Voices of God

Readers of the prophets – those brave or foolish enough to tackle these most challenging of the biblical books – tend to believe that these men of the ancient Mideast speak authoritatively for God. After all, they tell us that they do. Despite their many differences, the 15 writing prophets of the Hebrew Bible (Christians count 16, including Daniel in the ranks) all claim to be speaking on behalf of a God who has given them messages – primarily of warning – to deliver to humanity.

But why do we accept the authority of these men? After all, if we encountered men or women today who spoke or wrote the way the prophets do, we would be most likely to write them off as crazy, delusional, or at the very least obsessed with their religion to the exclusion of common sense, good manners and social skills.

We would likely react in a way similar to the priest Amaziah, who essentially told Amos to shut up and go home. Amaziah is portrayed as a villain by Amos, but when you stop and think about it, his behavior was pretty rational when confronted with a man who was running around screaming that the king would be assassinated, and the citizenry of Israel sent into exile. We don’t have much patience with people who claim to be receiving messages directly from God.

We know very little about the men who wrote the 15 prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible – basically whatever these authors chose to tell us, supplemented by a few little snippets in the books of Kings. And yet we not only accept that they were authentically speaking for God, but, in the case of Christians, that their words predicted the coming of Christ.

The late scholar David J.A. Clines, in his essay “Metacommentating Amos,” states the problem this way:

“Somehow we need to distance ourselves from the prophetic voice, and recognize that the prophet’s is only one voice in his community. The prophet, and the text, have a corner to fight, a position to uphold, and we for our part need to identify that position, and to relativize it, not so as to discard it but only so as to give it its proper due.”

As Clines points out, the supposedly villainous Amaziah was a respected priest. He and Amos shared a faith in Yahweh: “He worshipped the same God as Amos, and he and Amos believed in almost all the same things.” Indeed, it seems plausible that Amaziah was trying to protect Amos from the wrath of King Jeroboam II.

Amos, Prophet. Public domain image

Although Judaism, Christianity and – to a lesser extent – Islam have hung on the words of the prophets for millennia, it really is not clear who wrote those words. Many scholars suspect that multiple authors and numerous redactors contributed to each and every book of prophecy, even the very short ones. These authors and editors were crafting narratives about a society about which we have very little evidence outside of the Bible. This makes critical analysis extremely difficult, which is the point of Clines’s essay. (The essay appears in a collection called, Of Prophets’ Visions and the Wisdom of Sages, which Clines co-edited. The essay and the book are worth checking out for anyone serious about studying the Bible).

I feel about the books of the prophets much the same as I feel about the Bible as a whole. Although scholarship and speculation about the creative process that shaped it is very interesting, whave we have in front of us is an extraordinary work of art. Complex, sophisticated, deep in meaning, the Bible can certainly stand up to the belief that it was divinely inspired. How else could this kind of greatness emerge?

But the greatness is artistic, not historical or factual. The books of the prophets contain some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. These words inspire and transform us in the way that only great art can. In the end, it doesn’t matter that it is unlikely that Jonah lived in the belly of a fish for three days, or that Obadiah believed that God was coming to punish and shame the people of Edom for collaborating with a foreign power in their assault on Israel. (Scholars can’t agree on which foreign power Obadiah was writing about, or much of anything else about Obadiah, whose book is the shortest in the Hebrew Bible.)

The Prophet Obadiah.Orthodox Church in America

We assume the authority of these books because they are great literary achievements, just as we may talk about Amy Dorrit or Raskolnikov as if their stories are true. They are imbued with the truth of genius.

Who Is a God Like You?

Reading the book of the prophet Micah is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. It alternates graphic doomsaying with utopian visions not just for the Hebrews but for the entire world. At least three such reversals take place within its seven short chapters, announced by the classic prophet’s call to “hear” or “listen”; not unexpectedly, this has given rise to thousands of years of speculation over whether Micah is the work of multiple authors, as well as how many, and when they may have written the various documents redacted into the book we read today.

Jan van Eyck: The Prophet Micah, Ghent altar

Micah is revered among Christians primarily for the opening of chapter 5, which has been interpreted as predicting the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. That’s arguable – the passage can be read in other ways – and also one of the least interesting things about Micah, in my opinion.

In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Micah sits between Jonah and Nahum. It shares some common ground with both. All three books focus on Israel and Judah’s antagonistic relations with their neighbor Assyria, whose capital Nineveh is used as a synecdoche for that country and its people. Jonah is called to preach repentance to the Ninevites; Nahum portrays their total destruction. Micah addresses the threat that Assyria poses to the cities and towns of the two kingdoms, predicting that they will wreak destruction that will drive the Hebrews to repent their evil ways and ultimately lead to an earthly utopia.

Like Jonah, Micah takes a globalist view of God’s justice. While Micah is a much more traditional book of prophecy than is Jonah – unlike Jonah, Micah speaks to the Hebrew people about their behavior and their need to repent – he is clear that God’s love and mercy extend to all the peoples of the world. However, Micah makes clear that the Hebrews hold fate in their hands.

