Canter Bridge

Asa’s own political machinations come under the disapproving gaze of the prophet Hanani, who again takes up the language of leaning or relying. By persuading the king of Aram to open a northern front against the Asa’s Israelite nemesis, the Judahite king successfully wards off pressure from that quarter.

Yet YHWH’s prophet, for all the apparent success of this stratagem, is not amused.

‘You have leaned upon the king of Aram’, he accuses Asa, ‘when you should have leaned upon YHWH.’ Hanani also finds precedent for a less political, more YHWH-reliant maneouvre in Asa’s history. ‘Didn’t you fend off far greater forces—the Ethiopians and the Libyans— …’, he asks accusingly, ‘simply by leaning upon YHWH?’

It is difficult to harvest any low-hanging moral fruit from this story and even from the prophet’s apparent clarity in regard to how a godly king ought to confront national threats, whether from the north or the south. How can one not engage the potential allies at hand? And what is the harm in doing so?

Yet Chronicles and its proto-historical cousin, the Deuteronomistic History, are not alone in their vision for national conduct when YHWH is in the mix. The prophet Isaiah employs identical language in the book that bears his name when he confronts the habit of relying upon foreign allies to combat existential threats to the nation.

The thoughtful reader will want to ponder the exclusive alternatives that this viewpoint presents: one either relies upon others or one relies upon YHWH. Its proximity to the piety so often displayed by Christian people of few resources as they narrate their own (sometimes heroic) negotiation of life’s concrete challenges ought not to be missed.

Chronicles also sustains the language of seeking. Here Asa is contrasted with his devout and highly successful scion Jehoshapat. Even in illness, Asa ‘did not seek the Lord’. Jehoshapat, on the other hand, ‘refused to seek/consult the Baals’. What is more, he urged his Israelite ally to ‘consult/seek the word of the Lord’ before undertaking a military adventure. When that king responds by summoning up his Baal-ite prophets, Jehoshaphat insists that there must be some ‘prophet of YHWH’ whom one can consult instead.

The text is setting up a conceptual infrastructure wherein seeking/consultation of YHWH, his word, and his prophet are contiguous with leaning upon YHWH. The reliance that is commended is a thoughtful, consultative, careful, and perhaps slow-moving enterprise. It appears to reckon with the probability that precious and hard-won distinctives are in play whenever one seeks convenient alliances outside of the covenanted circles that those same distinctives create. Reliance or leaning, then, consists at least in part of inspecting the resources that covenanted relationships make available on the supposition that what is most needed is likely to be there at hand.

To fail to lean upon YHWH in this way is a contemptible move precisely because it discounts YHWH’s real-world provision—or at least the likelihood that he has made such provision—before it sprints off in search of what is needed somewhere else.

The narrative seems not, in fact, to reduce leaning upon YHWH to quietism, for it approvingly tells the story of military battle that was quite amenable to the ethics it sketches out. It is rather the slow, deliberative, consultation of YHWH and his mediated message that for the Chronicler comprises the better way.