Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Judges

  • With All the Faults and Failings

    With All the Faults and Failings

    One of the things I find most interesting about the Bible is the way that its stories openly–one might even say brutally–cover the faults and failings of the main characters. Nobody manages to come off all that well in the story. Even Moses, author of the Torah, or perhaps receiver of it, is not presented as a perfect man, though his failings seem rather minor. I’m reasonably certain that I would have done massively worse in his situation!

    I was reminded of this aspect of Bible stories when I listened to the story of Jephthah while walking on my treadmill, and then listening to my pastor’s sermon on Sunday, which was taken from Matthew 1. The sermon was focused on the righteous actions of Joseph, but I couldn’t help looking over the genealogy as he spoke.

    We’re introduced to Jephthah as “a mighty warrior” but he was the son of a prostitute. Yet he’s presented as one of the people who saved Israel. In Judges 11:15-28 he gives quite a recitation of the history of Israel, and in verse 29, the spirit of the LORD comes up him. What struck me in reading the story, besides the always disturbing story of his daughter, is that he is otherwise presented as a solid leader in Israel.

    My mind links things in sometimes odd ways, and what struck me in this story was the mention that Jephthah’s mother was a prostitute. It’s sparse and bold, neither covered up nor overemphasized. It was not, as one can gather from the story itself, something that endeared Jephthah to the good and normal citizens of Israel.

    That, in turn, led me to the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1. It’s odd, considering the times, that there are four women mentioned here. Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law while acting as a prostitute (Genesis 38), Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho who saved her family’s lives by helping the Israelite spies escape, Ruth the Moabitess (Deuteronomy 23:3), who was quite clearly a chaste woman, but barred from becoming an Israelite by the law, and finally “the wife of Uriah the Hittite,” the victim of David’s lusts.

    It interested me to consider why the Bible emphasizes these people. And I do the authors of these stories as making these folks stand out. Further, they stand out in some of the most powerful stories in the Bible. Genesis 38 hardly seems a necessary part of the story of the patriarchs, yet it is woven in later.

    I think there’s a point to be made here. The Bible is not a story of spiritual superheroes with superior ancestors. The heroes of the Bible do not stem from noble stock, the sort of people from whom we expect great things. Jephthah had become an outlaw with good-for-nothing men gathered around him. Then he got a call and the spirit of the LORD came upon him.

    And here in Matthew we have a close tie to the stories of Hebrew scriptures in these little hints provided in the genealogy. Jesus is the son of David–such noble ancestry! But look! There are some moments in that story that other people might prefer to tell.

    All that stands between you and me and doing great things is that call and that spirit. Good-for-nothing isn’t really in God’s vocabulary. “Nothing” is waiting for God’s “something.”

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • It’s Not a Success Story

    It’s Not a Success Story

    Prologue

    I’ve been listening to Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible as an audiobook. I’ll doubtless write something about this translation later. But right now I’m listening to Judges, and it’s caused me to think a bit about the broader story of the history of Israel and then of the church.

    Charismatic Leadership

    One of Alter’s comments is that the judges tended to be selected as charismatic leaders with their origins in moves of the spirit, such as angelic visions. So Israel was ruled by a succession of leaders chosen by God’s call given in various ways, and the book of Judges is not very positive on all of this. It doesn’t speak negatively about God’s selection of leaders, but it does comment regularly on the repeatedly dismal results. After a period of safety, the Israelites fall back into apostasy and are conquered by their enemies.

    The author/compiler of Judges tends to think Israel needs a king, presumably with a secured succession, so as to avoid these times of apostasy and failure.

    It doesn’t work out that way. We see the end of the period of the Judges and the beginning of the kingdom in the books of Samuel, and it’s a turbulent time. The first king is at best equivocal, and at worst actively working against God and the interests of Israel. David does maintain the loyalty of Israel, but his son Solomon plants the seeds of failure.

