How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Ha. Just kidding. We’d never do that. But, wow, what a zany pagan king that Mesha was, thinking that sacrificing his son and successor to his fictional god (Chemosh) would actually do any good!! Can you believe these people? Well, thank goodness the Bible will set him right. There are no other gods, child sacrifice is barbaric, and—obviously—this won’t work.

  Except it does.

  After Mesha sacrifices his son, we read: And great wrath came upon Israel, so they [the Israelite-led coalition] withdrew from him [Mesha] and returned to their own land (2 Kings 3:27).*

  And that’s how this story ends. No explanation. As if this is just what happens now and then when an enemy king sacrifices his son to a god. The biblical writers really should have thought ahead and included “footnotes for modern Christians.”

  Banking Options

  Here might be yet another ideal place to remind ourselves that these stories were written a very long time ago: Mesha’s rebellion is about as far back in time for us as about the year 4900 CE is forward in time.

  That distance always stops me dead in my tracks. We’re talking about a long time ago, in the Iron Age, which archaeologists date to 1200–500 BCE and is so called because ancient people figured out that iron made better weapons than bronze. People thought differently back then about a lot of things, not least of which was an assumed and universal belief in a very active divine realm where all sorts of gods went about their business. The responsibility of mere mortals was to make sure these gods thought well of them, so mortals could do things like grow crops, have a water supply, produce children, and wage war successfully—in other words, not die.

  But gods are fickle beings. Your comfort is not high on their priority list, and they can turn on you for reasons that would keep mortals guessing. One thing is for sure, however. When things were going badly for a nation, that meant one or more of its gods was clearly displeased and needed to be appeased by an offering, normally slitting an animal’s throat and burning it on a stone altar. In cases of extreme need, such as the one in which we find our King Mesha, you pull out all the stops and sacrifice your beloved child.

  Mesha’s move, though hardly easy for him, made sense in his world. He appeased his high god, Chemosh, with a sacrifice the deity couldn’t refuse. With divine pleasure restored, a wrath fell upon the Israelite-led coalition, and they were repelled.

  And all of this leads me to my point for bringing up the wild and wacky world of Iron Age religion. The biblical storyteller not only is clearly on board with the idea that Mesha’s sacrifice worked, but didn’t even feel the need to explain the concept to his readers.

  Neither does the writer explain why Yahweh didn’t interfere at that point and give the Israelites a glorious victory despite the sacrifice. I mean, I would expect to read, “And yet, Chemosh was still powerless to stop Israel’s Yahweh-backed victory.” Perhaps Yahweh didn’t want to back a coalition led by the northern kingdom (the writers of 1 and 2 Kings have nothing good to say about the north). We don’t know, but what we do know is that the writer accepted without explanation or hesitation the notion that other gods actually exist, can be appeased, and have the power to affect the course of human affairs. It’s just a given.

  Yes, Virginia, other gods do exist—at least the Israelites thought so, along with all their ancient neighbors. That notion takes some getting used to for us, but it might (or might not) help to remember that the ancient biblical writer really had no choice about what to make of Mesha’s last-minute rescue.

  The writer was part of a world that imagined the divine realm this way, and he can hardly be faulted. Any of us would have done the same.

  Today we don’t have a heavenly realm full of gods, but we do have a lot of banks, which means we have loads of banking options. Banks vie for our business by comparing themselves to other banks—“We are more friendly, have more locations, better interest rates, free checking,” and so forth. All competing banks claim, “We are the place to trust with your financial lives, not those dozens of other options you pass on the street day after day.”

  And now we know how ancient religions work.

  For Iron Age humans, the thought that all those higher powers vying for human devotion didn’t actually exist would have been as nonsensical as it would be for someone to tell us, “Oh, those other banks aren’t real. And those other ATMs don’t actually spit out money. They are empty. There are no other banking options.”

