by Jack Miles
The answer is, in two words, extreme duress. In the greatest crisis of his life, God makes heroic virtue of dire necessity. To appreciate what he faces and how he responds to it, we may consider first how he conducted himself during a similar if somewhat less life-defining time—namely, the time leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonia and the abduction of much of his people to their infamous Babylonian Captivity. This was an event that, in principle, could have left Israel without a god, and God without a people. The covenant between them, having been established by God’s victory over Pharaoh, was predicated on God’s guarantee that no other king or god-king would do as Pharaoh had done: subjugate Israel. By rights, then, once Babylonia did just that, the covenant should have become moot.
It did not become moot, because God had made his protection conditional. It was guaranteed only if Israel would “listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I lay down for you today, and then keep them and put them into practice, not deviating to the right or the left from any of the commandments that I impose upon you today, by following other gods and serving them” (Deut. 28:13–14). If Israel was guilty of any deviation, then “the Lord will raise against you from the far ends of the earth a nation like a raptor in flight, a distant nation strange of speech, grim of face, ruthless toward the old, and pitiless toward the young” (28:49–50). By the time of the alien eagle’s final victory, the besieged towns of Israel, God warned, would be so desperate for food that “the most dainty and fastidious of your women” would be reduced, after giving birth, to eating their own afterbirth (28:56–57).
Israel did indeed deviate from fidelity to the Lord. According to the sixth-century prophets and the Books of Kings, most Israelites were worshipping other gods at the time of the Babylonian Conquest. The fall of Israel, then, did not reflect negatively on the power of God. This was what he had said would happen. God did not simply withdraw his protection and allow Israel’s enemies to have at her. The Babylonian victory, like the earlier Assyrian victory, was not something that had simply befallen Israel, and therefore him. No, he insisted, it was something that he had actively and purposefully inflicted on Israel using these seeming conquerors as means to his end.
The Babylonian Captivity was a calamity, then, for which theoretical provision had been made; yet it still felt like something new, unprecedented, and terrible when it finally came about, scarcely less so for the Lord than for Israel. Speaking to the prophet Habakkuk, God said in wonderment at his own employment of Israel’s enemies:
Cast your eyes over the nations,
gape and be amazed to stupefaction.
For I am doing something in your own days
Which you would not believe if told of it.
Behold, I am stirring up the Chaldeans [Babylonians],
That fierce and fiery nation
Who march across miles of countryside to seize the homes of others.
(Hab. 1:5–6)
Later in that brief but scathingly eloquent book of prophecy, the Lord sends Habakkuk a second vision, in which, as we have seen, the divine warrior marches back into Canaan to wreak vengeance on these very marching and pillaging Chaldeans. The Lord’s intent was to establish beyond any shadow of a doubt that both ends of this transaction—both Israel’s initial, crushing humiliation and her ultimate, glorious vindication—were his doing and no one else’s. But in taking this means to his end, he had to wonder at himself.
Did he achieve his goal? Not necessarily, or entirely, or permanently. True, it may be more painful to imagine that there is no god or that, if there is, you are beneath his notice than to imagine that your god is ruthlessly punitive. After all, a god who punishes may later reward. A god who is in control of the world order, whatever it is, may someday improve it. If this is comfort, however, it is cold comfort; and there were clearly some in ancient Israel who were not willing to wait for it indefinitely. To say this is to recall that the second half of God’s punishment-and-rehabilitation promise was never kept. He never delivered the reward that he said would follow on punishment. Yes, some of the Babylonian exiles returned to Israel, but many did not. Yes, a very limited kind of national sovereignty was reestablished, but it did not even include all of traditional Judea, much less all of Israel. In due course, a modest new temple was built, but the divine giant never came striding forth from the mountains of the south, shaking the earth and terrifying the sky as he had said he would. Despite an interlude of relative independence, Israel seemed to be on a road leading downward toward permanent subjugation, worsening, at the whim of its rulers, into outright and brutal oppression.
The psychological cost of this state of affairs, as decades lengthened into centuries, is set forth with grim and grieving clarity in Psalm 44:
God, we have heard for ourselves,
our ancestors have told us,
of the deeds you did in their days,
in days of old, by your hand.
To establish them in the land you drove out nations,
to make room for them you harried peoples.
It was not their own sword that won the land,
not their own arms which made them victorious,
but your hand it was and your arm,
and the light of your presence, for you loved them.
You are my king, my God,
who decreed Jacob’s victories;
through you we conquered our opponents,
in your name we trampled down those who rose up against us.…
Our boast was always of God,
we praised your name without ceasing.
Yet now you have abandoned and humiliated us,
you no longer take the field with our armies,
you leave us to fall back before the enemy,
those who hate us plunder us at will.
You hand us over like sheep for slaughter,
you scatter us among the nations,
you sell your people for a trifle
and make no profit on the sale.
You make us the butt of our neighbours,
the mockery and scorn of those around us,
you make us a by-word among nations,
other peoples shake their heads over us.
