Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 67

Online Dissertations in Biblical Studies

The Ancient World Online (AWOL) recently posted a list of Durham University dissertations available for free. I combed through the list and here are some dissertations related to biblical studies and theology that readers might find of interest:

BUSHUR, JAMES,GEORGE (2010) “Joining the End to the Beginning” Divine Providence and the Interpretation of Scripture in the Teaching of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

CAVIN, ROBERT,LLOYD (2010) NEW EXISTENCE AND RIGHTEOUS LIVING IN COLOSSIANS AND 1 PETER IN CONVERSATION WITH 4QINSTRUCTION AND THE HODAYOT. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

CHRYSOVERGI, MARIA (2011) Attitudes towards the Use of Medicine in Jewish Literature from the Third and Second Centuries BCE. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

Clough, Emma Elizabeth (2004) In search of Xerxes: images of the Persian king. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

GOODRICH, JOHN,KENNETH (2010) Paul, the Oikonomos of God: Paul’s Apostolic Metaphor in 1 Corinthians and its Graeco-Roman Context. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

Häuser, Götz Ludwig (1992) Communion with Christ and Christian community in 1 Corinthians: a study of Paul’s concept of Koinonia. Masters thesis, Durham University

HILL, WESLEY,ALLEN (2012) Paul and the Triune Identity: Rereading Paul’s God-, Christ-, and Spirit-Language in Conversation with Trinitarian Theologies of Persons and Relations. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

Hilke, Hartmut (1993) The ideas of “predestination” and “election” in Pauline thought. Masters thesis, Durham University

HOCH, BRIAN,THOMAS (2010) The Year of Jubilee and Old Testament Ethics: A Test Case in Methodology. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

JOHNSON, BEN,JM (2012) A Reading of the David and Goliath Narrative in Greek and Hebrew. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

MASTON, JASON (2009) DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY IN SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM AND PAUL: A COMPARISON OF SIRACH, HODAYOT, AND ROMANS 7–8. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

MATHEW, SUSAN (2010) Women in the Greetings of Rom 16:1-16: A Study of Mutuality and Women’s Ministry in the Letter to the Romans. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

MATHEWS, MARK DEWAYNE (2010) Riches, Poverty, and the Faithful: Perspectives on Wealth in the Second Temple Period and the Apocalypse of John. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

MORLAN, DAVID,SCOTT (2010) Conversion in Luke and Paul: Some Exegetical and Theological Explorations. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

ORR, PETER,CHRISTIAN (2011) Christ Absent and Present: A Study in Pauline Christology. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

PIERCE, CHAD (2009) Spirits and the Proclamation of Christ: 1 Peter 3:18-22 in Its Tradition-Historical and Literary Context. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

SCHWAB, ZOLTAN (2011) A Theological Interpretation of the Book of Proverbs. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

SHERWOOD, AARON (2010) THE RESTORATION OF HUMANITY: Temple Cosmology, Worship and Israel-Nations Unification in Biblical, Second Temple and Pauline Traditions. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

WEDDLE, POLLY (2010) Touching the Gods: physical interaction with cult statues in the Roman world. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

WELLS, KYLE,BRANDON (2010) Grace, Obedience, and the Hermeneutics of Agency: Paul and his Jewish Contemporaries on the Transformation of the Heart. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

WILKINSON, JENNIFER (2012) Mark and his Gentile Audience: A Traditio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Investigation of Mk 4.35-9.29 and its Interface with Gentile Polytheism in the Roman Near East. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

WORTHINGTON, JONATHAN,DAVID (2010) The Beginning and Before: Interpreting Creation in Paul and Philo. Doctoral thesis, Durham University

Technorati Tags: biblical, dissertations, online, studies, theology

Naked Bible 2013: Pray for my Upgrade! And 2012 Stats

Remember this past year when I thought the Naked Bible was history?  When my WordPress upgrade basically destroyed the site and I had to re-install everything?  Well, that time is coming again; I’ve avoided it for as long as possible. So you can at least pray that there won’t be any sharp objects nearby when I go through the upgrade process again.

