Post-Mortem Salvation, Mercy for the Righteous, Elihu

I’m continuing my way through Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism.  I have three items:

1.  Richard Bauckham talks about the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, which could date anywhere from the first century B.C.E.-the first century C.E., and its origin could be within Second Temple Judaism or even Christianity.  The Apocalypse of Zephaniah has a view that was unusual within Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, according to Baukham, and that is that there is an opportunity for the wicked dead in the abyss to repent—-at least prior to the last judgment.  After the last judgment, however, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah concurs with other Jewish and Christian writings that the opportunity for repentance has passed.

2.  On page 181, Bauckham discusses recipients of mercy.  According to IV Ezra, or at least the “unconverted Ezra” in that book, God shows mercy to sinners who lack good works, not to the righteous.  II Baruch and the Enoch traditions, by contrast, hold that God’s mercy is specifically for the righteous, who have plenty of good works and yet are imperfect.  This reminds me of a couple of things.  First, there is Jesus’ statements in the synoptic Gospels that he came to call not the righteous, but sinners.  Second, I thought of how some scholars have characterized the position of the Judaizers whom Paul criticizes: that they already were good on account of their works, but that they still needed forgiveness (presumably through Christ’s sacrifice) to take care of those few areas where they are imperfect.  But Paul had a much dimmer view of humanity’s sinfulness and predicament.

3.  On page 200, Robert Kugler talks about the Testament of Job, and how Testament of Job 43 says that Elihu was possessed by Satan and thus lost his wealth.  This interested me because I have long wondered how to regard Elihu’s contribution to the Book of Job, which contains some of the same points that Job’s other friends have made, and yet may also set the stage for God’s rebuke to Job that Job does not know much.  Elihu is not condemned at the end of the book, in contrast to Job’s other friends, and scholars have said this is because Elihu’s contribution was added later.  Those who do not believe in those kinds of layers, however, have different explanations, such as one saying that Elihu was young and so God didn’t criticize him, thinking that Elihu didn’t know any better.  It’s interesting to see how Elihu is regarded within the History of Interpretation, and I see that the Testament of Job viewed him quite negatively.

I appreciated how the Jewish Encyclopedia characterized Elihu’s speeches (see here): “God is the educator of mankind, who punishes only until the sinner has atoned for his sin and recognizes his wrong-doing. Then God has attained His object, to ‘bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living’ (xxxiii. 17-30). Elihu, therefore, holds a middle ground, maintaining that God neither ‘takes away judgment,’ nor sends suffering merely as a punishment, but acts as the educator and teacher of mankind (xxxiv. 5; xxxv. 1, 14; xxxvi. 10, 22).”

Propitiating the Volcano

On page 144 of Stephen King’s Needful Things, there is the following passage about Pete Jerzyck’s thoughts about his cantankerous wife, Wilma:

“He did not just live in fear of her; he lived in awe of her, as natives in certain tropical climes once supposedly lived in awe and superstitious dread of the Great God Thunder Mountain, which might brood silently over their sunny lives for years or even generations before suddenly exploding in a murderous tirade of burning lava.  Such natives, whether real of hypothetical, undoubtedly had their own rituals of propitiation.  These may not have helped much when the mountain awoke and cast its bolts of thunders and rivers of fire at their villages, but they surely improved everyone’s peace of mind when the mountain was quiet.  Pete Jerzyck had no high rituals with which he could worship Wilma; it seemed that more prosaic measures would have to serve.  Prescription drugs instead of Communion wafers, for instance.”  That means that Pete put anti-depressant pills in Wilma’s coffee or tea to calm her down.

This passage about religion reminds me of what Job did in Job 1: Every day, he offered sacrifices on his sons’ behalf because he feared that they might have cursed God in their hearts, and Job sought to appease God for them, perhaps so that God would not punish them.  This was before Job experienced his calamity.  He was offering these sacrifices when things were going well for him and his family.  He may have felt that he was keeping things as they were—-that he was covering his bases with God so that his peace and prosperity and that of his family might continue.  The ritual of offering sacrifices probably gave him a peace of mind, even though I suppose one could argue that the very fact that he was making them in the first place indicated that he did not have perfect peace, for he saw God as one who would strike his loved ones dead for cursing God in their hearts.

What is interesting about the Needful Things passage is that it is acknowledged that the rituals did not prevent the eruption of the Great God Thunder Mountain, but that the rituals were a way for the natives to channel their fear when things were going well—-so that they could feel that they were at least doing their part to keep themselves safe, whatever the god ultimately decided.  Otherwise, they’d be terrified on a continual basis.  I can sympathize with that use of ritual—-an attempt to control the uncontrollable.  And I’d be lying if I were to deny that such a mindset is somewhere in my own religious beliefs.  But what I try to hold onto is that God loves me and my loved ones, whatever may happen to us, and that this present life is not all that there is.

Disinterested Nature? Introducing Harold Lauder

Last night, I read Chapter 28 of Stephen King’s The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition.  It focuses on Fran Goldsmith.  I have two items:

1.  Fran’s mother and father have just died from the superflu, and there are thoughts running through Fran’s mind that appear on first sight to be disconnected, when actually they are connected with each other.  She thinks about how her father died, and also that it is “a beautiful summer’s day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for” (page 247).  Fran then connects the two thoughts: “It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.”