    The Monarchy Isn’t Better

    The northern kingdom pursues an almost continually dismal process of decay, while the southern kingdom has good kings followed by bad kings in a cycle. One could say, “New system of government, same old problems.”

    Following the Babylonian exile, the Jewish people no longer govern themselves and pursue a more consistent course religiously, but one has only to look at some of the leaders described in the books of Maccabees to realize that all was not consistently going well. The Maccabees end up fighting both foreign domination and internal apostasy.

    Christians Have No Basis to Look Down on Others

    As Christians, we sometimes look down on Israel and the Jews after reading all this history, but such a reading is self-righteous and dismally lacking in self awareness. We’ve gone through many ways of “governing” the church, and have only had very short times when one could be totally proud of the church as an organization.

    I believe God as always had a Church consisting of true followers of Jesus. But I also believe God had a people in Israel throughout its history who were truly God’s people even when their brethren. For every Jason, there was a family such as the Maccabees who were faithful.

    But there never was a system of government that worked.

    This led me to think of conversations I’ve had about church governance. Over and over problems noted in a church are blamed on the particular approach to church governance. The church has bishops who supervise pastors? Not responsive enough to the local church. Pastors are responsible only to the local church? No true accountability! The church is led by a team of elders? Unclear leadership! The church is led by a powerful senior pastor? Hierarchical with too much power in one person.

    One can certainly debate ways of managing a church, but no form of governance is likely to be 100% effective.

    My Suggestion

    I don’t have a structural suggestion here myself. My one suggestion is not structural. It is simply this: Look to Jesus. Keep looking to Jesus. Turn your eyes back to Jesus if they drift to other things. It’s the one effective answer to any church problems.

  • Mark Alluding to Judges, and a New Blog

    David Lincicum, “University Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and Caird Fellow in Theology at Mansfield College, Oxford” (About), has a new blog. Well, new to me. It’s been around for several months. It looks interesting.

    Today he posted on a possible allusion (my term) to Judges in Mark in his post Trees Like People Walking. I see what he’s saying, and I see the connection, though it would be very hard to prove such an idea. He notes the difference in terminology between the LXX and the story in Mark, but if what we have is just a reference to the idea of the story, that vocabulary wouldn’t matter.

    So it becomes something of a look into the mind of the author. Nonetheless, in the context, it makes sense to me. That may not mean much. I was accused way back when I was working on my MA with being obsessed with parallels. Nobody said “parallelomania,” but I suspect some of them thought it. Or maybe Sandmel’s term hadn’t gotten wide enough circulation at that point in time.

    In any case, check it out. What do you think?

  • Stories in a Chronological Context

    Several things over the last couple of weeks have called my attention to time.  My pastor preached about it last week, speaking of times of God’s extended silence.  I lost some of it while being sick this week which always makes me a bit tense.  Then I received a copy of 24/7:  A One Year Chronological Bible, which puts Bible readings into a chronological framework.  (I’ll get around to reviewing the Bible in a later post.)  Finally I was asked about God’s answers to prayer and the frequencies of his miraculous intervention.

    As Christians when we read scripture we need to be aware of these long periods of time.  There are times to lose our sense of times, especially when our liturgy calls us to become more aware of eternity and less aware of the present.  It is rare in my experience that the liturgy is successful in this call, but it is certainly worth it, and should be more frequent.  But the very experience of eternity impinging on our limited, dare I say puny, time requires that we be aware of time.

    Stories, on the other hand, tend naturally to give a false impression of time.  You cannot tell a story of a long period of time whilst truly giving the full impression of the extended time of waiting involved.  Frequently you’ll see phrases like “after a long time” or “after several months” or even “years passed.”  For the reader, whether it is a few days or a few years, they are passed in just a moment.

    Which in the ordinary course of reading a story is a minor issue.  You know that time passed for the characters, and you’re glad you don’t have hundreds of pages narrating when they ate, went to bed, got up, or went to the toilet.