  The active question for us is not, “Which is the only bank that truly exists?” but “Where do you bank?” Likewise, Iron Age peoples asked, “Which god (or gods) are you devoted to? Which do you pray to and sacrifice to? Which do you worship?”

  It would be bizarre indeed to think that the Israelites somehow kept a safe distance from this ancient understanding of the gods—and stories like Mesha’s sacrifice tell us they didn’t.

  The Israelites certainly believed other gods existed, but Yahweh alone was to be worshiped because he was the best god. How they thought and wrote about their God was absolutely shaped by the world in which they lived—which is a very different world from ours.

  And this brings us to one of the best-known stories in the Bible, which is also the closest the Bible comes to a pay-per-view UFC cage match: the exodus from Egypt.

  What Does God Have to Be Jealous About?

  The exodus story is one of the better known in the entire Bible: Moses leads the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt after Pharaoh and the Egyptians suffer through ten plagues.

  These plagues aren’t random displays of Yahweh’s might, but a dramatic face-off between the story’s two central characters. In this corner we have Yahweh, the God of Israel, local god, god over slaves, newcomer on the world stage, making grandiose claims yet largely untested, and represented by his servant Moses. And in the other corner we have the reigning and undisputed perennial world champions, the tag team of Egyptian gods represented by the priests and above all by their Pharaoh.

  At stake was whether Yahweh or Pharaoh would claim Israel as his own. And in case you somehow missed The Ten Commandments on TV for the past sixty years, Yahweh wins. Easily. Like, no contest.

  Yahweh’s opening move in the first plague is to turn the Nile to blood. Impressive, yes, but also brimming with religious significance. The Nile was the reason Egypt existed at all—its yearly flooding of the banks allowed for life in an otherwise barren land. The Nile deity Hapi was to be thanked personally and profusely for making this happen like clockwork, thus keeping the Egyptians from dying. Yahweh’s first plague shows his superiority over a key Egyptian deity.

  In the second plague, Yahweh multiplies frogs all over Egypt. Okay. Whatever. Why not something more threatening, like puppies? Why frogs? Because the Egyptian goddess of fertility and childbirth, Heqet, is depicted with the head of a (wait for it) frog. An out-of-control mass of frogs was a religious statement: Heqet is unable to do her job of governing fertility when confronted by the more powerful Yahweh.

  If you want to be an awesome god in Egypt or anywhere in the ancient world, you definitely want to control water and fertility, the forces of life. The first two plagues depict a God of slaves marching into Egyptian territory and smacking around two of their vital deities.

  To mention just two more, in the ninth plague (darkness), Yahweh neuters the sun god Ra, the high Egyptian god and Pharaoh’s patron god, by blotting out the sun for three days. Then in the tenth plague, Yahweh brings death to the firstborn of Egypt, thus pinning to the mat the god of death, Osiris (or Anubis). The whole cosmic battle is summed up nicely in Exodus 12:12, where Yahweh tells Moses, On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments. You can say that again, Yahweh. You can say that again. Yahweh frees the Israelite slaves by beating the Egyptian gods into submission.

  For this story to have any punch (pun intended), we need to see that, to the ancient Israelites, the gods of Egypt were actually real and Yahweh actually did kick their actual (figurative) butts. We might not think that Egyptian god
s ever existed (mark me down for that), but how we imagine God is 110 percent irrelevant at the moment. How we see things is exactly what we need to get over if we want to understand stories like this one. The Israelites did believe Yahweh conquered the Egyptian gods—and if we bury that lede, we miss the point of this ancient story.

  Israel’s “founding narrative”—the departure from Egypt and ascent to nationhood—is an odd and ancient story of rumbling deities where Yahweh easily comes out on top.