I’m not entirely sure what the connection between these two thoughts is, but I can speculate.  Did Fran feel slapped in the face because her father died and it was a beautiful day, as if nature were mocking her?  Did she feel encouraged by the beautiful day?  Or perhaps the point is that nature is indifferent to us: that there will be days that we consider to be beautiful even when we are not around to enjoy them (and a lot of humanity is dying off at this point of the book).  Heck, scientists have said that there were such days before there even were human beings!  On page 250, Fran sees the superflu in a “Book of Job” sort of way (though she does not mention the Book of Job): “Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike…”  Nature seems to be disinterested.  At the same time, I should note that a big point of the book is that some are immune to the superflu, for a reason maybe known only to God (in the book, that is).

2.  Chapter 28 is where we first meet Harold Lauder.  So far, I prefer Corin Nemec’s depiction of Harold in the miniseries to Harold in the book.  In the miniseries, Harold had a crush on Fran since he was a little boy, and he was polite and gentlemanly to her and her father.  He was also a poet who wrote a few poems for a notorious literary publication.  And, after the superflu took most of the people in his town, he reflected to Fran that he remembers all those guys who used to give him wedgies, and he wanted them back.

Harold in the book, by contrast, strikes me as vulgar, cold, and not especially talented in writing.  Harold checks Fran out while talking with her, and Fran speculates that he has an X-rated movie going on in his head.  He does not seem to be affected by the death of his parents and his older sister, for he cavalierly remarks that life goes on.  He also uses the deaths of many in town as an opportunity to get free stuff for himself, such as somebody else’s nice car and new shoes in a store.  He wrote bizarre stories in the second-person.  In contrast to the miniseries, he did not even offer to help Fran bury her father.  He calls Fran “my child”, which reminds me more of Isaac on Children of the Corn than Harold in The Stand miniseries.  But Harold does speak intelligently.  There is one more difference between the book and the miniseries: in the miniseries, Harold essentially trusts the government, for he and Fran head to the Centers for Disease Control in Vermont to get advice on what to do next.  In the book, by contrast, he realizes that the government created the virus and botched things up.  But whether he and Fran will still try to get in touch with the government, I will have to see.

I prefer Harold from the miniseries, but I can still make do with Harold in the book and learn lessons.  For instance, how did Harold get to be so cold?  Fran speculates that Harold had never had a date in his life and that influenced him to have a worldly disdain for the world and for himself.  Harold’s older sister was also a popular person and spoke about Harold with disgust.  Harold may look at the world with disdain because he doesn’t fit into it, but to not care about the death of his very own parents?  That is cold.

Bartlett’s Jobian Rant

Rolf Rendtorff, The Old Testament: An Introduction, page 252:

…God no longer observes the right: he destroys innocent and guilty ([Job] 9.22f; 10.14-17 etc.).  Therefore Job challenges him to stand trial.

I watched a West Wing episode from the second season this week, the one entitled “The Two Cathedrals.” Among other problems President Bartlett is having, his long-time friend and his personal secretary, Mrs. Landingham, was killed by a drunk driver, right after she got a new car. Here is Bartlett’s prayer to God after her funeral:

What is Bartlett saying in Latin? According to this, Bartlett is saying the following:

gratias tibi ago, domine.
Thank you, Lord.
haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito?
Am I to believe these things from a righteous god, a just god, a wise god?
cruciatus in crucem
To hell with your punishments! (literally “(put/send) punishments onto a cross”)
tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui; officium perfeci.
I was your servant, your messenger on the earth; I did my duty.
cruciatus in crucem — (with a dismissive wave of the hand) eas in crucem
To hell with your punishments! And to hell with you! (literally, “may you go to a cross”)”

Near the end of the episode, the ghost of Mrs. Landingham exhorts the President not to use her death as an excuse to get out of the game. God doesn’t cause car crashes, she says, and there remains so much for the President to do.

But, in this prayer at the cathedral, Bartlett is basically saying that bad things shouldn’t happen to him and those he loves, because he has served God and helped others as President.

I thought about this West Wing episode at one of the masses that I attended this morning. The priest told us a nineteenth century Hasidic tale about a crooked rich man who gets his hands dirty by helping a man get his wagon out of the mud. After this rich man’s death, that act inclined the scales in the direction of merit, despite his crooked dealings, and so he entered the good afterlife.

There’s a notion out there that we can buy God’s favor by doing good. Evangelicals would say that we can never buy God’s favor, which is why we need grace. And yet, such a belief persists, maybe because the Bible talks a lot about God rewarding good and punishing evil.

Vegetarians Start to Eat Meat, God Discusses Justice to Job

1.  I’ll be reading one essay of Ancient Israelite Religion every day (except Saturday), until I decide to read more.  Today, the essay I read was William W. Hallo’s “The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel.”  Hallo refers to a Sumerian story about the crown prince Lugalbanda, of Uruk  (see Lugalbanda in the Cave). 

