by Peter Enns
And so God declares the promise that everyone will be treated as they deserve.
Of course, this is wonderful, but here’s the problem. Ezekiel’s prophecy, his word from the Lord, collides with an earlier word from the same Lord—the Second Commandment, against false worship (the making of idols).
In Exodus 20:4–6 (and the later version in Deut. 5:8–10), false worship merited a punishment extending to the third and the fourth generation.* The blessings for obedience will linger to the thousandth generation. Sure, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, which the Bible tends to do a lot when numbers are involved, but the point still sticks: when it comes to worshiping God, obedience and disobedience have multigenerational effects: children are blessed or punished for what their parents did.
Remember that the sin that landed the Judahites in exile wasn’t something like stealing or adultery or murder, but the very same topic that occupies the Second Commandment, false worship, which had been sponsored by one dumb Judahite king after another.
It’s hard to miss the implication of Ezekiel’s words: God clearly said one thing to Moses in the Second Commandment at the beginning of Israel’s journey, and then God clearly says something different through Ezekiel at the end.
Briefly, another example of diversity in the Bible over time is found in the story of King Jehu’s bloody coup in 2 Kings 9–10, a story from the days of the divided monarchy. In that definitely not-for-children’s story, Jehu is anointed by the prophet Elisha to hurry on to Jezreel and massacre the entire royal family of wicked king Ahab, including seventy of his sons. Thus began the dynasty of Jehu, and it all happened according to the word of the LORD that he spoke to Elijah earlier in 2 Kings 10:17.
But another prophet, Hosea, seems to have taken issue with this coup—or better, according to Hosea, God takes issue with it.
In a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. (Hos. 1:4–5)
So, which is it? How does God feel about Jehu’s coup? It depends on which book of the Bible you’re reading. These two authors give polar opposite perspectives on Jehu’s act.
To explore why exactly these two authors handle Jehu’s coup in opposite ways is a very interesting topic, but ultimately speculative. Let’s not get into all that. My point is simply that the Bible does this sort of thing, and when it does, we need to see it not as a problem, but an invitation. These scenes crack open for us a window onto a different way of experiencing God through the Bible. The circumstances of Ezekiel and Hosea’s days required a different “word from the Lord” than what had been in effect earlier.
Does this mean God changes? I don’t think so (though some do*). It means, rather, as I see it, that different times and different circumstances call for people of faith to perceive God and God’s ways differently.
God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.
I’m sure as a parent I’ve said to one or more of my children, “Watch what you do, because the habits you form now will stay with you for life and even be passed down to your own children without your even knowing it.” In fact, I can vouch for that as a parent—tendencies I picked up from my parents were downloaded onto my children, and I didn’t even realize it until they were in their teens.
But then at other times, like after a discouraging failure, I might say, “Don’t worry. Your life script isn’t written by this one moment. Tomorrow’s another day, and you can always start afresh.”
These are two separate parenting moments that require a different word. The same holds for clergy when caring for people—the moment, not the rulebook, dictates the words spoken. It takes wisdom to know what to say in what situation, because different situations call for different types of pastoral responses.
So why can’t the biblical writers, and God who is somehow mysteriously behind them, do the very same thing? I think they can, and in fact they do—especially when in crisis mode. And speaking of which . . .
Chapter 5
When Everything Changes
Rachel Is Weeping for Her Children
I’m a father of three adult children. Adult. I don’t take that for granted.
No joke here. When my children were young, a lurking fear was that something would happen to them. The rash of child abductions that flooded the news in the late 1980s and early 1990s gave me a lot of anxiety, which I more or less kept to myself.
The closest we got to realizing this fear was one day at the mall. We were about to walk out of a store, and all of a sudden our two-year-old wasn’t there. We scanned the store quickly. No sign. I barked orders: “Sue, you go through the store. I’ll stand at the entrance and scan the mall up and down.” In an instant I uttered every stock prayer I knew, including the “Oh Lord, if you bring her back to us, I promise to . . .” prayer.
We found her thirty seconds later (or was it thirty hours?) playing under a dress rack. I was shaken for days.
I cannot imagine losing a child. And I do not say this lightly, because I know people who have. Losing a child, for whatever reason, shapes your life narrative from there on out. It will be the reference point of the past, the time when everything tragically changed and the deepest possible questions of faith became your constant companion—like, as one mother said to me years ago, “Where the f*** was God when my son was killed?”
I trust no one will misunderstand my intentions. I don’t mean to compare the loss of a child to anything, let alone a national tragedy that happened a distant twenty-six hundred years ago. But I also know modern Western Christians have a lot of trouble identifying with the depth of panic and pain of the Babylonian exile, which one prophet compared to a mother losing her children:
Thus says the LORD:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more. (Jer. 31:15)
Rachel, the wife of Jacob in Genesis, is here symbolized as the “national mother,” disconsolate, watching as her children, vulnerable and defenseless, are plundered and pillaged and then taken a thousand miles away to Babylon. Surely, these children are no more.
