God's Problem (10 page)

Throughout the book of Joshua, the armies of Israel succeed whenever they obey the divine directives. When they deviate from these directives in even minor ways, God punishes them with defeat (for example, in the battle of Ai in Joshua 7). It should be understood that I am not discussing what
actually
happened when a group of exiles from Egypt entered the land of Canaan and took up residence there. Historians have long wrangled over the historical realities behind these stories—there is no archaeological evidence, for example, to support the claim of the complete destruction of Jericho in the thirteenth century BCE.
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What I am interested in here is how the Deuteronomistic historian himself thought about these events. In his view, success came to the people of Israel when they obeyed God; setbacks occurred when they disobeyed. In fact, the setbacks were rather severe. People suffered horribly if they did not do what God instructed them to do.

The same idea drives the book of Judges, which describes how the twelve tribes of Israel lived in the promised land before there was a king who ruled them all. This two-hundred-year period is portrayed as somewhat chaotic, but one theme dominates the account. When Israel was faithful to God, it thrived; when it departed from God, for example, by worshiping the gods of the other inhabitants of the land (the Israelite armies had failed to annihilate everyone), then God punished them. This overarching view can be seen in the summary of the period given at the very beginning of the book, in a description of what generally happened when the children of Israel began worshiping “the Baals”—that is, the local divinities of the Canaanites:

Whenever this happened—and it happens continually throughout the book of Judges—God raised up a ruler in one part or another of the land, rulers called judges, who would do his will and restore to his people freedom from foreign oppression. And so here we get stories of such figures as Ehud, the prophetess Deborah, Gideon, and the he-man Samson. The history of the time is stated succinctly in the last line of the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (21:25). Unfortunately, what was right in their eyes was not what was right in God’s, and so the book is filled with incidents of foreign oppression and domination.

The final judge was Samuel, and the books of 1 and 2 Samuel are devoted to showing the transition from the period of local (and chaotic) autonomy among the tribes of Israel to the period of the monarchy. Samuel is directed by God to anoint a king who will rule over his people. The Deuteronomistic History gives mixed reports about whether Israel’s demand for a king was a good thing, in line with God’s will, or an evil thing that he only grudgingly granted. First to be king is Saul, who is alternately portrayed as a good and godly ruler and a bad and ungodly one. Because of Saul’s defects, God appoints Samuel to anoint another king, the young David, who after a number of conflicts with Saul (recounted in 1 Samuel), and after Saul’s own death in battle, becomes God’s chosen king over all the people. This introduces a kind of golden age for ancient Israel, when the territories it ruled were extensive and when foreign powers such as Egypt and Assyria were not yet intent on dominating the region (2 Samuel). The age continued through the reign of Solomon, described in 1 Kings. Once again the Deuteronomistic narrator sets the tone for Solomon’s reign, in a word of God that comes to him:

As it turns out, Solomon proves not to be faithful to God. As was true for many powerful rulers before and after him, his downfall came because of his love life. We are told that Solomon had more than a thousand wives and concubines (11:3). This in itself was not a problem in a period in which polygamy was widely practiced, and it was not condemned by the Law of Moses (to the surprise of many readers today). The problem was that “King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women” (11:1). God had ordered the Israelites to be married and sexually involved only with Israelites. And the reason becomes evident in the case of Solomon. His foreign wives induce him to worship their gods. God becomes angry and vows that “I will surely tear the kingdom from you.” And this is what happens. Solomon’s son Rehoboam takes the throne after his death, but the tribes in the northern part of the land decide to secede from the union and start a nation of their own under a rival king, Jeroboam.

The rest of 1 and 2 Kings describes the reigns of the various kings in Israel (the north) and in Judah (the south), until both kingdoms are destroyed by Mesopotamian superpowers. The success of each king, in the eyes of the Deuteronomistic historian, depended not on his political savvy or diplomatic skills, but on his faithfulness to God. Those who obey God are blessed; those who disobey are cursed. Finally the disobedience grows so prominent that God decides to destroy the northern kingdom. The author of 2 Kings is explicit about what led to the Assyrian de
struction of the capital city of Samaria, and the entire northern kingdom with it:

A century and a half later, the wicked and godless kings of Judah were similarly rejected by God, and that nation too was destroyed, this time by the armies of Babylonia that had in the meantime conquered mighty Assyria. Again, for this author, the crushing military defeat and the massive suffering it produced were not the result of political missteps or poor troop strength; Judah was destroyed by God for disobeying his commandments:

The Jewish Sacrifice System

We have seen just how dominant the so-called classical view of suffering is. The idea that suffering comes to the people of God as a result of disobedience is found not only throughout the prophets, both major and minor, but also in traditional Israelite “Wisdom” literature (the book of Proverbs) and in the historical books of Scripture (e.g., the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History). In fact, it goes even deeper, into the very heart of the religion of ancient Israel.

