And God took the rib and closed up flesh in its place.
FOUR SONNETS ON EDEN: 2
scripture
FOUR SONNETS ON EDEN: 1
God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: AMOS
Amos was the first Hebrew prophet we know of who wrote a book. We can even date his work to a particular time—the decade between 760 and 750 BCE. This was a period of great success and prosperity for the sister kingdoms of Israel and Judah, mainly because the dominant imperial powers of the Near East were all in disarray, allowing the two of them (with Israel as the senior partner) to dominate the weaker states around them and garner immense wealth in tribute and trade.
The rich and powerful people of the two kingdoms responded much like the “1%” of the US in the last few decades—amassing great fortunes, spending extravagantly on themselves, and refusing to take any responsibility for the effects of their behavior on the public at large or, more specifically, the poor. Religion was very much bound up with the nation’s prosperity, since people attributed it to the favor of their God (with much the same enthusiasm as Americans attribute ours to the favors of capitalism). The Temples were well endowed, the festivals well attended, the clergy as well satisfied as the plutocrats.
In the midst of this, Amos appeared unexpectedly at Israel’s royal sanctuary in Bethel with a message of judgement and destruction. He insisted that he was not a prophet at all—not, that is, part of one of the regular guilds of prophets at the temples. Some understand him to have been a poor shepherd; others see him as a stockman, owning herds and groves of the sycamore figs used as cattle feed. However he made his living, he was a brilliant poet. And he made a particular point of the tension we’ve already noted in Genesis between God as the universal God and God as the God of a particular nation.
The opening oracle of the book (chaps. 1-2) makes a tour of surrounding nations, denouncing each for its sins and promising due punishment. This implies that God is the God of the whole world, able to punish anyone at all. But the Israelite audience will also have heard Amos as saying that this was the work of their God, the one who favored them. Then, at 2:4, things start going wrong. The seventh nation condemned is not the enemy, but Israel’s sister kingdom and ally, Judah. And rather than quitting, as expected, after the seventh oracle, Amos keeps right on into an eighth, directed now at Israel itself.
Amos denounces the surrounding nations not for their paganism, but for violence and cruelty toward their enemies. He denounces Israel and Judah primarily for cruelty toward their own poor and for betrayal of their relationship with their God. In other words, Amos catches them up short by turning their assumption of religious advantage into a threat. Further on, God will say to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” They expected “the day of the Lord” as their time of vindication. Amos says it will be not light and salvation, but darkness, judgement, and destruction (5:18-20). God will punish every nation for its inhumanity—Israel and Judah above all.
Amos’s God is indeed God of the whole world, as he declares in a short, but exalted poem that crashes into the sequence of oracles like a meteor:
The one who made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning,
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is his name,
who makes destruction flash out against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress. (5:8-9, NRSV)
There is no hint here of a God who is merely Israel’s God.
Amos repeats the point in another short cosmic poem:
The Lord, God of hosts,
he who touches the earth and it melts,
and all who live in it mourn,
and all of it rises like the Nile,
and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt;
who builds his upper chambers in the heavens,
and founds his vault upon the earth;
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out upon the surface of the earth—
the Lord is his name. (9:5-6 NRSV)
And then, Amos takes the matter still further as God tells the Israelites that they are no more special than any other nation, even the people furthest from them, even their enemies:
Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,
O people of Israel? says the Lord.
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,
and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir? ((9:7 NRSV)
The prophet resolutely adheres to both ends of the impossible tension. God will destroy Israel because God is the universal God of justice and God will destroy them because God is their own God whom they have betrayed by their cruelty to the poor.
Christians, over the centuries, have repeatedly lost our grasp on this necessary tension. This is what has allowed people of faith to be seduced into unquestioning support for violence against enemies and for oppression of people who have been marginalized in our own society. We suppose that God is ours and will judge us more favorably. No. Violence, inhumanity, trampling on the poor and weak—all will be judged wherever they are found. And we who think ourselves particularly favored will be judged, if anything, more severely.
