Canter Bridge

The man of God from Judah travels to neighboring Israel at a time when traffic of seers and oracles between the divided legacies of Solomon’s briefly (U)nited (K)ingdom would have been politically charged. It is not difficult to reduce this story to a political allegory tossed off to inculcate the moral superiority of Judah over the shrine-filled paganism of Israel.

It is no doubt more than that.

The monarchy’s ‘men of God’ are enigmatic figures. Their often strange appearance and their toggling back and forth between taciturn silence and confrontational declaration combine to paint the picture of unpredictable figures whose arrival would have unsettled a place.

They were not afraid of kings, damn them.

It was difficult for monarchs struggling to establish legitimacy and legacy to control men with so little fear in them. This was their power.

The man of God from Judah is Josianic both in vocabulary and in his attitude towards the altar that Jeroboam had set up in Bethel so that his people would not mingle with Jerusalem’s Davidides around the ostensibly religious activity of sacrifice and feast. That is, he cites a future Davidic king named ‘Josiah’, whose centralizing and pious demeanor would one day assume the posture of a David redivivus. Arguably Josiah would inspire more messianic expectation in Judah—and, dangerously, in Israel—than any other human being save David himself (see Marvin Sweeney’s King Josiah of Judah: the lost messiah of Israel).

Not only does the text have the man of God name Josiah, though it can plausibly be argued that the naming of Josiah is a clarifying insertion on the part of an editor who recognized in Josiah the fulfillment of an earlier generic description of a royal shrine-razer. He articulates a future for Bethel’s liturgical heresy that this reforming and centralizing future monarch would enact for countless shrines outside of Jerusalem’s temple walls.

This particular man of God adds to the peculiar fearsomeness of his guild destructive powers over both the altar he has decried and the outstretched hand of the king who would have seized him and ended the entire threatening scenario by the reliable measure of silencing the messenger.

And he remains unnamed,  known to us only by his Judahite provenance and the assertion of God’s accompaniment that surrounds the text’s every mention of his activities this far from his native land.

Still, he is vulnerable. Too persuaded by the lying compliments of an Israelite prophet who might have seemed a comrade-in-arms, the man of God allows himself to be derailed from his monastic mission by the seemingly reasonable comfort of food and drink. In consequence, he is mauled to death by a bear, a treatment that might well strike the reader as disproportionate to his traveler’s foible of accepting a good soul’s invitation to supper.

There are, we are asked to believe, matters of serving God that demand a fidelity to one’s mission that is more than tactical, that exceeds the limits of reasonable deliberation. Biblical narrative does not press such vocational extremity upon all its readers. It merely argues with its stories that such a thing exists, asking readers and hearers and hearing communities to consider that such a heavy yolk might fall upon shoulders quite near to hand.

A power overwhelms the lying northern prophet, who is compelled to announce the tragedy of his own making to the man of God who would die by it. It overwhelms the man of God who—mission completed—nonetheless dies on his way home at the claws of a crazed animal whose mission seems even more purely executed than that of his victim. It overwhelms a self-made king and his pretensions of aggrandizing his rule by co-opting the worship of an unpredictable God whose southern spokesmen insisted had but one house on earth.

A power overwhelms.

The burden, in part, of this odd, engrossing literature is to insist that—whether welcomed or not—a particular power overwhelms.