All day long I brood on my disgrace,
the shame written clear on my face,
from the sound of insult and abuse,
from the sight of hatred and vengefulness.
All this has befallen us though we had not forgotten you,
nor been disloyal to your covenant,
our hearts never turning away,
our feet never straying from your path.
Yet you have crushed us in the place where jackals live,
and thrown over us shadow dark as death.
Had we forgotten the name of our God
and stretched out our hands to a foreign god,
would not God have found this out,
for he knows the secrets of the heart?
For your sake we are being massacred all day long,
treated as sheep to be slaughtered.
Wake, Lord! Why are you asleep?
Awake! Do not abandon us for good.
Why do you turn your face away,
forgetting that we are poor and harassed?
For we are bowed down to the dust,
and lie prone on the ground.
Arise! Come to our help!
Ransom us, as your faithful love demands.
(NJB; Ps. 44:1–5, 8–26)
The remnant that reestablished a national life in Israel was a genuinely faithful remnant; and the greater its fidelity, the less plausible the interpretation of continuing foreign oppression as divine punishment. If the congregations that recited or perhaps sang the poignant words of Psalm 44 knew this, then did God not know it as well? And as he heard it, did it not remind him of his own broken promise, made through so many different prophets, that he would restore Israel to its former glory?
How could it not? But if we imagi
ne that God was not, as Psalm 44 imagines, asleep but simply too weak or that he was for some other, still more mysterious reason no longer willing to impose his will on history, then we have in hand a motive for Jesus’ revolutionary sermon. The prospect facing God is that if, on the one hand, he cannot defeat Israel’s enemies and, on the other, he can no longer claim that when they slaughter his sheep they are doing his bidding, then he must admit defeat. He must admit that, because of his failure rather than Israel’s, the covenant between him and his people has definitively lapsed. His failure will be only the more ignominious for his many boasts that Israel’s enemies are nothing but a pack of dogs he has whistled up for his hunt (Isa. 5:26). If those boasts are now exposed as vain, then God may, at most, be honored for his past services. He can no longer be respected for his present power.
God does have, however, one alternative to simply bringing his storied career to an ignominious close. Instead of baldly declaring that he is unable to defeat his enemies, God may declare that he has no enemies, that he now refuses to recognize any distinction between friend and foe. He may announce that he now loves all people indiscriminately, as the sun shines equally everywhere, and then urge—as the law of a new, broadened covenant—that his creatures extend to one another the same infinite tolerance of wrongdoing that henceforth he will extend, individually and collectively, to all of them.
Gentiles may imagine that their own goodness, their own attractiveness, was a sufficient motive for God’s decision to bring them into the covenant that he had once reserved for the Jews. But if we approach this change from God’s side, taking seriously a Bible that presents his covenant with Israel as dwarfing all else in its importance to him, then we must seek the reason for the eventual expansion of the covenant in the troubled state of his role within it. The covenant had to be changed because God could not keep its terms and because, on the eve of a new national catastrophe for Israel, he chose to stop pretending that he could.
The objection may be raised—indeed, must be raised—that it is one thing for God, safe in heaven, to resolve his dilemma by declaring that his erstwhile enemies are now friends, and quite another for human beings, imperiled on earth, to be required to do the same. Clever though it may be for God to excuse himself from the chore of defeating his enemies by declaring that he has none, this is cleverness on the cheap, or so the objection must insist, for it costs him nothing while imposing an unbearable burden on his creatures.
This objection is beyond logical refutation. The radical rejection of human difference, including the difference between friend and foe, does come on the cheap for God—unless and until God becomes a human being and suffers the consequences of his own confession. But in the story we are reading God has become a human being, and we may now begin to see why he has done so. Israel will be slaughtered like sheep, but God has become a lamb. He has made virtue of necessity, yes, but the virtue is real virtue. It is the heroic ideal of universal love.
INTERLUDE: THE ROMAN SHOAH AND THE DISARMAMENT OF GOD
Why did God become a Jew and subject himself to public execution by the enemy of his chosen people? He did so in order to confess that, by choice or of necessity, he was a god disarmed. He knew that genocide against his chosen people was imminent and that he would do nothing to prevent it. The one thing he could choose to do, as the Jew he became, was to break his silence about his own scandalous inaction.
God revealed to the seer Daniel at the court of the king of Babylon that when Babylon fell, the kingdom of God would not come immediately. Instead, there would come—in a succession symbolized in Daniel’s vision (Dan. 7) by a series of beasts—the kingdoms of the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks of Alexander the Great. Only then would God’s kingdom come, symbolized in the vision by “one like a son of man.” But as the Gospel opens, instead of God’s kingdom, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and the iron fist of this new Babylon is tightening around Judea in the last decades before a catastrophic rebellion. If, as the Book of Daniel makes clear, God foresees the historical future in detail, then he knows that he will not rescue his people from the defeat that lies ahead. Rome, enraged by Jewish rebelliousness, will perpetrate genocide, and God will do nothing. The one thing he can do—and does do as Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son—is break his silence about his own inaction.
