Canter Bridge

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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.

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

Moses’ narration of events occurring from the time Israel encountered YHWH at Zion through to the dramatic moment in which he delivers his sermons to a people about to wet their feet in the Jordan is a damning tale.

From this lawgiver’s perspective, YHWH has been attentive to the people’s needs during their generation of wandering. This same postponed generation has seen YHWH guide them through the politics of semi-nomadism, the necessary passages through claimed turf, and cultivated in them a desire for a place to call their own.

Moses ask rhetorically what other nation has known a god to walk in its midst as YHWH has walked in Israel’s. What other nation has been given statutes and ordinances that produce community and life, as Israel has received? His delineation of Israel’s life among the nations is a familiar one: They worship idols while Israel worships the living God who has set up camp in their midst. Continue Reading »