The Hebrew Bible reading for this fourth Sunday of Advent is  Micah 5:2-5.  The prophet Micah prophesied in the southern kingdom of Judah, in the middle of the eighth century: at about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying in Jerusalem, and near the time when Amos and Hosea prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel.   Micah lived and worked in Morasheth-Gath, a tiny village only 25 miles southwest of the big city of Jerusalem. 

AFTERWORD:

The Psalm for this coming Sunday is Luke’s Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55), often called the Magnificat after its opening in Latin, Magnificat anima mea Dominum (in the KJV, “My soul doth magnify the Lord;” the Presbyterian hymnal has a lovely and vigorous setting of this passage!).  Mary’s song is a powerful reminder that Jesus would be a very different sort of King!   Here is the whole song:

With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
    In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant.
    Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
        because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
    He shows mercy to everyone,
        from one generation to the next,
        who honors him as God.
He has shown strength with his arm.
    He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
    He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
        remembering his mercy,
    just as he promised to our ancestors,
        to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.

This month, Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.  Her historic election follows a campaign season in which both Mr. Trump and many other Republican candidates (including, here in Pennsylvania, successful Senate candidate David McCormick) made opposing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and specifically transgender persons a keystone of their campaigns.  Now, President-elect Donald Trump “says he will affirm that God made only two genders, male and female.”

So what does that mean for Representative-elect McBride?  Just last week,

Both of the Genesis creation accounts refer not simply to God’s generic creation of humanity, but specifically to the creation of women and men. Genesis 1:27 says,

God created humanity in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them.

Genesis 2 describes the special creation of the woman from the very stuff of the man.  In its climax, this account of creation declares, “This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

Many interpreters have therefore concluded that Genesis presents the union of male and female as God’s intention for humanity, and indeed for all the natural world.  By this reading, same-sex intercourse, since it does not involve a union of differences, violates God’s will, as does any blurring of the distinctions between male and female.  New Testament scholar N. T. Wright proposes that our gender identity cannot be separated from our physical being, which is a part of God’s good creation.

But I am not persuaded that Genesis must be read in that way.  Note, after all, that rather than the traditional “Let us make man” in Genesis 1:26 (so KJV, RSV, ESV; NIV reads “mankind”), the CEB has, “Let us make humanity” (compare NRSVue).   This is not, as some may claim, an instance of political correctness, but is rather a matter of accurate translation. In Hebrew, the word for “man” is ‘ish (see Gen 2:23-24); the word for “male” is zakar (see Gen 1:27). But the word used in Gen 1:26 is ‘adam, which means not “man,” but “humanity.” It is particularly important that we translate ‘adam correctly, because Genesis 1:27 goes on very plainly to state, “male and female God created them.”

Phyllis Bird proposes that the additional designation “male and female” is necessitated by the statement that ‘adam is made in God’s image, since God is genderless: “There is no message of shared dominion here, no word about the distribution of roles, responsibility, and authority between the sexes, no word of sexual equality” (“ ‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation,” Harvard Theological Review 74 [1981]: 151).

It must be said, however, that Bird’s restriction on the meaning and application of Gen 1:26-27 seems overstated. After all, the blessing in Gen 1:28 is not addressed expressly to males, but addresses ‘adam collectively:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

To be sure, Israel’s traditions were not always equal to this insight! Yet here it is, at the very beginning of the Bible. Men and women alike are made in God’s image.  Sexism is denied any place in God’s ordered world.

Further, there may indeed be a hint here about how God might be viewed. While admittedly, male images of God predominate in Scripture, female images as well can be found.  In Proverbs 8, the sages of ancient Israel describe divine Wisdom itself as a woman.  In the Psalms, God appears as a midwife (Ps 22:9-10), while in Hosea 11:3-4, God speaks as a mother:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
        I took them up in my arms,
        but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them
        with bands of human kindness,
        with cords of love.
    I treated them like those
        who lift infants to their cheeks;
        I bent down to them and fed them.

Similarly, Jesus cries out to Jerusalem, “How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that” (Matt 23:37//Lk 13:34).  God is neither male nor female, for neither masculinity nor femininity can fully capture the Divine.  Indeed, both masculinity and femininity reflect aspects of God, who makes all humankind, of every gender, race, and nation, “in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26 NRSV).

Attempts, then, to derive from Genesis 1:27 a rebuke of transgender persons, or the affirmation of a rigid sexual binary as the God-imposed norm, are seriously misplaced.

While in Genesis 1 the creation of humanity is described as a single act, Genesis 2 describes the special creation of woman. After creating the human (Hebrew ha’adam), God recognizes a problem: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him'” (Gen 2:18).

So the LORD God put the human [Hebrew ha’adam] into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs [Hebrew ‘akhad mitsal’otaw] and closed up the flesh over it. With the rib [Hebrew tsela’] taken from the human [Hebrew ha’adam], the LORD God fashioned a woman [Hebrew ‘ishah] and brought her to the human being [Hebrew ha’adam] (Gen 2:21-22).

While most translations render the word tsela’ as “rib,” based on its use in related Semitic languages as well as in Late Hebrew and Aramaic, in the Hebrew Bible this term always means “side”: for example, the side of the Ark in Exod 25:12; the side of the Tabernacle in Exod 26:20; a hillside in 2 Sam 16:13; one of two double doors in 1 Kgs 6:34.  Accordingly, in the rabbinic commentary on Genesis, R. Samuel bar Nahman says,

“When the Holy One, blessed be he, created the first man, he created him with two faces, then sawed him into two and made a back on one side and a back on the other.” When some objected that God had taken only a rib from ha’adam, “He said to them, ‘It was one of his sides, as you find written in Scripture, ‘And for the second side [tsela’] of the tabernacle’ (Ex. 26:20)’” (Bereshit Rabbah 8.1).

Rather than the Woman being made from a relatively insignificant portion of the Man, as is often held, Gen 2:20-21 describes major surgery: the Lord God uses one entire side of the original Human to fashion the Woman, basically splitting ha’adam in two!