Micah’s book begins with a frightening set of images of God coming down to Earth to trample the entire planet because of the sins of Israel and Judah (similar imagery is used by Nahum). “Listen, all you peoples, earth and its fullness,” Micah begins. He goes on:

“For the Lord is about to come out from his place.
And go down and tread on earth’s high places,
And the mountains shall melt beneath Him and the valleys split open, 

Like wax before the fire, like water pouring down a slope.” (1:3-4)

Universal destruction so far. But then there’s a twist:

“For Jacob’s trespass all this has happened 

And for the house of Israel’s offenses.” (1:5)

Already in 700 BCE, Jews were being blamed for all the troubles of the world. Some things never change.

Following this global cataclysm, Micah gets specific: Samaria will become “a ruined heap in the field.” Further, the threat will reach as far as Jerusalem’s gates, clearly a threat of an advancing army – the Assyrians – reducing Samaria to rubble and threatening, the Judean capitol in the south.

As Micha’s first prophecy proceeds, it becomes clear that the sins of the Israelites are to a large degree about corruption within their governmental and religious institutions. Judges demand bribes, preachers and prophets demand payment and offer lies in return, the rich and powerful rob the poor. Widows and their fatherless children are thrown out of their homes. Although “whore’s pay,” money spent on cultic prostitutes who then use it to purchase idols and other riches for their altars, is mentioned, Micah is not primarily about faith in the one God of the Hebrews. It is about how we behave toward each other in society and around the world.

Later on, Micah makes clear what would constitute behavior acceptable to God:

“It was told to you, man, 
What is good And what the Lord demands of you – 
Only doing justice and loving kindness 
And walking humbly with your God.” (6:8)

That last clause is interesting. “Your God.” Does that imply that your god might not be my god? It’s hard to say what the implication is at this point in Micah, but a few chapters earlier, presenting a utopian vision of a world at peace, he makes it clear that achieving this paradisiacal state does not demand that everyone adhere to the same religion:

“For all the peoples shall walk 

Each in the name of his god 
But we shall walk in the name of the Lord our God forevermore.” (4:5)

The future world at peace envisioned by Micah is duplicated almost exactly in Isaiah chapter 2. The two prophets (assuming 1st Isaiah here – Isaiah appears to have been written by at least three distinct authors) were contemporaries, and may have known each other or certainly of each other, so their content-sharing is not a complete surprise. We don’t have a clue who borrowed from whom. But Isaiah does not repeat the “Each in the name of his god” clause.

Micah and Isaiah position Jerusalem, site of God’s restored temple, as the center of this peaceful world, and as a place where God will be “arbiter to vast nations from far away.” (4:3) But while Isaiah seems to assume that the entire world will follow the Hebrew God, Micah does not require faithfulness to Yahweh of anyone but the Hebrews. Just as God in Jonah did not require conversion of either the sailors or the Ninevites, God in Micah does not mandate the conversion of anyone outside the Hebrew community. He just wants the pervasive maltreatment He observes to stop.

What kind of a god is Yahweh, who does not demand fealty to Himself, but instead demands that we recognize all of his human creation as worthy of decency and respect? One who places love and forgiveness above power and vengeance, it seems. The question arises both in the meaning of Micah’s name, “Who is like God?”, and explicitly in the final chapter of his prophetic book:

“Who is a God like You dismissing crime 
And forgiving trespass for the remnant of His estate?” 
He does not cling forever to His wrath, 
For He desires kindness.” (7:18)

Like Jonah, Micah seems taken aback by God’s determination to forgive, but unlike the other prophet, Micah is not angered by God’s graciousness. Micah sees tolerance and acceptance as key features of the universal utopia he envisions. It may take destruction and repentence to get there, but it awaits us as, in essence, its own reward. Would that today's children of Abraham recall what Micah knew.

The Questions of Jonah

The Book of Jonah stands out as an oddity even within a work as teeming with oddities as the Bible. Consisting of a mere four chapters – a trifle, in terms of the Bible – Jonah is by far the best known of the books of the Prophets despite the fact that it is completely unlike any of the Bible’s other prophetic books.

For one thing, it contains almost no prophecy. Although it is nestled among the 12 short works known as the “Minor Prophets,” Jonah is uniquely a plot-driven narrative mostly remembered for the episode in which the protagonist is swallowed by an enormous fish. The only words of God shared by Jonah are, “Forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown.”

That statement represents another oddity: Jonah delivers his prophecy not to the people of Israel or Judah, but to their sworn and feared enemy, the Assyrians, conquerors of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Nineveh was the Assyrian capitol. Jonah is the only biblical prophecy delivered to a non-Jewish audience. Other prophets wrote of the fate of the Hebrews’ non-Jewish neighbors -- the book of Nahum, indeed, prophesies the destruction of Nineveh – but the pagans are not the audience for those words

We are not told what language Jonah was speaking when he uttered those scant prophetic words while making his way through the streets of Nineveh. He is a self-described Hebrew, commanded by God to deliver his prophecy to the great city’s residents. But whatever language he spoke, The Ninevens must have understood him, because he was remarkably effective. Unlike the stubborn and recalcitrant Jews who received the other prophecies, the people of Nineveh immediately donned sackcloth and repented their evil ways. When their king decided to hop on the bandwagon, he added the city’s animals to the penitents required to put on sackcloth. Seeing their repentence from unnamed “evil,” God abandons his plan to destroy Nineveh and saves the heathens. Notably, their salvation does not involve religious conversion, simply their repentance.

