God's Problem (4 page)

Whenever they were actually written, the books of the Pentateuch contain very ancient understandings of Israel’s relationship to God, the only true God, the one who created the heavens and the earth. Many ancient Israelites took these traditions to be not only historically accurate but theologically significant. According to these traditions, as eventually found in the Pentateuch, God chose Israel to be his special people—even before they had become a people. After the world was created, destroyed by a flood, and reinhabited (Gen. 1–11), God chose one man, Abraham, to be the father of a great nation that would be uniquely tied to the Lord of all. Abraham’s descendants would be specially favored by God and so were thought to be his people. But two generations after Abraham,
his family was forced to enter Egypt to escape famine in the land of Israel. There they multiplied and became a great nation. Out of fear of their size and strength, the Egyptians enslaved the people of Israel, and they suffered miserably as a result.

But God remembered his promise to Abraham that he would be the father of this people, and he raised up a powerful savior, Moses, to deliver them from the hands of the Egyptians. Moses performed many miracles in Egypt to compel the Egyptian Pharaoh to release the people; eventually he was forced to do so and they escaped into the wilderness. Pharaoh then had second thoughts and pursued the children of Israel, but suffered an irreversible defeat at the hands of God, who destroyed Pharaoh and his armies when the Israelites crossed the “Red Sea” (or the “sea of reeds”). God then led the people of Israel to his sacred mountain, Sinai, where he gave Moses the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Jewish law and established his covenant (or “peace treaty”) with them. They would be his covenant people—meaning that he and they had entered into a kind of political agreement, a peace accord, with each other. They would be his chosen people whom he would protect and defend in perpetuity, just as he had done when they were enslaved in Egypt. In exchange, they were to keep his Law, which dictated how they were to worship him (much of the book of Leviticus spells out the details) and how they were to relate to one another as the people of God.

After the Pentateuch comes another set of historical books in the Hebrew Bible: Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel, and the books of Kings. These take the story yet further, showing how God gave the promised land over to Israel (there were already people living there, so the Israelites had to destroy them in war, as described in the book of Joshua); how he ruled them through local charismatic leaders (Judges); how the monarchy was eventually formed (1 Samuel), and what happened during the time of the united kingdom, when both north and south were ruled by one king (under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon), and then in the divided
monarchy, when the kingdom split into two parts, Israel (or Ephraim) in the north and Judah in the south. Among other things, these books detail the disasters that struck the people of Israel over the years, culminating in the destruction of the nation of Israel (the northern kingdom) in 722
BCE
at the hands of the Assyrians, Mesopotamia’s first “world empire,” and the destruction of Judah (the southern kingdom) a century and a half later in 586
BCE
by the Babylonians, who had overthrown the Assyrians.

It is not my purpose here to discuss the historical question of whether any of this—especially the accounts of the Pentateuch—actually happened. Some scholars think that the accounts of Genesis through Deuteronomy are essentially historical in their descriptions, others think they are much later fabrications, and probably the majority think there are some historical roots for these traditions, which developed significantly over time as the stories were told and retold in the course of centuries of oral tradition.
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What is certain is that many ancient Israelites believed such traditions about their ancestors. The people of Israel were the chosen people of God. He had entered into a special relationship with their ancestors; he had delivered them from slavery in Egypt; he had given them his Law; and he had bestowed upon them the promised land. This God was the Lord God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth and sovereign over all that exists. He was powerful and could accomplish his mighty purposes on earth simply by saying the word. And he was on the side of tiny Israel, agreeing to protect and defend his people and to make them prosper in the land he had given them, in exchange for their devotion to him.

Given this theology of election—that God had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him—what were ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as planned or expected? What were they to make of the fact that Israel sometimes suffered military defeat or political setbacks or economic hardship? How were they to explain the fact that the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence? How were they to
explain suffering—not only nationally, but also personally, when they were starved or seriously wounded, when their children were stillborn or born with defects, when they faced grinding poverty or personal loss? If God is the powerful creator, and if he has chosen Israel and promised them success and prosperity, how is one to explain the fact that Israel suffers? Eventually the northern kingdom was utterly destroyed by a foreign nation. How could that be, if God had chosen them to be his people? In another 150 years the southern kingdom was destroyed as well. Why did God not protect and defend it as he had promised?

These were questions naturally asked—fervently asked—by many of the people of Israel. The most resounding answer to the question came from a group of thinkers known as the prophets. To a person, the prophets maintained that Israel’s national sufferings came because it had disobeyed God, and it was suffering as a punishment. The God of Israel was not only a God of mercy, he was also a God of wrath, and when the nation sinned, it paid the price.

Introduction to the Prophets

The writings of the prophets are among the most misunderstood parts of the Bible today, in no small measure because they are commonly read out of context.
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Many people today, especially conservative Christians, read the prophets as if they were crystal-ball gazers predicting events that are yet to transpire in our own time, more than two thousand years removed from when the prophets were actually speaking. This is a completely egocentric approach to the Bible (it’s all about
me
!). But the biblical writers had their own contexts and, as a result, their own agendas. And those contexts and agendas are not ours. The prophets were not concerned about us; they were concerned about themselves and the people of God living in their own time. It is no wonder that most people who read the prophets this way (they’ve predicted the conflict in the Middle East! they foresaw Saddam Hussein! they tell us about Armageddon!)
simply choose to read one or another verse or passage in isolation, and do not read the prophets themselves in their entirety. When the prophets are read from beginning to end, it is clear that they are writing for their own times. They often, in fact, tell us exactly when they were writing—for example, under what king(s)—so that their readers can understand the historical situation they were so intent on addressing.