Phyllis Trible notes that sexual gender first enters the Hebrew text of this creation account at Gen 2:23-24. Prior to this, the Human is always addressed as ha‘adam, which as we have seen means “the Human,” and not “man.”  But now, for the first time, the explicitly gendered terms Woman (‘ishah) and Man (‘ish) are used. Trible proposes,

In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for woman and man. . . . Man as male does not precede woman as female, but happens concurrently with her. Hence, the first act of creation in Genesis 2 is the creation of androgyny (2:7), and the last is the creation of sexuality (2:27) (“Eve and Adam: Genesis 2—3 Reread,” in Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow [Harper & Row, 1979], 76.  Originally published in Andover Newton Quarterly 13 [1973]).

Intriguingly, this idea—that both sexes were present in the first Human–is also proposed in Bereshit Rabbah 8.1:

Said R. Jeremiah b. Eleazar, “When the Holy One, blessed be he, came to create the first man, he made him androgynous, as it is said, ‘Male and female created he them’.” 

The Late Hebrew word used here is indeed ‘androgiynos, a loanword from the Greek. In his translation, Harry Freedman (Midrash Rabbah, Genesis, Vol. 1 [London: Soncino, 1939], 54) has “an hermaphrodite [bisexual],” and observes in a footnote, “Normally androgynos means one whose genitals are male and female, but here it means two bodies, male and female, joined together.”   Hence R. Samuel bar Nahman, as we have seen, understands God in Gen 2:27 to saw that original hermaphrodite apart, into male and female halves!

The Greek and Latin versions of Genesis address the problem of how to reference the first Human by introducing the personal name “Adam” at Gen 2:19 (note that the KJV follows them in this!): the point in the narrative where the Woman’s origin story begins.  The generic Human becomes a very specific person, with a name, once relationship with another created person comes into play. Certainly, whether we are persuaded by Trible and the rabbis or not, it is far from clear that Genesis requires a distinct line between male and female.

Another text often cited in this conversation is Deuteronomy 22:5:

Women must not wear men’s clothes, and men must not wear women’s clothes. Everyone who does such things is detestable [Hebrew to’ebah] to the LORD your God.

That same word, to’ebah, is famously used in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.  The first reads, “You must not have sexual intercourse with a man as you would with a woman; it is a detestable practice.”  The second goes further: “If a man has sexual intercourse with a man as he would with a woman, the two of them have done something detestable. They must be executed; their blood is on their own heads.”  The word rendered “detestable” in the CEB (see also the NIV) was translated in the KJV as “abomination.”

Leviticus 18 and 20 are purity legislation.  This is, in fact, what Lev 18:26-28 explicitly states:

You must not do any of these detestable things, neither citizen nor immigrant who lives with you (because the people who had the land before you did all of these detestable things and the land became unclean), so that the land does not vomit you out because you have made it unclean, just as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

In Leviticus, to’ebah is not about ethics or morality, but about ritual impurity and defilement: these are acts which defile the land, making it unclean. Of course, male homosexuality (note that nothing is said here about women engaging in same-sex relations) is grouped in these chapters with other “abominations” such as incest (18:6-18), child sacrifice (18:21), and bestiality (18:23)–actions anyone would regard not merely as unacceptable, but as grotesquely immoral.  But here, they are condemned not as the moral offenses they clearly are, but specifically because they defile the land.

After all, also among these “abominations,” and in no way distinguished from the others,  is this command: “You must not approach a woman for sexual contact during her menstrual uncleanness” (Lev 18:19).  During her menstrual period (Lev 15:19–23), neither the woman herself nor anything she lies or sits upon are to be touched, because she is ritually unclean–so obviously, in this worldview, men should avoid sexual relations with menstruating women. But earlier in this book (Leviticus 15:24), the man who has sex with a woman during her period merely shares in her impurity—like her, “he will be unclean for seven days.”  Leviticus 18 and 20 go far beyond this:

If a man sleeps with a woman during her menstrual period and has sexual contact with her, he has exposed the source of her blood flow and she has uncovered the same. Both of them will be cut off from their people (Lev 20:18).

I have written about these verses in greater detail  before.  Put briefly, they come from a section of Leviticus called the Holiness Code (Lev 17—26), which “democratizes” the idea of holiness: not only are the priests and the sacred objects pertaining to worship set apart as belonging to God, but all of Israel is God’s, and so is called to a higher standard of commitment, service, and ritual purity: “You must be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2).  In the radical view of ritual purity the Holiness Code upholds, sexual contact with a menstruating woman is to’ebah: an abomination to be punished by exile from the community (compare Ezek 18:6; and 22:11, where to’ebah may refer to Lev 18:19 and 20:18).

Likely, this is the idea back of Deut 22:5 as well: rather than affirming an inflexible gender binary, this verse regards cross dressing as a ritually defiling act. After all, this same chapter goes on to condemn planting a vineyard with two different kinds of seed, plowing a field with two different types of animal, and making a garment with two types of thread, and further requires fringes at the corners of every garment.  Clearly these are not moral judgments; they are purity regulations. Like not eating pork (Lev 11:2-8) or shellfish (Lev 11:9-12), they are lifestyle choices that make Israel culturally distinctive.

So–no.  I do not believe that the Bible compels us to regard maleness and femaleness as inflexibly fixed.  We can affirm masculinity and femininity as God’s good creation without denying the created goodness of those whose gender does not fit into those traditional boxes.  Certainly, the Bible does not support the graceless inhospitality, prejudice, and hatred toward a duly and properly elected colleague demonstrated by Reps. Mace and Johnson.

This Sunday marks the end of this Christian year; next Sunday, with Advent, a new year will begin. The last Sunday of the Christian year is called the Reign of Christ, or the feast of Christ the King.  Appropriately, the Gospel for this Sunday, John 18:33-37, relates Jesus’ trial before Pilate:  has Jesus claimed to be a king, in opposition to Caesar?

