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by
Peter Enns
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March 22 - March 27, 2022
The sacred responsibility I’ve been talking about is really a call to follow this biblical lead by reimagining God in our time and place.
Imagining a boundless God from within our bounded moment in time is a paradox of faith—as inescapable for us as it was for the biblical writers.
And those ordinary languages were then called upon to do the extraordinary: speak about the boundless Creator.
In fact, the Creator must condescend to our humanity in order to be understood—as any parent will remind us.
Those ancient languages were used to describe God in ways that made sense to the ancient writers—so Yahweh is a shepherd, a king, a warrior, a gardener, and so forth. Those descriptions of God were taken from the surrounding world. God isn’t actually a shepherd, but God cares for Israel the way a shepherd cares for his flock. God isn’t actually a king, but God is like a king.
They use familiar metaphors when speaking of God. They don’t—“poof”—magically take off their cultural lenses. No one does.
To do so would be to cease being human, which I don’t believe God is asking any of us to do.
the only means they had at their disposal for talking about God were the language and the thoughts of that point in the human drama that they happened to occupy.
Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension. Perhaps accepting that paradox is true faith.
Psalm 68—to take a quick example—says that God rides upon the clouds (verse 4), an image also used to describe the ancient Canaanite storm god Baal. I don’t mind saying that I don’t think God rides a chariot across the sky to make weather or for any other reason—but the ancient Israelites certainly seemed to. Or at least they found the metaphor helpful. But I don’t.
This doesn’t make the ancient Israelites “wrong” or “unsophisticated.” It makes them human. Neither should it make us snobs who think we “get it” more than others. We, too, are human, seeing God from the limitations of our own time and place in ways we probably don’t even realize.
And just like their ancient neighbors with their own religions, the Israelites believed that their national god was the highest and best among all the gods. But as Moses’s warning illustrates, these other gods nevertheless had a purpose. And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven. But the LORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron-smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very
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“Worshiping the sun, moon, and stars is what I set up for all the other nations. But you, Israel, are mine. You worship me only.” At least here, it seems as though God really doesn’t have a problem with other religions for other people.
To use the technical language, the Israelites were not monotheists in the strict sense of the word, but monolatrists: they worshiped one God, but believed in the existence of many gods.*
The Israelites of long ago believed that other gods really, actually existed and that these real, actual gods could do real, actual things to them—like withhold rain, give victory to the enemy, or send a plague of locusts. I can understand how odd this “one God among many gods” idea may sound, but it’s the Bible itself that drove the idea home for me—one
Around the year 850 BCE, almost one hundred years after Israel split into the northern and southern kingdoms, King Mesha of Moab rebelled against the north.
and an unnamed king of nearby Edom,
The outnumbered Moabites were pinned inside a walled city.
After Mesha sacrifices his son, we read: And great wrath came upon Israel, so they [the Israelite-led coalition] withdrew from him [Mesha] and returned to their own land (2 Kings 3:27).*
Mesha’s rebellion is about as far back in time for us as about the year 4900 CE is forward in time.
But gods are fickle beings. Your comfort is not high on their priority list, and they can turn on you for reasons that would keep mortals guessing. One thing is for sure, however. When things were going badly for a nation, that meant one or more of its gods was clearly displeased and needed to be appeased by an offering, normally slitting an animal’s throat and burning it on a stone altar.
The biblical storyteller not only is clearly on board with the idea that Mesha’s sacrifice worked, but didn’t even feel the need to explain the concept to his readers. Neither does the writer explain why Yahweh didn’t interfere at that point and give the Israelites a glorious victory despite the sacrifice. I mean, I would expect to read, “And yet, Chemosh was still powerless to stop Israel’s Yahweh-backed victory.” Perhaps Yahweh didn’t want to back a coalition led by the northern kingdom (the writers of 1 and 2 Kings have nothing good to say about the north).
the writer accepted without explanation or hesitation the notion that other gods actually exist, can be appeased, and have the power to affect the course of human affairs. It’s just a given.
