How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That's Great News

by Peter Enns

And so the bulk of the promised land was no longer in Israelite possession, and the chosen people in the north were never heard from again.

there remained a remnant, the nat...

In 586 BCE,* after a decade of struggle, the mighty Babylonians under their dreaded king, Nebuchadnezzar, exiled a portion of the southern kingdom after destroying Jerusalem and burning the Temple to the ground. The Temple, mind you. God’s dwelling place. Now the chosen people have no land, no king, and no Temple. That’s just another way of saying that God has abandoned them. The exile is Judah’s tragic story, the reference point of the past, that moment that would now color all others and that needed to be processed:

The people of Judah did return from Babylonian captivity in 538 BCE,* due to the policy of the conquering Persians of resettling the peoples that the Babylonians had deported. So that’s good news. But the Persian Empire did rule over the land of Judah for the next two hundred years, and during that time the questions shifted

Yes, the Judahites were in a full-blown, centuries-long crisis that would come to lodge itself deeply in the Jewish consciousness.

This is who we are. This is where we came from. This is what we believe of God. This is where things went wrong. This is our hope for a renewed future. Christians call that story the Old Testament.

And the Judahites, in the centuries following the return from Babylon, created what would come to be called the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament. I don’t mean to suggest that nothing had been written down until this sixth-century national crisis of faith.

But it was only in the wake of the crisis of God’s abandonment that they needed to tell their whole story—to make sense of how broken their past had been and how shattered it had become as they “wept by the waters of Babylon” (as Ps. 137 puts it).

Without the crisis of exile, the Bible as we know it wouldn’t exist.

the exile for a few pages, because it is the changing circumstance that brought the ancient Judahites to their knees and forced them to engage their past and...

And the question that drove these ancient writers and editors was the wisdom question we have been looking at all along: “What is God up to today, right here and now?”

The Assyrian army was relentless and nearly invincible and (judging from Assyrian artwork) impaled and skinned those who resisted.*

He begrudgingly delivered the shortest and most negative sales pitch ever, Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown (3:4), and then stomped away. Despite his efforts to subvert God’s will, Jonah’s worst fears were realized: the people and the king repented, and so God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it (3:10). Ugh. Could this day get any worse?

Nahum, however, tells another story about what God thinks of the Ninevites: he hates them. Nahum in fact celebrates the demise of Nineveh and interprets it as an act of God. The book concludes: There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is mortal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty? (3:19).

19). Translation: God destroyed Nineveh and everyone cheers as if it were the golden goal in the World Cup finals.

The book of Jonah isn’t a history lesson. It’s a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.

In fact, Babylon would become a center of Jewish life and thought for the next thousand years. (The Babylonian Talmud, the authoritative book of Judaism, was produced there.)

too. And the author used as his illustration a clearly fictionalized account of their long-gone ancient foe to express his newfound belief, or at least hope, that God is more inclusive than they were giving God credit for.

Both Nahum and Jonah are works of wisdom, of reimaging God to make sense of current experience in the here and now.

I’d like to think—and in fact I do think—that the portrait of God in Jonah is closer to what God is like: that God does not rejoice in wiping people out, but desires to commune with people of every tribe and nation. But that’s just me. Without a moment’s hesitation, I will say that I favor one story over the other, because it makes more sense to me, as that sense is

informed by other experiences that I and those I know have had of God and especially given what I understand of God in...

I may be wrong in how I process what God is like, of course, but I am not wrong because I process what God is like.

The books of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings tell the five-hundred-year story of Israel’s monarchy from the first king, Saul (sometime before 1000 BCE), until the Babylonian exile.

Chronicles is not a repeat of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. It is a retelling of those books from a much later point in Jewish history. In fact, it is nothing less than an act of reimaging God.

1 Samuel through 2 Kings were probably written before and during the Babylonian exile, and the main question these books address is, “How did we get into this mess?

What did we do to deserve exile?” The short answer is, “You committed apostasy by worshiping foreign gods, wi...

But 1 and 2 Chronicles were written centuries later, probably no earlier than about 400 BCE and more likely closer to 300 or even a bit later—so somewhere in the middle of

the Persian period (which began in 538) and perhaps as late as the Greek period (which began with the conquest by the Greeks under Alexander the Great in

3...

these books answer a different question altogether, not “What did we do to deserve this?” but “After all th...

King Manasseh appears in 2 Kings 21:1–18, where he is absolutely the wickedest loser king in the entire Bible. During his long fifty-five-year reign (the longest of any of the Old Testament kings), Manasseh was all kinds of stupid.

Manasseh was so wicked that the author credits him entirely for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians a

few generations later. Even the sweeping reforms and deep devotion to the Law of his grandson Josiah—who is praised by the writer as no other—weren’t enough to cancel out Manasseh’s wickedness:

(2 Kings 23:26).

The story of Manasseh in 2 Chronicles 33

According to this author, Manasseh’s sins did not lead to Judah’s exile—but to his exile: the Assyrian army took Manasseh captive to Babylon.

This incident is not mentioned in 2 Kings—because it didn’t happen. There was no Assyrian invasion to remove one Judahite king, and if there were, they wouldn’t have taken him to Babylon!

The people were to blame, not Manasseh.

The reign of King Manasseh in 2 Chronicles—with his deportation to Babylon, repentance, and return to his homeland—is not an account of Manasseh’s reign. It is a symbolic retelling of Judah’s exile and return home after the captives had learned their lesson and repented of their sins.

As 2 Chronicles 7:14 puts it: If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That is to say, the retelling of the reign of Manasseh (and 1 and 2 Chronicles as a whole) is an act of wisdom—of reading the moment and reimagining what God is doing and, more important, what God will do in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

What was ultimately at stake for the ancient writers wasn’t simply how they perceived the past, but how they perceived God now.

Watching how the Bible behaves as a book of wisdom rather than a set-in-stone rulebook is more than just a textual curiosity to be noted and set aside. Rather, it models for us the normalcy of seeking the presence of God for ourselves in our here and now. Like that of the biblical writers themselves, our sacred responsibility is to engage faithfully and seriously enough the stories of the past in order to faithfully and seriously reimagine God in our present moment. The Bible doesn’t end that process of reimagination. It promotes it.

The Bible says a lot about God that is comforting, encouraging, and inspiring, but at other times not so much. The Bible sends us conflicting messages about what this God is like. The LORD is my shepherd or Even though I walk through the darkest valley (Ps. 23:1, 4) aren’t always enough to balance out I am going to . . . destroy . . . all flesh in which is the breath of life (Gen. 6:17) or Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . and stone him (Lev. 24:14).

If faith in God means having to keep the universe and the Bible under an invisibility cloak, that’s much more stressful for me than trying to work it through.

What kind of God would give us minds with which to ponder our existence and then expect us to clamp down the lid when we actually ponder?

We are who we are and when we are, and rather than avoid these facts of life, we should look this challenge square in the face and (stop me if you’ve heard this already) embrace the sacred responsibility of asking a question that I feel is at least as important as any other we can ask, if not more so: What is God like?

now, I have come to terms somewhat with this dilemma of matching the God of the Bible with my faith: The God I read about in the Bible is not what God is like—in some timeless abstraction, and that’s that—but how God was imagined and then reimagined by ancient people of faith living in real times and places.

I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.

reimagining God for one’s here and now is what Christians and Jews have been doing ever since there have been Christians and Jews, and invariably so, because we are people.