It is mind-boggling to think that, of the Mosaic innovation, only the prophetic word is mobilized against this compelling reality.
* * *
John Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity, Prentice-Hall Studies in Religion Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). ↵
Robert W. Friedrichs has shrewdly described the interests of sociologists and the influence of interests on scholarship in A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970). For the paradigm we will seek to develop here, the connections are worth noting. Thus the paradigms of system and conflict, which Friedrichs uses for sociology, may have correlations with the royal and Mosaic traditions of Israel. ↵
This particular judgment was made in a lecture given in St. Louis in 1976, but his general argument moves in this direction as well. That theological urging is not unrelated to his understanding of tribe and city. Compare Mendenhall, “Social Organization in Early Israel,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 132–51. ↵
The term hapiru in various forms and with various linguistic cognates appears in the Ancient Near East in the second millennium to refer to stateless people who live at the edges of society, threaten society, and are in turn threatened by it. It is widely thought that the biblical term Hebrew is linked to the term; if so, then the early references to what became Israel are linked to a border social movement of marginal, precarious peoples. Recent scholarship has indicated that the term is not ethnic but is sociological and refers to those at the edge of economic and political viability in many states in the region. The theme of Hebrew-hapiru figures prominently in the influential sociological interpretation of Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 b.c. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979). ↵
See George E. Mendenhall, “The Monarchy,” Interp 29 (1975) 155–70; Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), 237–41. He refers to David’s court as “rustic,” a term usually assigned only to Saul. Note James Flanagan’s important work, David’s Social Drama: A Hologram of Israel’s Early Iron Age, JSOTSup 73; SWBA 7 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988). ↵
Walter Brueggemann, “The Social Significance of Solomon as Patron of Wisdom,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. J. G. Gammie and L. G. Perdue (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 117–32. ↵
The evidence is summarized by Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 368–402; Gösta W. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine, ed. D. Edelman (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 455–542; William G. Dever, “Archaeology of the ‘Age of Solomon’: A Case Study in Archaeology and Historiography,” in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. L. K. Handy, Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 217–51. ↵
Mendenhall, “The Monarchy,” 160. ↵
Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 148–56. The phenomenon hypothesized by von Rad, sharply disputed by other scholars, can be read negatively as well as positively. James L. Crenshaw disputes the entire hypothesis of a Solomonic Enlightenment, whether it be viewed positively or negatively (“Introduction,” in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, Library of Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1976], 16–20). ↵
See Walter Brueggemann, In Man We Trust: The Neglected Side of Biblical Faith (Richmond: John Knox, 1972). I believe that my interpretation in that work is essentially correct, but that it should be emphasized or read with positive interpretations surely reflects the milieu of the book, namely the theological climate of the late 1960s. ↵
See the sensitive expression of distinction by Stefan Heym, The King David Report (New York: Putnam, 1972), 237. ↵
See Walter Brueggemann, “Presence of God, Cultic,” in IDBS, 630–33; idem, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 576–704, and Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology, Religious Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). ↵
Jürgen Moltmann has seen most clearly that the loss of passion is not only a psychological factor but a predictable ingredient in social oppression; see The Experiment Hope, ed. and trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), chap. 6; more extensively, idem, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). ↵
Thus Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg sees a direct link to the Genesis materials: “The book of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) was written by the author with Genesis 1–4 in front of him; Qoheleth’s conceptuality is formed on the basis of creation history” (Der Prediger, KAT 17 [Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1963], 230). Hertzberg can persuasively hypothesize that the literature is a reflection of Genesis 1–4, including the J (Yahwist) material, likely a Solomonic piece. The irony of linking this literature at least indirectly with the Solomonic situation is strengthened by the analysis of Ecclesiastes by James G. Williams, “What Does It Profit a Man?” in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, ed. J. L. Crenshaw (New York: Ktav, 1976), 375–89. Williams himself has no interest in that question, but the circumstance he posits for the literature is suggestive. ↵
Compare Bernhard W. Anderson, Creation Versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987; reprinted with a new foreword). ↵
The relation between these two strands of tradition and these two perceptions of reality is a question fundamental to current Old Testament studies. While the tradition itself argues for continuity, the scholarship reflected here not only distinguishes between them but sees deep conflict between them. Such a way of putting the question enhances the figure of Josiah, in which the two are briefly held together. ↵
See Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); Moltmann, The Experiment Hope; Elie Wiesel in various works such as A Beggar in Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1997); Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). ↵
I have used the paradigm in a quite concrete way in “A Biblical Perspective on Hunger,” ChrCent 94 (1977), 1136–41. ↵
The phrase is from Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chap. 3. ↵
3
Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
We have considered as a paradigm for prophetic imagination the formation of a consciousness that is a genuine alternative to the royal consciousness. Now a question must be faced (and it is surely a contemporary question): What would such an alternative consciousness be like? Here I take only the modest step of considering some ways in which the prophets of Israel addressed that task, but behind that explicit consideration we necessarily wonder what we might do given our own situation.
We also are children of the royal consciousness. All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask, as Israel’s prophets ever asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I s
uspect that our own self-concept as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim. But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.[1] It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes. I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises.
