God's Problem (15 page)

One that matches it for sheer horror comes to us from the historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible, that infamous chapter 19 of Judges. There is a man from the tribe of Levi who lived in the northern part of the land, in Ephraim. He has a concubine—a kind of “wife” of secondary legal standing—who gets angry, apparently at how he has treated her, and returns to her home in Bethlehem in Judah. After four months, the man goes off to retrieve her, tracks her down, and stays for a few days in her father’s house before heading home with her. On the way back, they need to find a place to stay the night and decide to try the town of Gibeah, north of Jerusalem, in the territory of Benjamin. They are taken in by a stranger, an old man who has seen them and offered hospitality.

And then the horror begins. After dark, “the men of the city, a perverse lot, surrounded the house, and started to pound on the door” (Judg. 19:22). They demand that the old man send his visitor outside so that they can gang-rape him. This would be not only a sexual crime but also a social one: by ancient codes of hospitality, by bringing the Levite under his roof the old man has responsibility for him and can’t let him suffer. The concubine and the old man’s virgin daughter are another story. They are, after all, merely women. The old man shouts to the townspeople through the door, “No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Since this man is my guest, do not do this vile thing. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do whatever you want to them; but against this man do not do such a vile thing” (Judg. 19:23–24). The men outside, however, want the visitor. To save his own skin, the Levite grabs his concubine and thrusts her out the door. And then the unspeakable happens. The men of the city “wantonly raped her, and abused her all through the night until the morning.” In the morning,
she crawls up onto the doorstep and there, evidently, she dies of the abuse (or at least loses consciousness).

The Levite gets out of bed—we’re not told, but evidently he had a decent night’s sleep—and prepares to go on his way. He goes outside, sees his concubine there, and tells her, “Get up, we are going.” When he sees that she is dead, he loads her on his donkey and returns to his home. And then the truly bizarre event of the narrative takes place. The Levite takes a knife and cuts the concubine into twelve pieces, limb from limb, and sends the pieces by messenger to the leaders of each of the twelve tribes of Israel, in order to show what has happened. This evidently is a call to war. The tribes gather together to attack the tribe of Benjamin, within which this crime has occurred, and in the ensuing war they nearly destroy the entire tribe (Judg. 20–21).

The Deuteronomistic historian who recounts this tale does so, in part, to show the rank immorality and unspeakable evil that transpired in the land “when there was no king in Israel” (Judg. 19:1). He will go on, in the chapters that follow, to show how God intervened to provide a king for his people, in part to control their sinful inclinations.

But not even the kings could bring sin under control. The degradation associated with human abuse of others continues under the kings—in fact, it is caused even by the kings themselves. And so there is the story of David and Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11). From the roof of his palace in Jerusalem David sees a beautiful woman, Bathsheba, bathing next door. He wants to have her, and since he is the king, no one can stop him. She is brought into the palace, they have sex, and as fate would have it, she becomes pregnant. The problem, of course, is that she is already married to someone else, and not only that, but this someone else, a man named Uriah, is off at war, fighting battles as a faithful soldier for his good king David, who has secretly seduced his wife. What is David to do? If word gets out, there will be a scandal, since Uriah himself is obviously not responsible for his wife’s pregnancy (it’s been a long war).

David hatches a plan to bring Uriah back from the front lines for a brief furlough—just long enough for him to have sex with Bathsheba. But faithful soldier that he is, Uriah refuses to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh while his colleagues are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. A frustrated David decides that Uriah has to die, and he makes an arrangement with the general in charge of the troops to put Uriah in the front line and to have everyone else pull back during an attack so that Uriah will be hacked apart by the enemy with no one to help him. It happens. Uriah dies. David marries Bathsheba. And life goes on. But not for Uriah, an innocent killed by a king who couldn’t keep his pants buttoned.

David’s son Solomon is another case in point. Solomon is best known for being the “wisest man ever to have lived” and for his amazing building projects—including most notably, the Temple in Jerusalem, his own palace, and other major undertakings in various cities throughout his realm (1 Kings 6–9). How exactly, though, does a king build so many fine structures? Does he find a subcontractor to hire out the jobs to the lowest bidder? No, not in ancient Israel. These projects are labor-intensive (no land-moving equipment, cranes, or electric tools), and for major work, one needs lots of bodies. And so Solomon provides lots of bodies—by enslaving large numbers of his own people for the job. For the Temple he “conscripted forced labor” to the tune of thirty thousand men, along with seventy thousand other laborers in the hill country, and eighty thousand stonecutters (1 Kings 5:13–18). Later we’re told that these were not actually Israelites, but other peoples—Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—who had not been driven from the land when it was conquered (1 Kings 9:15–22). I think that is supposed to make us feel better about Solomon: he didn’t enslave anyone descended from the tribes of Israel, just people of other ancestry.

The Consequences of Sin in the New Testament

The Christian New Testament, of course, is no stranger to the effects of sinful human behavior on others. The central message of
the New Testament is that Jesus brings a restored relationship with God, and nearly all of its authors understood that it was precisely the crucifixion of Jesus that brought this salvation. Authors like Paul focus on the significance of Jesus’ crucifixion (1 Cor. 2:2; Gal. 3:1), but to the surprise of many modern readers, they say almost nothing about the event itself. Not even the Gospels, which tell stories of Jesus’ life and death, indicate what happened at the crucifixion other than to say “and they crucified him” (see Mark 15:24). This seems odd to people who have seen movies about Jesus—most notoriously, Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
—that, we are told, give an “accurate account” of what the Gospels have to say about Jesus’ death. But in precise
contrast
to the Gospels, such movies focus on the blood and gore, the torture and the torment, the pain and agony—exactly those aspects of Jesus’ death that the Gospel writers never deal with, let alone explicate in long, detailed narratives that give a blow-by-blow account.