Similarly, in the first chapter of Jonah, the episode detailing the storm at sea, God saves the ship full of religiously diverse – and presumably polyglot – sailors who reluctantly follow Jonah’s instructions and throw him overboard as appeasement of the God that Jonah had tried to flee. When the storm immediately stops, the sailors pray and make sacrifices to the Hebrew God, but there is no suggestion that they have converted.

One of the key messages of Jonah may be, indeed, that belief in the god of the Hebrews is not a requirement for God’s mercy, but abstaining from evil is.

Those casually acquainted with the story of Jonah often think of it as a tale for children, the story of a man who disobeyed God, was swallowed by a fish in whose belly he spent three days and three nights, repented and was saved. But that is a seriously understated depiction of this book. Jonah may be brief, but it is far from simple or straightforward.

Jan Brueghel the Elder: Jonah Leaving the Whale 

Jonah is by convention divided into four chapters that play out as follows:

• God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to deliver a prophecy, which at this point is not defined. Jonah, in fear of confronting that city’s populace, instead decides to flee from God, traveling to the port of Joppa (Jaffa) and purchasing a fare on a ship bound for the distant city of Tarshish. When the ship sets sail, a fierce storm develops. The crew prays to their various gods for salvation, to no avail. Jonah, who has gone down into the vessel to sleep, is confronted by the ship’s captain who asks him about his god. Jonah acknowledges that he is a Hebrew and, evidently having previously told the sailors he was fleeing from God, says that in order to save themselves they must throw him overboard. Although the sailors are reluctant to do so, they eventually see that as their only option and cast Jonah into the sea, which immediately calms, leading to the sailors’ prayers and sacrifices.

• God instructs a gigantic fish to swallow Jonah, who then spends three days and nights in its belly. While in there, he recites a prayer, a psalm about salvation and deliverance. Hearing this, God instructs the fish to “vomit” Jonah out onto shore.

• God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and deliver his prophecy, which this time Jonah does, inspiring the city’s population – and eventually their king and their animals – to don sackcloth, fast, and repent. Hearing their repentance, God changes his mind about destroying the city.

• Jonah is incensed by God’s change of mind, and goes east of the city to sit and sulk. He builds a small shelter. God causes a shade tree to grow to protect him from the sun, but after the first night, God sends a worm to destroy the tree and a wind to make conditions unbearable for Jonah. God confronts Jonah about why he is angry, to which Jonah responded that the reason he ran away in the first place was that he knew that God was compassionate and was likely to save the Ninevens. He tells God he wants to die. The story ends with a questioning retort from God to Jonah: “You – you had pity over the qiqayon (tree), for which you did not toil and which you did not grow, which overnight came and overnight was gone. And I, shall I not have pity for Nineveh the great city, in which there are many more thousand human beings who do not know between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?”

That final question, which gets no answer, is a radical one in biblical terms, making it clear that despite the fact that God is worshipped by the Hebrews, he is God of the entire world, and sees care for all of humanity as his obligation. This from the God who so often in the Bible has protected the Israelites from their enemies, dispatching Egyptians, Phoenicians, and assorted pagans.

Although the residents of Nineveh are said to have been condemned for their evil ways and are saved by repentence, it is never made clear what evil they have perpetrated to deserve the destruction God has proposed. Whatever the moral of this story is, it does not have to do with specific, named acts. Instead, it suggests that we know evil when we see it; it doesn’t have to be spelled out to us.

One thing that is clear is that Jonah’s God likes to be recognized and communicated with. The sailors in Chapter 1 do it and the storm is quelled; the Ninevites in Chapter 3 do it and their city is spared from destruction; and Jonah does it in his psalm in Chapter 2, after which God engineers his release from the belly of the beast. It has been widely noted that neither the sailors nor the citizens of Nineveh are said to convert to Judaism; however, they recognize the Hebrew god as a powerful agent whose wishes need to be obeyed.

So, what is the Book of Jonah, exactly? That’s a question that continues to stump both scholars and the faithful. As the Yale Anchor Bible series volume on Jonah puts it:

“The question of the genre of the book of Jonah is a thorny one. It has been described as history, satire, parody, allegory, midrash, parable, biography, prophetic narrative, novella, tragedy, myth, and folklore, among others. Almost as common as the assigning of Jonah to a specific literary genre is the insistence that the book defies genre categories … The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of the genres that appear in discussion are foreign to the ancient biblical world.”

If Jonah is satire, or parody of the other writing prophets, how did his jab at them end up in the Bible? Well, the Bible is an anthology – even an anthology of anthologies when you consider how many of its books appear to have had multiple authors whose work was stitched together by editors who have come to be known as redactors. Like many anthologies, its point of view is not consistent. The so-called Wisdom Books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are similarly off-the-main-stream message.

It’s very hard to know when the books of the Hebrew Bible were written much less accepted into the canon. Guesses about Jonah’s authorship and era are all over the board. The prophet is mentioned in 2 Kings as having lived during the reign of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom, a 41-year span lasting from approximately 790 to 750 BCE. But his association in Kings with reestablishment of an eastern border bears no relation to the Book of Jonah.

The Anchor Bible commentary posits that the book we read today as Jonah is a blending of at least three distinct components:

• A straightforward original story in which God commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh to deliver his prophecy and Jonah obeys – in other words, the opening of chapter 1, followed immediately by chapter 3.