Pilate went back into the palace. He summoned Jesus and asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” 

Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others spoken to you about me?”

Pilate responded, “I’m not a Jew, am I? Your nation and its chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Jesus replied, “My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world. If it did, my guards would fight so that I wouldn’t have been arrested by the Jewish leaders. My kingdom isn’t from here.”

“So you are a king?” Pilate said.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. I was born and came into the world for this reason: to testify to the truth. Whoever accepts the truth listens to my voice.”

We need to be clear on two points.  First, Jesus was a political prisoner, executed by the Roman state on the charge of insurrection.  When Christians reflect on the cross, we tend to forget, or perhaps even to ignore, this obvious truth.  Rome didn’t crucify thieves, or bandits, or rapists, or even murderers.  It crucified slaves, and those who rebelled against Roman authority.

The words Pilate posted above Jesus’ head on the cross were not a title, but an accusation–the accusation that brought him to the cross: “Jesus the Nazarene, the king of the Jews.”

Thankfully, a survey of Roman Catholic Christians conducted by St. Joseph’s Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations in July 2022 with SurveyUSA determined that “Catholics were significantly more likely to affirm Catholic teaching regarding the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.”

Nearly 70% of respondents blamed “the sins of humanity” (41.6%) or Roman soldiers and Pontius Pilate (28.2%).

Who killed Jesus?  If our question is historical, then as 28.2% of those surveyed thankfully realized, Jesus was condemned and executed by Roman authority.  If our question is theological, as 41.6% of those surveyed understood it, then we killed Jesus: Jesus died for your sins and mine.  In her powerful devotional book God Is No Fool (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), Lois A. Cheney writes:

Would we crucify Jesus today? It’s not a rhetorical question for the mind to play with.

I believe,

We are born with a body, a mind, a soul, and a handful of nails.

I believe,

When a man dies, no one has ever found any nails left,

            clutched in his hand

                        or stuffed in his pockets  (Cheney, 40-41).

The scholars at St. Joseph’s “seemed unsettled that roughly 30% of U.S. Catholics didn’t know (9.6%)” who was accountable for the death of Jesus, “thought no one is to blame (9.6%) or openly blamed Jewish people (11%).”

The Jews did not kill Jesus–Rome did. But given the sad resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary American life, I wonder what a similar survey of Protestant Christians would reveal?

The second point on which we must be very clear is that Jesus firmly rejects earthly, political kingship: “My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world. If it did, my guards would fight so that I wouldn’t have been arrested by the Jewish leaders. My kingdom isn’t from here” (John 8:36). 

This was not the first time that Jesus rejected an earthly kingdom.  At the very beginning of his ministry, when Jesus was tested in the wilderness:

Then the devil brought him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He said, “I’ll give you all these if you bow down and worship me.”

Jesus responded, “Go away, Satan, because it’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him” [see Deuteronomy 6:13]. The devil left him, and angels came and took care of him (Matthew 4:8-11).

This point is vital, friends, as some American Christians seem to have the idea that it is their task to restore Christian political power, and indeed to impose Christian rule. President-elect Donald Trump promised in his campaign to “champion his followers’ brand of Christianity across American life and government. . . his support for ‘my beautiful Christians,’ as he calls them, leans heavily into their fears about losing power in a secularizing and pluralist country.”

Accordingly, Mr. Trump “is promising to elevate not only [conservative Christian] policy priorities but also their ideological influence. He says he will affirm that God made only two genders, male and female. He will create a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias. And he will give enhanced access to conservative Christian leaders. . . ‘It will be directly into the Oval Office — and me,’ Mr. Trump told pastors in Georgia. ‘We have to save religion in this country.’”

We need to call this so-called “Christian nationalism” what it is, friends: it in fact is not Christian at all, but a heresy.  Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), identifies the tenets of this American heresy:

God responds to this rejection, this wounding, with an outpouring of God’s Spirit (as in Joel 2:28-29 [in Hebrew, 3:1-2]).  But here, God pours out “a spirit of compassion and supplication on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (12:10). This spirit sufficiently softens their hearts so that “when they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.”

First off, please let me apologize to subscribers and regular readers of “The Bible Guy,” as well as to all visitors, for my long absence: I injured the rotator cuff in my right shoulder, and the precise angle of my arm when I sat down at the computer was excruciating!  However, I am now at last recovered, and able once more to write.  So it is my intention to resume my usual bimonthly posts.  Thank you for your patience!

Well, here we are.  Again.  Tuesday’s election reminded me once more that I am in a minority–not only among our national population, just over 50% (72,793,677) of whom voted for Mr. Trump, but especially among my fellow Christians:

Exit poll data from CNN and other news outlets reported that 72% of white Protestants and 61% of white Catholics said they voted for Trump. Among white voters, 81% of those identified as born-again or evangelical supported Trump, up from 76% in 2020 and similar to the 80% of support Trump received in 2016.  . . . But Trump also won the Christian vote overall: 58% of all Catholics voted for him and 63% of Protestants, according to the early exit polls. 

I hope that few of those Christian voters actually espouse Mr. Trump’s violent rhetoric toward immigrants and transgender persons even if they are concerned about immigration, and regard trans people as immoral.  But those Christians for Mr. Trump need to understand the legitimate concerns that rhetoric poses for those communities–and indeed, given his threats against his political adversaries, even for an old white guy like me.  Friends, I have been surprised and disappointed by elections before this (Reagan’s election in 1980, George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and re-election in 2004, Trump’s 2016 victory), but this is the first time in my life that an election has made me fear for my own safety, and the safety of those I love.  I pray that our society is strong and stable enough to resist the turn toward fascism and autocracy that prevailed in Orban’s Hungary, or Putin’s Russia (two other “strong men,” both of whom are admired by Trump and by many of his supporters).