  The lesson continues. About three months after they left Egypt, the former slaves arrive at their destination, the mountain of God, Mt. Sinai, to meet their hero-warrior God and await further instruction. Yahweh soon summons Moses to hike up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, and the first thing out of Yahweh’s mouth is:

  I am Yahweh* your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. (Exod. 20:2–3)

  This is the first of the Ten Commandments, and it’s good and proper to start with the most important one, which reiterates what just happened in Egypt. But having no other gods before Yahweh (meaning “in preference to” Yahweh) is a command that only has force if real live divine options are available.

  The command does not say, “Remember that there are no other gods out there,” but, “Don’t even think about sharing your allegiance with any of them.” After all, Yahweh alone delivered the Israelites from slavery and so he alone is to be worshiped (monolatry). This command preps the Israelites for the next stage of their journey—when they enter the land of Canaan with its own lineup of deities, like the storm and war god Baal and the fertility goddess Asherah (mentioned all over the place, especially in 1 and 2 Kings).

  The First Commandment is Israel’s prime directive: worship only Yahweh. With all the other divine options out there, it’s easy to forget.

  The Second Commandment drives the point home even further: bowing down before (worshiping) any idols would make Yahweh jealous (Exod. 20:4–5). Idols were mainstays of the ancient world, statues of stone, wood, or clay that represented the gods, reminding mortals that the gods, though far off somewhere, were never so far off that they could be forgotten.

  Worshiping these idols would make Yahweh jealous. Not “What a dumb thought. Please get over the ‘idol’ idea immediately,” but, “Worshiping idols makes me jealous.”

  Resist entertaining memories of the high-school dating scene. God’s jealousy isn’t a petty, pouting, brooding kind of resentment or bitterness because your dream guy, whom you’ll love till the day you die, doesn’t know you’re alive and asked someone else to the county fair. God’s jealousy is more like what a spouse might feel if the other breaks the marriage vow—which is why worshiping other gods is sometimes depicted in the Old Testament as adultery.

  My main point, however, is that for Yahweh to be jealous about sharing his people with other gods, all concerned parties need to be operating on the same assumption, namely, that Yahweh actually has something to be jealous about. If my wife were to take a weeklong vacation knitting scarves on an island for grandmotherly women, spousal jealousy wouldn’t enter my mind—I’d probably welcome the challenge to see how long I could live on Entenmann’s,* Wendy’s, and Maker’s Mark. But if she announced she was taking off for a month to live in a shirtless under-thirty male colony, I’d have a different reaction.

  I’ll cross that bridge if and when I come to it. All I want to say here is that Yahweh is deemed worthy of worship not because he is the only God and the Israelites have no other options, but because he isn’t and they do. This is how the Israelites imagined their God, as the best in a world of many gods.

  The stories of Mesha, the plagues, and the first two commandments aren’t the only places in the Bible where the “one God among many gods” idea shows up, but they will have to do.* Let me simply sum up by saying that the biblical authors speak of God in ways that reflect their experience in a world where many gods are a given. They are processing their experience of God through the limitations of their world.

  And with that we should be very careful to avoid two extremes. The first is looking down on this ancient view of God as simply “wrong.” The other is elevating this view off the pages of history, of taking it as timeless and “correct” because it’s in the Bible.

  We respect these sacred texts best not by taking them as the final word on what God is like, but by accepting them as recording for us genuine experiences of God for the Israelites and trying to understand why they would describe God as they do. God met the ancient Israelites on their terms, in their time and place, stepping into their world.

  We follow the lead of these writers not by simply reproducing how they imagined God for their time, but by reimagining God for ourselves in our time, which for us (as we’ll get to later) includes taking into account the Christian story as well. In doing so, we will necessarily commune with God differently with respect to those who went before.

  The ancient ways the Bible describes God drive us to work through what God is like for our own time and place. And, as I’ve been saying, that process is an act of wisdom, of asking, “What is God like? What God do we truly believe in?”

  Paradoxically, that most lofty and honored of questions about the boundless Creator can only be asked by embracing the bounded human conditions of past and present from which these questions spring.

