well suited to the post–70 world because they had, as it were, constructed their daily lives around a virtual temple which became the focus of their spirituality. Now R. Johanan and his successors would begin to build this imaginary shrine in more detail. The first task of the rabbis at Yavneh was to collect and preserve all the available memories, practices and rituals of traditional religion, so that when the temple was rebuilt the cult could be resumed. Other Jews might plan new rebellions against the Roman empire; Christians could insist that Jesus had replaced the temple; but together with the scribes and priests who had joined them at Yavneh, the Pharisees would make a heroic effort to keep every single detail of the lost shrine in their minds, at the same time as they revised the Torah to meet the needs of their drastically altered world. It would take the Pharisees many years to become the undisputed leaders of the new Judaism. But by the late 80s and 90s, as we have seen, some of the Christians had begun to feel seriously threatened by Yavneh, whose vision seemed more compelling and authentic to many Jews than the gospel. Yet in fact the Pharisaic enterprise had much in common with early Christian churches. The Pharisees would also search the scriptures, invent another form of exegesis, and compose new sacred texts – even though they would never claim that these formed a ‘New Testament’. When two or three of the Pharisees studied the Torah together, they found – like the Christians – that the Shekhinah was in their midst. At Yavneh, the Pharisees pioneered a spirituality in which Torah study replaced the temple as the chief means of encountering the divine presence.