• An interpolated story about Jonah’s attempt to flee from God by boarding a ship to Tarshish, the storm at sea and the swallowing by the fish – most of chapters 1 and 2

• The psalm in chapter 2, which virtually everyone agrees was an independent, pre-existing work absorbed into Jonah’s story.

If this theory is correct, each of these pieces likely was written at a different time, and their redaction into one narrative may have occurred quite late in the compositional stream of the Hebrew Bible. That would make sense if Jonah is indeed a satirical commentary on other prophetic works (Nahum and Joel are likely candidates). The author(s) of the fish story and God’s final interaction with Jonah in Chapter 4 may well have had a more universalist view than the often fiercely national pre-exilic prophets.

Remember, too, that the Priestly writer (P) credited with the first, universalist creation story in Genesis 1 is believed to have lived long after the Yahwist writer (J) who composed the domestically scaled creation story in Genesis 2. Adam and Eve can be seen as the beginning of the story of the Jewish people; the Priestly creation story covers all of us.

But is that all that we are seeing at play here? I think there is more, and that something more may be more subversive expected in a book of the Bible. Let’s take another look at the sailors, the citizens of Nineveh and Jonah. What do they have in common? It’s clear that they all changed their behavior to attain God’s mercy. They prayed, they fasted, they repented their past behaviors. But did they really change?

As mentioned before, there is no suggestion that either the sailors or the Ninevites converted to the worship of the Hebrew God. Jonah seems to fully accept God’s rule in the Chapter 2 psalm, but since he appears to be reciting a pre-existing prayer, is that really evidence that the man who tried to escape and hide from God has truly changed? Chapter 4 tells us that the answer is a resounding no. It reveals Jonah as headstrong and petulant, incensed that God showed mercy on the people of Nineveh. Moreover, it reveals that this mercy is just what Jonah expected and was rebelling against when he decided to run away. In his eyes, he has been proven right. It seems Jonah has learned little, despite his time in the belly of the fish.

Antonius Wierix: Jonah Under the Gourd

No wonder the book ends with that challenging question from God. How can Jonah, it asks, waste his sympathies on a triviality – a tree that provided temporary shade – while criticizing God for saving an entire population of his creatures? Have the Hebrews, including their prophets, learned nothing from their experiences, the loss of their kingdoms and the destruction of their temple? Why are they wasting their time mourning over trivialities? Staying alive is relatively easy, the stories show. Pray, fast, repent, repeat.

But if that doesn’t translate into care for all of God’s creation – including our perceived enemies – we’ve missed the point.

Of War, Terrorism and Other Family Disputes

On social media today, positions are hardening, tempers are flaring and friendships are ending over the tragic events in Israel and Gaza. A terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, the political organization that controls the Gaza strip, has resulted in has resulted in unspeakable carnage, cold-blooded murder and victimization of innocent civilians, including taking of children as hostages. In retaliation, the Israeli government has promised a siege of Gaza, home to 2.2 million people, that would include shutting off the fresh water supply as well as electricity. An inexcusable act of genocidal terror is met with an unjustifiable threat of more genocide.

Piling on the wrongs has no chance of resulting in a right, but mention that at your own peril. War is hell.

The attack on Israel is said to have resulted in the most Jewish deaths in a single day since the Holocaust. That is beyond shocking, beyond reprehensible. As everyone knows, it is also the latest episode in a struggle that has lasted on-and-off for thousands of years in a tiny corner of the globe that cannot support the passions that are bound to it.

Last weekend, as I was trying to make some sense of the news, I came across an essay by Jonathan Sacks, the late theologian and author who served for many years as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. The essay is titled, “On Judaism and Islam.” It is part of volume 1 of Sacks’ series of reflections on Torah, collectively titled Covenant and Conversation.

The essay turns on three intriguing moments in the telling of the story of Abraham, the founding figure of both Judaism and Islam (Christianity attaches to Abraham via its Jewish roots).

The first incident is that when the servant who had been sent to secure a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac was returning with the young woman, Rebecca, she spotted Isaac, who had “returned from Be’er-lahai-ro’i.,” and was on his way to meditate. Be’er-lahai-ro’i was the place where Hagar, the slave who bore Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, was found by an angel when she fled during her pregnancy from abuse by Sarai. The angel directed her to return to her home with Abram and Sarai, promising her to “multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. This same angel instructed Hagar to name her son Ishmael, “because the Lord has listened to your affliction.” Hagar herself named the place of this encounter because it was the place where God saw her. Thus God both heard and saw this abused slave girl, who had been impregnated without her consent and then tormented for supposedly being ‘uppity’, and promised her a reward through her offspring.

The ancient site of Be'er-lahai-ro'i

Immediately following the episode introducing Isaac to Rebecca is the revelation that after Sarah’s death, Abraham married again, to a woman named Keturah, who bore him six children. We are given no details about Keturah, but we do get a genealogy of the next few generations of Abraham’s offspring through her children, and are told that when Abraham died, he left “all that he had” to Isaac, but that before his death, he had given gifts to “the sons of his concubines,” and sent them away from Isaac, “eastward to the east country.”

