Session
22
In
the final product of Hebrew Scriptures one can note that there aren’t always
smooth transitions in story lines. Why
tell and retell the creation story in different ways and place them right next
to each other? There was reluctance of a
later editor to leave early sources out and so both stories were preserved side
by side. Modern persons think that
writing is the work of one identifiable person who owns a text as copyrighted
intellectual property. This notion can
be naively projected upon God as the inspiring author and upon a supposed
single oracle such as the person of Moses.
A more fitting metaphor for Hebrew Scriptures is the quilt: material from
various cloth events of a family’s past are retained in an overall new quilt to
serve the current need of family for warmth using pieces of cloth from the
past. Modern people are too hung up on
the singular author but the way Hebrew Scriptures are put together reveal them
to be a continuous writing and editing process within the communities. The writings belong to a living community and
the fact that the writing indicates a tendency to conserve even if there seems
to be contradiction is an indication of the honesty of the writing tradition.
How
are we going to conserve our traditions so that our children can know our
connection with our ancestors and why we are who we are? Writing was a technology of preservation in
times when a people’s stability could become unsettled. Please note that living in the Diaspora or
away from Israel has been the normal nomadic experience for Jewish peoples throughout
their history. This early community
experience of living away from homeland only has enhanced the importance and
the critical factor in the maintenance of their community identity.
As
we look at the growing specificity in the stories of the patriarchs of
antiquity, we can begin to look at how a community of
teachers/writers/scribes/priests is trying to cite relationship of current
practice with the ancient pre-historic stories of antiquity. As we anticipate how the writers of the New
Testament will use the Hebrew Scriptures I would like to introduce a model of
the spiral or coil. Imagine historic
events as a rising spiral or coil. A
place on a higher ring of a coil lines up with a place on a lower previous
coil. History does not actually repeat
itself, but the sameness of the themes of human events recurs in a cyclical
way. When one is tracing textual
traditions one sees the recurrence of themes.
And so a previous event then predicts or anticipates the recurrence of a
similar event or the understanding of an event. Example in the Bible: miraculous or unique
birth traditions for great persons.
Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, John
the Baptist, and Jesus are in this story genre tradition. If a person is great in the Bible, they had to
have the signs of this known before they ever actually did deeds of
greatness. The marvelous birth tradition
accompanies how one tells the story of a great person. This is a motif of story-telling traditions
in the Bible. It is a marvelous literary
tradition but not to be confused with modern journalistic writing. We cannot impose the methods of modern
journalist writing upon the writers of the Bible. It only confuses the writing purposes of
both.
In
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, sons of Jacob and Joseph as the twelve tribes of Israel
we have the stories still in the mist of prehistory of antiquity that are used
to see traces of the precedents for subsequent religious, ritual, social and
legal customs of the community.
In
this cycle of stories the theme of covenant is further developed. How does the story get from the Garden of
Eden to the area we know to be Palestine?
It happens when Abram is called to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees
(Iraq) and travel west. Abram and his wife
Sarai are childless but in the hero cycle the hero is one who is able to
receive direct and specific voice message from this One God. Just imagine the psychological judgments that
we moderns would place upon people who regularly hear the voice of God in such
specific ways. Do you see how unique and
infrequent this kind of communication has to be regarded in understanding a
tradition? What if everyone was chosen
and heard voices to go and move around?
We also know that the religious leaders today who claim to hear God’s
voice so clearly are often part of communities who practice behaviors that put
them at great odds with some of the commonsense realities of modern sciences.
With
Abram we have a further covenant. God is
going to bless the world through Abram’s offspring even though he and his wife
Sarai are old and childless. The
covenant promise is ritually sealed through an animal sacrifice. In these story cycles we see the precedents
for the full-blown practice of animal sacrifices in the Temple. Obviously the priests and the Priestly
writing tradition would be interested in developing the primeval origins of the
sacrificial tradition. It started with
Adam and Eve; remember Abel the shepherd gave a lamb. It continues with Noah and with Abram. Abram loses his faith in believing that he
will have a son with Sarai, so Sarai gives her maid Hagar to conceive a child
with Abram. Ishmael is born; Sarai is
jealous and Ishmael and Hagar are forced into the desert, but God speaks to
Hagar (so in the Bible the tradition of the Arab people come through Abram but
the covenant to the Arabs come by the voice of God to Hagar when the covenant is
made to her son Ishmael). Abram after
many problems, like having a problem relative in Lot (got Abram in lot of
trouble in Sodom and Gomorrah) and a run-in
with a Pharoah where Abram actually pimps his wife in presenting his wife Sarai to the
Pharoah as his “sister,” and finally Abram and Sarai have a son, Isaac and they get
their names changed to Abraham and Sarah.
The covenant comes to fulfillment in a marvelous birth. The covenant is ratified with God with two
further “blood” rituals. The
circumcisions of Ishmael and Isaac continue the symbol or a permanent marking on the
males in Abraham’s line that they are sons of this covenant. The next “blood” ritual is when Abraham is
tested by God; God tells him to sacrifice his only son (do you see a theme that was adopted in Christian theology?) in the land of Moriah.
Abraham takes his son to obey God and God’s angel only intervenes when the
knife is lifted and ready to be plunged into Isaac who is tied to an
altar. God’s angel allows that a ram can
be sacrificed as a replacement for Isaac.
The place of this sacrifice is supposed to be the very place of the
first temple in Jerusalem and it is the place over which the Islamic Mosque the
Dome of the Rock now stands.
Exercise:
Notice
how our society is so used to this stories from Scriptures even while our in
our modern practice we would judge these practices as primitive and
barbaric. What kind of God would tell a
parent to sacrifice their child? What
kind of Father would even hear such a voice say such a thing? Today we disagree about the necessity of
circumcision. But remember the spiral of
history and tradition; themes return. We
look at the present in light of what was similar in the past. What parent in Christianity sacrificed his
only son? Do you see how the Abraham
Isaac story provided the templates for early followers of Jesus to understand
the significance of his life?
If
we think this coil of history is silly just think about our own way of
processing current events. If one speaks
of Roger Maris one speaks about Babe Ruth.
We talk about the importance of hitting lots of homeruns because of Babe
Ruth. Same with golf; when we speak of Tiger
Woods, we speak of Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklas. Why? We
see and understand the significance of present through the past. The past templates can even seem to predict
the present events. We need to
understand this dynamic to understand the Bible.
Father
Phil
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