Reading the Bible again for the First Time

by Marcus J. Borg

  You oppress the poor and crush the needy.

  You trample on the poor and take from them taxes of grain.

  You trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.12

  He paints vivid and damning pictures of people who live lives of luxury and yet are indifferent to the misery in their midst:

  Woe to you who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on your couches,

  eating lambs from the flock and calves from the stall;

  who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise

  on instruments of music,

  who drink wines from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph [the poor].

  Therefore, you shall now be the first to go into exile.13

  With words as sharp as a well-honed machete, Amos indicts Israel’s worship of God. In the name of God, he says that God despises “solemn assemblies”:

  I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

  Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

  I will not accept them;

  and the offerings of your fatted animals, I will not look upon.

  Take away from me the noise of your songs;

  I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

  What then does God want? Amos continues:

  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.14

  Amos also speaks about the judgment of God. But it is not the final judgment or last judgment at which individuals will face heaven or hell. Rather, it is God’s judgment within history: societies filled with rampant injustice face destruction.

  All of this was brand-new to me when I was introduced to it in college. Amos was passionate about social justice. Indeed, for him, sin was primarily injustice. Amos spoke of God’s judgment not in the distant future—whether at the end of time or when an individual dies—but within history. I had had no idea that the prophets were like this, or that there were passages in the Bible like this. For the first time, I saw and heard the Bible without the domesticating lenses of my childhood faith. For me, the encounter with Amos marked the beginning of a new stage in my perception of the Bible, of Christianity, and of the world.

  The Indictment-Threat Oracle

  I went to seminary in part because of Amos. There, what I learned about the prophets underlined the impression I had gotten from Amos. I learned that the most common form of prophetic speech was the indictment-threat oracle. The form has two major elements, and sometimes a third.

  The indictment: an accusation or a list of offenses.

  The threat (or sentence): what will happen because of the offenses.

  The summons to the accused: the naming of the offenders. This third element, though sometimes explicit, is often implicit. When explicit, it is most often the first element in an indictment-threat oracle.

  Seeing the form was (and remains) very illuminating. An awareness of the most common pattern of prophetic speech helps in reading the prophets because the pattern discloses what they most centrally were doing. In effect, they were prosecuting a covenant lawsuit on behalf of God against Israel.

  I illustrate the indictment-threat oracle with two examples. The first is from Micah, who spoke in the southern kingdom in the eighth century. Jerusalem was that kingdom’s capital, Zion was the mountain on which the temple stood, and “the house” in the last line of the oracle refers to the temple.

  The summons to the accused: Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel.

  The indictment: You abhor justice and pervert all equity. You build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong. Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, “Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us.”

  The threat: Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.15

  The indictment names injustice, and the threat speaks of Jerusalem and the temple in ruins.

  A second example is from Amos. To clarify the first line, Bashan was an area known for its fine cattle. As the indictment makes clear, the phrase “cows of Bashan” refers to the wives of the wealthy men of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom.

  The summons to the accused: Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria.

  The indictment: You oppress the poor, you crush the needy, you say to your husbands, “Bring something to drink.”

  The threat: The Lord God has sworn by his holiness: The time is surely coming upon you when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. Through breaches in the wall, you shall leave, each one straight ahead.16

  The indictment is once again against the oppression of the poor. The threat envisions the city of Samaria after a military conquest, its walls breached during the siege, and the survivors marched off by the conquerors as “booty.”

  The Dramatic Power of Prophetic Acts

  In seminary I also learned about “prophetic acts.” Sometimes the prophets performed attention-getting symbolic actions in order to dramatize their message. These included the symbolic naming of children. Hosea, for example, named two of his children Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi, Hebrew phrases that mean “not pitied” and “not my people.”17 The names are a threat: the days are coming, Hosea says, when Israel will be “not pitied” and “not my [God’s] people.”

  Isaiah named two of his children Maher-shalal-hash-baz and Shear-jashub.18 The first is a Hebrew phrase meaning “the spoil speeds, the prey hastes,” and is a promise of deliverance to Judah: the two kingdoms threatening it will soon be prey and spoils of war for Assyria. The second is a Hebrew phrase meaning “a remnant will return.” Though it has an element of promise, it is also a threat: that there will be only a remnant speaks of destruction.