A video about Keturah

Finally, Sacks notes that the Torah tells us that when Abraham died – recounted immediately after the story of Keturah and her children -- his sons Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury him (nothing is said about whether his children by Keturah are there). But there’s a detail that Sacks did not note that adds intrigue: “After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son. And Isaac settled at Be’er-lahai-ro’I,” the very place where God’s angel encountered Hagar. And immediately after this statement, we are given the names of the sons of Ishmael, whom we are told are “twelve princes according to their tribes.”

The Burial of Abraham (1728) by Gerard Hoet

People familiar with the work of the ancient and medieval Midrashic Jewish scholars (the sages, in Sacks’s words) knows that they took the words of the Torah as a jumping-off point for their teachings. Where they saw gaps and discontinuities in the Bible’s narratives, they did not hesitate to jump in to fill those gaps. The narratives recounted above are not explicitly connected, although they occur in a short space in Genesis chapters 24-25; they are quite literally slammed together as in a collage. The sages provide the missing links that turn the collage into a cohesive picture.

The French scholar Rashi is the most prominent of several rabbis to consider these connections. The theory expounded by Rashi and his peers is that Keturah was in fact the same person as Hagar, who had been sent away with Ishmael to the Arabian peninsula. Noting that many figures in the Hebrew Bible have multiple names – Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah, Jacob was renamed Israel, Moses’s father-in-law is called Jethro, Reuel and several other names, Solomon was also called Jedediah – they say that Hagar was called Keturah because “her acts gave forth fragrance like incense (ketoret).”

In the sages’ telling, after Sarah’s death, Isaac engineered the reconciliation of Abraham with Hagar, renamed Keturah, bringing his far-flung family back into one whole.

Why is this relevant to this week’s events? For one thing, Jews trace their lineage back to Abraham through Isaac, while Muslims trace their lineage back through Ishmael. The sons’ appearance together at Abraham’s burial suggests reconciliation, further supported by the sages’ interpretation of the final years of the patriarch’s life.

Sacks finds in this an optimistic message for our times: “Yes, there was conflict and separation; but that was at the beginning, not the end. Between Judaism and Islam there can be friendship and mutual respect. Abraham loved both his sons, and was laid to rest by both. There is hope for the future in this story of the past.”

It will take more than hope to get us through the current strife. It will take hard work, difficult understanding, and a willingness to find new ways to look at age-old hostilities.

On Kindness to Strangers

Having immersed myself for the past several months in the judicial and political elements of Torah, I find it impossible to view certain current events without recalling imperatives and admonishments in the Bible.

This weekend has been full of horrors in the Middle East that recall millennia of hostilities among the people who call that part of the world their home – the Israelites and Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites and so many other nations that fought over these territories for reasons not terribly different from what we witness today.

But my thoughts recently have been more consumed by issues of immigration and refuge, which have reached a fevered intensity in the United States over the past several months. Politicians of all stripes agree that we are in the midst of an immigration crisis. Some call for closing of our borders, others for greater attention to the causes of migration from places like Haiti and Venezuela. What strikes me most is that few call for kindness to these strangers in our midst, one of the Bible’s most urgent and persistent commands.

My own community, Quincy, Massachusetts, last month saw a neo-Nazi rally targeted at an immigrant shelter at a local college, a counter-protest the next day, and a few days later a tumultuous town meeting at a school auditorium that brought out 500 or so residents, all determined to be heard and few interested in listening.

“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him,” God tells Moses in Exodus 22, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Strangers – also referred to as sojourners and resident aliens – are named over and over again, along with widows and orphans, as disadvantaged people to whom we should show generosity, sympathy and brotherhood. Often, God’s exhortations on this subject are framed in the notion that, as in the quote above, the condition of these strangers is akin to that of Israelites in the kingdom of Egypt.

But in a society that is quick to evoke the Ten Commandments as well as sexual and behavioral prohibitions named in the Torah, there is next to no acknowledgement of this requirement that we show kindness to strangers in our midst.

Instead, the mainstream effort appears to be centered on ensuring that these people get nowhere near us.

Hospitality to travellers has been a core value in the Middle East since time immemorial. The sin of Sodom was not, as is so often supposed, homosexual activity but rathe failure to of the Sodomites to show hospitality and respect to the angels whom Lot welcomed as strangers into his home.

How is it that we have lost track so thoroughly of this basic requirement from God, in a population that largely claims to be believers in that same God?

I’m not going to argue that the world hasn’t changed enormously in the three millennia since the Torah was set down on paper. The world is vastly more populated, as well as politically, economically and technologically more complex than that of the Biblical-era Israelites. But in human terms, we are largely the same as our long-ago ancestors. We live, die, scratch out a living, raise families, seek safety and shelter, provide for our children and our aging loved ones, and interact with those around us in ways very similar to those distant predecessors.

One of the reasons the Bible remains so central to our society is how shockingly familiar the emotional lives of the ancient Israelites are to our own. Reading about the rivalry between Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Sarah and Hagar, we connect immediately to the conflicts in our own personal lives. Moses’s many frustrations with the people he is leading to freedom, as well as the skepticism and stubbornness of those people, are nearly identical to feelings we encounter today. Is anyone surprised that the first person born on Earth turns out to be the first murderer?

While I don’t take the Bible literally, I do find it useful to discuss it as if its stories are real. I do the same thing with other great literature. We continue to read Dickens, Eliot, Fitzgerald and the other great writers because there is so much resonance in our own lives with the experiences of their characters.