In these difficult days, I have been remembering a couple of old hymns that I grew up singing.  One is a hymn of creation: “This Is My Father’s World,” written by Maltbie Davenport Babcock, and published after his death, in 1901.  In the version I learned, the third verse is particularly apt to our present circumstance:

Among the peoples surrounding ancient Israel, it was common to imagine creation as a primordial battle between the creator god and the dragon in the sea: a monster of uncreated chaos.  By defeating the dragon, the creator imposed order upon chaos, bringing into being an ordered, meaningful world.

God’s victory and rule over chaotic water is affirmed in our Bible as well.  For example, Psalm 46:1-3 [2-4] affirms:

God is our refuge and strength,
    a help always near in times of great trouble.
That’s why we won’t be afraid when the world falls apart,
    when the mountains crumble into the center of the sea,
     when its waters roar and rage,
    when the mountains shake because of its surging waves.

But other biblical texts deny that chaos ever was truly overcome.  The battle against chaos continues, and only at the end of the age will the dragon be defeated. So, Isaiah 24—27 describes our present age as a time of uncertainty and struggle.  Only with the end of this world and the dawn of the next will the Divine Warrior finally prevail over the dragon:

On that day, the LORD will take a great sword, harsh and mighty, and will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the writhing serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea (Isa 27:1).

Similarly, in Daniel 7, the prophet’s vision of the future begins with “the four winds of heaven churning the great sea” (Dan 7:2). The nations that had oppressed Israel in times past, and the terrible, final oppressor who is coming, are described as “beasts” that “emerged from the sea” (Dan 7:3). Little wonder that in the new heaven and new earth of John’s vision, “the sea was no more” (Rev 21:1)!

Our hymn recognizes the seemingly overwhelming power of wrong, yet nonetheless asserts God’s rulership: “This is my Father’s world,” after all.  As the hymn says, “the battle is not done”!  The Divine Warrior still opposes chaos, oppression, and cruelty; we are called to do so as well, confident that while we may not see the consummation, “God is the ruler yet,” and will prevail. 

The second hymn much on my mind today was a favorite of my dear friend and colleague in United Methodist ministry Bruce Merritt, may light perpetual shine upon him: “Come Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing,” written in 1758 by Robert Robinson.   It is not often sung today, largely because of its (to many) enigmatic second verse:

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

“Ebenezer” is a biblical place name mentioned in 1 Samuel 4:1 and 5:1, although not explained until 1 Samuel 7:12:

As any beginning Hebrew student knows, ‘eben is Hebrew for “stone,” and ‘ezer means “help”–so, “Ebenezer” means “stone of help.”  Ebenezer is a standing stone, erected to memorialize God’s deliverance of Israel from its enemies, the Philistines.  In about half of its citations, ‘ezer is used as it is here, for God’s help in threatening times (see Exod 18:4; Deut 33:7, 29; Pss 20:2[3]; 70:5[6]; 121:1-2; 124:8; 146:5).

God has brought us this far, friends.  God has come after us in the person of Jesus God’s son, to demonstrate God’s determination to keep coming after us and to stand by us to the end, no matter what.  “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God”–or,  as Paul wrote, “God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).  The cross is the proof of God’s abiding, unfailing, invincible love for us.  Therefore we have hope, even in the midst of hopelessness.  So let us raise our Ebenezer, right here, right now, and declare that, secure in God’s love and promise, we will stand up for those on the margins, as Christ has stood up for us.

In Pennsylvania where I live, we have been inundated by political ads on television.  I have been horrified by how many of them feature white people railing about “illegals” pouring unchecked over our borders, committing crimes, getting government handouts, and stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.  The sorry climax of this blatantly racist display was the former president, on a national stage, voicing a baseless slur about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH stealing and eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors.  Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, firmly rejects this slur and praises the immigrants for their positive influence on the community:

“Let me tell you what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal,” the governor said. “They came to Springfield to work.”

But in an interview on CNN, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance freely acknowledged that he had supported this internet rumor, knowing it was likely false, to make a point:

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So: does the Bible have anything to say about immigrants and immigration?  In fact, it does: indeed, quite a lot!  To begin, consider this passage:

“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien [Hebrew ger], for you were aliens [Hebrew gerim] in the land of Egypt.  You shall not abuse any widow or orphan.  If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans” (Exod 22:21-24 NRSVue).

We know of course who the widow and the orphan are. We can understand why, in the clan-based economy of ancient Israel, a special command might be needed to ensure their just treatment: a women without a husband to ensure her access to property, or a child without a parent’s protection, could well fall through the cracks.  However, who is the ger (“resident alien” in the NRSVue)?

To find the best contemporary translation for ger, it may help to consider how this word is used in our Old Testament. The ger is a person of foreign birth, living within the borders of Israel but without land or legal status. That is why the ger is so often listed together with the widow and the orphan: like widows and orphans, the gerim are vulnerable: they have no one to look out for their rights. This is why a special command is needed to ensure their just treatment, and why generosity to the ger is a consistent biblical principle.

So, who is the ger in our own time and context? The NRSV “resident alien” is accurate, but bookish and stodgy; far more vigorous, and no less accurate, is the Common English Bible rendering “immigrant”—particularly if we include those sometimes vilified as “illegal immigrants,” and those we call “refugees.”

As the political rhetoric of this campaign has made tragically apparent, the gerim are perhaps more vulnerable and at risk now than ever before—making the passages of Scripture referring to them more relevant than ever before. As Exodus 22:21-24 demonstrates, the ultimate guarantor of rights for the ger in Scripture is the LORD, who assures us, “If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword”—which should, to say the least, give us pause.

Deuteronomy continually calls upon the people Israel to remember who they are, and who God is. Indeed, those two calls are inextricably intertwined: Israel is the people who were made a people by the Lord who delivered them from bondage.  Consider Deuteronomy 10:14-19:

Clearly, the Lord owns the sky, the highest heavens, the earth, and everything in it.  But the Lord adored your ancestors, loving them and choosing the descendants that followed them—you!—from all other people. That’s how things still stand now.  So circumcise your hearts and stop being so stubborn, because the Lord your God is the God of all gods and Lord of all lords, the great, mighty, and awesome God who doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t take bribes.  He enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing.  That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt.