On one of his campaigns, Lugalbanda is left for dead in a cave, with little food.  The plants aren’t fit to eat, so Lugalbanda becomes carnivorous by necessity.  He lures an auroch (a kind of cattle) and two goats through cakes, and he binds them.  He’s hesitant to wield his cutting-tools against his prey, but a dream from Za(n)qara (the god of dreams) instructs him on how to slaughter them.  He follows the instructions to the letter, and (in Hallo’s words) “goes them one better—significantly better” (9).  He shares his meat with the four greatest deities of the Sumerian pantheon.  The sweet savor rises to the gods like incense, as they consume the best part of the meat.  And Lugalbanda recovers from his illness. 

Hallo compares this story with Genesis: humans were made vegetarian, but God allowed them to eat meat after the flood.  Hallo’s view (if I understand it correctly) seems to be that the sacrificial system served to legitimize the consumption of meat.  Israelites wanted or needed to eat it, but they were leery about shedding blood, so sharing their meat with the gods allowed them to eat it without qualms. 

But the commonality between Lugalbanda and the Bible is that both present humans as initially vegetarian, until they were allowed to eat meat (which gods/God did anyway).

2.  I started Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies.  Today, I read “The Meaning of the Book of Job.”

Essentially, Tsevat argues that the Book of Job says God doesn’t consistently reward the righteous and punish the wicked, so people should be righteous because it’s good, not to receive a reward.  I already knew that Job complained about this in his speeches, but Tsevat’s essay was helpful because he referred to places in God’s speech from the whirlwind touching on reward and punishment.  For Tsevat, God addressed Job’s complaint head-on.

Here are some examples, and the translation is whatever Tsevat is using:

40:11-14: “Give free scope to your raging anger.  Seeing anyone haughty, bring him low; seeing anyone haughty, abase him and tread down the wicked in their tracks.  Conceal them alike in the earth, wrap their faces in concealment.  Then I, too, will acknowledge that your right-hand is all-prevailing.”  

38:12-13, 15: “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, have you directed the dawn to its place to take hold of the skirts of the earth so that the wicked are shaken out of it, so that light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.”

Tsevat interprets these passages to mean that Job can’t punish the wicked, and it’s not God’s general policy to do so, either.  For Tsevat, 38:12-13, 15 doesn’t describe what God does, for the morning doesn’t hurt the wicked; rather, the sun shines on the just and unjust alike.

38:25-27 is also pretty telling: “Who has cleft a channel for the rain flood or a way for the thunder cloud to cause rain on land where no man is, on a desert where no people live to satiate waste and desolate terrain and to sprout fresh grass?”  As Tsevat points out, the Hebrew Bible often treats rain or the withholding of it as a tool God uses for reward and punishment (see Deuteronomy 28:24, or the Elijah story).  But God tells Job in 38:25-27 that God sends rain where there are no people.  It’s almost as if God or nature is blind to what humans do, or maybe the lesson here is that God doesn’t consider humans to be the center of the universe!

I checked the MacArthur Study Bible and the Nelson Study Bible, and they have an interesting take on Job 38:12-13, 15, the passage about morning.  Nelson says that God here is responding to Job’s complaint in 24:13-17 that God allows the wicked to do their evil deeds at night.  For MacArthur and Nelson, God’s response is that he sends the morning to interrupt and expose the wicked, to shine the light on their activities.  That’s tempting to accept, but 38:15 says that light is withheld from the wicked.

I’m not sure what to do with Tsevat’s proposal.  I always understood God to be saying to Job that Job can’t do all the things God does, for God is superior.  That would imply that passages such as 38:12-15 and 40:11-14 affirm the existence of a moral order in the universe.  That would be consistent with Job 1, in which God places a hedge around Job for his protection, presumably because of Job’s righteousness.  But God can make exceptions to his moral order, as when he tests people, so Job’s friends were wrong to assume that Job was suffering on account of his sin.

At the same time, I like Tsevat’s proposal because it takes seriously Job’s speeches about the existence of injustice in the world, as when Job observes that there are wicked people who die in a state of peace, prosperity, and contentment (Job 21).  Can we interpret God to say that he’s just in his whirlwind speeches, thereby sweeping Job’s observations under the rug, as if they’re invalid?  But if God is saying that he doesn’t rule the world according to a moral order, that allows Job’s observations to stand.  We don’t have to be like Job’s friends, who try to subordinate reality to their belief that God is just.

Jobian Existentialism

Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: MacMillan, 1980) 143.

Seltzer discusses various viewpoints on God’s whirlwind speech in the Book of Job.  The final one that he presents is that of Matitiahu Tsevat.  I’ll call it the “existential view”: life makes no sense, but you do what you can to get by and love others.