So in that spirit I want to suggest that the reason God finds it necessary to repeat over and over again the requirement of hospitable and generous behavior to strangers is exactly because it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to most people. We hardly need reminders to do what we were going to do anyway. As Jesus put it near the opening of the earliest Gospel, “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)

We need reminders to care for the needy – for the strangers, widows and orphans among us – because it is both easy and tempting to ignore them. They get in the way of our easy enjoyment of life. Historically, churches and government institutions have provided reminders. But we live in an age where some churchgoers complain that teaching the words of Jesus amount to liberal indoctrination. (see “Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus,” Newsweek, 9 August 2023). Meanness has overtaken charity in much of our discourse.

It is unlikely that public policy would ever reflect exactly the teaching of the Bible – and I would be the first to complain vociferously if it did so – but I believe that in the past it informed public policy in a way that has largely disappeared. Today, we fight to post crosses and the text of the Ten Commandments as a substitute for thoughtful consideration of the meanings of religious teachings.

The Bible is used as a weapon rather than as a guide. When that happens, there may be little room for kindness to strangers.

In the Wilderness

 The wilderness, the untamed space between human settlements, plays an enormous role in the Bible. One entire book, the one that we today call Numbers in English, is titled Bemidbar, meaning “In the Wilderness” in Hebrew. It takes place entirely in the area between Egypt, the place from which Hebrew slaves fled, and the land that God promised in His covenant with the Israelites. 

In our human-dominated biome, wilderness exists between constructs, whether they are gardens or cities or agricultural areas. Wilderness may be avoided, it may be explored, it may be traversed. In the Bible it serves as a place of refuge, of contemplation, of isolation, of passage, of rest, of conflict. In Leviticus, it is where the scapegoat is released, carrying away with it the sins of the Israelites. In the Gospels, it is the place where Jesus is tempted by the devil. 

At times, it is the where humans make contact with God. It is where we are given the opportunity to grow, to see God’s intentions more clearly, to receive His instructions to us.

In Chapter 2 of Genesis, the second creation story, human life begins in a garden. Not in the wilds of nature, but in a defined place where nature is contained, tamed. We are told that God fills this garden with “every tree lovely to look at and good for food.” (We are told that this garden is “in the east” but the east of what is not made clear – we can surmise it is east of the Levant where the Israelite audience of the time lived. Geography is uncertain in this Biblical episode but the river Euphrates is named, which could suggest a Mesopotamian setting for Eden). I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about gardens as an architectural element, and contrasting the garden with the wilderness, where nature is not cultivated and tamed, where things that may not be lovely to look at or good for food may thrive. 

When Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, they presumably are sent into the wilderness outside of the garden’s boundary, where God has told them life will be tough. It would appear that at this time, everyplace that was not Eden was wilderness. 

After Adam and Eve settle again in this wilderness and bear two sons, the first murder occurs when Cain slays Abel. Like his parents before him, Cain is banished into the wilderness where, we are told, he and his offspring create cities and, presumably, civilizations that provide refuge from the surrounding wilderness. 

The most elaborate and important wilderness story in the Bible is the aforementioned story of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. This journey, which comprises the last four books of the Torah, is the foundation of both the state of Israel and the Jewish religion.

The five books of the Torah have a structure that may be diagrammed as A-B-C-B-A, where A – Genesis and Deuteronomy – are about the creation of the nation; B – Exodus and Numbers – are the stories of transit; and C is an internal climax, where God approaches the incipient nation most closely and gives it the structure and regulations needed for it to serve as His home on Earth. 

Exodus and Numbers – or, to be more accurate, the first 60 percent or so of Exodus and the last two-thirds of Numbers – depict in great detail the human story of the Hebrews’ liberation from enslavement in Egypt and their 40-plus yearlong migration to the Promised Land. I stress that this is a human story, because so much of its contents reveal the mental and emotional state of the people as they make this arduous journey. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his brilliant series of Torah commentaries, Covenant & Conversation, brings in a notion from political science to help elucidate what is happening in the hearts and minds of the Hebrews. Sacks cites Ronald Heifitz’s theory of technical and adaptive challenges. Heifitz, a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, posits that these technical challenges are difficulties that can be resolved by external means – medicine to treat an illness, for example – while adaptive challenges require a person to change internally – a doctor’s recommendation to lose weight, exercise more, or alter one’s diet, for instance. 

In Exodus, Sacks writes, we see multiple examples of technical challenges resolved via God’s intervention. The escaping slaves are trapped at the edge of the Red Sea; God instructs Moses to divide it to allow safe passage. When the Israelites have eaten all of the food they brought with them and complain of hunger, God provides manna from Heaven. When they are thirsty in the desert, God tells Moses how to draw water from a rock. This works quite well for the sojourners until they reach Mount Sinai, where God calls Moses to the mountaintop, leaving the people behind for 40 days.

Without Moses, who has been their intermediary with God, the people languish. In desperation for the presence of God, they talk Moses’s brother Aaron into making an idol, the golden calf, for them to worship. This of course, is a disaster, a pivotal event that changes the entire course of history. But it is the first time the Israelites have attempted to set their own course, solve their own problem. As wrong-headed as their solution was, it was the first time the people have tried to take hold of their destiny, to adapt to circumstances. How many of us have floundered terribly the first time we tried, unprepared, to solve a difficult problem? 