  More dramatic are public acts that amount to street theater. Isaiah, for example, walked naked and barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem for three years to symbolize that Judah should not enter a military alliance with Egypt against Assyria, for Assyria would conquer Egypt and carry them off naked and barefoot as prisoners of war.19

  Jeremiah also performed several prophetic acts. In the presence of some of the leaders of Jerusalem, he shattered a clay jug, accompanying that gesture with the words, “Thus says the LORD, ‘So will I break this people and this city.’ ”20 On another occasion, Jeremiah is told by God to wear a wooden yoke on his neck in order to symbolize that Jerusalem and Judah are to wear the yoke of Babylon and not join a military alliance of small kingdoms against Babylon. His act set up one of the classic scenes in Hebrew prophecy, a confrontation between two prophets proclaiming opposite messages. A prophet named Hananiah challenged Jeremiah, broke the wooden yoke Jeremiah was wearing, and proclaimed, “Thus says the LORD: This is how I will break the yoke of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.” Soon thereafter Jeremiah announced in the name of God words to this effect: You have broken a wooden yoke, but God has forged an iron yoke that you will wear.21 For the people of the time, it must have been bewildering to see two prophets, both speaking in the name of God, making opposing pronouncements.

  Ezekiel was the star of prophetic street theater. Shortly before the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem, he is told by God to make a model of Jerusalem surrounded by a siege wall, camps, and battering rams. In a public place, he is to lie on his left side for 390 days, then on his right side for 40 days, to symbolize the number of years that Israel and Judah are to spend in exile. During all this time, he is to eat starvation rations such as would be available in a city under a prolonged siege, and he is to bake his bread using human dung as fuel. All of this would symbolize what was soon to happen to Jerusalem.

  The way I heard the prophets the second time captivated me. I was struck by t
heir passion for social justice, their antiestablishment message, and their warnings of the consequences facing a society that did not take peace and justice seriously. Their combination of prophetic critique and street theater was perfect for the times: it was the late 1960s. Especially to an idealistic college student, the prophets seemed like powerful allies in the movements against racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War.

  Hearing the Prophets the Third Time

  But I was to hear the prophets a third time. It was not that my second hearing was wrong; that hearing was simply incomplete. Since then, how I hear the prophets has been added to in three important ways.

  The Prophets and God

  I now see that God was utterly central to the prophets. More specifically, I have become convinced that experiences of the sacred were the source of their sense of mission, their passion for justice, and their courage to challenge the established power of domination systems.

  To explain what I mean, I return for a moment to how I heard the prophets the second time. That hearing was not only “perfect” for the social activism of the 1960s; it also fit where I was personally in my religious life. During that same period of time, I had become increasingly uncertain about the reality of God. By my late twenties, my adolescent doubts about God had deepened to the extent that I was virtually a “closet atheist.”22 In any case, I was a “practical atheist” or “functional atheist”—namely, a person who lived as if there were no God.23 And yet the Bible and Christianity remained very important to me.

  Thus the prophets were especially attractive. Because their focus was on this world, not on another world, they seemed to provide a way of taking seriously a major strand of the biblical tradition independent of whether God was real. I heard them as deeply political and only incidentally religious; I heard them as passionate about justice in this world and about the destiny and fate of societies within history. Even if God was not real, these were crucially important matters.

  Of course, I was aware that the prophets believed in God; that was obvious from their words. After all, most people in their time did. But I took it for granted that the prophets’ convictions about God were inherited from tradition, not generated by experience.

  Though I knew that most of the prophets’ books included visions and “call stories” in which they reported having been commissioned by God, I gave little weight to such stories. I saw them as legitimations of the prophets’ mission and message. I imagined that such stories were necessary as responses to those who challenged their radical criticism by asking, “What is your authority for what you are saying?” They would say, as Amos did, “The LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ ”24 I even wondered whether the visions and call stories were literary creations by followers of the prophets, the people who had collected the prophetic words into books.25

  In short, I did not imagine that God was an experiential reality for the prophets. I did not think of the prophets as having experiences of the sacred. The reason: I did not think that such experiences happened. I knew about believing in God; but I did not imagine that people could know God.

  But now I am convinced that experiences of the sacred do happen, that the prophets had such experiences, and that such experiences were foundational for what they were, said, and did. This claim does not flow out of a more detailed study of the prophets in particular, but from my conviction that such experiences have happened throughout the history and cultures of humankind from antiquity into the present.

  If one grants that experiences of the sacred do happen, it seems obvious that the prophets had such experiences.26* Though I recognize that the accounts of their visions, ecstatic states, and calls serve a literary function, I no longer see them as simply literary creations. Though I am not sure that we ever have an exact transcript of prophetic ecstatic experience, I am convinced that the prophets had such experiences.