    But when you go to reading scriptural stories, which provide us with an example (1 Corinthians 10:6), you need to think about this.  How long was it between one thing and the next.  Consider for a moment Judges 13:1:

    The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD gave them into the hand of teh Philistines forty years.  (NRSV)

    Now how do we normally read this story?  Well, when I got it in church, I heard immediately about the arrival of the angel and then we wandered through the story of Samson as one overwhelming chain of miracles.  Of course, with all this miraculous intervention by God, we also shook our heads over Samson’s terrible failures.  How could he, when God was so obviously with him?

    But that view of the story misses two important things.  First, those forty years.  Forty years ago it was 1978, and Jimmy Carter had been president for nearly two years.  Forty years ago I was in college.  Forty years ago the PC was a pretty marginal idea.  Forty years ago there was no internet.  Forty years is a long time, and the Israelites had been under foreign domination for that length of time.

    Second, there’s the lifetime of Samson.  While the story of Samson can be covered in a Sunday School lesson or so, at least as stories are commonly covered in Sunday School, we’re told that Samson judged Israel for 20 years (Judges 16:31).  Twenty years is an awful lot of lifetime in which to hide those miracle stories.  It may be that Samson spent years between those miraculous interventions wondering whether God was going to do things for him.  Yes, we’re told he always had his strength, but it seems to have come into play only rarely.  All things considered, I would guess that Sampson did often long for God’s more direct intervention

    We can apply this principle to the entire Bible story.  I’m frequently asked why God doesn’t act today in the way he acted in Bible times.  Which Bible times?  Do we refer to the hundreds of hears the Israelites spent in slavery in Egypt?  Or perhaps we’re looking for century after century of the divided kingdom.  Maybe instead we should think about the 400 years or so from the time of the return from the exile to the opening pages of the New Testament.  Sure, we have a few interventions under the Maccabbees, but would you really want to suffer what those guys did in order to get a couple of divine interventions?

    My point here is certainly not that we should pray less, or ask less of God, nor is it to cut off hope.  More importantly, I think we need to cut off excuses.  We shouldn’t claim that God is more absent from our lives than he was from the lives of people in “Bible times.”

    Yes, there are moments in time when God’s intervention is pretty frequent, but even then remember that we are being told a few stories that cover a long time.  The book of Acts, for example, relates around 30 years of the history of the early church.  If we spread the number of miracles recorded in Acts over 30 years of the modern church, is it possible that people would complain bitterly about God’s absence?

    Stories are wonderful.  They can be encouraging or instructive.  But in the Bible they form part of a history of how God has intervened.  Understanding how they fit into time can be very important as we try to learn the lessons they offer for our lives.

  • What Did They Cry?

    In Judges 4:1-7, when the Israelites cried out, what did they have to say?  With Psalm 123 included along with Judges 4:1-7 in Proper 28 / Ordinary 33 / Pentecost +27, I think we have an interesting possibility for preaching on prayer in trouble.

    My basic starting point would be to suggest to the congregation that they imagine themselves in deep trouble.  How should you pray?  Would it be Psalm 123 with a simple statement that you’ve had it and God needs to show you some mercy?  Would it be more complicated.  One could try a number of different prayers, and ask the congregation which is the “best” one.

    • The arrogant prayer–I’m one of the good guys, Lord, so why haven’t you helped me?
    • The self-deprecating prayer–I don’t deserve anything, of course, I’m completely worthless, but could you help anyhow?
    • The desperate prayer–I’m at the end of my wits.  If you don’t help me, I’m done for!
    • The bargaining prayer–if you help me now, I’ll be faithful forever.  (This would be a good time to look elsewhere in Judges for the behavior of the Israelites.
    • The thankful prayer–if you can think of things to thank the Lord for.  (Note that just because God is doing lots of good things doesn’t mean that we will notice them!

    The Israelites have brought all of this on themselves, according to the text, and it is God who sent the oppressor.  Does that change the way one should pray?  There are those who always rebuke Satan in times of trouble, but is it necessarily Satan who is acting?

    Finally, does the prayer one offers change God’s response to the situation?