Israel has direct and personal knowledge of what it means to say that God “doesn’t play favorites,” because if had God shown partiality for the wisest, the strongest, the most prosperous– the best–then God would never have chosen this rag-tag band of slaves and outlaws as God’s own! Likewise, Israel knows personally that the Lord  “loves immigrants [Hebrew ger], giving them food and clothing,” because, as God reminds them, “you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.” Indeed, in most of the biblical passages regarding the ger, God gives Israel this reminder (see, for example, Exod 22:21; Lev 19:34).

With the exception of our Native American brothers and sisters, all of us are here because our ancestors came here from somewhere else. Some, like the famous Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, came fleeing religious persecution. Some, like my Scottish-Irish forebears, came because of hardship and political oppression at home. Some of us came here in chains. As Americans, a nation of immigrants, it behooves us, too, to remember who we are. Those of us who claim the name Christian need also to remember whose we are, and what it means to be the people of the God who “enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants.”

There is no specific word in biblical Hebrew for hospitality.  But in Greek, the word is philoxenia—that is, love for the stranger!  This word appears twice in the New Testament. In Romans 12:13, Paul commands his audience, “Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.”  Hebrews 13:2 deliberately alludes to the story of Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18—19: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” I hear this passage in my head in the KJV: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

In his sermon on Romans 12:13, the great early Christian preacher St. John Chrysostom (347-407 CE) praised Abraham (Genesis 18:1-5) and Lot (Genesis 19:1-3) as examples of radical hospitality:

Thus did Lot, thus Abraham. For he spent the whole day upon it, waiting for this goodly prey, and when he saw it, leaped upon it, and ran to meet them, and worshipped upon the ground, and said, “My Lord, if now I have found favor in Thy sight, pass not away from Thy servant.” [Gen 18:3] Not as we do, if we happen to see a stranger or a poor man, knitting our brows, and not deigning even to speak to them. And if after thousands of entreaties we are softened, and bid the servant give them a trifle, we think we have quite done our duty. But he did not so, but assumed the fashion of a suppliant and a servant, though he did not know who he was going to take under his roof. . . . as did Abraham also, whom beside his largeness and ready mind it is just especially to admire, on this ground, that when he had no knowledge who they were that had come, yet he so acted. Do not thou then be curious either: since for Christ thou dost receive him. And if thou art always so scrupulous, many a time wilt thou pass by a man of esteem, and lose thy reward from him.      . . . Do not then busy thyself with men’s lives and doings. For this is the very extreme of niggardliness, for one loaf to be exact about a man’s entire life. For if this person be a murderer, if a robber, or what not, does he therefore seem to thee not to deserve a loaf and a few pence? And yet thy Master causeth even the sun to rise upon him! And dost thou judge him unworthy of food even for a day? (Homilies on Romans 21).

Jesus was certainly not silent on this issue!  In Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; and Luke 10:25-28, Jesus declares that the whole of God’s law hangs on two essential prescriptions: love for God, and love for neighbor. Jesus’ first commandment comes from Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” His second commandment comes from Leviticus 19:18: “You must not take revenge nor hold a grudge against any of your people; instead, you must love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.”

Some interpreters have proposed that this was an in-house commandment: “your neighbor” means “your fellow Israelite”–in our  context, other Christians, or perhaps other native-born Americans.  But Leviticus 19:33-34 demonstrates that this is far too narrow a reading:

When immigrants live in your land with you, you must not cheat them.  Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.

Here, love is commanded toward “the immigrant who lives with you” (the Hebrew term, once more, is ger) in the same language used in 19:18 for the neighbor: “you shall love them as yourself.” In fact this passage says, the ger “must be treated as if they were one of your citizens.”

We may not like this commandment—particularly if we are persuaded that immigrants and refugees pose a threat to us: either economically, by taking our jobs and resources, or more fundamentally, through crime or terrorism. We could perhaps say that these words of Scripture address the community of faith, not the nation, and that national policy needs to be mindful of the security of our borders.

But for the church and for the individual Christian, there is no passing this particular buck. We cannot even use the tired “Old Testament laws don’t apply to us” excuse, because Jesus has made it eminently clear that this particular law does apply to us—second only to the command to love God. Certainly, unemployment, crime, and terrorism are real concerns (although we may legitimately ask if there is any evidence connecting those concerns to immigrants or refugees).  But whether we like it or not, if we want to be followers of the Christ, we are commanded to love our neighbors—including immigrants and refugees—as we love ourselves.

AFTERWORD:

The General Council on Religion and Race of the United Methodist Church has condemned “the harmful and unfounded accusations have been made against Haitian migrants in Ohio,” and called for us “to stand against racism and xenophobia in all its forms.”

So too, the Board of Church and Society has quite specifically called out Mr, Trump and Mr. Vance:

King Omri (876-869 BCE) was a major player in the history of ancient Palestine.  He forged an alliance with the Phoenician king Ethbaal of Tyre, sealing the deal by the marriage of his son Ahab to Ethbaal’s daughter Jezebel, bringing the wealth of the Phoenician sea trade into his kingdom.

Dissatisfied with his backwater capital at Tirzah, Omri built the city of Samaria, which archaeological investigation reveals to have been both beautiful and well-fortified.  Indeed, in many passages, “Samaria” becomes a way of referring to the northern kingdom, as “Judah” is used for the southern.  The Samarian ivories, over 12,000 finely carved decorative items, confirm both the wealth of Omri’s kingdom, and the beauty of his capital: a showplace of the ancient world.

Outside of the Hebrew Bible, Omri is mentioned on the Moabite Mesha Stele (ca. 84o BCE), which calls the kingdom of Israel “the house of Omri.”  The image at the head of this blog is from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE), depicting King Jehu of Israel (843-815 BCE) doing obeisance before the Assyrian monarch; he is identified in the inscription as Jehu of bit-Homri:  “the house of Omri.”  Indeed, for generations after Omri’s death, Assyrian texts continued to refer to the northern kingdom of Israel as mat bit-Homri; the land of the house of Omri.

Yet, in the history of Israel in Samuel-Kings, Omri gets only six verses:

In the thirty-first year of Judah’s King Asa, Omri became king of Israel. He ruled for twelve years, six of which were in Tirzah. He bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two kikkars of silver. He fortified the hill and named the town that he built there after Shemer, the previous owner of the hill of Samaria. Omri did evil in the Lord’s eyes, more evil than anyone who preceded him. He walked in all the ways and sins of Jeroboam, Nebat’s son, because he caused Israel to sin. They angered Israel’s God, the Lord, with their worthless idols. The rest of Omri’s deeds and his powerful acts, aren’t they written in the official records of Israel’s kings? Omri lay down with his ancestors and was buried in Samaria. His son Ahab succeeded him as king (1 Kings 16:23-28).

What does this tell us?  Clearly, Samuel-Kings is not an objective history of ancient Palestine—but then, it never pretends to be. This is a confessional statement, an affirmation of the meaning of Israel’s history in terms of the covenant theology found in Deuteronomy. By those standards, Omri, who lived and ruled in violation of that covenant, was just another wrong turn on Israel’s journey. Ultimately, he doesn’t matter.

It is all too easy for us, confident in our self-importance, to see ourselves as the main characters in the world’s drama: and of course, nothing bad can happen to the main characters. Thinking ourselves invulnerable, invincible, we misunderstand the world and our place in it.

Twenty-three years ago today, our sense of national invulnerability was shattered in a single morning, as three airplanes, loaded with passengers and fuel, were directed by sad, wicked, deluded men into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Another plane, intended to crash into either the Capitol or the White House, was forced down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania by its heroic passengers and crew – saving the lives of others at the cost of their own.

In the wake of this attack, our national confidence was shaken; our naivete was lost.  But unfortunately, it was all too easy for us to learn the wrong lessons.  At the time, in a sermon I preached at Woodlake UMC, where I was serving as an interim pastor, and at a public gathering in the Ashland, VA town square, I said

Sisters and brothers, God forbid that the horrific assault that our nation suffered on Tuesday should cause us to forget who we are!  We are a nation founded upon fundamental human rights and freedom for all people, affirming the essential dignity of every woman and man.  If this assault makes us forget that, then the terrorists will have won.  They will have destroyed, not just stone and mortar and steel and flesh, but the dream that makes us who we are. . . .  Friends, the people who committed this atrocity may have been Arabs, but the Arab people did not do this.  Those who brought this horror to us may have called themselves Muslims, but Islam did not do this.  In the difficult days ahead, should the call that justice be brought to the criminals who perpetrated this act transform itself into a cry of vengeance against a race or religion, we must recognize that prejudice for the evil that it is, repudiate it, and root it out of our midst.

Sadly, our national response did not avoid violence and racism–either abroad  or at home.  Our ill-considered “War on Terror,” involving the shameful torture of prisoners, culminated in a withdrawal from Afghanistan reminiscent of the last days of the Vietnam War, leaving the Taliban in control.  Indeed, apart from the execution of the chief 9/11 planner Osama bin Laden, it is difficult to see much at all that was accomplished, wasting the international outpouring of good will responding to that initial terrorist assault.

At home, the attacks “triggered a wave of hate crimes against individuals and institutions perceived to be Arab or Muslim.”  Indeed, one major political party has apparently gone all in on anti-immigrant hatred and xenophobia. Mr. Trump and his running mate JD Vance have repeated on the national stage an unfounded and ludicrous slur against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”  Local officials in Springfield have found no evidence, either credible reports or specific claims, of pets being harmed by Haitian residents.  But when fact-checked at the presidential debate, Mr. Trump’s response was that it must be true because he had seen it on television!

Friends, if we think that we can somehow get back our naive sense of confidence and invulnerability by attacking outsiders, or by abandoning our democracy, sacrificing our freedoms so that we can make ourselves safe once more, we have learned the wrong lesson. On the other hand, if we think that nothing we do matters, if we succumb to fear and despair, then again we have learned the wrong lesson.

Perhaps the real lesson of 9/11 is also the lesson of Omri. History is neither in the hands of the Omris nor the Osamas. The future is shaped, neither by leaders great in the world’s eyes, nor by nihilists bent on the world’s destruction.

History is in the hands of our God, who sees history differently than we do: after all, by the standards of Christian Scripture, the greatest event in human history was the execution of an accused insurrectionist by Roman soldiers on a hill outside Jerusalem.  Whatever may come, we may confidently entrust our future into the hands of the God who raised Jesus from the dead. As the apostle Paul boldly confessed,

Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “We are being put to death all day long for your sake.  We are treated like sheep for slaughter” [Psalm 44:22].

But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us.  I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created (Romans 8:35-39). 

Rejecting both hatred and despair, friends, let us resolve to live in hope.

AFTERWORD:

The painting of Christ on the cross above is Jewish artist Marc Chagal’s “White Crucifixion.”   Facsimiles of the Mesha Stele and (I believe) the Black Obelisk are part of the collection in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s Kelso Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology (temporarily closed for public tours).

Close readers of Genesis have long noted two different ways of identifying the Creator in its opening two chapters, evident even in English translation. In Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a, the creator is called “God.”  Back of this in Hebrew is the word ‘elohim, a plural noun sometimes meaning “gods” (see, for example, Gen 6:2; Exod 12:12; Ps 86:8). But as Hebrew can use the plural to indicate greatness or majesty, ‘elohim is commonly used in Scripture as shorthand for “God of gods” or “God above all gods” (for example, Deut 10:17; Jer 10:10; Pss 80:3; 84:7), and so properly translated “God.”

