The Rise and Fall of the Bible

by Timothy Beal

  Countering such atrocious uses of biblical literature is not so simple as calling them misrepresentations of the Bible. We must face the fact that stories like that of Phineas are there, generating suspicion of ethnic otherness and motivating violence against others in our midst.

  But they do not stand uncontested. Over against the oppressive passages cited above are many passages that proclaim God above all to be a God of the oppressed, of liberation, who takes sides with those most vulnerable to exploitation and violence. The Torah repeatedly reminds Israel of its former enslavement and oppression: “remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” and, “you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” We often find passages in the Torah and the Prophets that open up hospitable spaces for the voices of the marginalized.

  You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry . . . If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate. (Exodus 22:22–27)

  Jesus echoes this spirit of the Torah when he declares, in Matthew 25, that any injustice against the most vulnerable and needy among us is an injustice against him. “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

  And Paul declares in Galatians that all the structures of identity (ethnicity, class, and sex, for example) that keep people in their places have been abolished in Christ: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” That’s potentially radical stuff.

  Related to this biblical tension between condoning and condemning slavery is a deep ambivalence about the meaning of “justice,” mishpat in Hebrew. On the one hand, mishpat means law and order. It’s what keeps people and things in their proper place within the social hierarchy of power. On the other hand, mishpat also often refers to a new, potentially revolutionary order in which structures of oppression and domination are overthrown. It is a liberationist and socially transformative idea of justice, close to what we today would call “social justice.” This is the justice envisioned by the lowly teenage Mary, mother of Jesus, in her song of praise for what God is doing:

  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

  and lifted up the lowly;

  he has filled the hungry with good things,

  and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52–53)

  This is a vision of justice in which the structures of social power are turned inside out and upside down. For Mary, and for the Gospel of Luke, that is the meaning of Christmas.

  Likewise when, at a crescendo in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. echoes the biblical prophet Amos, declaring that we must not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” we rightly hear a call for emancipation, a tearing down of the structures of racism that divide and conquer. Yet the prophet Amos himself was also and equally concerned about what he considered abuses of law and order—the other meaning of mishpat. He wanted to see priests and kings act justly; that is, according to the law. He was not interested in overturning hierarchies, but maintaining them in proper order.

  In a poem called “Power,” Adrienne Rich wrote of Marie Curie, two-time Nobel laureate who discovered radium and died from radiation sickness, “denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.” For many, the Bible is a source of power and liberation. For many others, it is a source of wounds and oppression. When we read it honestly, as I think Twain did, it’s hard to deny that it is a source of both, and that the two are often inextricably intermixed. The poisonous texts stand against the curative. The voices are in tension. They contradict. Sometimes, the poison is deceptively easy to take. And keep taking.

  I daresay this, too, is a rich biblical polyvocality. We impoverish the Bible when we deny the poison’s presence. As we saw earlier, the vast majority of values-added Bibles are conservative and moralistic, aimed at reinforcing the fundamentalist iconic image of the Bible that has so dominated American culture since the nineteenth century. But we should have as much trouble with a God Is Love Bible that remakes the Bible into something that’s all sweetness and light, turning our attention away from these other, often violent and vengeful passages, as much as we may believe that God really is love. The deep biblical contradictions between liberation and oppression, love and hate, cure and poison, are also deep within us. Biblical interpretation is not a passive matter. It requires our own active negotiation. When we pretend that, deep down, all the voices are really saying the same thing and ought to be able to get along, we forfeit our responsibility as inheritors of this richly, sometimes disturbingly, contradictive literature.

  Letting Suffering Speak

  Speaking of pain. Why is there undeserved suffering in the world? This is not a problem for nontheological people, who can justifiably respond, why wouldn’t there be? But for those who set their faith in God as a God of justice and love, it is the most profound of all problems.

  Here we are in the territory traditionally called theodicy, which concerns the justice of God. Imagine the problem as a triangle: on one corner you have the belief that God is just; on the next you have the belief that God is all-powerful; on the third, you have the observation that people suffer unjustly.

  It’s a logical problem. You can’t hold the three corners of the triangle together. So any solution to the problem of theodicy inevitably lops off one of them. A traditional Christian response has been to decide that God is not all-powerful: God gave up power so that humans would have free will. Another is to cut off the “God is just” corner. After all, God is said to repent of the evil he intended in Exodus 32, and Isaiah says that God “creates both peace and evil.” Finally, one may decide to lop off the corner that says that there is undeserved suffering in the world. It may not be obvious why someone is suffering, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a good reason. Perhaps we simply cannot see the justice of it as God does. In any case, you can’t solve the problem of theodicy without cutting a corner.

  What’s fascinating to me is that, taken collectively, biblical literature does not solve the problem. Rather, it argues about it, exploring different responses and ultimately affirming the question over any and every solution. It cannot be reduced to a univocal answer.

  There are very many biblical texts that raise questions of theodicy. In some cases, a biblical story will raise it subtly, between the lines. Why, for example, does God in the Exodus story “harden Pharaoh’s heart” so that Pharaoh refuses the demand to “let my people go,” so that God will “get glory” over Pharaoh, leading ultimately to the death of every firstborn in all of Egypt, “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the female slave who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the livestock”? Were these firstborns deserving of such a fate? Was the collateral damage justifiable? It seems like a lot of unnecessary loss and suffering for the sake of a more dramatic and glorious flight from bondage.

  Questions also well up from the raw experience of personal suffering as it finds voice in Israel’s prayer book, the book of Psalms.

  How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

  How long will you hide your face from me?

  How long must I bear pain in my soul,

  and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

  How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

  (Psalm 13:1–2)

  Such texts are categorized by biblical scholars as psalms of lament and complaint, but biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann offers a more provocative term: “psalms of disorientati
on.” He insists that these profoundly challenging voices be allowed to stand in radical, irresolvable tension with other “psalms of orientation.” In psalms of orientation, all is right with the world and “God sits enthroned over the flood” (Psalm 29:10). God is altogether good and altogether omnipotent; therefore justice and order prevail on every level, from body to house to society to cosmos. In psalms of disorientation, however, that splendid order of creation so confidently articulated in psalms of orientation is pulled downward into the depths of theological chaos by poetry that cuts so breathtakingly close to the bone that it can make a reader dizzy. One of the most stunning is Psalm 88, which gives voice to a life of undeserved, God-inflicted despair, loneliness, and depression.

  Your wrath lies heavy upon me,

  and you overwhelm me with all your waves.

  You have caused my companions to shun me;

  you have made me a thing of horror to them.

  I am shut in so that I cannot escape;

  my eye grows dim through sorrow. (Psalm 88:7–9)

  Here there is no trace of hope. Yet the psalmist is relentless in bearing the pain up to an unheeding God.

  O LORD, why do you cast me off?

  Why do you hide your face from me?

  Wretched and close to death from my youth up,

  I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.

  Your wrath has swept over me;

  your dread assaults destroy me.

  They surround me like a flood all day long;

  from all sides they close in on me.

  You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me;

  my companions are in darkness. (Psalm 88:14–18)

  So the psalmist ceases, desperate and fearful, cowering alone in a world of theological disorientation and divine terror.

  Many of us, horrified by this articulation of Godforsakenness, feel the urge to turn away from such raw despair. We are uncomfortable with letting the experience of unanswered suffering have the last word. We want to mute its terrible echo with an assuring answer. But the psalm itself, indeed the Bible itself, doesn’t turn away with us. It stays with the voice of pain. Even as it lingers in the hollow silence after Jesus’s own lonely cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In that opening line from another psalm of disorientation, Psalm 22, Jesus himself finds words for his Godforsaken terror on the cross. The German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote, “To let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.” The library of the Bible has spaces to let suffering speak and be heard.

  Trials of God

  Elsewhere in the Bible, we feel as though we’ve stepped into an ongoing argument about the problem of theodicy. Consider, for example, the explicit disagreement between the book of Job and the book of Deuteronomy. We’ll call it Job against Moses.

  The book of Deuteronomy in the Torah is essentially a long sermon delivered by Moses, as mouthpiece of God, to the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land. In it he offers a vision of a perfectly moral universe governed by God. All of creation bears witness to the wisdom and justice of God. The justice of the creator God inheres within it. Social order and moral behavior follow from it. Keep God’s commandments and you, your society, and your world will thrive and be blessed. Disobey them and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Do good, be blessed. Do bad, be cursed. Obedience puts you in blessed harmony with the moral universe. Disobedience puts you wretchedly out of sync with it. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today,” declares Moses toward the end, “that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

  The book of Job directly challenges the faith in that moral universe. Job suffers not because he has sinned or disobeyed God. In fact, Job is singled out by God precisely because he is so good. The story begins with God saying to the accuser (hassatan, “the accuser,” often wrongly called by the proper name Satan), who acts as a prosecuting attorney in the divine court, “Have you noticed my servant Job? There is no one else like him on the earth, blameless and upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job 1:8). The accuser replies, “Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has on every side?” (1:10). Good point. After all, how hard is it to be good if you never face adversity? To see if Job will remain righteous even without all his goods, God allows his property to be taken and his children killed. Thus, contrary to Deuteronomy, Job’s righteousness singles him out not for blessing but for curse.