  Tiptoeing Around the Touchy Almighty

  I mentioned earlier that every issue we’ve looked at thus far—what to do with a fool, how to look at wealth, how to rear children, how to obey laws, and what God thinks of Nineveh and eating sour grapes—are really about what God is like and what it means to live a life aligned with this God. We are really only dipping our toes in a deep reservoir of examples from the Bible, and we’ll definitely be taking a closer look at some other factors later in the book.

  But before we move on, I want to circle back to one particularly problematic portrayal of the biblical God that has given the faithful fits and that everyone seems to be talking about these days, especially since 9/11.

  In the Bible we see a lot of bloody physical violence that God either commits, commands others to do, or silently watches as they do. That violence can take many forms, but mass killing, sending plagues, and starving people are among the most common and can be inflicted on anyone including God’s own people, the Israelites.

  Here is my list of the top ten in the order in which they appear in the Bible, though there are others you should feel free to add.

  God drowns all life on earth except a core few (Gen. 6).

  God threatens to “consume” (with fire) the Israelites after they build a golden calf (an idol) while Moses was on Mt. Sinai getting the Law. Moses intercedes and convinces God to relent by reminding him that his honor is at stake (“What will the Egyptians say?”). Moses, however, gets the tribe of Levi to go through the camp and kill three thousand of the unfaithful. Yahweh seems pleased, or at least he doesn’t comment (Exod. 32).

  During their forty-year desert wandering, the Israelites are commanded by God to avenge themselves on the Midianites by killing everyone except the virgin females, whom the men are allowed to divide among themselves (Num. 31).

  God commands the Israelites to enslave or kill residents of towns along the way to the promised land and simply to kill everything that breathes within the promised land itself, so they can take possession of it (Deut. 7, 20; most of the book of Joshua).

  According to the long and horrific list of curses we peeked at earlier, upon those who disobey God will bring pestilence, panic, consumption, fever, ulcers, scurvy, grievous boils, madness, blindness, confusion of mind, and sexual abuse. Their crops will fail; their children will be captured. They will be defeated, besieged, reduced in hunger and thirst to cannibalism, and destroyed, scattered among the peoples of the earth (Deut. 28:15–68).

  While exterminating the Canaanites at God’s command, Joshua, among other acts, tracks down five kings, k
ills them, and then hangs (impales) them on trees (Josh. 10:26).

  As punishment for an earlier incident in Exodus 17, King Saul wages war against the Amalekites, killing their king, Agag; every man, woman, and child; and the livestock (1 Sam. 15:1–9).

  As punishment for false worship, God brings the Babylonians to slaughter the Judahites in the streets, leaving their bodies as food for birds and reducing the survivors to cannibalizing their children and neighbors (Jer. 7, 19).

  Some Psalm writers ask God to slay their enemies, including dashing Babylonian little ones against a rock (Ps. 137:9).

  In the book of Job, God allows a member of his heavenly court, “satan” (“the adversary”), to kill Job’s children and livestock and to inflict incredible pain on Job (Job 1–2).*

  Struggling with God’s violence is nothing new for people of faith. Jews and Christians over the centuries have had to face it frequently, and I’m not sure if there is any part of the biblical story that puts the question “What is God like?” before us today with more urgency and discomfort. After all, these stories are in plain sight, and they don’t mince words. Even if we don’t acknowledge it consciously, somewhere deep down we are saying either one of two things: “This too I believe about God,” or “This I do not believe about God.”

  Precisely here it is good—actually, a relief—to remember that how any of us, including the biblical writers, see God is inextricably connected to our human experience.

  The Israelites didn’t make up this notion of divine violence. In fact, in other, older, ancient cultures we know of, violence is woven into the fabric of creation itself: the cosmos was formed after a cosmic battle, where the god who emerged victorious reigned supreme. Such conflict doesn’t make it into the creation story in Genesis 1.* Still, it is no surprise that violence and retribution describe the God of Israel, given the religious climate.