Today, many people in our Western world (especially where I live, in the American South) think of religion as a matter of belief: to be sure, religion involves rituals of worship and affects how a person lives, but at heart, religion is a matter of what one believes about God, or about Christ, or about salvation, or about the Bible, and so forth. In ancient Israel, however—as in nearly all ancient societies—religion was not principally a matter of correct belief. Religion was about worshiping God properly. And proper worship was a matter of performing sacred rituals in divinely ordained ways (this was true of ancient pagan religions as well). In particular, the religion of Israel was a religion of sacrifice.

In the Torah, God directs the ancient Israelites to make sacrifices of animals and other foodstuffs to him (see Leviticus 1–7). Modern scholars find the laws of sacrifice complex and confusing, and there is considerable debate over what kinds of sacrifices there were (“sin” offerings, “guilt” offerings, “burnt” offerings, “wave” offerings, and so forth—all of these are discussed in the Torah), how they were performed, and how they actually “worked.”
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One thing, however, appears clear. Some of the sacrifices that were to be offered by Israelite priests in the designated holy place (for example, the ancient Tabernacle; or later, after the days of Solomon, in the Jewish Temple) were made as an atonement for sin. That is, when people either collectively or individually had violated God’s law, and thereby fallen out of his favor, God had provided a way for
them to make restitution: by offering a sacrifice. The basic idea behind this form of sacrifice is that there is a punishment (i.e., divine suffering) appointed for those who violate God’s will; when the appropriate sacrifice is offered, this punishment is rescinded.

This appears clearly to be the case for what Leviticus calls “burnt offerings” (“it shall be acceptable on your behalf as atonement for you”; Lev. 1:4; cf. Job 1:5); for “sin” offerings (“thus the priest shall make atonement on your behalf for the sin that you have committed, and you shall be forgiven”; Lev. 4:35); and for the “guilt” offering (“the priest shall make atonement on your behalf with the ram of the guilt offering, and you shall be forgiven”; Lev. 5:16).

Because sin brings horrible judgment in the manifestation of God’s wrath, this wrath needs to be averted. It is averted by the proper sacrifice of an animal. It is not clear, as I’ve said, how the sacrifice actually “works.” Does the animal substitute for the human being, who now no longer needs to be slaughtered because the animal has been? (See Gen. 22:1–14.) Or is some other, more complicated logic at work?
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Whatever the answer to the question of mechanics, the Israelite temple cult was focused on sacrifice as a way of restoring a lost relationship with God, broken by disobedience. Thus, the classical view of suffering—disobedience leads to punishment—lay at the very heart of the ancient Israelite religion.

Eventually within the history of Israel this notion that one being (an animal) could be a sacrifice for another (a human being) took on symbolic proportions. This, as we will see, was to become very important for early Christians, whose understanding of the death of Jesus was sometimes expressed as the “perfect” sacrifice for sins (see Hebrews 9–10 in the New Testament). It is important to realize, however, that Christians did not invent the idea that the suffering of one could lead to the forgiveness of another. This idea was rooted in ancient Israel itself, as seen in particular in the writings of a prophet active in the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586
BCE.
Because the writings of this prophet were later combined (on
the same scroll) with those of Isaiah of Jerusalem, who lived 150 years or so earlier, he is commonly known as Second Isaiah.
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Substitutionary Sacrifice in Second Isaiah

Historians have used several sources in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 25; Jer. 52) to reconstruct how the southern kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians.
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Torn between the competing demands of the Egyptian empire to the south and the Babylonian empire to the northeast, the Judean king Zedekiah made a fateful decision to align himself with the former. The Babylonian armies under King Nebuchadrezzar marched against Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem for eighteen months, causing severe hardship and starvation in the city. Eventually the walls were breached, the opposition killed, and the holy Temple (built by Solomon some four hundred years earlier) destroyed. Zedekiah tried to escape but was captured: Nebuchadrezzar had the king’s sons slaughtered before his eyes, then gouged out his eyes and led him back as a captive to Babylon. Many of the elite members of Jerusalem’s aristocracy were led off to captivity as well (the thinking was that they could not foment a rebellion away from their homeland). It is in that context that Second Isaiah utters his proclamation.

For well over a hundred years now, scholars have realized that chapters 40–55 of the book of Isaiah could not come from the author who wrote (most of) the first thirty-nine chapters. Those earlier chapters presuppose a situation in which Assyria is set to attack Judah—that is, they were written in the eighth century
BCE.
Chapters 40–55, on the other hand, presuppose a situation in which the southern kingdom had been destroyed and its people taken into exile—that is, the mid-sixth century
BCE.
Perhaps because the two books have similar prophetic themes, someone at a later date combined them into one scroll, adding as well chapters 56–66 from a yet later prophet (Third Isaiah) writing in still another context.