This also relates to blog stats. I usually post statistics for the year on Jan 1, but I can’t do that (for my blogs anyway) this year, since my last WordPress upgrade destroyed my statistics plug in. I’ve been trying to get a new one in place, but all new plugins have been rejected. The reason, so WordPress tells me, is that I need to upgrade AGAIN to get any new plugin to work. So…

I will be upgrading this blog sometime in the middle of January. That means it may go down again, if recent history holds. I’ll be taking plenty of time to get backups in place before the upgrade. Even if I have to re-install the whole thing, I should be fine.  So, be aware — Naked Bible may disappear for a while.

Statistically, all I can share of relevance for this audience is that my homepage traffic has continued to rise.  The stats are below. Thanks to all who visit and read my stuff!

Mike’s Homepage:

unique visitors
2009
169152



2010
239607



2011
243543



2012
286,675







number of visits
2009
330587



2010
559089



2011
683899



2012
771,015







website hits
2009
5563139



2010
7447119



2011
6627720



2012
9,196,722

 

Technorati Tags: biblical, biblioblogging, blog, studies

Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 3

Well, finally back to this. Since it’s been so long, I need to give readers the context of the first and second posts.

Review

In the first post, I had encouraged readers to keep the following items in mind as they read the essay from the Anchor Bible Dictionary I linked to (and as they read future articles on this topic):

1. What does the terminology indicate about the status of the poor? That is, what kinds of poverty are described by the terminology?

2. What does the biblical text tell us about the circumstances of or occasions for the poverty situations described? In other words, why are the poor poverty stricken? Whose fault is it?

3. Who is responsible for a solution to the poverty described?

In the second essay I went through the essay and made the following observations with respect to its content and the aforementioned questions:

1. Sometimes the vocabulary is vague, offering no hint at why a person is poor. That is, the vocabulary focuses more on what it’s like to be poor, or how the poor must live or are living, or what a person lacks that qualifies them as poor.

2. It seems quite clear that, on an individual, spiritual level, causing someone’s poverty through wicked acts is evil, as is a refusal to help the poor. There is less clarity on other levels. For example, do laws targeting national Israel (even at the individual level) with respect to the treatment of the poor apply to a non-theocratic political situation today? On what basis?

3. Except for laziness, it is difficult to discern a reason for the poverty described in the OT.

4. In the above assessment I’m a bit more cautious than the writer of the ABD article. At times the writer fills in this gap with suggestions that the poor are poor because of oppression. I would actually assert that isn’t clear. Granted, there are a number of passages that describe the poor as oppressed, but it isn’t clear to me that the oppression made them poor, or that the passages are saying that, because they are already poor, they are easy targets of oppression.

These were of course tentative conclusions, as I wanted to solicit the input of readers to get more sets of eyes on the examples. We’ll return to this “causative” issue more than once as we proceed in the series.

I then went on to answer the obvious question: Why do I care about these issues? Part of my response went as follows:

I wouldn’t of course dispute that any number of tragic or “oppressive” circumstances could leave a person poor (invasion, illness, victimization by criminals, etc.), but since the biblical language of oppression is so often politicized today, I’d like some clear examples where we are told exactly who the oppressor was and whether it caused the poverty or not. It’s pretty clear that God does not want the poor oppressed, and so at the least someone already poor should not be oppressed (whatever “oppress” means — which is something I hope to discuss in future installments). However, the political Left today (and of yesterday) frequently wants to assert that government policies that don’t put wealth into the hands of people amounts to “oppressing the poor” or contributes to said oppression. . . . So, while those in governing authority are very obviously sinning when perpetrating legal injustices, does government policy that doesn’t increase the wealth of the poor (through redistribution of the wealth of others or some other means) amount to “oppression”?

I then went on to cite some illustrations of the above ambiguity, and concluded:

Only when we know more precisely the origins of a poverty circumstance can the moral obligation and remedy be clear so that the innocent (even if they are wealthy) are not punished with the guilty when solutions are applied. 

