The Genesis of Justice
Page 25
2) You write of the early Biblical characters in language that gives the impression that they were actual living people—although in the concluding chapters you do write of the narratives. We are the heirs of thousands of years of oral tradition and should be very careful about referring to Biblical people and events as factual if there are no historical corroborations to their existence. Whether the Bible is a compilation of myths, or the elaborations of stories shared around the dinner fire, we have to be very careful to see these stories as examples of ways to live, explanations of phenomena and, yes, the experiences from which society has drawn a code of ethics and laws. Gospel scholars are just now, after nearly 2000 years, beginning to admit that although Jesus was probably a real person, most of the things he is said to have shared and done may not be directly from Jesus, but more in the manner of what Jesus would have done. And a minority of seminary scholars will even admit that the nativity is more than likely the writers’ attempts to appeal to a Roman audience than a real happening. Many scholars would like to have us start from their basic premises in order to follow their logic, but we are taught to first look very carefully at the basic premise to see if it is believable and just what agenda the premise is the starting point for in the study. Native Americans, Afro Americans, Asian Americans, and women have long been hurt by putting a spin on historical stories in order to foster agendas. You and I are part of generations who want to look beyond what we are told is an obvious truth and decide on our courses of action after we feel we have some control over how truth is presented.
—C.D.H.
In the first chapter dealing with Cain and Abel and the first murder, you wonder why Cain murdered Abel. Didn’t he know what would happen? I don’t believe he did know. Cain did not know “death” because there had been no death in his lifetime. His parents were alive as was his brother. His profession was a farmer, not a shepherd. His family did not eat meat (meat was not allowed to be eaten until after the flood). From where was he to learn of murder or death? I bet he didn’t even know why Abel didn’t get up to continue the argument.
—F.R.
First, let me say that I believe the most significant aspect of your position, especially for Western civilization as we know it, concerns your idea of God and man learning together in a dynamic give and take. Interactive redemption, especially as embodied in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, certainly undergirds our evolving sense of social justice, i.e., the expansion of human rights and our own views of the meaning of inclusion in the political processes of democratic government. Plato and Augustine, and their intellectual descendants, have always had a difficult time with anything short of absolutism and final judgment. For them, God stands outside history in the unchanging and absolute world of the Forms, and passes final judgment on the saved and the damned at the end of history.
By the same token, surely you agree that we cannot overlook the contributions of the ancient Greeks and Romans to our legal system. The great Athenian playwrights dealt with equally significant, and heinous, issues as the writers of Genesis, and for equally religious and civic purposes. In fact, I believe the Athenian focus on the value of the individual human being, and the “divine spark of reason,” and the Roman Republic’s concept of separation of powers, were reflected directly in the constitution and the civil and criminal law. I also think the Stoic emphasis on Natural Law in ancient Rome, as superceding legislated law, gave Jefferson his structure for the Declaration of Independence. This, in turn, gave Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King his justification for civil disobedience during the great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s. “How long? Not long! The Moral Arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice!” While not a constitutional scholar like yourself, I think many of the rulings of the Warren Court, overturning stare decis, were based more in Stoic principles of the supremacy of Natural Law than in the scriptures. The Stoic concept of Natural law was an almost pure Aristotelian construct.
Also, a look at the Code of Hammurabi, I think, will reveal that the ancient Babylonians adhered to Lex Talionis too.
On the other hand, none of this is to deny the core place of the Torah in our Western system of law and justice. Your book does a great job of stimulating one to think about it in new and interesting ways worthy of the Rabbis.
—V.M.
I submit that the Book of Genesis is not about God’s growth and evolution into greater “Godness,” if you will, but rather humanity’s growth into greater humanness. Genesis and the other books of the Bible are a history of how the human person has evolved—not how God has. Truth can only be conveyed to people via the human medium of ideas and thoughts.
The limits of our capacity oblige us to represent God to ourselves in ideas that have been originally drawn from our knowledge of self and the world. What I believe we are reading in Genesis is psychological projection to some degree. The writers of Genesis put onto God their own struggles with justice. Just like you have done in your book. Humanity, not God, was working out the brush strokes of justice as time and experience was teaching them. For instance, the idea of threatening to do something and then backing down (Chapter 1) … overreacting to sin and disobedience (Chapter 3), Abraham and the defense of the guilty (Chapter 4) … and so on. This is not God bumbling around trying to figure God’s self out or God trying to figure out human nature, but rather God allowing the creatures He/She created, with free will, to evolve in their own system of justice through experience, consequences, thought, hindsight, and so on.
The Book of Genesis was written when the Jews were captive in Babylon, as you know. They are asking the question, “What did we do to get here? What happened to us? Where did we lose the way?” And in this corporate reflection, in listening to and retelling the stories of their past, they create the stories we find in Genesis. And I think we see a very real, complex, convoluted, earthy journey of the human journey to justice.
What I found lacking in your explanations, especially in Chapter 4 where you speak about the holocaust, is the reality of evil, i.e., Satan. In the face of such massive, intense, and unimaginable suffering, can one say there is not a personified evil in the world? Some of the horrendous things we read about in the news today, in my opinion, is demonic at its source. I am not implying here a lack of human choice … or as “Geraldine” would say … “The devil made me do it.” But I am saying that human nature is, has been, and will continue to be influenced by evil. I would recommend a reading, or a rereading, of C. S. Lewis’s The Screw-tape Letters.
I am reminded of the story of Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5: 1–20). A man is possessed by many demons, and when questioned by Jesus, the spirits say their name is “legion.” Jesus commands the demons to leave the man, and they go into a herd of swine. The swine then “charged down the bluff into the lake, where they drowned.” When the townspeople hear of this, they ask Jesus to leave their neighborhood. Why? Because they blamed Jesus for the loss of the 2,000 swine. Very typical: Blame Jesus for the “evil” when in fact it was the demons that caused the swine to rush off the bluff. You do the same thing in your book, blaming God for all sorts of evil and mayhem. Do you not believe in a Satan? What is your explanation for evil, sin, and the suffering in the world? Is your answer God and human free will? I do not believe God brings or causes evil, tragedy, illness, or suffering to people. We have individual and societal consequences to our choices, and some of our choices have been influenced by Satan. How can one believe in a God of justice and love, and then say this God causes the evil and suffering we see in the world today? This is schizophrenic thinking.
—K.C.
*These estimates were derived from Archbishop James Ussher’s traditional dating system from the seventeenth century. This dating system has not been without its critics (see Mordecai Cogan, “Chronology,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman, New York: Doubleday, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 1002-1011, for a discussion of alternative dating systems). The Bible itself rarely is specific about
the time between major events. Accordingly, scholars have had to extrapolate from the ages of bibical figures and other sparse data provided by the text.
Throughout this book, the original Hebrew names are used interchangeably with their Anglicized counterparts.
*I use the terms “Old Testament” and “Jewish Bible” interchangeably, without intending any theological implications.
*An excerpt from my talk of June 16, 1956, is reprinted in the endnotes on p. 21. The “ch” in Chukkat is pronounced like the first syllable in “Hasid” or “chutzpah.”
*Genesis 12:6.
*For those without e-mail, my address is:
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
*I will deal with these issues in some detail in Chapter 13.
*The broader question arises, of course, if Job is a fictional character, why not Adam, Eve, Abraham, etc.? Abraham Joshua Heschel’s view of the Bible as midrashic metaphor would accept an affirmative response to this question.