In the friends’ insistence that Job’s suffering meant he had sinned, and in Job’s demanding a specific reason why he, in his innocence, should suffer, both sides had presumed the reality of reward and punishment in the cosmos.  Perhaps, however, the voice from the whirlwind is asserting that there is no such law of retribution and that nature is neutral to man’s moral action.  The sun rises on the righteous and sinner alike (28:13, 15).  Rain falls on the desert, whereas it could have been directed only to the cultivated land where it is needed by men (38:26-27).  Wild animals do not observe the tenets of human morality (38:15-16).  Accordingly, God’s speech can be construed to imply that material prosperity and misfortune do not constitute divine recompense or chastisement.  Tsevat proposed that only the concept of  a cosmic order that does not operate according to a built-in principle of moral retribution makes possible the selfless piety that was the first issue posed by the book of Job.  “It would be a grave error to interpret [the book's] denial of divine retribution as constituting a legitimate excuse for man from his obligations to establish justice on earth.  Justice is not woven into the stuff of the universe nor is God occupied with its administration, but it is an ideal to be realized by society.”  The author of Job may be denying one fundamental assumption of the narrative and prophetic books of the Bible, but his denial is consistent with another, even more fundamental assumption: that it is up to man to carry out God’s commandments and that his primary task must be done in society and actualized in the course of history.  A principle of reward and punishment would, in fact, be a form of coercion, leaving no special realm in which man could exercise his moral freedom by doing the good from purely disinterested motives.

Diverse Bibles, God’s Unforgiveness, Bad and Good Waters

1. Martin Jan Mulder, “The Transmission of the Biblical Text,” Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 101.

“Kahle was moved to his criticism by studying the finds of biblical fragments in a geniza (=storage room) of a synagogue in Cairo, which had been built in 882 C.E., and was rebuilt in 1890. This led to the discovery of the ‘hidden treasures’. From the geniza appeared numerous manuscripts of the Bible, and also of other religious and liturgical books. Some of the biblical manuscripts, which can be dated in or even before the ninth century, occasionally show considerable divergencies from our present MT. In rabbinic literature, too, deviations from the MT occur in biblical quotations, just as in the Ancient Versions. According to Kahle, there was not at first a single text of the Hebrew Bible, but there existed several Vulgartexte. Kahle modelled his hypothesis on the (Aramaic) targumim, which had also circulated in different forms. He claims that during the first centuries of the Common Era, one of the said Vulgartexte was rewritten in such a way that an official text could grow out of it.”

There are several manuscripts and quotations of the Hebrew Bible in antiquity. They have a lot of similarities, but they also have differences. Conservatives do well to point out that the biblical manuscripts at Qumran match the Masoretic Text to a great extent. But there are also differences between certain Qumran manuscripts and the MT, particularly concerning the Book of Jeremiah.

Conservatives and others like to use textual criticism to discover what the text originally said. But is this even possible, when the transmission of the biblical text may have been rather fluid up to a certain time?

What effect do different versions have on the Christian faith? There were biblical authors who obviously had a problem with variance in texts, for the authors of Deuteronomy and Revelation command people not to add or subtract from their books (Deuteronomy 4:2; Revelation 22:8). At the same time, if memory serves me correctly, Jerome asserted that both the Septuagint and the Hebrew text were inspired, even though he was aware of their differences.

Bart Ehrman is a liberal scholar who makes a big deal about differences among New Testament manuscripts. Conservatives usually retort that the differences are mostly orthographic (spelling) and do not demonstrate significant discrepancies on the important stuff, such as the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Personally, I don’t think that the existence of different manuscripts compromises the big-picture stuff, such as the character of God, which includes his love, justice, righteousness, etc. The Bible itself presents variety in terms of laws. Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel have differences in the precise details of their legal stipulations, but all of them acknowledge God’s holiness and goodness. So I guess I’m a big-picture man.

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 426.

“Tertullian held all mortal sins (of which he numbers seven), committed after baptism, to be unpardonable, at least in this world, and a church, which showed such lenity towards gross offenders, as the Roman church at that time did, according to the corroborating testimony of Hippolytus, he called worse than a ‘den of thieves’…”

The NRSV of I John 5:16 states: “If you see your brother or sister committing what is not a mortal sin, you will ask, and God will give life to such a one–to those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin that is mortal; I do not say that you should pray about that.” The NRSV calls a sin unto death a “mortal sin.” I wonder if Roman Catholic Church believes that its conception of mortal sin is the topic of I John 5:16. Most Protestants apply that passage to the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus says will not be forgiven (Mark 3:28-29 et al).

From what I can see in its catechism, the Catholic Church holds that mortal sins–sins “whose object is grave matter and is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent”–can be forgiven (1856).

For my daily quiet time, I’ve been reading the Koran (Do I hear gasps?). Here are some quotes about God’s forgiveness, from Ahmed Ali’s translation:

“God does accept repentance, but only of those who are guilty of an evil out of ignorance yet quickly repent…But he does not accept the repentance of those who continue indulging in evil until death draws near and they say: ‘We now repent’…” (The Women 17-18).

“God does not forgive that compeers [=equals] be ascribed to him, though he may forgive aught else if he please” (The Woman 48).

In these quotes, God doesn’t forgive intentional sin, nor does he care much for death-bed repentance. And God’s also not too eager to bury the hatchet when people say other beings or things are equal to him.

I don’t know what the full ramifications of this are. After all, many of the first converts to Islam were formerly idolaters. Would Muhammad say that God forgave them because they acted in ignorance?