Moving On

I’d like to return to the problem of the “causative ambiguity” in this post (and will no doubt in the future). Again, I trust everyone would agree that injustice is evil. The causative ambiguity relates to two items in my mind: (1) can we say for certain what caused the poverty that is described; and (2) with respect to the biblical references to injustice, particularly as they relate to the poor, are telling us (anywhere) that being wealthy causes the poverty of others. That is, does the Bible tell us that being wealthy:

is unjust
necessarily leads to injustice
necessarily causes injustice
is a necessary catalyst to injustice

Put as clearly as I can: are the above propositions part of a biblical theology of poverty and wealth?  If they are not, then if we believe these things about wealth and poverty, we are compelled by honesty to call that belief something other than “biblical.”

I cited Isa 32:7; Jer 5:28; and Amos 5:12 in Part 2 of this series, noting that the passages did not specify at what point the victims became poor, leaving the possibility that the injustice was not the causative agent. I won’t revisit them here.

For this post, I re-read the article, noting all the other places where the author mentions something about those in authority oppressing the poor, or the poor being oppressed in legal (i.e., “law and order”) contexts, or “exploiting” the poor. The following list of verse citations emerged (all containing at least one of the lemmas that were the focus of the essay):

Isa 3:14-15; Isa 10:2; Isa 11:4; Isa 26:6; Isa 29:19; Isa 32:7; Jer 2:34; Jer 5:28; Jer 20:13; Jer 22:16; Ezek 18:12 (cf. Deut 24:12; Ezek 22:29); Amos 2:6-7; Amos 4:1; Amos 5:11-12; Amos 8:4-6; Psa 35:10; Job 24:4; Eccl 5:7.

So now the next exercise for us. Going back to the two issues floating around in my head related to “causative ambiguity,” I’d like us to think about:

(1) What causes the poverty in these verses? For example, are they clear that the poverty of the victims was caused by economic exploitation?

(2) What can we say about the abusers in these passages? Are they wealthy? How can we tell? Are they state officials (as opposed to some random wealthy person)?  Is there anything taught in these verses that provides a biblical axiom along the lines of “wealthy people inevitably cause oppression”?

To this point, it seems clear that we can say (so far) that there are two causes of poverty:

1. Laziness

2. Military invasion

We’re asking now, “are there more?”

As I said in Part 2, these “invasion” passages can at times be read to say that the invading armies left the (already) poor behind because they had nothing to contribute to their captors (i.e., the Babylonians took leaders and skilled people to Babylon), it’s probably fair to say that at least some, and perhaps many, had everything taken from them by warfare, and so we could interpret the passages as saying (in part) that “those left behind became poor.” That isn’t what can exhaustively be said, but it seems reasonable.

However, it would be terribly careless and flawed reasoning to label this as “political oppression” in our world. And yet this seems to be the flavor of some of the statements made by the author of this essay. I say this because he uses the phrase “political oppression” of these passages without nuance. In our day (and certainly in the past), “political oppression is a loaded term. Its usage in this article creates the impression that the OT isn’t talking merely about the effects of an invading army, but must be speaking about anything that might be perceived as oppressive in which the state plays a part (things like capitalism and free markets come to mind). That’s an illegitimate equation. The article’s own citation of the Moabite (Mesha) Stela illustrates this illegitimacy very well:

“Omri, the king of Israel, oppressed [wy˓nw] Moab for a long time because Chemosh was angry with his land. Then his [Omri’s] son [Ahab] succeeded him and he also said, ‘I will oppress [˒˓nw] Moab’” (lines 4–6; cf. TSSI 1: 74; KAI no. 181).

It is clear here that military invasion and subjugation are the source of the oppression. Mesha didn’t “oppress” the Israelites with capitalism or free markets. More like swords and spears. There’s no way this “political oppression” corresponds to the discussion today, but yet such wording potentially misleads the reader.