I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state. What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community. In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. When we think “prophetic” we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be “religious,” where do we begin? What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.
In considering the Solomonic achievement, I have been speaking of the fate of the royal consciousness as “numbness” even though I have not used that word. The Solomonic establishment embodies the loss of passion, which is the inability to care or suffer. One has only to compare the grief, anguish, and joy of David (2 Sam 1:19-27; 3:33-34; 12:15-23; 18:33; 19:4; 23:13-17) with the one-dimensional narrative of Solomon to realize something decisive has happened from the father to the son. Here the discussion of numbness concerns apathy, the absence of pathos, whereas in the reflective statement of Ecclesiastes the same experience is expressed as vanity:
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
then they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:7-9)[2]
In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience.[3] Clearly, the regime is interested not in what people experience but in their behavior, which can be managed.
More specifically, the royal consciousness is committed to numbness about death. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience the end of his favorite historical arrangements, for they have become fully identified with his own person. Indeed, they are his person, as much as he is or has a person. And therefore his historical arrangements must be invested with a quality of durability if not eternity. Kings need to assign the notion of “forever” to every historical accident over which they preside. Thus it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienations. So we must practice the royal game with our marriages and all serious relations, with our bodies, our age and our health, our nerve, and our commitments.
There is no place in the public domain where failure can be faced. Witness the squirming anguish of Richard Nixon—who was more like us than different from us—during the Watergate investigations, or Bill Clinton in his tortured posturing throughout the impeachment process. Ultimately, we are incapable of facing our own death. All these denials about endings are necessary in the royal community because it is too costly to face and embrace them. It would suggest that we are not in charge, that things will not forever stay the manageable way they are, and that things will not finally all work out. It is the business of kings to attach the word “forever” to everything we treasure. The great dilemma is that religious functionaries are expected to use the same “forever,” to attach it to things and make it sound theologically legitimated. But “forever” is always the word of Pharaoh, and as such it is the very word against which Yahweh and Moses did their liberating thing.
In a St. Louis radio station there was a cleaning lady who one day walked through a studio during a program offering advice on marital problems. In an offhand way she simply provided advice on her way to do her work. Her advice turned out to be more sound and clever than what was officially offered, and as a result, she was made a part of the regular programming. Miss Blue became a feature, and the words with which she began and ended were “All is well.” Sometimes, depending on the mood of the announcer, she was invited to say it repeatedly, perhaps only to cause a chuckle, probably a bit of mockery, even self-mockery, but also to practice the religion of deception. From the ghetto community out of which she spoke, it could be that “all is well” is a trusting affirmation that enables persons to cope. But when the same phrase is co-opted for the media, it becomes an endorsement of the status quo that serves further to deny and numb. It is like a king who says “forever” to keep all the serious questions in check.
The chant of Miss Blue, now co-opted, is not unlike the mocked statement of Jeremiah concerning the numbed self-deception of the temple: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” (Jer 7:4). Nor is it unlike Toots Shor, that most famous saloon-keeper who died of cancer. In his last days, when his death was imminent, he said, “I don’t want to know what I have.” That is a fair summary of the attitude of the royal consciousness—not wanting to know. If we don’t know, perhaps it won’t happen, and we can pretend a while longer. When I must deny about myself then I can afford to deny about my neighbor as well, and I don’t need to know what my neighbor has or doesn’t have. I can imagine both my neighbor and myself out of historical existence, and “forever” becomes not an affirmation but a denial.
Bruce Lifton has studied attitudes concerning death in our culture beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and responses to these events.[4] Beyond these he has considered the more general response to living in a world where death is so visible, so daily, so pervasive, and so massive, and yet so unnoticed. Lifton has concluded that we have no adequate way to relate to death’s reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness.
Moreover, says Lifton, behind that frightened practice is a symbol gap in which we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced. Obviously the notion of a symbol gap about the reality of death is pertinent to our theme. The royal consciousness that lacks the symbols for full experience is the same royal con
sciousness that nullified the symbols in the first place. Those symbols that will release experience and let it be redemptive bring to expression precisely those dimensions of reality that the king fears and cannot subjugate. It is the penchant of kings to nullify all symbols that reveal what is beyond royal administration. And so the power of the king to destroy symbols by reducing them makes necessary the subsequent denial of the experience symbolized.
It must be observed that religious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with and facilitators of such denial. We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief?
Everyone helps his neighbor,
And says to his brother, “Take courage!”
The craftsman encourages the goldsmith,
and he who smoothes with the hammer him who strikes the anvil,
saying of the soldering, “It is good”;
and they fasten it with nails so that it cannot be moved.
(Isa 41:6-7)
In a hospital room we want it to be cheery, and in a broken marriage we want to imagine it will be all right. We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere, which is not a promise but only a denial of what history brings and what we are indeed experiencing. In the Christian tradition, having been co-opted by the king, we are tempted to legitimate the denial by offering crossless good news and a future well-being without a present anguish. Such a religion serves the king well, for he imagines he is still king. He imagines that he can manage and that his little sand castle will endure (if you pardon the phrase) “forever.”
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