Exile was the trauma of the Old Testament—and we dare not underestimate its impact.
Moving to Babylon wasn’t just a setback, an inconvenience. The Israelites believed they owed their existence to God’s irrevocable promise to Abraham of countless descendants and a perpetual kingdom of their own in a land of their own—the land of Canaan (Gen. 12, 15). That promise was confirmed throughout Israel’s story in a series of steps, beginning with the miraculous birth of Abraham’s son Isaac (Gen. 17), Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery and receiving the Law on Mt. Sinai (Exodus, Leviticus), the successful conquest of Canaan (Joshua), and the founding of the monarchy with God’s chosen king, David, on the throne (1–2 Samuel). Through all these stages, the Israelites had their share of rebellions and murmurings against God, and things rarely went as planned. But still, God stuck with them. God had made a promise after all.
The first major crisis came when God took the nation of Israel from David’s grandson Rehoboam and divided it into the northern and southern kingdoms (around 930 BCE). The causes were Solomon’s introduction of false worship into Israel (due to the influence of his many foreign wives), and Rehoboam’s very shortsighted and undiplomatic handling of a volatile political moment (see 1 Kings 11–12). The northern kingdom eventually fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, leaving only the rump state of Judah to the south. And so the bulk of the promised land was no longer in Israelite possession, and the chosen people in the north were never heard from again.
The ancient promises were beginning to unravel. But at least there
remained a remnant, the nation of Judah.
But imagine if an invading army took control of the western two-thirds of the continental United States, deported many of its residents to South America, and erased state lines, leaving intact only the states east of the Mississippi River? Sure, we can see an upside (do we really need Texas and two Dakotas?), but the drastic change would be rather traumatic nonetheless and result in a lot of soul searching about what it means to be an American—especially if you believe this is God’s country (which it isn’t, but that’s another book).
But the worst was yet to come. In 586 BCE,* after a decade of struggle, the mighty Babylonians under their dreaded king, Nebuchadnezzar, exiled a portion of the southern kingdom after destroying Jerusalem and burning the Temple to the ground.
The Temple, mind you. God’s dwelling place.
Now the chosen people have no land, no king, and no Temple. That’s just another way of saying that God has abandoned them.
The exile is Judah’s tragic story, the reference point of the past, that moment that would now color all others and that needed to be processed:
How could God let this happen?
How could God abandon us?
How could God turn his back on a promise that goes back to Abraham?
What will happen to us now?
Are we no longer the chosen people?
The people of Judah did return from Babylonian captivity in 538 BCE,* due to the policy of the conquering Persians of resettling the peoples that the Babylonians had deported. So that’s good news. But the Persian Empire did rule over the land of Judah for the next two hundred years, and during that time the questions shifted a bit:
How much longer before we have our own king again?
When will things finally get fully back to normal?
What do we do in the meantime?
Yes, the Judahites were in a full-blown, centuries-long crisis that would come to lodge itself deeply in the Jewish consciousness. And that crisis would have to be processed, so the Judahites did what anyone would have done under the circumstances—they told their story:
This is who we are.
This is where we came from.
This is what we believe of God.
This is where things went wrong.
This is our hope for a renewed future.
Christians call that story the Old Testament.
Don’t we too sooner or later want to tell our story when faced with tragedies and hardships? We need to give our crisis a narrative, something to tell ourselves and others so we can make some sense of the pain and find hope for tomorrow. We may tell our story to a friend over coffee or on a blog. We might journal—or even write a book or two. And the Judahites, in the centuries following the return from Babylon, created what would come to be called the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament.
I don’t mean to suggest that nothing had been written down until this sixth-century national crisis of faith. Certainly the Israelites long before had written stories, accounts of battles, court records of kings, and poems and songs to express who they were, where they came from, and how their God, Yahweh, is wrapped up in all of it. But it was only in the wake of the crisis of God’s abandonment that they needed to tell their whole story—to make sense of how broken their past had been and how shattered it had become as they “wept by the waters of Babylon” (as Ps. 137 puts it).
Without the crisis of exile, the Bible as we know it wouldn’t exist.
We’ve lingered here in the exile for a few pages, because it is the changing circumstance that brought the ancient Judahites to their knees and forced them to engage their past and reimagine God for their present and future. The ancient Judahites, who would later come to be called Jews, had to tell their story. They had to account for the crisis, to process it, and to move forward to a better future.
That’s how the Bible was born. Out of crisis. And the question that drove these ancient writers and editors was the wisdom question we have been looking at all along: “What is God up to today, right here and now?”
Which brings us to the well-known children’s story, which is anything but.