In view of this rhetorical oversight (I’m assuming it was an oversight), I can’t help wondering about the looseness of some other statements, such as:

“Prophetic texts concern themselves with the poor who are economically exploited by the large landowners and ruling members of ancient Israelite society. The wisdom tradition divides over the question of poverty: Proverbs, in a somewhat condescending and possibly censorious tone, promotes the traditional wisdom view that poverty is the undesirable consequence of laziness, whereas Job, and to a lesser extent Ecclesiastes, understand poverty to be the result of political and economic exploitation.”

I’m wondering — and so, this is the target of our task — if you think these assertions really derive from the passages cited in their support. Please have a look at the verses listed above as we try and sketch a picture of what they say / describe.

Technorati Tags: Bible, biblical, exploitation, justice, Old Testament, oppression, poor, poverty, social, theology

Naked Bible Podcast 031: Exegetical Fallacies

This episode continues the series on studying the Bible at the word level. The episode utilizes the audio of a short screen capture video that Dr. Heiser created to illustrate a range of exegetical fallacies that amateur researchers frequently commit when doing Greek and Hebrew word studies. For those to whom the term is unfamiliar, an “exegetical fallacy” is the academic term use to described flawed methodology in word study and the flawed conclusions that such methods yield. Enjoy this important podcast!

Technorati Tags: Bible, exegetical, fallacies, greek, hebrew, studies, study, word

High Resolution Images of Dead Sea Scrolls Now Online

Pretty cool. Over 5,000 high resolution images of the scrolls are now available online. This is an awesome site for scrolls research in general, too. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: dead sea scrolls, digital, images, photographs, Qumran

Is the Virgin Birth Based on a Mistranslation?

That’s the subject of the most recent podcast episode of Mark Goodacre’s NT Pod. As Naked Bible readers may know, my own answer is no. Professor Goodacre (Duke University) agrees. Have a listen!

Technorati Tags: almah, birth, Jesus, Mary, parthenos, Stavrakopolou, translation, virgin

Short Note to Naked Bible Readers and Listeners

Just a short apology here about getting back to the social justice thread (I haven’t forgotten  it) and gaps in the podcast (ditto).  I was poised to produce on both fronts this weekend until Coast to Coast AM called. That invitation, coupled with the fact that I have grades due Monday and Thursday (I’m currently doing some adjunct teaching) have created the perfect storm.  I’ve been at the grading for about 20 hours this weekend, and am almost done. (I squeezed in some website stuff for the show, too). Now I need to prepare some things for the show and go back to the normal chaos of preparing for Future Congress 2 and (of course) putting a little time into my novel’s sequel. I should be back to “normal” after the show Thursday night and produce some posts and the next podcast.

Mike Scheduled for Coast to Coast AM: Discussing Prophecy (Really)

The anomalous nature of me being on Coast to Coast AM discussing this topic will make sense once you hear the date. I’ve blogged here in the past (at length) about how an obsession with prophecy is a waste of time — and I stand by that. So who better to discuss apocalypticism and popular end times weirdness than yours truly?

The folks at Coast to Coast AM have scheduled me for the show the night of Thursday, December 20, the night before the world ends. A nice touch, and I thank them for both their generosity and timing. I haven’t checked this for accuracy (just like popular prophecy teachers), but I think this is either my 21st or 22nd appearance on the show . . . 21? the day the world ends . . . 22? the first day of the new age? . . . spooky. Where’s Jonathan Cahn when I need him to make sense of it all?

We’ll be chatting about the Mayan Doomsday hype (just in time), millennialism, and assorted other beliefs related to end times, including the odd sorts of things popular Christian writers make piles of cash on (what another blog termed “fearporn”). Should be fun!

Technorati Tags: 2012, apocalypticism, end times, eschatology, mayan

Why Don’t Scholars Understand Logos’ Learn to Use Greek and Hebrew?

Someone sent me this link today by Dr. Rod Decker of Clarks Summit: Can you skip 1st year Greek and start with 2d year?  Dr. Decker proceeds to bash the “Learn to Use Greek and Hebrew” product produced by Logos Bible Software, of which I had a part in producing (and we plan to produce a 2.0 version in 2013).

Once again, a critic has managed to misunderstand the marketing claims for the product. The marketing copy reads as follows (just read it again today):

Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew with Logos Bible Software teaches you how to interpret Scripture with the original languages in a simple, straightforward manner. This is a complete introduction to using the original languages for interpretation from the Greek and Hebrew scholars of Logos Bible Software.

Notice the use of the word “interpret” in the above as I answer Dr. Decker’s question. I’ll try and keep this simple.

To answer Dr. Decker’s question “Can you skip first year Greek and start with second?”:

No – if your goal is to produce translators.

Yes – If you goal it not to produce translators, but instead to teach people the grammatical terminology and associated concepts so they can intelligently read things like commentaries and journal articles.

I thought that was pretty clear when we created the product. I guess it wasn’t. We’ll keep trying.

Since Dr. Decker felt free to insult the product (and me, by extension, along with the company I work for), I’d like to enter a dialogue with him.

Question: What discipline in the world embraces a 90% failure rate and calls it a success and the right course to follow?

Year after year thousands of students take Greek and Hebrew to learn to be translators – to reproduce (crudely) what they could buy in any given bookstore, or get free from the Gideons. In schools that require only one year of Greek and Hebrew, the student never gets to exegesis. Many seminaries fall into that category. So what does the student take away?  However, a good number of schools do require a second year (albeit a smaller number than 20 years ago). So, of those students that get through the second year, how many graduate and use their Greek and Hebrew *regularly* (week to week) in sermons? If the number was high, I’d expect that we’d see congregations across the United States where people are being fed solid meat from the pulpit. Pardon my skepticism in that regard. Sure, there are such places, but an abundance? What do we have to show for the thousands of students who take two years of Greek and Hebrew?  The reality is that of the students who survive two years of each language, most don’t use it. Why? reasons vary. The realities of ministry simply don’t allow most pastors to review their languages to maintain the memorization levels needed to be translators. Another is that a second year course is often inadequate (who does Dr. Decker trust more in handling the text — his two year students or his doctoral students?). Second year Greek often is just category memorization, not exegesis.  Second year usually constitutes a short review of forms and vocab, then on to memorizing syntactical categories for exams and perhaps producing an exegetical paper. If someone is lucky, the professor actually situates all that memorization into an exegetical method. But that is rare. Personally, I took Greek syntax three times at three different schools (I got an A each time; it was just a quirk of my educational path that required me to keep taking it). I never learned an exegetical method. I also never had to produce an exegetical paper. I had to wait until I got to graduate school in Hebrew studies to get anything that looked like that.

Other realities work against the success of traditional language teaching. Another reality is that a fair number of those students will go into youth ministry, where exegesis is the last thing they’re doing. Some will never go into the ministry at all. A few will move into graduate school for more intense language training and perhaps doctoral work in a language field. I was one of those, and loved it. But I’m a geek. Most seminary students aren’t me, or Dr. Decker. Most seminary students and graduates don’t use their Greek and Hebrew on a weekly basis to feed either themselves and their congregations. They don’t have the time and are often left groping for what the payoff is supposed to be. By the pulpit’s fruit we know it. And when they do use their languages, what they’re doing is the sort of thing we try to teach people in Learn to Use Greek and Hebrew, since our goal is not to produce translators.  Our goal is to motivate people to inform their sermon content with biblical language insights from serious (not devotional or homiletical) commentaries. Our goal is to assist pastors and other interested people in discovering how Greek and Hebrew can help them be better interpreters (see the above quotation). We think that would help raise the content bar in the pulpit. But I suppose Dr. Decker would disagree. Which brings me back to my question for him.