In Genesis 2:4b-25, ‘elohim is combined with another term in the expression “LORD God” (most English translations follow the King James Version [KJV] and place LORD in all capitals here). Back of “LORD” in the Hebrew is a Name: the personal name of God, which can be rendered from Hebrew into English characters as Yhwh.

In Jewish tradition the Name of God is revered (see Exod 20:7//Deut 5:11). So, when you come to the Name while reading the text aloud, the Name is not pronounced: instead, you say ‘adonai, that is, “my Lord”—hence, the translator’s convention of representing Yhwh as LORD, in all capitals.

Indeed, to help the reader, the Masoretes (the Jewish scribes who preserved and transmitted the text of the Hebrew Bible used in the synagogue, called the Masoretic Text, or MT; the Christian Old Testament is based on this text) began presenting the Name as a deliberately unpronounceable combination of the consonants Y-h-w-h and the vowels of ‘adonai.

Continental scholars transliterated the Name as Jhvh, leading to the designation “J” for the narrative material in the Pentateuch (and Genesis particularly) that prefers to use the Name, and to the term “Jehovah,” a Western Christian attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable Name.  The King James translators used “Jehovah” seven times, in places where the context clearly demands a name: see Genesis 22:14; Exodus 6:3; 17:15; Judges 6:24; Psalm 83:18, and Isaiah 12:2; 26:4 in the KJV.

We should remember, by the way, that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses is a comparatively recent innovation, compared to the text itself.  Usually, chapter and verse divisions follow natural patterns and themes in the text–but not always!  So, the chapter break at Genesis 2:1 actually comes before the end of the first creation account.  The first three verses of Genesis 2 read naturally as a continuation of the first chapter: indeed, their description of the Seventh Day is the culmination of that account, which describes creation as spanning the first week of time.

We could conclude from this chapter break that the Sabbath comes after creation is finished (see Exod 20:11).  The Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the first five books of the Bible used by the Samaritans), the Greek Septuagint, and the Syriac all say that God completed God’s work on the sixth day, a reading that the CEB and the recent NRSVue alike follow (see also Exod 20:11; 31:17; 2 Esdras 6:38-59).  The versions, influenced in particular by the Exodus passages, are making an understandable decision: after all, how can God be said to finish God’s work on God’s day of rest?

But the Hebrew MT reads wayyikal ‘elohim bayom hashibi’i mela’kto [“God completed God’s work on the seventh day”].  The old NRSV, like the RSV and KJV, stayed with the MT here.  I am persuaded that that is the better course.  The priestly writers in this unit pursue a sabbatical logic.  In Genesis 1:1–2:4a, each day is numbered, from One through Seven (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31; 2:2-3). Indeed, rather than using the word “Sabbath,” Gen 2:1-3 speaks only of Day Seven, to preserve that numbering sequence.  In this context, then, the seventh day is the day of completion, the climax of creation.  The NRSV had it right.  For the priests who wrote Genesis 2:1-3, Sabbath was part of the very structure of reality, woven into the warp and woof of the cosmos.

Similarly, even a casual reader will recognize that a change occurs in the middle of Genesis 2:4.  The first half of this verse looks back to Genesis 1:1—2:3, recapitulating Gen 1:1–note the verb “create” and the phrase “the heavens and the earth” in both places.  The first creation account in Scripture, then, is not Genesis 1, but Genesis 1:1–2:4a.

Something new begins in the second half of that verse.  Note first the inversion of “heaven” and “earth” in the MT of Gen 2:4b (CEB has “earth and sky”). The Aramaic Targum agrees with the Hebrew here, but in the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac, and the Samaritan Pentateuch the order is the same as in Gen 1:1 and 2:4a. Still, it makes better sense that those versions would have altered the order for consistency than that the MT would have changed it. The different order in the MT is so striking that it must be original, emphasizing the beginning of a new narrative:

On the day the LORD God made earth and sky—before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the LORD God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land, though a stream rose from the earth and watered all of the fertile land—the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life (Gen 2:4b-7).

For the first time in the Bible, God is addressed by God’s Name! However, the Name occurs here in the curious combined expression Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”), found 20 times in Gen 2—3, but rare elsewhere.

Readers of the English Bible need to be aware that “LORD God,” “Lord GOD,” and “LORD GOD” translate three different Hebrew expressions! The NRSV and many other translations follow the KJV and render the common Hebrew expression ‘adonai Yhwh (“my lord Yhwh”) as “Lord GOD,” to avoid “lord LORD” (for example, Gen 15:2; Exod 9:30; Deut 3:24; the LXX sometimes does render this title as kurie kurie [“lord Lord”]).

In Isa 12:2 and 26:4, NRSV and RSV have LORD GOD for the Hebrew Yah Yhwh.  Yah is a shortened form of the Name, often found in names like “Jeremiah” as well as in the expression “Hallelujah” in the Psalms (64 times). In both Isaiah passages, KJV reads “Lord JEHOVAH,” while in Isa 12:2 NRSVue has simply “LORD.”

While “LORD God” (Yhwh ‘elohim) predominates in Gen 2—3 (the only exception is the conversation between the woman and the snake in Gen 3:1b-5, where ‘elohim is used), it is elsewhere found only in a very few, late-dated texts: specifically, in Chronicles (1 Chr 17:16-17; 22:1, 19 [Yhwh with ha’elohim]; 28:20; 29:1; 2 Chr 1:9; 6:41-42 [a citation of Ps 132:8-10, which lacks this expression]; 26:18; 32:16), in Psalm 84:11; and in Jonah 4:6. The two apparent exceptions only prove the rule, as in both Exodus 9:30 and 2 Samuel 7:25, there are questions about the text.  In Exod 9:30, most LXX manuscripts read simply kurios (“Lord”), while in 2 Sam 7:25, the LXX and several Hebrew manuscripts suggest that ‘adonai Yhwh is the better reading.