In the Bible, the narrative is broken off at this point to focus on creating a religious structure – literally – to bring God close to the people. The last part of Exodus is devoted to the construction of the Tabernacle. The entire book of Leviticus details the rituals of worship as well as the religious calendar. And the first chapters of Numbers describe the people’s preparations to resume their travel. 

In the rest of Numbers, the people face challenge after challenge, and Moses as their leader becomes frustrated, even distraught, at one point asking God to “just kill me.” These challenges are more difficult because they require the people to change. They must shake their slave mentality in which decisions were made for them, and learn to become self-directed. 

In response to hardships, we see the people become nostalgic for their lives in captivity. Growing tired of their diet of manna, they long for life along the Nile, where at least they had fresh vegetables and fish to eat. They stage a rebellion and look to name a leader to take them back to Egypt. A team of scouts sent to scope out the Promised Land comes back and reports that it is inhabited by fearsome giants who will surely defeat them in battle. Even Moses’s siblings turn against him at one point. 

God ultimately realizes that the people are not ready to become free and shape their own destiny. It will take generational change, and so He tells the people that those who fled Egypt will not enter the Promised Land. Only the next generation will do so, led by Joshua and Caleb, the only two of the scouts who gave an honest report about the current population of Canaan. God sets them wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. 

The point of all this, in Sacks’ analysis, is that adaptive change takes time. Self-transformation is not easy. And once again I am staggered by the brilliance of the Bible in elucidating the intricacies of the human mind. 

In this light I would like to look at the figure of Hagar, whose story is related in Genesis 16 and 21. She is an Egyptian and a slave, who works as a handmaid to Sarai, the wife of Abram. We are not told how Abram and Sarai acquired her, although one might speculate that the couple picked her up when they traveled to Egypt to escape a famine in the Levant. We don’t know how old she is, or what she looked like. She clearly is still in her child-bearing years, and is in some favor with her mistress, who selects her to bear a child for her husband, a child the mistress has grown to old to produce. But that’s about it.

Because the Bible reveals so little about Hagar, her “back story” has been filled in by numerous other writers. Some rabbinical sources have speculated that she was actually an Egyptian princess, given to Abram and Sarai by the Pharoah whose hospitality Abram and Sarai enjoyed until the king found out that they had lied about being brother and sister rather than husband and wife (they later are revealed to be half-siblings). 

One Islamic tradition holds that she was the daughter of an early prophet. 

But let’s focus on what the Bible actually says about Hagar. Twice, in Genesis 16 and 21, she is found by God in the wilderness. The first time, she is pregnant by her master, Abram, and has fled due to abusive treatment from her mistress. Sarai’s complaint is that now that she is pregnant, Hagar “looks down” on Sarai. Sarai goes off on Abram, blaming him for the situation even thought it was Sarai herself who engineered the coupling. Abram takes the passive route, telling Sarai she is free to do as she pleases with the slave girl. 

The second time, Sarah (God has given her a new name by now) has succeeded in convincing Abraham to drive Hagar and her son, Ishmael, away, so that there can be no question about who will be Abraham’s heir. 

Hagar addresses God using a name that occurs nowhere else in the Bible: El Roi, the God who sees me. That’s a fascinating detail, coming from a slave who, despite having been impregnated by her master, is essentially not seen as human. Sarai and Abram determine her fate without her input or her consent. The child she is to bear is expected to be raised as the child of Abram and Sarai, not of Hagar. It is only her hostility that draws attention – and that is suspect, given the way Sarai also lashes out at Abram over the results of Sarai’s own scheming. 

One of the things that distinguishes the Judeo-Christian God is His focus on the weak and the poor, a characteristic also strongly present in the Islamic tradition. Hagar is not held up as a heroine in the Bible, although she is in Islamic tradition. 

It is not surprising, in light of all this, that Hagar has become a revered and much-studied figure in African-American womanist theology (see Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, by Delores S. Williams). Williams writes of Hagar’s encounters with God: “The two times that God relates directly to Hagar are in the context of helping her come to see the strategies she must use to save her life and her child’s life. The first strategy is to go back to her oppressor and make use of the oppressor’s resources. The second survival strategy not only has to do with the woman and child (family) depending upon God to provide when absolutely no other provision is visible, but also includes, upon God’s command, the woman Hagar lifting up her child and “holding him fast with your hand.” 

In other words, Hagar is told that she must change in order to survive and to realize her potential and that of her son. God promises to “make him (Ishmael) a great nation.” But in order for that to happen, Hagar must develop the survival skills to keep herself and her son alive in the wilderness. When she does so, we are told that Hagar raises Ishmael and secures him an Egyptian wife. No more is heard from them until Ishmael returns to Canaan for his father’s burial. 

Two great nations, Israel and Arabia, survive to this day. Arguably, both exist because their founders were able to adapt.

Protection

Defining boundaries is the great work of the creation. Maintaining and honoring those boundaries is the great challenge of Leviticus. The first days of the Genesis 1 creation story depict God creating the boundaries between heaven and Earth, the waters aove and the waters below, land and sea. In Leviticus we are given explicit instructions on how to keep separate the holy and the profane, the clean and unclean, the pure and impure.