For Iron Age humans, the thought that all those higher
powers vying for human devotion didn’t actually exist would have been as nonsensical as it would be for someone to tell us, “Oh, those other banks aren’t real. And those other ATMs don’t actually spit out money. They are empty. There are no other banking options.”
The Israelites certainly believed other gods existed, but Yahweh alone was to be worshiped because he was the best god.
The Nile deity Hapi was
Because the Egyptian goddess of fertility and childbirth, Heqet, is depicted
with the head of a (wait for it) frog.
This is the first of the Ten Commandments, and it’s good and proper to start with the most important one, which reiterates what just happened in Egypt. But having no other gods before Yahweh (meaning “in preference to” Yahweh) is
a command that only has force if real live divine options are available.
Yahweh alone delivered the Israelites from slavery and so he alone is to be worshiped (monolatry). This command preps the Israelites for the next stage of their journey—when they enter the land of Canaan with its own lineup of deities, like the storm and war god Baal and the fertility goddess Asherah (mentioned all over the place, especially in 1 and 2 Kings).
God’s jealousy isn’t a petty, pouting, brooding kind of resentment or bitterness because your dream guy, whom you’ll love till the day you die, doesn’t know you’re alive and asked someone else to the county fair. God’s jealousy is more like what a spouse might feel if the other breaks the marriage
vow—which is why worshiping other gods is sometimes depicted in the Old Testament as adultery.
Yahweh is deemed worthy of worship not because he is the only God and the Israelites have no other options, but because he isn’t and they do. This is how the Israelites imagined their God, as the best in a world of many gods.
God among many gods” idea shows up, but they will have to do.* Let me simply sum up by saying that the biblical authors speak of God in ways that reflect their experience in a world where many gods are a given.
The first is looking down on this ancient view of God as simply “wrong.” The other is elevating this view off
the pages of history, of taking it as timeless and “correct” because it’s in the Bible. We respect these sacred texts best not by taking them as the final word on what God is like, but by accepting them as recording for us genuine experiences of God for the Israelites and trying to understand why they would describe God as they do.
God met the ancient Israelites on their terms, in their time and place, ste...
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The ancient ways the Bible describes God drive us to work through what God is like for our own time and place. And, as I’ve been saying, that process is an act of wisdom, of asking, “What is God like? What God do we truly believe in?”
In the Bible we see a lot of bloody physical violence that God either commits, commands others to do, or silently watches as they do. That violence can take many forms, but mass killing, sending plagues, and starving people are among the most common and can be inflicted on anyone including God’s own people, the Israelites.
Moses, however, gets the tribe of Levi to go through the camp and kill three thousand of the unfaithful. Yahweh seems pleased, or at least he doesn’t comment (Exod. 32).
to remember that how any of us, including the biblical writers, see God is inextricably connected to our human experience.
As I mentioned earlier, whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers. And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, “Is this what God is like?”
Likewise, the curses of Deuteronomy don’t reflect what God is now and always like, but reflect the harsh realities of Judah’s political struggles with the Assyrians.
To put it another way, the problem of divine violence becomes far less of a problem when we remember why some
biblical writers portray God violently. They are making sense of God with the ancient vocabulary available to them in their world. And like most things in the Bible, God is presented in diverse ways along with the changing experiences of the ancient Israelites and then the first followers of Jesus.
I don’t believe that the God of galaxies, light-years, and dark matter fights battles with other gods or has heavenly board meetings, or that other gods exist that can effectively be appeased by child sacrifice to win local skirmishes. Nor do I believe God passes out violent retribution like he’s sowing grass seed. I do believe that the Israelites at some point believed these things about God. They imagined God in the only way that God would make sense to them—through the language and concepts of their time and place.
images of God as a potter or king, though relatively innocent, are no less culturally conditioned images of God than are “Yahweh is the best God among all the gods” or “Yahweh tends to solve conflicts through violence.” They all reflect the cultural language used for God at the time.
How else could anyone talk about God? Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.
