Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 16, 2008| Leave a Comment »
YHWH broods darkly, both in the assessment he delivers to Moses regarding how quickly the nation will decline after its lawgiver’s death and in the song he commissions Moses to write. It is a virtual tour de force of ingratitude.
The main point is not complicated: YHWH did everything for these clueless people. They responded with breathtaking thanklessness and egotism. He will bring his sword down upon them for this. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 15, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Although the blessings held out to Israel in Moses’ final speeches are heart-warming, the corresponding curses test the mind’s capacity for confronting the white-hot heat of divine anger. The imaginative detail that is bent to articulating the shape of calamity is astonishing. A reader finds himself asking—as Moses was summoning Israel to do in this narrative moment—whether one can live with a God like this one. If the breadth of his mercies seems the only mitigation for our wayward instincts, so the severity of his judgment appears our sure undoing. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift, textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 14, 2008| Leave a Comment »
You can tell a lot about a person from the company he keeps. The same is true of ethical prescriptions, especially when they occur in a list like the one in Deuteronomy 27. Each item of the list is followed by the people’s ‘Amen!’, pronounced upon a curse that in turn has been declared over the miscreant who has violated one of Israel’s fundamental ethical precepts.
It is helpful to view treatment of the alien among the company that is kept by this particular curse:
Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind person on the road. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’
Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!
Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has violated his father’s rights. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!
Cursed be anyone who lies with any animal. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’
It would be foolish to draw a straight line from this statement to either a strict or a relaxed attitude to the immigrants who find their way to our North American communities today. The matter calls for more sophistication than that.
Yet for those who take biblical ethics seriously, this reading should at least serve as an alert to how seriously the matters at hand must be treated. Whatever ‘justice for the alien’ (and the orphan and widow) means, an Israelite context would call a curse down upon the life of one who deprived the alien of it.
The quest for a biblically informed starting point for the immigration conversation ought to at least linger here and ask whether this is not one component of what it seeks.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 13, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Anglo-Saxons like this writer tend to view law as a given, even as an absolute. Our discussion of controversial issues often begins and ends with reference to the law. One of the many dangers of such a legalistic mindset is the reduction to a code of what in Torah is a far more humane, personalistic, and subtle enterprise. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 12, 2008| 1 Comment »
Abel’s spilt blood cries out and earns YHWH’s attention in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. So effectual is this innocent blood’s clamor for justice that its plea become enshrined in Israel’s legal code. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 11, 2008| Leave a Comment »
In his valedictory speeches to the nation that has taken shape under his hands, Moses in the book of Deuteronomy lays out Israel’s festal rhythm. Three times each year, Israel is to rejoice in the feast: Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the autumnal Feast of Booths.
The relentless servitude of Egypt is to fade away—though not its memory—before the productive labors and frequent feasts of Israel in its promised land.
A certain pattern emerges as the discipline of feasting is observed. First, there is to be gladness. Second, the Israelites will meet YHWH with offerings fueled by gratitude. Third, the feast is not to occur at the expense of added labor for the serving class. To the contrary, the entire community—including even its resident aliens—participates in the collective bonhomie of the Three Feasts. Finally, the people are to remember YHWH’s goodness in their affliction as an antidote to forgetting his presence among them. The feasts are to remind a joyous Israel of YHWH’s liberation and his provision.
In the calendrical timescape that Moses places before his impatient people, listening to their liberator and lawgiver on the cusp of their promised land, hard labor and warfare lie before Israel. But a feast is never far away.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »
The ethical energy of the Bible is rarely unleashed on a corrupt world to accomplish its transforming work in quick, redemptive violence. It is, rather, like a benignly corrosive agent leaked into the streams and water tables of an unsuspecting nation.
Slavery, for example, continues as a recognized—one might almost say authorized—institution in both of the biblical testaments. Yet its ugliest manifestations are one by one orphaned, excluded, and in the end quietly denounced by the mere act of recognizing the human dignity of slaves.
In the Pentateuch this positive anthropology is complemented by an historical recollection: ‘You too were slaves in Egypt.’
Israel is enjoined to nurture the memory of what it was like to have one’s human dignity resolutely dismissed by the rigors of forced labor in Egypt. History, in this way, becomes ethics. Memory is the hinge between the two things. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 9, 2008| Leave a Comment »
The Deuteronomic insistence that YHWH-conversation must pervade all of life is not so much the imposition of religion upon one’s every minute as it is the dissolution of religion as a category. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Israel reckoned with a guiding hand in the desert that she could not control and did not often comprehend. The rhetoric of Moses’ speeches on Moab’s plains takes pains to exclude all causes within Israel herself that might explain YHWH’s outlandish affection for her. Simply, the attraction is mysterious. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Deuteronomy, textures on March 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Much of the sinewy stuff of biblical faith is about showing up. We are given few levers over events, circumstances, and the outcomes that in retrospect we bundle together and label ‘history’. The core of our work is to present ourselves and to wait, not a passive, inactive waiting but a tour de force of preparedness for whatever happens. (more…)
Canter Bridge 