Some of the more mystifying strictures in Leviticus 19 – the heart of what has come to be known as the Holiness code -- have to do with the prohibition on creating garments from mixed fabrics, interbreeding livestock and planting diverse seeds in a single field. The best explanation I have read for these prohibitions is that this mixing would weaken the boundaries God set in place at creation, and thus weaken God’s intentions for the universe. 

The sexual prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20, which surround the code’s central chapter, appear to be put in place to distinguish the Hebrews from the Canaanites, whose land they are to take over, as well as the Egyptians, from whose land they have fled. Child sacrifice, sodomy and bestiality are dealt with in one compact passage of chapter 18, after which God tells Moses that the land itself was defiled by the practitioners of these deeds: “And the land was defiled, and I made a reckoning with it for its iniquity, and the land spewed out its inhabitants.” Israelites as a whole will not be “spewed out” for these offenses, God says, but the perpetrators will be “cut off from the midst of his people.” 

 In chapter 20, he makes makes it even more explicit. After pronouncing death sentences for a host of sexual transgressions, he orders Moses to tell the Israelites: “And you shall not go by the statuses of the nation which I am about to send away before you, for all these things they have done, and I loathed them. And I said to you, it is you who will take hold of their soil, and as for Me, I shall give it to you to take hold of it, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the Lord your God Who set you apart from all the peoples.” 

Boundaries. I’m telling you. 

 It makes sense that the Torah, a work whose overarching purpose is to define a nation, would be preoccupied with boundaries and with specifying what is allowed and what is forbidden within those boundaries. Many of the rules of Leviticus focus on things that may be considered to pierce, or to blur, those boundaries. Included are things that violate the boundary between the creator and the creation: God and the people. 

The anthropologist Mary Douglas is one of many who have commented on the “squeamishness” of the priestly author of Leviticus when it comes to blood and other bodily fluids. Blood, identified with the life force, is intended to stay on the inside, and when it is released, as in ritual slaughter of animals, it must be reserved for dedication to God, most often sprinkled around the sacrificial altar. It is strictly forbidden to consume blood. Menstrual discharge and sexual emissions also release inner fluids to the outside and are considered to make the emitter unclean, unready for admittance into the presence of God. Childbirth, with its emission of not only the baby but voluminous contents of the pregnant body, renders a woman unclean for a long period of time – thirty-three days for a boy and double that for a girl. It requires an offense offering before the woman is seen as fit to re-enter the community. It may seem strange that the very act for which God intended humanity is one that renders the chief actor unclean, but holiness operates in strange ways, at least in Leviticus. 

Leviticus also evidences an obsession with the skin, and in particular diseases of the skin. Although classic translations of the Bible typically refer to these as leprosy, modern translators more often say that the skin diseases that render men and women impure and subject to isolation are not leprosy, which was not known in the Middle East until centuries later, during the Hellenistic period (according to a note in Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation). The skin being the primary boundary that keeps us separate and intact, It makes sense that skin conditions would be treated as uniquely important. Consider also that along with skin diseases, Leviticus discusses mildew in clothing and mold in the walls of houses, and it becomes clear that the overriding concern is with these protective coverings that preserve our bodily integrity. 

The integrity of the skin is the subject of other restrictions, such as chapter 19’s ban on tattoos as well as laceration of the skin to mourn the dead. 

The pivotal Leviticus 19 begins a directive from God to Moses that is repeated throughout the chapters of Leviticus that have come to be known as the Holiness Code: “Speak to all the community of Israelites, and you shall say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” 

The distinctive feature of the Holiness Code is that its pronouncements are meant to be delivered to all Israelites, not just to the priestly caste – the Levites, particularly Aaron and his descendants – or to Moses as their prophet. Just as Moses was selected from among all of humanity to be the bearer of the Law, and as the Levites were selected from all of the Israelites to serve as priestly intermediaries between the Israelites and God, so the people of Israel were selected from amongst all of humanity to be holy, close to God. A series of boundaries is drawn, concentric circles, each of which contains fewer members as we move toward the singular figure of Moses. 

Successive boundaries separate the spaces of the Tabernacle

The boundary encircling Israelites is one of holiness. And that is a distinction fraught with risk. Holiness requires adherence to a broad set of behavioral rules, and transgressions against them – piercing of the boundary defining holiness – elicits consequences that may range from the need for washing to banishment (either temporary or permanent, depending on the transgression) to death. The boundary of holiness must be protected, as are the successive boundaries of the Tabernacle and of the body. Holiness allows the people to come near to God – but not too near. The separation of God from humanity is strictly enforced. 

Repeatedly, examples are made of people who transgressed the boundaries, whether the sons of Aaron who were incinerated for an unspecified transgression of the Tabernacle’s rules, or Miriam who was stricken with a skin condition after questioning God’s decision to distinguish Moses from all others, or a man who touched the Ark in an effort to steady it during transport. 

The boundaries protect both God and the people. The importance of separation – protection of people from God and God from people – is given additional weight in Chapter 4 of numbers, with its detailed instructions on how the Ark of the Covenant and other contents of the innermost sanctum of the Tabernacle – the Holy of Holies – must be wrapped in cloths for transport as the Israelites move through the wilderness. 

The boundaries set out in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy provide the definition of the Jewish people, and may be one of the reasons this population has survived millenia of oppression, ill treatment and hatred. By remaining separate and distinct, their identity is protected and preserved.