Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

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СКАЧАТЬ in his reading of Ezekiel 16, Jerome proposes that the fornicating “Jerusalem” stands for all of us who pass from one sin to the next without repentance. Tropologically, the “brazen harlot” of Ezekiel 16:30 is none other than “every Christian soul that has abandoned the worship of God, indulged in vices and excess, and having pursued a worldly life, has not done well even in that respect, but has both lost the wealth of religion and has not received the riches of the world.”151 Interpreting Ezekiel 16:38–40, where God promises to gather Jerusalem’s “lovers” and allow them to see her naked, strip her bare, and destroy her by stoning and the sword, Jerome first postulates that the literal sense must not be understood as signifying a real woman, nor can the metaphor be limited to adultery. Rather, this is a “metaphor of an adulterous and homicidal woman, who not only fornicated against her own husband, but also killed her children.”152 The metaphor has in view the Babylonian exile, as well as the future destruction of the (second) Temple. In the metaphor, says Jerome, the killing of children stands for rejecting “good thoughts” given by God and instead choosing to “[turn] away unto evil works.”153 Moreover, lest we get the wrong idea even about this metaphor, Jerome develops a tropological reading which makes clear that Ezekiel 16 is not about women but rather is about “every soul” who has received a gift from God but who chooses instead to worship “demons and contrary powers.”154 Jerome insists upon not attributing to God any violating action toward any woman.

Along similar lines, Mark Sheridan has observed that John Chrysostom is constantly concerned that readers of the Old Testament will read literalistically and assume that the portrayals of God’s anger, threats, and abusive actions toward men and women are meant to describe the character of God or what is permissible for God.155 Chrysostom fears that believers will imagine that God is bodily, that God commits (or desires to commit) acts of brutality, and/or that God has human passions such as anger. According to Chrysostom, God only allows vivid and potentially deeply misleading metaphors to be used about himself in Scripture because God wants to get through to dull readers and to alert them to seek for a spiritual meaning. It is this deeper spiritual meaning, and no other, that must be gleaned from metaphors that otherwise would demean God.

For Baumann, the difficulty is not answered by these positions, since Baumann’s concern is why God permitted abusive metaphors to be used in Scripture even if they were always meant to signify allegorically.156 In Hosea, she finds that “a parallel is drawn between land and ‘woman/wife’ in order to denounce the ‘whorish’ behavior of both. Divine punishment of ‘woman’ Israel follows, stated in images of sexual violence, but also in metaphors applying to the land and its fertility.”157 Jeremiah 13:22 is likewise impossible for her to accept, given that she thinks that the meaning that readers will receive is “unmistakable,” namely that YHWH “acts against Jerusalem in the role of a perpetrator of sexual violence.”158 As Angela Bauer says, “The image of God the rapist haunts theology and biblical interpretation.”159

Along similarly critical lines, John Barton remarks that “biblical texts do . . . portray God as having a dark side.”160 In his view, the prophetic literature depicts a two-faced God. He warns, “Commentators have always been tempted to fudge the issue of just how unjust the God of the prophets is when evaluated in human terms—and not simply in our terms . . . but in the moral terms the prophets themselves apply to human conduct. The God of the prophets is often no ‘nicer’ a character than the God of Joshua and Judges [who commands genocide].”161 Approvingly drawing upon the work of Andrew Davies, Barton draws attention to the passage from Isaiah 3 that I have quoted above: “Even if we grant that there is something wrong with the women of Isaiah 3:16–4:1, who take such pleasure in their jewelry and cosmetics, it is impossible to find any human moral principle that would justify the cruel and degrading punishment with which the prophet threatens them.”162

      Yet, I think the point of the first chapters of Isaiah is far from unjust: God has abandoned Israel to her enemies, because Israel has become deeply corrupt. As God says in his law case against Israel, “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Every one loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them” (Isa 1:23). God adds that the “land is filled with idols” (Is 2:8)—as archeological evidence confirms was the case. In sum, I do not agree with Barton insofar as he implies that God’s abandonment of Israel—which follows from Israel’s abandonment of God—is unjust. The imagery of the smiting of the “daughters of Zion” (Isa 3:15) is paired with similar insistence that the men of Israel will be humiliated and punished. As God says through the prophet Isaiah, “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: ‘It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’” (Isa 3:14–15).

Baumann’s concern is a deeper one than Barton’s. She wonders how anyone could accept a Scripture as “holy” if it employs images that involve God violating women sexually or images in which God causes women to be publicly humiliated in the very ways in which men of the time caused women to be publicly humiliated. The fact that Jerome insists that such metaphors are meant to be interpreted tropologically or as allegories whose meaning is the opposite of what the metaphor implies, may seem only to confirm Baumann’s outrage. Baumann notes that from the outset of her research, “the center of my interest in the prophetic imagery of marriage was not YHWH the ‘loving husband.’”163 On the contrary, she always focused on the punitive imagery, which in her view predominates over love in the prophetic literature. She asks, “Is the complex of metaphors of sexual violence really inseparable from the prophetic marriage imagery?”164

This question is all the more urgent for her because she finds that in contemporary culture (she lives in Germany), women are subjected to misogyny and violence. In her (mistaken) view, “marriage is the relationship in which it is easiest for violent men to make women their victims.”165 There is also the problem of male fantasies about violence against women, fantasies that are regularly played out in pornography.166 Her fundamental point is that “[t]he version of God in which ‘he’ is presented, in connection with the prophetic marriage imagery, as a sexually violent male is just one of the many problematic sides of the biblical God-image.”167 Even if Israel, having abandoned God, deserved its punishment (namely, abandonment by God), how could a good God permit himself to be described in sexually violent and abusive imagery? As Cheryl Exum states, “Claiming that there is a suffering and loving god behind this imagery will not make it go away.”168 Like Baumann, Exum warns against trying to sidestep the problem by “creating a canon within the canon.”169

By contrast, other biblical scholars have argued that the metaphors must be read as metaphors (in light of the actual destruction brought about by invading armies) rather than as descriptions of acceptable behavior. Robert Carroll urges in this regard, “The voice I hear and read in Jeremiah 2–3 (and also in 5.7–8) is a voice expressing strong disapproval of the community or nation’s past behaviour as wild, uncontrolled and apostate. . . . The target of the mockery is the male society.”170 For Carroll, it is important to perceive that the metaphorical woman in the prophetic text is not intended to be a real woman, but rather to be a description of the corporate people. He states that “the only women in the chapter [Ezek 23] are metaphors. The narrative is not about women but about cities or communities represented by those cities. . . . [T]he use of metaphors of women for the community, nation, city and land in the prophets may have little to do with the representation of women as such.”171 The metaphors disturb us, but their original readers may not have understood them the way that we do, and, besides, they too would likely have been disturbed. Somewhat similarly, Else Holt thinks it possible to criticize the disturbing metaphors while retaining the overall portrait of God in the book of Jeremiah. She does not think that we have to “distance ourselves from” or repudiate the prophetic books.172 From the perspective of studies of trauma, Kathleen O’Connor suggests that the disturbing metaphors are understandable given the prophetic task of articulating and giving meaning to the extreme horrors that the people of Jerusalem and Judah experienced during the events that led to the Babylonian exile.173 This does not mean that today we need to approve the portrait of God as an abusive husband (or of Israel as СКАЧАТЬ