What discipline in the world embraces a 90% failure rate and calls it a success and the right course to follow?  Swimming instruction? (90% drown, but at least somebody’s using that skill). Explosives training? Emergency medicine?  Construction engineers? Good guesses, but the answer is: seminary language training. I’m sure Dr. Decker will disagree. So if he can empirically demonstrate to me that more than 10 % of the graduates of his seminary use their Greek and Hebrew on a weekly basis in their pulpit ministry, I’ll buy him dinner at next year’s ETS meeting. (Trust me, since I love the languages like he does, I’d be thrilled to see proof to the contrary). If not, my suggestion is that he stop whining about our product and raise the percentage. We’re trying to improve what happens in the pulpit; to fix the failure in some small way. We don’t think the strategy of trying to turn people into translators can provide evidence that it’s actually working for the mass of seminary graduates. It seems to only be working for the people who emerge as doctoral students (people like me). While I’m thrilled that people like me emerge from the process (and I certainly have no regrets; I still memorize vocab and rehearse forms, even in Ugaritic and Egyptian), the Church would be better served if more people could understand the important work of scholars in commentaries and other works. Our efforts at Logos are no more complicated than that. We have no interest that people who come to love the languages stop memorizing and studying them at a deep level, regardless of how that fits a vocation or doesn’t. Our concern is with the great majority of *seminary graduates* who just don’t use what they were taught in their language classes. We think perhaps a tool-based approach that front-loads the payoff will work better. At the very least we could try it instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 2

I’m hoping that by now those interested will have read the ABD essay I posted on terms for poverty and the poor in the Old Testament. In case readers did not take it upon themselves to do so, here is another PDF of the actual OT occurrences of each of the OT words for the poor/poverty. If you want to tackle any of the issues or questions I have below, this will be a handy resource.

I had encouraged readers to keep the following items in mind as they read the article (and as they read future articles on this topic):

1. What does the terminology indicate about the status of the poor? That is, what kinds of poverty are described by the terminology?

2. What does the biblical text tell us about the circumstances of or occasions for the poverty situations described? In other words, why are the poor poverty stricken? Whose fault is it?

3. Who is responsible for a solution to the poverty described?

The ABD article and its coverage of the vocabulary allow several observations with respect to these questions (at least for the first two):

1. Sometimes the vocabulary is vague, offering no hint at why a person is poor. That is, the vocabulary focuses more on what it’s like to be poor, or how the poor must live or are living, or what a person lacks that qualifies them as poor. For example: Isa 14:30; Ezek 16:49; Jer 39:10; 2 Sam 12:3; Deut 24:15.

2. It seems quite clear that, on an individual, spiritual level, causing someone’s poverty through wicked acts is evil, as is a refusal to help the poor. There is less clarity on other levels (see below, and future posts); that is, if there are clear principals in the Scripture about the government and poverty, how do they apply (if at all) since the theocracy of Israel is ancient history? Do laws targeting national Israel (even at the individual level) with respect to the treatment of the poor (usually within the “family” of Israel) apply to a non-theocratic situation today? On what basis?

3. Except for laziness, it is difficult to discern a reason for the poverty described in the OT. The book of Proverbs offers several clear passages that assert a person is poor because of laziness (e.g., Prov 10:4; Prov 6:10-11; Prov 24:33-34; Prov 14:23), but beyond such passages, the OT doesn’t seem to give clear reasons as to why the poor are poor.

4. In the above assessment I’m a bit more cautious than the writer of the ABD article. At times the writer fills in this gap with suggestions that the poor are poor because of oppression. I would actually assert that isn’t clear. Granted, there are a number of passages that describe the poor as oppressed, but it isn’t clear to me that the oppression made them poor, or that the passages are saying that, because they are already poor, they are easy targets of oppression. I’ve read through all the occurrences of each word (see the file), but I can’t say I’ve lingered over the wider context of each one. II’m hoping readers can help here — that they can come up with a clear example that the oppression caused the poverty, since I haven’t found one that seems clear it can’t be the other way around (someone already poor was the target of oppression).