What makes a prophet? In the Hebrew Bible there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of prophets. Some prophets—probably the majority, historically—delivered “the word of God” orally. That is, they were spokespersons for God, the ones who communicated (their understanding of) God’s message to his people, to let them know what God wanted them to do or how God wanted them to act—in particular, how they needed to change their ways in order to stand in God’s good favor (see, e.g., 1 Samuel 9; 2 Samuel 12). Other prophets—these are the ones who are more familiar to us today—were writing prophets, spokespersons for God whose (oral) proclamations were also written down, on the ancient equivalent of paper. The writings of some of the ancient Israelite prophets later became part of the Bible. In English translations of the Bible they are divided into the “major” prophets, the well-known figures of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the “minor” prophets. This differentiation is not made to suggest that some prophets are more important than others but rather to indicate which writings are longer (“major”) than others (“minor”). The twelve minor prophets are somewhat less well known, but many of them deliver powerful messages: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

What ties all these prophets together is that they were delivering God’s message, speaking God’s word, as they understood it, to God’s people. They saw themselves, and (some) others saw them, as the mouthpieces of God. In particular, they were delivering God’s message to people in concrete situations, telling them what, in God’s view, they were doing wrong, what they needed to do right, how
they needed to change, and what would happen if they refused. This matter of “what would happen if they refused” is the full extent of the “predictions” made by the prophets. They were not speaking about what would happen in the long term, thousands of years after their own day. They were speaking to living people of their own time and telling them what God wanted them to do and what he would do to them if they failed to obey.

As a rule, the prophets believed there were dire consequences for not following their instructions, given by God. For them God was sovereign over his people and was bound and determined to see that they behaved properly. If they did not, he would punish them—as he had punished them before. He would cause drought, famine, economic hardship, political setbacks, and military defeat. Most of all, military defeat. The God who destroyed the Egyptian armies when he delivered his people out of slavery would destroy
them
if they did not behave as his people. For the prophets, then, the setbacks the people experienced, many of the hardships they endured, many of the miseries they suffered, came directly from God, as a punishment for their sins and in an effort to get them to reform. (As we will see later, the prophets also thought that human beings themselves were often to blame for the suffering of others, as the rich and powerful, for example, oppressed the poor and powerless: it was precisely for such sins that God had determined to punish the nation.)

Most of the writing prophets were producing their work around the time of the two great disasters experienced by ancient Israel: the destruction of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in the eighth century
BCE
and the destruction of the south by the Babylonians in the sixth. To explore further the specific burdens of these authors, here I will simply highlight the message of several of them. Those I have chosen are representative of the views found in the others, but they present their messages of sin and punishment in particularly graphic and memorable terms.
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Amos of Tekoa

One of the clearest portrayals of the “prophetic view” of the relationship of sin and suffering comes in one of the gems of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Amos.
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We learn little about the man Amos himself from the book, and he is not mentioned in any other book of the Bible. What he tells us is that he was from the southern part of the land—that is, from the country of Judah—from the small village of Tekoa in the hills south of Jerusalem (1:1). He twice mentions that he was a shepherd (1:1; 7:14) and a farmer—one who tended sycamore trees (7:14). It has often been thought, based on his occupation, that he was from the Judean lower class; but given the fact that he was literate and obviously trained rhetorically, he may well have been a relatively prosperous landowner with flocks of his own. He was, in any event, no champion of the rich upper classes; on the contrary, much of his book is directed against those who had acquired wealth at the expense of the poor. It was because of the abuses of the well-to-do, he believed, that judgment was soon to come to Israel. It was against the north in particular that Amos spoke his prophecies, traveling up from his southern clime to announce God’s judgment on the kingdom.

The preface to Amos’s book (1:1) indicates that his prophetic ministry was undertaken when Uzziah was king of the northern kingdom (783–742 BCE) and Jeroboam was king of the south (786–746 BCE). This was a relatively calm and peaceful time in the life of the divided kingdom. Neither the large foreign empire to the south—Egypt—nor the larger empire to the northeast—Assyria—was an immediate threat to the tranquillity of the peoples living in the “promised land.” But that was soon to change. Amos predicted that God would raise up a kingdom to oppose his people because they had violated his will and broken his covenant. In the future, he contended, lay military defeat and disaster. As it turned out, he was right.
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Some twenty years after Uzziah’s peaceful reign, Assyria
flexed its muscles and invaded, destroying the northern kingdom and dispersing its people. At the time of Amos’s proclamation, however, his dire predictions may well have seemed unnecessarily bleak, as life was relatively good for those living in the land, especially for those who had prospered during the time of peace.

Amos begins his prophecies on a note that will characterize his entire book, uttering fearful predictions of destruction for Israel’s neighbors, destruction to be brought by God as a punishment for their sins.
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Thus, at the outset, comes a prophecy against the capital city of Syria, Damascus, for its destruction of the smaller town of Gilead: