Canter Bridge

It is perhaps not for us to judge Ezra’s decisions when his people’s survival was at stake.

To say this is immediately to risk the kind of biblicism that fails to reckon with narrative that is not fit for morality lessons or reduction to principles. A story like this exists because the events it describes actually happened in a people to whose clothing the smoke of extinction still clung. Such a people finds it impossible to regroup gently.

Their hope is that there is mercy in severity. If that mercy does not appear, they are worthy of disdain. Yet this does relieve us of the readerly duty to read sympathetically, even when this requires a hermeneutical discipline that is not native to us. (more…)

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The shadow of angels flits furtively across the Bible’s pages. Only rarely do these mysterious messengers tarry long enough to be named. More often, they remain invisible or—if glimpsed—simply do their work and go back to where they came from.

Wherever that is.

The few studied reflections on angels in the Bible’s pages suggest that they are the Lord’s agents, standing at the ready to do his work without ever taking any of the credit.

The Old Testament, several steps closer to its mythic origins and several degrees more candid about things unseen, suggests that the angels—some of them at any rate—are what non-Israelites would consider to be gods. That is, they are powers lesser than YHWH himself and beholden to his will but no less formidable to human dimensions for all of that. They rush to do YHWH’s bidding. (more…)

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If God were to act within the small parameters of ordinary people, what evidence would be left in the wake of his visit?

Peter has done the unthinkable, crossing lines of demarcation that had been conceived, established, refined, and maintained with impeccable care and unspeakable cost. That he should do so is all the more unthinkable for his own dedication to divisions that he and his people considered the opposite of arbitrary. The delineation of two virtual races of humanity—Jew and gentile—was hardly regarded as a national choice. It reflected, rather, the path of the Creator’s scalpel.

The dietary laws were to die for not for nutritional or even mere religious reasons. They were, rather, the most concrete and universal of ways—for who does not eat, and that every day?—of observing what God has done. (more…)

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Peter’s behavior in the face of the gentilizing Jesus movement is the stuff of wrong-headedness, unclarity, and gross misapprehension.

The man is either too easily swayed. Or a craven opportunist. Or the right kind of mystic.

A man who has battled for the kind of conceptual precision that will allow the movement to retain its causal link with Jacob’s God and its covenantal compact with Israel can hardly be excused for turning his back on that project the moment a promising messenger summons his company.
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The book of Job comprises some of the Bible’s finest poetry. Sophisticated and complex as a piece of Hebrew literature, the book is just as confident in its ideology as in its artistry.

Perhaps its greatest contribution to biblical thought—to say nothing of wider religious conversation—is its assertion that its eponymous figure’s speechifying defiance of God was theology more true than the polished certainties of Job’s rhetorical adversaries and sometime companions.

Students of the work tussle over what Job actually repented of in the final chapters of the book’s present form. Astonishingly, new proposals for understanding YHWH’s speeches and Job’s response continue to see the light of day in our time, such is the book’s generative potency. (more…)

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Contemporary Bible readers familiar with ‘the three great monotheistic religions’ are ill prepared to understand the Hebrew Bible’s insistence upon YHWH’s incomparability. Casual encounters with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mark the human race a bit too artificially into those who worship one god and those who serve a plurality.

Only rarely does the Bible trouble itself to sweep the heavens of all powers but one. More often it simply relegates the others to the margins, from which they do YHWH’s bidding in splendid isolation from the worship of men and women too enthralled with YHWH to have much energy left for lesser immortals. (more…)

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A series of disproportionate pairs shape the narrative of Solomon’s temple dedication. The first of these is the inequity between the meticulous choreography on the part of the worshippers and the liturgy-halting appearance of YHWH’s glory.

It is possible to read the sacrifice of animals as the intended pinnacle of this momentous day at Solomon’s new YHWH-house in Jerusalem. If so, that liturgical anchor has been displaced by prayer. The change hinges on the priests’ inability to play their role:

Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God. (more…)

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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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