On some level, the Koran is getting its idea about God’s forgiveness (or lack thereof) from the Bible. Numbers 15:22-31 says that those who sin unintentionally can offer a sacrifice and receive forgiveness, whereas the people who sin high-handedly get the death penalty. Such an attitude carries over into the New Testament, which refers to God’s mercy on the ignorant. This includes people who killed Jesus (Luke 23:34; Acts 3:17; I Corinthians 2:8), persecuted the church (I Timothy 1:13), worshipped idols (Acts 17:30), and committed a host of other sins (Ephesians 4:18; I Peter 1:14). But Hebrews is clear that God does not forgive those who fall away or “sin willfully” after knowing the truth (Hebrews 6:4ff; 10:26; 12:17). Even in the New Testament, there’s a view that says God forgives unintentional sins, but not intentional ones.

Where that leaves me, I have no idea. I find that I do sin with the knowledge that the Bible disapproves of my act. Lust is a big example. But do I know the full ramifications of what I’m doing? How ignorant am I when I sin–of the inherent goodness and rationality of God’s standard, for example?

This last week, I encountered a woman on the bus who was worried that she had blasphemed the Holy Spirit. She seemed pretty composed for a person who believed she was going to hell, but her story was this: she asked God for a billion dollars, God said no, and she cursed him and “prostituted herself.” Now, according to her, she’s ugly, and her significant other has left her. In her mind, the curse of God is upon her.

I told her that, if what she did (e.g., cursing) was unforgivable, then everyone is going to hell. She nodded her head and proceeded to confess Bible verses silently to God. I thought I was a failure because I didn’t give her the usual evangelical spiel on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which I have problems with (see Matthew 12:22-37: Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit). But maybe I wasn’t a failure after all. Even if she thought I was from the devil and trying to deceive her, I got her praying, and that’s a good thing!

I wondered why Jesus even uttered his statements about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, since they have led to the emotional and spiritual abysses of many Christians. But I think that Jesus gave them as a warning, not to kick people when they’re down. I’m not sure if he was saying that the Pharisees had placed themselves beyond the realm of God’s mercy, since he later asks God to forgive them because they didn’t know what they were doing. But when the Pharisees attributed Jesus’ works to the devil, Jesus may have been saying, “You’d better watch what you say! You don’t want to put yourself beyond the realm of God’s forgiveness. And you are on the verge of doing so right now!”

I’m not sure if the passages about God not forgiving people are meant to discourage us from repenting and seeking God’s forgiveness, whatever we have done or however knowingly we did it. God forgives his prodigal children, after all! But they may be designed to make us watch ourselves–to make sure that we’re not in a position where God cannot reach us. If we are so rebellious that nothing God does will bring us to him, then we may very well be on dangerous ground.

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism’s Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 191.

“From the beginning of creating the world, God foresaw Moses, who was called ‘for he was good’ {Ex. 2:2), and [God foresaw that] Moses would receive his punishment on account of [water, smiting the rock for water, rather than merely speaking to it], ‘For it was not good.’…Along these same lines, the Holy One, blessed be he, said, ‘Since the water will punish the generation of Enosh, the generation of the flood, and the generation of division, therefore let the words ‘for it was good’ not be written with regard to water.”

Neusner is quoting Genesis Rabbah. In Genesis 1, God calls most of his creation “good” after each day of creation (except Day 2), but he does not explicitly say that about water. I remember Professor Jon Levenson pointing that out in a class that I took at Harvard. At the time, I assumed this was because water in Scripture and the ancient Near East is often an enemy of God. It represents chaos, which God has to subdue to restore the natural order. Jon Levenson discussed this in Creation and the Persistence of Evil, and Bernard Batto (a professor of mine at DePauw) did so in Slaying the Dragon.

In Genesis 1, God calls everything he had made “very good,” after he has created all the heavens and the earth, of course. But did God create the waters? In Genesis 1:2, they are around before God says “Let there be light.” God mostly arranges the elements that already exist: darkness, the water, etc. So were these things co-eternal with God? Some scholars think so. Armstrongites, of course, would posit that there was another creation before the one in Genesis 1, explaining why there was water before God commanded light to appear.

What’s interesting is that the rabbis point out that Scripture praises water on a few occasions. Psalm 93:4 says that water praises God, and there are passages in which God commands and restrains the waters. For the rabbis, Neusner argues, nature is obedient to God, whereas human beings usually are not. This resembles sentiments of Islam and Clement, who say that nature is naturally subservient to God, whereas humans have to yield to him from their own free will.

Maybe. And yet, we all know there’s a lot of brutality in the animal kingdom! Christians usually attribute this to the Fall, which disrupted the goodness of God’s natural order. But God points out to Job that his creation can be pretty strange, so maybe the bizarre things in nature are all part of the plan!

Job and Resurrection, Clement on Faith and Works, Christian Edom

1. Roger T. Beckwith, “Formation of the Hebrew Bible,” Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 74-75.

“Josephus’ works list the distinguishing tenets of the three great Jewish schools, and rabbinic literature mentions a great many of the points at issue between the Pharisees and Sadducees, but neither source ever suggests that the Sadducees rejected the Prophets and Hagiographa. On the contrary, as Jean Le Moyne points out, one of the later midrashim, the ‘printed Tanhuma’, seems to imply the opposite, stating that[:] The Sadducees deny the resurrection and say, ‘As the cloud disperses and passes away, so he who descends to Sheol shall not come up any more’ (Job 7:9).”