The word genocide above refers to the ferocious escalation of violence that took place in the generation immediately after the execution of Jesus and came to its first climax with a Jewish revolt against Rome in 66–70 C.E. The Jews were a formidable opponent for imperial Rome. They were, more than is sometimes remembered, populous, well organized, well financed, and passionately motivated. Rome did not finally defeat them and suppress their rebellion until after it peaked for a second time, in 132–135 C.E. After this final Jewish revolt, an uprising led by the messiah Simon Bar Kokhba, Rome changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina and made it a capital offense for any Jew to set foot in the erstwhile City of David. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel then came to an end for fully eighteen centuries.
Rome’s imperial agenda did not extend to the extermination of all the Jews of the empire. In that one regard, the Roman suppression of world Jewry’s bid for freedom differed from the Nazi “Final Solution” of 1941–45. In two other regards, however, Rome’s victory in its sixty years’ war with the Jews may plausibly bear the grim designation genocide. First, the Roman intent in destroying the Jewish Temple was to end the distinctive national life that the Jewish people had led as a nation within the empire. Second, the portion of the world Jewish population that perished in the first of the Jewish Wars alone is comparable to the portion that perished in the Nazi shoah.*
Contemporary estimates of the world Jewish population in the first century range from a low of 5.5 million to a high of more than 8 million. Of these, 1 million to 2.5 million lived in Palestine; 4.5 million to 6 million lived in the diaspora. In the years before the doomed uprisings, the Jews of the Roman empire, notwithstanding worsening oppression within their homeland, were more numerous, more powerful, and better organized within the greater multinational social order of their day than were the Jews of Europe before the outbreak of World War II. Their remarkable unity—all Jews looking to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital and all supporting the Temple by the payment of a Temple tax—mimicked the organization of the Roman empire itself. This political coherence was admired by the other, less autonomous peoples of the empire, but it was understandably suspect in the eyes of the imperial authorities themselves.
Perhaps because of latent Roman resentment of Jewish success within the empire, not to mention various officially conceded Jewish legal exemptions and privileges, the Jewish revolts were put down with exceptional violence. The first-century historian Josephus, a Romanized Jew, reports that 1.1 million died in Titus’s siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The Roman historian Tacitus estimates six hundred thousand dead. Though many modern historians have regarded these numbers as exaggerations, Josephus in reporting his figure recognizes that it will seem incredible and explains that Passover pilgrims from the diaspora had swollen the resident population of Jerusalem to a degree that, though not out of the ordinary for this pilgrimage city, might well seem unbelievable to outsiders. He then engages in a surprisingly modern back-calculation from the number of animals slain for the feast—256,500—to a Passover population of 2,700,200 at the time the siege began.
Jerusalem in that era, it must be remembered, was like Mecca in our own: the site of an astounding annual concentration of pilgrims, overwhelmingly male, for whose ritual purposes an equally astounding number of animals were slaughtered. When the Roman siege began, the temporary population of Jerusalem was further swollen by refugees from parts of Palestine where Roman forces had already, and with great force, been putting down the Jewish rebellion for three full years. In view of all this, the large casualty figures quoted by Josephus and Tacitus are not as implausible as they might otherwise seem.<
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Even adjusting those figures downward, however, it seems clear that the first-century slaughter of the Jews of Palestine was large enough to be comparable in its impact to the twentieth-century slaughter of the Jews of Europe. The destruction of the Temple in and of itself would have had a major psychological impact, but this loss came coupled with staggering casualties; mass enslavements and ensuing depopulation in the promised land; and, not least, the memory of hideous atrocities. Generally faulted for obsequiousness toward Rome, Josephus does not flinch from reporting terror-crucifixions outside the walls of Jerusalem—mass crucifixions aimed at driving the defenders of the city to despair and panic—or from reporting that when some of the defenders did flee, Roman mercenaries took to disemboweling them in search of swallowed gold coins until stopped by the Roman commander himself.
Tales like these bear comparison with the grisliest from the Nazi concentration camps. The memory of them, combined with so devastating a loss of life in the Promised Land and with major pogroms against Jews in a number of cities within the Roman empire, can scarcely fail to have raised many of the radical or desperate questions about God that, to some, seem to have arisen for the first time in the twentieth century. As for radical or desperate answers to those questions, one seems to have been the Christian vision of the divine warrior self-disarmed.
Historically, there is little doubt that the Jews who rose against Rome expected that their God would come to their assistance, as he had in the historic victories whose celebration remains central to Judaism. There can be equally little doubt that these rebels, as they imagined the God who would assist them, imagined him as knowing the future in detail. This is the image of God expressed so vividly in the Book of Daniel. Literary criticism attending to the character of God within the Old Testament and the New is free to accept this understanding of God (as well as the time and place of the Book of Daniel as given in the text) and then to stipulate about God, as we have done earlier in this book, that, from the Babylonian exile onward, his character is such that he knows the future in the detailed way that human beings know the past.