  When he continues to hold fast to his righteousness, the accuser rebuts, “Skin for skin! A man will give up all he has for his own life. But touch his bones and flesh . . .” (2:4–5). So begins phase two of Job’s suffering, as he is “inflicted . . . with terrible boils from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.”

  This is where the argument with Deuteronomy begins to heat up. The boils that Job gets are precisely, word for word, what Deuteronomy describes as punishment for disobedience: “If you do not obey the LORD your God . . . the LORD will inflict you . . . with terrible boils from which you will never recover, from the sole of your foot to the top of your head” (28:15, 35). Both passages use the same Hebrew verb for “inflict” (nakah), and the description of the terrible boils is virtually identical. Clearly, the description of Job’s cursed affliction is drawn directly from Deuteronomy, but with a major twist. In Deuteronomy, the curse is the promised punishment for unrighteous, disobedient behavior. In Job, however, it is brought on by Job’s exemplary righteousness. Job’s exceptional goodness has made him a target for suffering, by the will of God! Whereas Deuteronomy lops off the “people suffer undeservedly” corner of the triangle, the book of Job lops off the “God is just” corner.

  In his wretched state, Job rants and rails against the injustice of his suffering, questioning God’s goodness in very direct terms. Job’s so-called friends scold him for doing so. They defend God’s moral universe, and insist that Job must’ve done something wrong to deserve such misery. They expect God’s anger to burn against Job for his blasphemous words. But in the end, it is against them, not Job, that God’s anger burns, because they “did not speak rightly about [or to] me as my servant Job has” (42:7). The one who has argued with God has spoken rightly; the ones who defended God have not. In Job, speaking rightly with God is a boldly contentious business.

  One of the greatest teachers on Job as a biblical model of a faith that refuses to let go of the struggle with and against God is the Jewish philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. I first got to know him as a faculty colleague at Eckerd College, where he was a distinguished visiting professor during several month-long winter terms. One might expect such a preeminent scholar and public intellectual to keep his distance from us regular teachers, students, and staff. That was not the case at all. He was always on campus, always happy to meet with students in his office and talk with professors over the copy machine.

  Rarely if ever was such conversation light. The first time I met him was at a dinner party hosted by our dean. After a few formal introductions at the door, my wife, Clover, and I sat down on the living room sofa facing him and his wife, Marion (a remarkable force in her own right). I was just about to sit back and take a bite of pita and hummus when he turned to me and asked, “Tim, what will the historian of the twenty-first century say about our time?” I can’t honestly remember how I answered. Something about fascination and fear, reflecting how I felt not only about our time but also about the fact that I was actually talking face to face with Elie Wiesel.

  In several subsequent winters, it was my great privilege to get to know him as a colleague and friend, and in the process to hear him speak personally about his deep and abiding relationship with biblical tradition. In one conversation, which we published in a book about reading the Bible after the Holocaust, we talked at length about his play, The Trial of God, as an interpretation of Job.

  The play takes place in a seventeenth-century eas
tern European village after the massacre of local Jews. It’s the eve of Purim, a celebration of the book of Esther, and the last few survivors are holed up in a tavern. The proprietor, Beresh, and his guests decide to put on a Purim play in which they put God on trial for what has happened to their community and to others throughout history. The only problem is that no one is willing to represent God. Then, just when it appears that the case will have to be dismissed, a mysterious man named Sam arrives and gladly agrees to take the role of defense attorney. In the trial that ensues, Beresh is very much the voice of Job, refusing to justify God in the face of this undeserved suffering. Sam, on the other hand, sounds very like Job’s so-called friends. Unlike in Job, however, this trial is cut short not by divine intervention but by the bloodthirsty villagers eager to murder the last Jewish survivors. In the final moment of the play, as the mob breaks through the tavern door, Sam pulls off his mask and reveals himself to be none other than Satan.

  “In this play, the only one willing to ‘do theodicy,’ that is, to justify God . . . is revealed as Satan in the final terrible moments. Does this suggest,” I asked, “that to justify God in such a situation . . . is in some sense ‘satanic’ or evil?”

  “Satan knew the answer,” Wiesel replied. “He has all the answers. Actually Satan speaks like a fanatic. In this play I wanted to show the danger of fanaticism. The fanatic thinks he is justifying God. Never think that you are justifying God. To ask questions of God’s justice is all right.” There’s a difference, he insisted, between asking theodicy questions about God’s justice, or lack thereof, and answering them.