Did Job believe in the resurrection of the dead? One of my professors wrote a paper on this topic. On the “pro” side, Christians have appealed to Job 19:25-26: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God” (NRSV).

Detractors argue, however, that Job is not speaking of resurrection from death, but rather Job’s recovery from his sickness.

On the “anti” side, we have Job 7:9-10 and 14:12:

Job 7:9-10: “As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to Sheol do not come up; they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them any more.”

Job 14:12: “so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.”

To demonstrate how proponents of bodily resurrection addressed such passages, let me quote a paper I wrote on Gregory I, the pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 590-604:

“According to Rava, Job denied the resurrection from the dead in Job 7:9, which states, ‘As a cloud fades away, so whatever goes down to Sheol does not come up’ (B.T. Baba Bathra 16a). Gregory equates ‘Sheol’ with hell, so he interprets the verse to mean that the wicked who go to hell will suffer eternally (Moralia VII.17.33-VII.18.34)…A passage in which Job appears to deny the resurrection is Job 14:12: ‘So man lies down never to rise; he will awake only when the heavens are no more, only then be aroused from his sleep.’ Gregory asks if this passage denies the resurrection, and he responds that it does not, for the resurrection will occur after the end of the world, ‘when the heavens are no more’ (Moralia XII.7.11-XII.8.12).”

Gregory’s translation of Job 14:12 appears rather loose, but I can see how he gets something like that from the verse: people will not rise from the dead until the heavens are no more. In Gregory’s view, after the heavens are no more, they will rise.

If Job believed in the resurrection, why his hopelessness about his suffering and the injustice of life? For certain Christian interpreters, maybe he arrived at the resurrection as a solution to his problems.

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 394.

Clement of Alexandria (second-third century C.E.), Stromata VI.14: “When we hear, ‘Thy faith hath saved thee’ (Mark 5:34), we do not understand him to say absolutely that those who have believed in any way whatever shall be saved, unless also works follow. But it was to the Jews alone that he spoke this utterance, who kept the law and lived blamelessly, who wanted only faith in the Lord.”

Schaff responds to Clement as follows: “How little he understood the doctrine of Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, may be inferred from a passage in the Stromata, where he explains the word of Christ: ‘Thy faith hath saved thee,’ as referring, not to faith simply, but to the Jews only, who lived according to the law; as if faith was to be added to the good works, instead of being the source and principle of the holy life.”

There are a variety of things that I can say about this. I can understand Schaff’s interpretation of what Clement is saying, but it’s not entirely accurate. I think both believe that good works should flow from faith. Clement explicitly states that good works should follow belief. At the same time, I disagree with Clement if he’s saying that salvation by faith applies only to the Jews. I wonder how he would explain Romans 4:5: “But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.”

Also, was there a sola fide or antinomian camp in the days of Clement? He appears to be addressing something like that. But, on that note, the same may be true of James: “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24).

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism’s Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 173.

“So, adhering to its context in post-Constantine, Christian Rome, Genesis is read as if it portrayed the history of Israel and Rome. Why Rome in the form it takes in Genesis Rabbah? And how come the obsessive character of the sages’ disposition of the theme of Rome? Were their picture merely of Rome as tyrant and destroyer of the Temple, we should have no reason to link the text to the problems of the age of redaction and closure. But now it is Rome as Israel’s brother, counterpart, and nemesis, Rome as the one thing standing in the way of Israel’s, and the world’s, ultimate salvation…It is not a political Rome but a Christian and messianic Rome that is at issue: Rome as competitor with and surrogate for Israel, Rome as obstacle to Israel…Rome in the fourth century became Christian. Sages respond by facing that fact squarely and saying, ‘Indeed, it is as you say, a kind of Israel, an heir of Abraham as your texts explicitly claim. But we remain the sole legitimate Israel, the bearer of the birthright–we and not you. So you are our brother: Esau, Ishmael, Edom.’”

This would be something to check out: Does “Edom” always refer to Christian Rome, or could it refer to pagan Rome as well? I assumed that the Jews called Rome “Edom” as a cryptic symbol: they wanted to criticize Rome, but they were too afraid of political retaliation, so they used the name “Edom” whenever they bashed Rome. The problem with this view is that the rabbis could be pretty brazen in their criticisms of Hadrian. In that case, they named names!

I wondered why Jews called Rome by the name of a son of Jacob, and Neusner’s explanation may be correct: they were responding to Christians, who claimed to be the true seed of Abraham. The rabbis responded that they were, in a matter of speaking, but they belonged to the line that got an inferior blessing.

God’s Quiz, More on the Afterlife, a Present Kingdom

1. Aaron Demsky, “Writing in Ancient Israel. Part One: The Biblical Period,” Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 13.

“In fact, it has been suggested that Job 38-39 is actually based on a quiz of a teacher on the order of nature, a subject familiar to the more advanced student of both the wisdom and priestly schools.”