One reason the biblical authors do not explain what happened at the crucifixion may be that their readers knew full well what crucifixion meant and how it was done, and so didn’t need to be told about it. It is striking that the Gospel writers are not alone in that. We have
no
detailed descriptions from the ancient world of what it meant for someone to be crucified. And so the modern ideas and portrayals of the crucifixion have to be based on scattered references and allusive statements found here and there in ancient sources.

What we do know is that death by crucifixion was not a happy sight. The Romans reserved this mode of execution for the lowest of criminals and seditionists, individuals they wanted to humiliate and publicly torture to the death as a kind of disincentive to crime and sedition. The Roman view of justice was very different from ours. We are concerned about due process, trial by jury, the possibility of appeal, and that sentences be carried out in private, away from the public eye. The Romans believed in public deterrents. If they had a problem with carjacking (which, of course, they didn’t), they would simply round up a few of the culprits and nail them to crosses in public view, where they would hang for a couple of days
before finally dying in excruciating agony.
Then
see how many people were inclined to rip off a car.

Crucifixion was evidently a death by asphyxiation, not blood loss. A criminal would be fastened either to a wooden upright or to a cross beam that would be attached to an upright, either tied or nailed through the wrists (not through the hands, or the nails might rip out) and sometimes through the feet. This naturally rendered the victim completely helpless against the elements, scavenging birds and animals, torments of thirst, and so on. Death came as the weight of the body forced the torso to distend, making it impossible to breathe. The crucified could relieve the pressure on the lungs by pulling up on the nails in the wrists or pushing up with the ankles. Sometimes a board was provided to sit on. That’s why it could take days for crucifixion to work—and that’s how the Romans wanted it (they, by the way, did not invent this method of execution, although they did use it a lot). The whole idea was to make death as painful, humiliating, and public as possible. Jesus’ death, then, would have been like the death of many, many others in his time; two others were crucified just that morning with him in Jerusalem; we have no idea how many might have died that way at the same time throughout the empire. Or the next day or the day after. Altogether, there were many thousands who suffered the same fate.

In the New Testament, of course, Jesus’ death is seen not simply as the evil workings of an unjust Roman state. It is seen also as the will of God. Nonetheless the New Testament authors were quite insistent that even though God effected something good out of the death of Jesus—something
very
good: the salvation of the world—the people who perpetrated the crime were still responsible. Sin has its ugly consequences in the suffering of others.

The same can be said of other instances of torturous treatments and horrible deaths in the New Testament. In the book of Acts, for example, the first Christian martyr is a man named Stephen who offends the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem and so is stoned to death (Acts 7). Stoning also was not—and is not (it is still practiced in
some places)—a pleasant way to go. Rocks fly in, most of them missing anything vital but all of them causing enormous pain. They break bones and rupture organs, until some finally strike the head with enough force and accuracy to bring unconsciousness and then death.

We have one author who indicates that he was subjected to a stoning but lived to tell the tale—the apostle Paul. In the book of Acts there is a narrative account of Paul being stoned, but critical historians tend to doubt the historical accuracy of Acts’ narratives, since they appear to have been constructed some thirty years after the events they describe by someone who had not witnessed those events. In the Acts account, Paul is preaching the gospel of Christ in the city of Lystra in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) when he incites the anger of his opponents among the non-Christian Jews. They stone him, drag him outside the city, and leave him for dead. After they leave, he gets up and goes on to the next city, as if nothing had happened to him (Acts 14:19–20). This account suits quite well the theological purposes of Acts—in this book nothing can stop Paul, because God is behind him and his mission. You can’t keep a good man down.

Paul himself does allude to the event (or a similar one), but again without explicating the details. In one of the most interesting passages in his letters, Paul is trying to convince his converts in the city of Corinth that he is a true apostle, not because he is filled with supernatural power but because he suffers. A lot. For Paul, the more an apostle suffers, the more he is shown to be a true apostle. Jesus himself, after all, did not lead a charmed life with lots of luxury and popular acclaim. He was rejected, despised, and eventually crucified like a lowly criminal. For Paul, to be an apostle of Christ means to share his fate. He is writing this to the Corinthians because some of them are convinced that the power of God is at work in their midst making them rise above the petty concerns and cares of this world. For Paul, if they have it easy, they are not true apostles. And so Paul emphasizes his suffering:

And he goes on. His point is that suffering shows that he is closely aligned with Christ. For our purposes, his “suffering list” shows that for Paul there was a lot of evil in the world, and that people could not expect to be removed from the wicked and godless behavior of others.

Still other accounts of human pain and misery are intimated in the New Testament. Like the accounts of the crucifixion, they are not narrated at great length, in part because readers of the day may already have known enough for the mere mention of an incident to conjure up a mental image of suffering in extremis. Take, for example, Jesus’ “prediction” in Luke’s Gospel that Jerusalem would one day be besieged and conquered by the Romans: