God's Problem (14 page)

Every time I read this passage I imagine an heiress to millions sitting in a lounge chair by her outdoor pool, asking her “dawlin’ husband” for another daiquiri.

Why are these “cows of Bashan” to take notice of Amos’s reproach? Because their end will not be pleasant:

Amos thinks that those who oppress the poor will be punished by God, when the enemy attacks the city, destroys its walls, and takes its wealthy inhabitants away, through the breaches in the wall, in single file, not linked together by chains around the wrists, but by massive hooks through their mouths. It is a vicious image, one that portrays the prophetic view of God’s punishment graphically. But what about the
reasons
for the punishment? It is not God who oppresses the poor and needy. It is the rich. Suffering comes not only from God but also from others.

The other prophets we have examined agree. For Isaiah it is the rulers of the people who are especially culpable: “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after it. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them” (Isa. 1:23). Or again:

So too the prophet Jeremiah:

God may get the last word, punishing the sinners. But in the meantime, the hungry go hungry, the needy are made needier, the poor get poorer, the defenseless have no one to defend them. This is suffering caused not by God but by people.

The Consequences of Sin in the Historical Books

When people today say that the Bible is a “very human book,” they tend to mean something about its authorship and ultimate authority—that rather than coming from the hands of God, it comes from human authors, authors with different views, perspectives, biases, ideas, likes, dislikes, and contexts. Others, of course, think that the
Bible is a “completely divine” book, meaning, in most cases, that ultimately it is God who is behind the writing of the various books of prophecy, history, poetry, and so on. Wherever people stand on that theological question, there is one sense in which I think everyone can agree that the Bible is a very human book. Its historical sections contain numerous accounts of people who act in all-too-human ways, sometimes living righteously but also sometimes sinning with gusto, not just striving to please God but also striving to oppose him with all their being, not just seeking to help others but also trying to hurt, oppress, maim, mutilate, torture, and kill others. The biblical authors did not shy away from presenting human existence as it is, and much of the time the resultant picture is not attractive.

Apart from religious faux pas like committing idolatry or breaking the sabbath, most “sins” in Scripture involve people harming other people. Most of the Ten Commandments involve personal relations: Israelites are not to murder one another (it is apparently all right to murder Canaanites), to steal from one another, or to want very much to steal (covet) someone’s donkey or wife (these laws are patriarchally oriented, and women are often seen as the “property” of men). The historical narratives deal with violations of these laws and many others like them.

The first act of disobedience committed by human beings, of course, did not directly harm anyone else. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. The results of this disobedience were bad: they were driven from the garden, the descendants of the woman were to experience excruciating pain during childbirth, and the descendants of the man were doomed to toil and labor with the sweat of their brow to provide adequate food. But these results were
punishments
for the sin; the sin itself had no effect on anyone else. Of course, there wasn’t anyone else around to affect, but that’s a different matter.

Also a different matter is what happened next. The primeval couple has two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain becomes a farmer and Abel a shepherd, and they both bring offerings to God from the fruit of their labor (Gen. 4). God prefers the animal sacrifice of Abel
to the grain sacrifice of Cain (for some unexplained reason); Cain is angry (as one might understand) and decides to do something about it. Rather than make a second attempt with an animal sacrifice, he decides to sacrifice his brother, in a sense, and out of anger rises up and murders him (Gen. 4). In the context of the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, this can be seen as a kind of natural outcome of the first act of disobedience in the garden. Sin leads to sin, and the more heinous comes on the heels of the less. Why is Cain’s fratricide more heinous than his parents’ tasting of the fruit? Because Adam and Eve sinned against God, but Cain sinned against both God and his brother. Abel is the first direct victim of sin, brutally murdered by his own brother. The stage is set for the human drama. From here on out, sin will be a matter affecting not only human beings’ relationship with God, but also their relationship with others, the objects of their willful and violent acts.

Such stories continue, of course, to the end of Genesis and on through the other historical narratives of Scripture. At the beginning of the next book, Exodus, when the twelve sons of Jacob have become a great nation in the land of Egypt, they are enslaved and put into forced-labor camps. They are under whip and lash, compelled to build cities of brick, eventually having to find their own building materials and being severely punished for not keeping production levels high. Jewish midwives are ordered to murder every newborn male to prevent the proliferation of the race (Exod. 1). All of this comes not as punishment for the sins of Israel but as a direct consequence of having “a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph” (Exod. 1:8), one who was ruthless in his designs.

It is not just the godless outsiders who cause suffering, though. Once the Israelites are brought out of their slavery in Egypt, they are given the promised land—a gift difficult to accept, of course, since someone already inhabited the land. To be “given” it meant taking it by force. And so the Israelite attack begins with the fortified city of Jericho, whose walls are demolished and whose entire population is slaughtered—every man, woman, and child in the
city (Josh. 6). Now you might think that this is the judgment of God against the city and its inhabitants, but nothing in the text actually indicates this. The entire point of the narrative is that God wanted the children of Israel to inhabit the land, and to do so they had to get rid of the previous inhabitants. But what about the innocents in Jericho, the two-year-old girls toddling around their yards and their six-month-old brothers? Slaughtered on the spot. For the God of Israel, evidently, this was not a sin.

But the same cannot be said of the slaughter of other infants—for example, in the most famous instance from the New Testament, when the coming of the infant Lord into the world leads to the so-called slaughter of the innocents. The story is told only in Matthew (recall: I’m dealing here with biblical understandings of suffering—
not
with what “actually” happened; there is, in fact, no evidence that this event took place historically). After Jesus’ birth the wise men come looking for him, led by a star (which evidently is giving them only general cues at first, since they have to make inquiries). When King Herod discovers that a new king has been born, he is understandably distressed; it is his throne, after all, that is up for grabs. In an attempt to circumvent the divine will, he sends for the troops and instructs them to murder every boy two years and younger in Bethlehem. They do as the king demands, and there was much weeping and wailing:

Originally, this saying referred to the time when the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed and its inhabitants exiled by the Assyrians—a time of much wailing over the loss of human life. Matthew, however, sees the text as being “fulfilled” in the events surrounding
Jesus’ birth. To that extent, one might look upon Herod’s murderous actions as a kind of fulfillment of prophecy—that is, as according to the divine will. But there is nothing to suggest that these poor infants of Bethlehem had it coming to them. This is human brutality of the highest order.