Don’t Put God in a Box, Unless You Want to Be Swallowed by a Fish
The book of Jonah tells the famous story of the prophet Jonah who wanted nothing to do with his divinely given assignment—to go to the city of Nineveh and cry out against it for its wickedness (1:2), which is to say, give the city a chance to repent. Nineveh, by the way, was the capital of Assyria, which sacked the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 BCE and continued to harass the southern kingdom, Judah, throughout the seventh century BCE until the Babylonians gained control of the region.
The Assyrian army was relentless and nearly invincible and (judging from Assyrian artwork) impaled and skinned those who resisted.* I don’t want to use an inappropriate analogy, but God’s willingness to give the Ninevites a chance to repent while they were at the height of their destructive power might be compared to giving Stalin a chance to repent while he was starving millions of Russian farmers or Hitler while he was slaughtering millions of Jews. Who—with any active sense of justice—would want to give them a chance to repent of their wicked ways?! They need to be judged and sentenced. Why in heaven’s name would God show any compassion to our enemies who mean to destroy us?
So, Jonah wanted nothing to do with these godless warmongering bullies for fear they might actually listen and repent. To escape God, Jonah boarded a ship heading the exact opposite direction, but when storms threatened to sink the vessel, Jonah confessed to the crew that he was responsible for unleashing God’s wrath on them; if they simply tossed him overboard, they would survive, which they did only too eagerly. And this is where a large fish swallows Jonah, which for some reason is thought to make for a great children’s story, though that isn’t at all what we’re interested in here.
This little incident caused Jonah to reconsider his decision, so when the fish vomited him up onto the shore, he headed to Nineveh—but still copping an attitude. He begrudgingly delivered the shortest and most negative sales pitch ever, Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown (3:4), and then stomped away. Despite his efforts to subvert God’s will, Jonah’s worst fears were realized: the people and the king repented, and so God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it (3:10). Ugh. Could this day get any worse?
That’s a great story and echoes the words of Jesus: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, for in doing so you will be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:44, 48).
The book of another prophet, Nahum, however, tells another story about what God thinks of the Ninevites: he hates them. Nahum in fact celebrates the demise of Nineveh and interprets it as an act of God. The book concludes: There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is mortal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty? (3:19). Translation: God destroyed Nineveh and everyone cheers as if it were the golden goal in the World Cup finals.
Jonah and Nahum clearly see the matter of God’s attitude toward the Ninevites differently, and the reason is . . . wait for it . . . they were written at different times and under different circumstances for different purposes.
Nahum lived at the time of the fall of Nineveh and, historically speaking, he was right. Nineveh fell to the Babylonians in 612 BCE and, as all prophets do, Nahum interpreted the event as an act of God. Jonah, however, was written in the postexilic period, after (perhaps generations after) the return from Babylonian exile in 538 BCE. And this author doesn’t seem to be in the least bit interested in recording history.
The author knew as well as everyone else that Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire had actually fallen. Had the Assyrians actually repented, it would have amounted to a mass shift in religious commitment and political strategy, which would have been big news (“Assyrians bow the knee to Israel’s God. Hostilities cease. Film at 11:00”). But
nothing of the sort is known from any ancient record, Assyrian or otherwise. It strains credulity.
And then there’s the whole “Jonah swallowed by a fish” part of the story. Jonah remains there for three days as the fish descends down, down, even entering the abode of the dead, which the Bible calls Sheol. These strike me as the kinds of details a writer, including an ancient one, would put into a story to ensure that his readers knew they were dealing with something other than history. The book of Jonah isn’t a history lesson. It’s a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.
One of my biggest life lessons about God came when I left home for a “foreign country,” namely, graduate school. While working on my PhD, I got to know a lot of people—students and professors—who had religious outlooks very different from mine. It sobered me to see how differently they conceived of God, if at all, and that they were products of their worlds as much as I was a product of mine. And so rather than think of them as pitiful outsiders to God’s great plan, I began to do some serious soul searching about whether God might be more merciful and more inclusive than I had always been taught.
The writer of Jonah, living sometime after the exile, had a similar experience and wrote to a community that would have understood his point. While in Babylonian captivity, the Judahites no doubt got to know their hosts quite well. They raised children and buried relatives there. Familiarity breeds acceptance, and when the Persians gave the all-clear for the Judahites to return home, many actually decided to stay behind. In fact, Babylon would become a center of Jewish life and thought for the next thousand years. (The Babylonian Talmud, the authoritative book of Judaism, was produced there.)
And so the writer of Jonah told a story of God’s expansive mercy for non-Israelites; in other words, maybe God cares for other people too. And the author used as his illustration a clearly fictionalized account of their long-gone ancient foe to express his newfound belief, or at least hope, that God is more inclusive than they were giving God credit for.
