Canter Bridge

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »