Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

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СКАЧАТЬ this is a variation of the problem that also faces interpreters of passages such as Joshua 10:40, where Joshua’s destruction of “all that breathed” in the cities that he conquered is seen as obedience to God, “as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” How could a good God be one who commands Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam 15:3)? Indebted to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas suggests that actions against non-combatants, which appear to conflict with the Decalogue’s commandment against killing the innocent, may justly be undertaken in obedience to divine command, because God “is Lord of life and death: for He it is who inflicts the punishment of death on all men, both godly and ungodly, on account of the sin of our first parent, and if a man be the executor of that sentence by divine authority, he will be no murderer.”174 I consider this argument to be untenable. Certainly God is the “Lord of life and death,” but if he commanded Israelite soldiers to kill pregnant women and babies, God would be culpable for morally warping the soldiers who performed such heinous actions. Unlike the divine retribution caused by disease or natural disaster—in which the agent of the punishment is not a conscious agent—an intrinsically evil action has a distortive impact upon the person who carries it out. Thus, Church Fathers such as Origen were correct to infer that the human author has a purpose in attributing such commands to God (for example, to warn readers against becoming assimilated to the nations and their gods), but that in actual fact that living God revealed in Scripture could not have issued such commands.

With respect to publicly stripping a woman naked, Baumann points out that John Huehnergard’s studies of ancient Near Eastern texts indicate that “if a widow remarries she is to be deprived of the property of her first husband and leave his house naked. In Huehnergard’s opinion this stripping [an instance of which is found in Hosea 2:3] has a humiliating aspect: its purpose, however, is primarily the protection of the property of the family or clan.”175 Likewise, Thomas Podella has suggested that the lifting of the skirt, such as is found in Nahum 3:5, is connected in the ancient Near East to legal rites surrounding a divorce, so that it is less about humiliation than it is about indicating that a change of status has taken place.176 Baumann also recognizes that given the ancient Near East’s expectations for covenantal treaties, in the prophetic literature “[t]hreats of violence against women are . . . found within the framework of scenarios in which it is prophesied that a vassal, should he prove unfaithful, will be subjected to every kind of fearful punishment imaginable. Rape of women in the ancient Near East is therefore no more to be regarded as part of ‘normal’ life than are the other curses.”177 She adds that in the context of exile, there are ancient Near Eastern “iconographic witnesses to the fact that deported persons or prisoners in many cases had to strip or be stripped.”178

Alice Keefe argues that the disturbing imagery arises, in fact, from how profoundly women were valued in biblical Israel. She explains that women had in their power the very survival of the people: “The social character of sex in ancient Israel relates to the pragmatics of survival in a marginal agrarian frontier zone . . . where the survival and strength of the family group depended upon its size. . . . Such a culture would not likely abstract concerns about group strength and survival from its symbolic constructs about woman’s body and female sexuality.”179 With regard to the prophets’ symbolic references to the female body, Keefe urges that “in Israel the maternal body might also be considered a ‘natural place’ to display themes relating to fertility, procreation, lineage, kinship and covenant.”180 As she says, it is understandable and, indeed, powerfully resonant that “woman’s body” in biblical texts serves “as a sign for the social body,” as the prophets and other biblical authors employ “gynomorphic figurations of corporate identity indigenous to [their] world.”181 Keefe reminds us that when we are disturbed by the “metaphor of female sexual transgression” as an “image for the negation of Israel’s identity,” we need to realize that “[t]he adultery metaphor works in this way because it is also a maternal metaphor, and as such, it participates in and effects a reversal of another important dimension of the symbolism that is constitutive of Israelite identity—Israel as generative mother, symbol of the ongoing life of the people.”182 This perspective helps us to appreciate why such metaphorical imagery was employed in the first place, as well as its original positive intent.

This background gives some explanation to the use of such imagery in Scripture, so long as we do not thereby suppose that we are not meant to be disturbed by the imagery. Baumann remains unpersuaded that the imagery can be excused. If God can be said to behave in this way, how can men be told that they cannot behave in this way?183 This is obviously a problem that applies to genocidal violence as well.

I agree with Baumann that a God who engages in the ancient Near Eastern practice of physically humiliating and attacking rebellious wives is not an acceptable “God.” For scholars such as Exum, this means “doing away with . . . biblical authority” and with the notion that the biblical God is the “‘real’ god.”184 By contrast, I stand with Jerome and with the other witnesses to the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church’s spiritual—allegorical, typological, tropological—reading of parts of the Old Testament’s language. A cultural practice of physically abusing wives is being metaphorically attributed by the prophetic authors to God, but this cultural practice is not of God.185

This is similar to how many Christians have long interpreted God’s biblical commandments regarding the killing of all the persons living in a specific city. It is also similar to how many Christians interpret biblical portraits of God noisily “walking in the garden” or of God inflamed with jealousy and rage, desiring to slaughter his entire people until Moses talks him out of it (Gen 3:8; Deut 32).186 Such texts are read theologically in light of the overall biblical witness to the God who makes covenant with Abraham in order to bless Abraham’s descendents and ultimately the whole world.

      What this kind of exegesis (“allegorical” or “theological”) does is allow the abusive metaphorical imagery to be read and understood in its fullest and most proper contexts, while valuing the value of the historical-critical clarifications brought by Keefe and others. Jerome knows that the God who reveals his love in the prophetic books and in Christ Jesus may (and does) justly punish his people—indeed the punishment (exile) is intrinsic to their idolatrous turning away from God—but this God would never abuse a woman, and indeed would never commit any evil action whatsoever. After all, “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and “God cannot be tempted with evil” (Jas 1:13). Quite rightly, Jerome uses his knowledge of the entire Bible to guard against misreadings of the abusive imagery that would turn the just God of mercy and love into the very kind of oppressive and sexually abusive god (prevalent among the nations) that he repeatedly reveals himself not to be.

Recall what happened when the young Augustine, inspired by Cicero’s Hortensius to seek wisdom about divine realities, applied himself to reading Christian Scripture. For Augustine as a young man, one of the problems with Scripture—especially the Old Testament—was that “[i]t seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero.”187 Cicero never thought of God as filled with the passions of jealousy and anger or as plotting actions of violence against women and infants. Later, Bishop Ambrose of Milan advised Augustine to read the Book of Isaiah; but Augustine “did not understand the first passage of the book” and put it down.188 Augustine’s response to the first chapters of Isaiah is easy to sympathize with, given Isaiah’s attention to the contemporary politics of his day and the dense culturally embedded style of his writing. But Ambrose’s influence won out. Augustine reports, “I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill (2 Cor. 3:6).”189

We may also recall Pope Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini, where he reflects upon the “‘dark’ passages” of the Bible, namely “passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”190 In addressing the problem, Benedict XVI proposes that “it must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, СКАЧАТЬ