I heard something like this in Ed Greenstein’s class on Job, which I took at Jewish Theological Seminary. Essentially, this view states that God overwhelmed Job with his (God’s) encyclopedic knowledge of nature. “You think you’re so smart, Job?,” it presents God as asking. “Do you know this, and this, and this?”

I’ve seen scenes like this on movies and TV shows. Remember that scene in Omen II, in which the arrogant teacher was trying to stump young Damian (the Antichrist) with a bunch of hard historical questions, only to see Damian answering all of them? Or a similar scene in Finding Forrester, in which the cocky teacher was tossing at Jamaal a bunch of poetic quotations, expecting to embarrass him in front of his classmates? The only problem for him was that Jamaal knew the source of all those poetic quotations and ended up embarrassing the teacher!

Then there’s the scene in Remains of the Day, in which a rich man is trying to make a point about the flaws of democracy, and he does so by asking butler Anthony Hopkins some hard questions about gold and the economy. You can tell that the butler knows the answers, but he dutifully pretends that he does not, as he tries to be a good butler. And there’s a scene from the West Wing, in which a pop journalist embarrasses C.J. by criticizing her dress, and C.J. returns the favor by asking her questions about government (e.g., “How many representatives are in the U.S. House?”) at a press conference. The journalist walks away mortified!

In all of these scenes, a figure with authority attempts to embarrass someone by making him or her look ignorant, and that seems to be what God does in the Book of Job. Is God effective? Yes, in the sense that God brings Job to repentance, as Job realizes that he doesn’t know that much after all (though Ed Greenstein disagrees with this interpretation). But I’m not sure if I agree with God’s argument. Just because God knows a bunch of facts about nature, does that mean he runs things well? Sure, God created things a certain way, and he knows what that way is, but does that entail that it’s the best possible way?

But maybe God just assumes that Job would agree that God’s created order is the best possible way. After all, it guarantees life and sustenance to a lot of people, plants, and animals. Perhaps God is trying to convey to Job that he (God) knows the intricacies of how his complex machine works and benefits all creation. If God acts in mysterious ways to benefit living things, then why shouldn’t Job trust God when God appears untrustworthy?

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 309.

“Another prominent feature of the catacombs is their hopeful and joyful eschatology. They portray in symbols and words a certain conviction of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, rooted and grounded in a living union with Christ in this world. These glorious hopes comforted and strengthened the early Christians in a time of poverty, trial, and persecution. This character stands in striking contrast with the preceding and contemporary gloom of paganism, for which the future world was a blank…”

At my Latin mass today, I heard a sermon about the afterlife. The priest criticized the Islamic view of post-mortem reward, with its focus on material prosperity (e.g., sex, wealth, good food, etc.). For him, material prosperity will not make people happy, since they eventually grow tired of physical pleasures. The priest contended that the only thing that can make people happy is knowledge of God, whom they will behold and understand more fully in the afterlife.

Is this the Christian conception? In some sense, yes. Paul says in I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (NRSV). I John 3:2 states, “What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

I’m not sure what Paul means when he says we will know “fully.” Can we ever know God fully? Sure, there are beautiful things about God that we can appreciate, but can we completely know an inexhaustible God? I’m not sure if I’d respect God as much if I could know him fully. That implies that he has limits. I’d like to see God as someone I learn more and more about each day, meaning I can never arrive at a state of perfect knowledge.

Another point: Schaff says that paganism drew a blank in its conception of the afterlife. But, to be honest, I’m not sure how specific Christianity is about that topic. We know that we’ll be incorruptible, and that we’ll rule as kings and priests in some way, shape, or form (I Corinthians 15; II Timothy 2:12; Revelation 20:6). But, overall, the New Testament doesn’t really flesh out what we’ll be doing, at least not as far as I can see (and I may be missing something!).

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism’s Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 105.

Quote of Alan Avery-Peck: “By providing opportunities for the Israelites to model their contemporary existence upon a perfected order of things, these commemorations further prepare the people for messianic times, when, under God’s rule, the world will permanently revert to the ideal character at the time of Creation.”

According to Neusner, the laws of the Torah present Israelites with the same choice that Adam and Eve had in Eden. In Genesis 2:15-16, God tells Adam: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

On the Sabbatical year, Israelites could freely eat from the fallow land. Exodus 23:11 allows the poor and the wild animals to benefit from the fields, vineyards, and orchards. According to Neusner, the Sabbatical year replicated Edenic conditions, in which Adam and Eve could eat freely, private property did not really exist, and man did not have to toil for his survival (103-104).

But, in the same way that God restricted Adam and Eve from eating from one particular tree, God banned the Israelites from eating certain fruit–at least for a certain span of time. Leviticus 19:23-25 states:

“When you come into the land and plant all kinds of trees for food, then you shall regard their fruit as forbidden; three years it shall be forbidden to you, it must not be eaten. In the fourth year all their fruit shall be set apart for rejoicing in the LORD. But in the fifth year you may eat of their fruit, that their yield may be increased for you: I am the LORD your God.”

The Israelites were to submit to God’s regulation on what they should eat and when. They were to do right what Adam and Eve did wrong. Part of this was so they could avoid the fate of Adam and Eve, who were booted out of paradise. If the Israelites obeyed God, then they could continue to thrive in their good land.

But submitting to God’s rules also prepares the Israelites for the Messianic Era, a time when Edenic conditions will be restored. This reminds me of things I’ve heard from various religious groups. I once had a conversation with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they said that they don’t believe in fighting wars because they are citizens of God’s kingdom, which will not allow war (Isaiah 2:4). And I heard a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor proclaim that we should keep the Sabbath now, since we’ll be keeping it in heaven (Isaiah 66:23). “You might as well get used to keeping the Sabbath on earth, since you’ll be doing it in heaven,” he glibly remarked.

For both, the nature of the future kingdom of God should impact how we act in the here-and-now. And they have a point. The kingdom is not just a far-off-in-the-future reality, for it has a present dimension. As Paul says in Romans 14:17, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

Satan: Prosecutor or Embodiment of Evil?

Source: George W.E. Nickelsburg, “Stories of Biblical and Early Post-Biblical Times,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 53.

“As Isaiah is being tortured, Bechir-ra, acting as the mouthpiece of Satan, attempts to get the prophet to recant. With the aid of the Holy Spirit, Isaiah refuses, curses Bechir-ra and the demonic powers he represents, and dies.”

Nickelsburg is discussing the Martyrdom of Isaiah, which he dates to the second century B.C.E. Nickelsburg sometimes assumes that literature is talking about Satan when it doesn’t specifically do so, for he states that Jubilees refers to birds as agents of Satan, when actually Mastema is the one who sends them. In the case of the Martyrdom of Isaiah, however, Satan is explicitly mentioned, for 2:2-3 say that the evil King Manasseh served Satan and his angels.

I have a colleague who says that the concept of Satan as the embodiment of evil first appeared in New Testament times. Many scholars have argued that, in the Hebrew Bible, Satan was like a prosecuting attorney, who continually pointed out to God the faults of his people, even going so far as to place them in a position to display their sins (as in the case of Job). I heard one professor assert that the word “Satan” was a technical term for prosecutor in a particular ancient Near Eastern country, but the Anchor Bible Dictionary says that the word is unattested in the ancient Near East, so I’m not sure who’s right.

In the intertestamental period, my colleague contends, God doesn’t have one major adversary in Jewish literature, but rather there are many demons. For my colleague, Satan as the embodiment of evil first emerges in the New Testament, since Jesus knew about the spiritual realm and could inform us about it. (My colleague wrote the paper at a Christian school.)

But apparently Satan is the embodiment of evil in the Martyrdom of Isaiah. Indeed, he tries to trip Isaiah up, but that could be part of his prosecutorial role of showing a person’s not worthy of God’s favor. But he seems to be more than a prosecutor: he’s the one evil King Manasseh is worshipping when he serves idols. He is the source of evil.

I think he may be something like that in the Hebrew Bible as well. I don’t want to dismiss him being a prosecutor, but I find it interesting that the Hebrew Bible often uses the word “Satan” to refer to enemies. Here’s a quote from Victor Hamilton’s article on “Satan” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary:

“The first human called a śātān in the OT is David. Philistines rulers, observing the presence of David and his supporters in their camp as they prepared for war with Israel, complained that David would in fact become their “adversary” (1 Sam 29:4), and thus win the favor of his own king, Saul.

“The second instance involves Shimei, a Benjaminite who had earlier cursed and humiliated David as the king fled Jerusalem (2 Sam 16:5–14). Subsequently a repentant Shimei sought David’s forgiveness (2 Sam 19:19b–21—Eng 19:18b–20). Abishai, a member of David’s court, pushed for Shimei’s execution for blaspheming the king. David, however, opted for leniency, and branded Abishai (and his brothers) as an ‘adversary’ for even suggesting such a thing (2 Sam 19:23—Eng 19:22). Killing Shimei, while legally permissible, would seriously diminish David’s chance of effectively ingratiating himself with the Saulide Benjaminites. David will decide who, if anybody, shall die for any crime.

“The third instance involves Solomon. He wrote to Hiram, king of Tyre and friend of his late father, stating that David had been unable to build a temple because he was so preoccupied with war in expanding and defending his empire. Now, however, Solomon is free to pursue that project, for his era is one of relative peace, one in which Solomon is without any kind of an “adversary” (1 Kgs 5:18—Eng 5:4). Clearly śātān here designates military enemies, those who threaten the well-being of others.

“Perhaps Solomon, in speaking of the absence of satans on his borders, spoke prematurely. Some years later Yahweh raised up two satans against Solomon, whose relationship with Yahweh was in disarray. The first was Hadad from Edom (1 Kgs 11:14), and the second was Rezon from Syria (1 Kgs 11:23, 25). Here again, the meaning of śātān is military rival who lives outside one’s empire.”

“Satan” means “adversary,” or “enemy.” It’s not a proper name, as so many Christians treat it, but it’s what someone is. It can even refer to humans. That’s why the devil is called ha-Satan–the Satan–rather than just Satan: it’s a role he plays, not his proper name. And maybe he is called that, not so much because he’s a prosecutor, but because he’s the enemy of God and all humanity, especially God’s people.