Canter Bridge

To count the troops in the blush of peace seems a reasonable thing to do. One takes inventory of the men he can summon should the deposed threat rise again. An accurate count makes matters of taxation and crop projections more science and less art. A prudent king, one thinks, ought to count.

The Book of Chronicles lays upon this scene a more jaundiced eye. Likely fueled by the pre-monarchic suspicion of standing armies and royal militias, the narrator quickly sizes up David’s prudence as a kind of idolatry of the state. The Lord will raise up both leaders and warriors when they are needed, the logic seems to run. The aggrandizement of central command and the perennial temptation of kings to march before armies and enjoy too much the grandstand view as the missiles pass by is, from this angle of view, a rejection of the Lord’s pledge to nourish and protect his Israel. (more…)

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When everything is at risk, men become brothers. Warriors are bonded in the act of surviving into a proximity that is rarely equaled in pleasant times.

Chronicles, the post-exilic retelling of Israel’s great Primary History (Genesis to Kings), allows itself to revel in the memory of men whose deeds have been forgotten. Their glory is to have fought alongside David and those battle companions of his who wrecked the Philistine aspiration to dominate all that moved in their strip of the Eastern Mediterranean almost a millennium before the time of Christ.
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The Bible exults in reversals. Beyond the established contours of what is morally and aesthetically tolerable, its stories seem almost to delight in reversal for reversal’s sake, though always with the hint that there is a subterranean logic to the events that would, if it were visible to the naked eye, throw them into a positive light.

Dead men live again. Kings lose their thrones. Peasants come to rule. The seeing go blind. The blind receive their sight. The second-born makes off with the paternal goods.

So it goes, as though life is rather more volatile than we imagine. So it goes, as though this is a truth to be welcomed more exuberantly than we know how. So it goes, as though history’s climax is scripted as the best reversal of them all, a kind of primus inter pares of liberation stories when one day’s weak become the next dawn’s strong. (more…)

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By the time Jesus asks the woman famously ‘caught in the act of adultery’ about her accusers, they are nowhere to be seen. ‘Where are they?, he probes. ‘Does no one accuse you?’

Her answer is poignantly brief and plausibly full of the brief intimacy of shared wonder

No one, sir.

Jesus appears to anticipate the shift of moral guardianship onto his shoulders.

Neither do I accuse you. Go and sin no more.

It is one of the gospels’ finest moments. The anonymous woman—the tradition has energetically tried to name her—goes off to a life of we know not what. There are no metrics tracking moral transformation, no judgment regarding the long-term effectiveness of Jesus’ rogue action. The woman described only by her sin is not brought back for periodic checkups and revision of treatment protocols. (more…)

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The miraculous powers ascribed to the prophet Elisha must have flowed perennially rather than permanently. Otherwise, these odd vignettes would take on the qualities of a daily journal entry

Bought bread, made an ax-head float, raised up a dead boy, paid taxes …

Rather, we are meant to envisage a formidable loose cannon who moves about in the sometime company of a guild of prophets and—upon occasion—pulls off a stunning and inexplicable reversal of the natural course of events. In this way, Elisha conforms to the enigmatic and sometimes troublesome profile of the Israelite ‘man of God’.

The narrative paints a picture of a man who could appear heartless. He promises an impossible conception to a childless old couple who asked for no such thing. The child in fact appears but then dies, leaving the woman’s bitter plea—’Did I even ask for a child?—seeming more reasonable than Elisha’s ill-advised decision to leave his landlords a human being as a kind of tenant’s tip. (more…)

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Prophets have no peripheral vision.

Their penetrating insight into a people’s core blinds them almost as a matter of course to the less urgent but no less tangible realities that surround them. Allies, for example. Blood brethren, kindred spirits, that sort of thing.

Elijah’s conquest of Baal’s prophets on Mount Carmel and subsequent flight from Jezebel represent one of the Hebrew Bible’s greatest melodramas. The juxtaposition of unparalleled access to divine power and the despondency of a man in the wake of his superlative moment makes Elijah an easy parable for those seeking insight into the emotional dynamics faced by any public leader in his or her moment of crisis. (more…)

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Having dispatched Solomon and his tarnished glories, the book of Kings now turns to that assessment of Israelite and Judahite kings that has made it the bane of Bible readers uninstructed in the subterranean hope and tragedy that fuel the biblical telling of history. Seemingly dry and disapproving, this intersecting list of two people’s kings is in fact a prophetic coming-to-terms with the human conduct of leaders and its tragicomic effect upon lives, blood, and national destination.

David is the unseen guest at this tabular table. His shadow is long. Either his legacy has experienced a rehabilitation of Stalin-esque proportions or the Israelite historian is shrewdly abbreviating his chequered life in terms of what matters most. A sympathetic—not to say naive—reading adopts the latter as its assumption. We learn that David was a paradigmatic figure in that his heart was ‘complete’ before the Lord. We read further that David …

… did what was just in the sight of the Yahweh and did not deviate from all that Yahweh had commanded him except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite (more…)

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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. (more…)

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If audacity drives the human side of temple-building, a kind of fiction shapes the divine response. The biblical texts of temple-building know this and work expertly with the multiple points of view that must be sustained if building a house for god is to be anything more than pious nonsense.

Solomon and YHWH understand that the temple is a concession. ‘The God of heaven and earth’, as YHWH seems to have become known both to Israel and to her neighbors in their moments of disposition cannot in fact live in a hewn-stone, cedar-embellished Levantine shrine. Yet the reality of God being present with his people in that modest construction is no less genuine for this impasse of transcendence and concreteness.

He is not really there. Yet he is really there. (more…)

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Building God a house is an audacious adventure, as even Solomon the temple-building king recognizes in his dedicatory prayer. Yet the space-time complications of housing a transcendent God are not enough to halt the project.

Solomon’s Temple is known to us only by literary description and is often called Israel’s ‘First Temple’. It was all about keeping ‘God with us’. YHWH’s wish to have such a place built for him is expressed in his determination that …

I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.

Viability seems to be the operative concept. In the language of dwelling with Israel, as in the careful description of the temple’s measurements and accoutrements, lines are drawn both to the underlying divine habit of covenanting with Israel and to the earlier, non-permanent dwelling known as the tabernacle. (more…)

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