  Taking such experiences seriously accounts for much of what we see in the prophets. It takes their words seriously. They regularly say, “Thus says the LORD,” and they speak in the first person on behalf of God. I do not think the words they use come from God. The prophet is “a person and not a microphone,” as Abraham Heschel put it.27 In other words, the prophet is not simply an amplifier for a divine voice but speaks out of his own personality and experience. But the words of the prophets suggest that they were speaking from their knowledge of God—not from their knowledge about God, but from their knowing God.

  Their experiences of the sacred account for their courage. They were often in trouble. By command of the king, Amos was ordered to leave the kingdom.28 Jeremiah was beaten, put in stocks, threatened with death, forced into hiding, imprisoned, and lowered into a muddy cistern to starve and die.29 The prophets all spoke unpopular messages that challenged the rich and powerful, and most (if not all) had to contend with the opposition of court prophets in the service of the monarchy. Their source of courage was God.

  The prophets’ experiences of the sacred also account for their affirmation of a God not identified with the social order, but “behind” and “beyond” it. Like the God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, such a God subverts rather than legitimates the social order.

  Finally, the prophets lived within the traditions of Israel, especially the exodus and covenant traditions. Thus they interpreted their experiences of God within the framework of exodus and covenant. As they looked at their contemporary society, they did not see the kind of community envisioned by the story of the exodus and the laws associated with it.

  To put the combination together: the prophets had experiences of God; they lived within the traditions of Israel; and they were passionate about social justice. That the three are connected seems apparent.

  This claim is also the central theme of Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets. Heschel was one of the two most influential Jewish theologians of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, and this book (like all of his books) is a marvel of insight and language. He emphasizes the same combination: the prophets were passionate about social justice, and they were people who knew God. He speaks of “their breathless impatience with injustice” and affirms that they experienced “moments that defy our understanding.” These moments were moments of knowing God, and what they experienced in such moments of knowing was “a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos.”30

  The word “sympathy” here has a much richer meaning than it often does in modern usage, where it commonly means something like, “I feel sorry for you.” Its roots point to the richer meaning: pathos means “strong feeling” (often suffering, but other strong emotions as well—anger, compassion, love, joy, etc.); the prefix sym means “with.” Thus “sympathy” means “feeling with,” or feeling the feelings of another. For Heschel, the phrase “sympathy with the divine pathos” means that the prophets felt the feelings of God. Their passion was thus God’s passion; it came out of knowing God.

  Thus I now see the prophets as more (but not less) than radical cultural critics with a passion for social justice. I now see them as God-intoxicated, as filled with the passion of God. And so I speak of them as God-intoxicated voices of radical social criticism and God-intoxicated advocates of an alternative social vision. Their dream is God’s dream.

  Prophets, Peasants, and Elites

  The second major factor shaping how I now hear the prophets is a more precise understanding of the social system of the world that they addressed. That understanding has enabled me to see the target and content of prophetic criticism much more clearly.

  At the heart of that fuller understanding is the model of preindustrial agrarian societies sketched in the previous chapter. These social systems (comprising economic, political, religious, and social structures) were controlled and shaped by elites of power and wealth to serve their own interests. So thorough was the elites’ control that there was no way of countering their self-serving manipulation of
the system.31

  This type of society began to develop within Israel with the emergence of the monarchy around 1000 BCE. By the time of Solomon, Israel’s third king, the major features of the ancient domination system were in place: a politics of oppression centered in monarchical authority; an economics of exploitation centered in the monarchy and aristocracy; and a religion of legitimation centered in the temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem.

  Thus, by the time the classical prophets began to speak in the eighth century, Israel and Judah had become miniature versions of the ancient domination system that had enslaved their ancestors in Egypt. The victims (the majority of the population) were Israelites, of course, but now the elites at the top were also Israelites! Egypt had been established in Israel.32

  Seeing this social system as the world addressed by the prophets has been greatly illuminating. Before I was aware of it, I heard the prophetic indictments against “Israel” in an undifferentiated way, as if the people as a whole were being indicted for injustice. It sounded as if everybody was guilty. This puzzled me. I wondered if perhaps Israel and Judah were especially unjust societies, or if perhaps the standards of the prophets (and God) were so high as to be ultimately unrealistic.

  That puzzlement has been replaced by considerable clarity. I now see that most of the prophetic indictments are directed against the elites who were responsible for creating and maintaining structures of domination and exploitation. A careful reading of the prophets discloses that often the elites are explicitly named or, alternatively, that the offenses named are elite offenses. The prophets indict the elites; they do not blame the victims and hold them responsible for the injustice of their society.