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by
Peter Enns
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February 23 - April 18, 2019
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.
That’s how the Bible was born. Out of crisis. 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?”
I don’t want to use an inappropriate analogy, but God’s willingness to give the Ninevites a chance to repent while they were at the height of their destructive power might be compared to giving Stalin a chance to repent while he was starving millions of Russian farmers or Hitler while he was slaughtering millions of Jews.
So, Jonah wanted nothing to do with these godless warmongering bullies for fear they might actually listen and repent.
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?
Jonah and Nahum clearly see the matter of God’s attitude toward the Ninevites differently, and the reason is . . . wait for it . . . they were written at different times and under different circumstances for different purposes.
The author knew as well as everyone else that Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire had actually fallen. Had the Assyrians actually repented, it would have amounted to a mass shift in religious commitment and political strategy, which would have been big news (“Assyrians bow the knee to Israel’s God. Hostilities cease. Film at 11:00”). But nothing of the sort is known from any ancient record, Assyrian or otherwise. It strains credulity.
It’s a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.
And so the writer of Jonah told a story of God’s expansive mercy for non-Israelites; in other words, maybe God cares for other people 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.
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.
Because 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.
To make a long story short, 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, with your kings leading the way.” In other words, these books interpret events of history and pronounce a guilty verdict on Judah.
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 some...
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And these books answer a different question altogether, not “What did we do to deserve this?” but “After all this time, is God still with us?”
Seeing how these late postexilic Jews reprocessed their entire history is for me (and I’m not kidding), the most exciting part of the Old Testament, because 1 and 2 Chronicles are nothing less than one big act of reimagining God,
King Manasseh appears in 2 Kings 21:1–18, where he is absolutely the wickedest loser king in the entire Bible.
Manasseh was so wicked that the author credits him entirely for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians a few generations later.
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.
So what caused the national exile according to 2 Chronicles if not Manasseh’s sins? The people were at fault. They followed the repentant Manasseh in restricting their worship to Yahweh alone, yet they continued to worship Yahweh by sacrificing at the high places, altars erected here and there, rather than in the Temple alone. This author couldn’t ignore the exile, but he did give it a different cause. The people were to blame, not Manasseh.
symbolic retelling of Judah’s exile and return home after the captives had learned their lesson and repented of their sins.
God treats you as you deserve. 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 also how Manasseh is described in 2 Chronicles.
When will God restore them to their former glory?! When will they once again experience God’s favor and blessing?! Those were the active questions of their day.
Seeing the Bible as a book of wisdom, which doesn’t hand us answers but invites us to accept our journey of faith with courage and humility, is a new idea, I suspect, for some reading this book.
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.
Those who have a hard time with the God of the Bible can’t be dismissed as faithless rebels against God’s word. Some want to have faith—but they also want to have integrity. They live here and now, not there and then, yet they have this ancient Bible and a Christian faith bound fast to it, and the way forward feels like walking on a razor’s edge between two options—belief in the absurd God or belief that the idea of God is absurd.
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?
In fact, “What is God like?” is the wisdom question around which all others revolve, the question that is ever before us, as each successive generation tries to pass on the faith of the past, which comes to us from an ancient time and in an ancient book, to the next generation that occupies its own unique moment in time and space.
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.
And to give a preview of where I’m going with all this, not only in this chapter but in the ones to follow, 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. And that process of reimagination began, as we’ve already seen, within the pages of the Bible itself.
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.
And, once again, the Bible—simply by being its ancient, ambiguous, and diverse self—invites us to engage this God question for ourselves. Even here, where the topic is the very nature of God, the Bible simply doesn’t let us sit back as spectators, but summons us on a journey of wisdom along with the biblical writers themselves who trod this same path long before.
So even on that most basic level of language, God is known through our human experience. In fact, the Creator must condescend to our humanity in order to be understood—as any parent will remind us. Parents have to stoop down to their children’s level to speak into their world. Expecting children to operate at their parents’ level is bad parenting.
God alone is God, so the words and thoughts we use can never be equated with God; when we make that false equation, we are actually limiting God.
Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension.
The Israelites believed something about God that would get some of us in very hot water today if we uttered the thought in polite Christian company. As we saw earlier, just like every other ancient people of biblical times, the Israelites believed that many gods existed and that their God (Yahweh) was one of them. Not “the only God,” but one of the gods.
Translation: “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.”
What made the Israelites different from their neighbors, religiously speaking, was their belief that only Yahweh, and not any of the other gods (heavenly bodies included), was worthy of their worship.
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.
And all of this leads me to my point for bringing up the wild and wacky world of Iron Age religion. 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.
Yes, Virginia, other gods do exist—at least the Israelites thought so, along with all their ancient neighbors. That notion takes some getting used to for us, but it might (or might not) help to remember that the ancient biblical writer really had no choice about what to make of Mesha’s last-minute rescue.
The Israelites certainly believed other gods existed, but Yahweh alone was to be worshiped because he was the best god. How they thought and wrote about their God was absolutely shaped by the world in which they lived—which is a very different world from ours.
Yahweh’s opening move in the first plague is to turn the Nile to blood. Impressive, yes, but also brimming with religious significance. The Nile was the reason Egypt existed at all—its yearly flooding of the banks allowed for life in an otherwise barren land.
In the second plague, Yahweh multiplies frogs all over Egypt. Okay. Whatever. Why not something more threatening, like puppies? Why frogs? Because the Egyptian goddess of fertility and childbirth, Heqet, is depicted with the head of a (wait for it) frog.
The Israelites did believe Yahweh conquered the Egyptian gods—and if we bury that lede, we miss the point of this ancient story.
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.
My main point, however, is that for Yahweh to be jealous about sharing his people with other gods, all concerned parties need to be operating on the same assumption, namely, that Yahweh actually has something to be jealous about.
All I want to say here is that 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.
We follow the lead of these writers not by simply reproducing how they imagined God for their time, but by reimagining God for ourselves in our time, which for us (as we’ll get to later) includes taking into account the Christian story as well. In doing so, we will necessarily commune with God differently with respect to those who went before.