Why do I care? Well, I wouldn’t of course dispute that any number of tragic or “oppressive” circumstances could leave a person poor (invasion, illness, victimization by criminals, etc.), but since the biblical language of oppression is so often politicized today, I’d like some clear examples where we are told exactly who the oppressor was and whether it caused the poverty or not. It’s pretty clear that God does not want the poor oppressed, and so at the least someone already poor should not be oppressed (whatever “oppress” means — which is something I hope to discuss in future installments). However, the political Left today (and of yesterday) frequently wants to assert that government policies that don’t put wealth into the hands of people amounts to “oppressing the poor” or contributes to said oppression. Even more extreme, some of the “discourse” about wealth and poverty that derives from the Left assumes that the mere existence of the wealthy axiomatically produces an oppressive reality for others, as though there were a finite amount of wealth in our space-time existence, so that what one person has must have been taken from another. I’d like to see if there is any biblical justification for any such thinking, regardless of how biblical phrases are mouthed by politicians to that effect. I’d like a specific example that provides clarity or directs our thinking along any such trajectory. So, while those in governing authority are very obviously sinning when perpetrating legal injustices, does government policy that doesn’t increase the wealth of the poor (through redistribution of the wealth of others or some other means) amount to “oppression”?  Does the fact that there are wealthy people per se amount to injustice? These questions may seem absurd, but anyone in tune with the current political climate knows this discussion is real. It would be nice to have biblical data for forming any biblical theology in this part of life.

By way of illustrating the ambiguity, the writer of the ABD article (discussing ‘ebyon; עביון) notes that the description of the poor can connote “unfair handling of legal cases” and then cites Isa 32:7; Jer 5:28; 22:16; Amos 5:12 among such instances. This wording seems to suggest that the unfairness causes the poverty, or perhaps contributes to it. But that isn’t clear to me at all. Here are those passages:

Isa 32:7 – As for the scoundrel—his devices are evil; he plans wicked schemes to ruin the poor with lying words, even when the plea of the needy is right.

(Did this scoundrel make the person poor, or was the victim already poor? How can we tell?)

Jer 5:28 (with context):

26 For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. 27 Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; therefore they have become great and rich; 28 they have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of evil; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy.

(Do the wicked fail to defend the needy (‘ebyon) when they weren’t poor, thus making them poor, or do they target the poor? How can we tell?)

Amos 5:12 – For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate.

This passage seems fairly clear that the injustice does not make the person poor, but the already poor person is turned away from getting justice. If that is the case, then the unfairness is subsequent to the person’s condition of poverty; the latter was not caused by the former. If the writer wanted to make the opposite point, it seems he took this passage out of context.

Even passages that describe the aftermath of the exile aren’t really clear that the military invasion caused the poverty (see 2 Kings 24:14; 25:12; Jer 10:47), though it doesn’t seem a stretch to infer that, at least for some people.  These passages can quite easily be read to say that the invading armies left the (already) poor behind because they had nothing to contribute to their captors, as opposed to interpreting the passages as saying “and those left behind became poor.” It just isn’t clear to me.

But the point is not to critique the article. Rather, I’d just like to see the causative relationship derive from the text as opposed to filtering a passage through that idea. Only when we know more precisely the origins of a poverty circumstance can the moral obligation and remedy be clear so that the innocent (even if they are wealthy) are not punished with the guilty when solutions are applied. 

Lastly, I think the above ambiguity is present with those places where the writer of the article situates poverty in a legal context — that is, where the poor are connected (for some reason — and that is the issue) with legal injustice. (Do a search in the file for terms like “legal” and “political” and “exploitation” to see what I mean here). I think it’s reasonable to ask for the cause-effect relationship to be made clear (if it can be) before parsing how the legal material / contexts ought to be understood and then applied to our own legal/political situations. And if that cannot be determined, we will need to guard against imposing our own context on the text to baptize whatever political position we favor in this regard as the one God would endorse via what the Scripture says about the poor.

There’s obviously more to say here, but I’ll wait for some feedback before going any further.

 

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