The point is that we can claim the particular love of God for ourselves only insofar as we allow it to be extended to the whole world. It is a hard notion to hang onto and we keep losing our grip on it. The scriptures have no purpose more fundamental or more valuable than this: to hold us to this tension and bring us back to it when we abandon it.
HOW TO READ SCRIPTURE
Through an adult lifetime of teaching the Christian scriptures in churches and institutions of higher education, I have grown increasingly discontented with the way we read the Bible in both contexts. Not that I object to reading scripture from the perspective of faith; I do it myself and it informs my life. Nor that I object to reading it with critical questions about the history and sociology reflected in it or the literary forms that shape it; I do that, too, and find it profoundly instructive.
To a degree, my objection is to the separating of the two ways of reading. Academic Biblical Studies become trivial—even sterile—when they turn their back on the deep questions raised in scripture. And religious readings of the Bible that lack critical awareness tend to reduce it to a confirmation of our existing beliefs. Each way of reading needs the other as corrective.
In a larger sense, however, my objection is that all our readings tend to shortchange the sacred texts. We simplify the text and reduce it to the parameters of our particular set of concerns, which might be those of right-wing Evangelicalism or of Marxist sociology or any of a thousand other conscious or unconscious programs. We want to “make sense” of it on our terms, to get direct and simple answers out of it.
In reality, there is nothing straightforward and simple about the scriptures. They contain great, indeed unresolvable, tensions. Take Genesis as an example: it begins with a God who is the Creator of the whole universe and concludes with a God whose particular care is focused on a single family. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the sages who created Genesis tried to soften this tension, to subordinate one side of it to the other, or to make some kind of decision between the two poles. They simply leave us with the tension, a tension that in fact pervades all of human life.
This strategy isn’t unique to the Biblical writers. All writers whose work has proved its value enough to be called “classical”—such people as Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen—they don’t settle things for us; they awaken us to the tensions in our lives and our understanding. They give our own reflections on life more breadth and nuance that they would otherwise have. Christians are happy to accept this gift wherever we find it, but above all we count on finding it in the scriptures.
To many, this may seem an odd way to speak of the scriptures. The broad public impression of the Bible in the US today is quite different. It’s more likely to be seen as a weapon that preachers use to beat up on their congregations, one another, and the outside world. Exactly how it is used varies with the kind of preacher. The Conservative’s Bible is full of rules; it is a martinet with dangerous aspirations to theocratic tyranny. The Liberal’s Bible is full of reproof; it is a scold, a nag, a guilt-broker. (There are, thank God, many exceptions. This isn’t an accurate description of contemporary Christianity, only what I see as the broad public impression. At the same, the impression is not unrelated to reality.)
Both conservative and liberal approaches miss the real value of Scripture. Despite the common assumption, only a small percentage of the Bible is devoted to legislation. Perhaps somewhat more is devoted to prophetic reproof, though that’s not the whole of the prophetic message by any means. The central gift of scripture, however, is not rules or reproach, but the way in which the Scriptures place us in the presence of the One who shapes all reality and help us begin to think about our humanity and our world in the light of this God who is origin and sustainer of both.
For this, the tensions in the text are essential. We don’t live in a simple world. If it were simple, probably we would all “read” and interpret it much the same. That is far from being the case. For that matter, if the Bible were simple, we would probably all understand it the same. That’s just as far from being the case. What I hope to do is shift our attention from reductionist kinds of reading to a kind that allows scripture its full complexity and calls us into a truer awareness of ourselves and our world before God. I am confident that we will find this more useful in both the life of faith and the life of the mind.
In subsequent posts, I’ll explore this approach in terms of some specific texts—starting with Genesis, for what comes first inevitably affects our reading of everything else. I invite my readers to enter into conversation with me and with one another as we proceed.