Most likely, the unusual references to the Divine as Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”) in Gen 2:4b—3:24 are the work of an editor, or perhaps of the Priestly writers themselves, integrating the second creation account with the first, and so guiding the reader toward an integrated, canonical reading of these opening chapters of Genesis.  Even so, the use of ‘elohim (“God”) in the first and Yhwh (“the LORD”) in the second is an important clue that there are two distinct traditions concerning creation in these chapters.

But these traditions need only be seen in conflict if we believe it necessary to read them as fact statements, rather than as truth statements. The canon itself models such a reading repeatedly. In the Pentateuch, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with their separate and distinctive views of Israel’s identity and its duties before God, appear side by side—and of course, the Christian New Testament begins with four unique and distinctive tellings of Jesus’ story. Reading canonically, we can embrace the implications of each tradition, while still permitting each its autonomy.

For example: in Gen 1:1—2:4a, God calls everything into being, including time and space. While one could say that God creates light on the first day, the text avows, “God named the light Day and the darkness Night” (Gen 1:5). It is more accurate, then, to say that by creating light, God creates the first day, and so every day thereafter: time itself begins here. Similarly, when on Day Two God inserts the solid bowl of the heavens into the roiling waters of chaos, dividing them into the waters above and below (Gen 1:6-8), suddenly space has come into being: there is now up and down, back and forth, right and left. As their creator, ‘elohim stands outside of both space and time.

In Genesis 1, to use the theological language of Karl Barth, God is “‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above;’” there is an “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man” (“The Humanity of God,” trans. John Newton Thomas, in The Humanity of God [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], 42)—that is, ‘elohim is transcendent.

But in Gen 2:4b-25, the LORD God formed (Hebrew yatsar, the term for what potters do!) ‘adam “from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils” (Gen 2:7); a very intimate, personal, indeed human-like view of the Divine.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, that we are shaped by the LORD’s hands “expresses. . . the bodily nearness of the Creator to the creature, that it is really he who makes me—man—with his own hands; his concern, his thought for me, his design for me, his nearness to me” (Creation and Fall, trans. John C. Fletcher [orig. Schöpfung und Fall, Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937], in Creation and Temptation [London: SCM Press, 1966], 45). In theological shorthand, the LORD is immanent.

Clearly, believers want and need to affirm both: God is transcendent and God is immanent. If all we had was the first account of creation, we could well think of God as distant, abstract, and uninvolved. If all we had was the narrative in Gen 2, we could well lose the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the Divine. But Genesis 1 and 2 together present God as transcendent and immanent. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Since the assassination attempt against candidate Donald Trump which left one innocent rally attender dead and wounded two others, calls for national unity have come from across the political spectrum.  Unfortunately, on closer examination, many of these are really calls for uniformity: if you would just think and act like us, then our national divisions would be healed!

Biblical ideas of unity, on the other hand, always involve unity in diversity.  Typical is Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ:

If the whole body were an eye, what would happen to the hearing? And if the whole body were an ear, what would happen to the sense of smell? But as it is, God has placed each one of the parts in the body just like he wanted. If all were one and the same body part, what would happen to the body? But as it is, there are many parts but one body. So the eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” or in turn, the head can’t say to the feet, “I don’t need you” (1 Corinthians 12:17-21).

But the best indication of God’s rejection of uniformity is Genesis 11:1-9.  True, traditional readings of the Tower of Babel story see it rather as a warning against unchecked ambition. By this reading, the sin of Babel is the tower, with which they sought to reach the heavens on their own. It was to halt this prideful ambition that God cursed them by confusing their languages, stopping the construction and forcing them to divide into language groups and scatter.

But as Theodore Hiebert has observed, that traditional reading misses the reason the text itself gives for their building: not so as to reach the heavens, but because “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4; Theodore Hiebert, “The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World’s Cultures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 [2007]: 29-58). Sure enough, when God decides to act, God says nothing about the tower, or pride—or indeed, about punishment. God acts because the people are about to succeed in their goal of remaining “one people” with “one language,” so that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Having circumvented God’s will in this, what else might they do?

This is neither a story condemning the sin of unchecked ambition, nor an account of divine punishment for that sin.   It is about God stepping in to ensure difference and diversity, just as humans are about to succeed in enforcing sameness.

Why does God do this? Perhaps because, as Argentinian Methodist theologian José Míguez Bonino wrote,

God’s intention is a diverse humanity that can find its unity not in the domination of one city, one tower, or one language but in the “blessing for all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3)” (José Míguez Bonino, “Genesis 11:1-9: A Latin American Perspective,” in Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible, ed. Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999], 15-16).

God loves diversity.

In 1956, Rev. W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—at that time the largest Baptist church in the world—was invited to address the General Assembly of the South Carolina legislature on the subject of racial segregation. In his cringingly self-revealing remarks, Criswell condemned “scantling good-for-nothing fellows who are trying to upset all the things that we love as good old Southern people and good old Southern Baptists.”

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision. . . to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. . . Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends (Cited in Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016], 167).

Rev. Criswell could just as well have spoken for the First Church of Babel. The denizens of that place built their city and their tower to ensure that they would stay together in homogeneous uniformity: “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).

We sometimes refer to the confusion of the world’s languages and the scattering of humanity as the “curse of Babel”—but being “scattered abroad” was exactly what God intended for humanity! The real curse of Babel is staying where we are comfortable and unchallenged, in “my church,” “my school,” with “my friends.” Babel itself, in its safe, comfortable, stultifying sameness, is the curse.

The people of Babel wanted to stay all together, and all the same. But God willed differently. The Babel story itself gives no indication of whether or not the people realized that their desires ran counter to God’s. But the old priestly traditions in Genesis state this plainly. The priestly accounts of creation and flood alike declare that humanity was to “fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). As the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 concretely describes, this meant not only being geographically scattered, but ethnically and culturally diverse.

By staying together and squelching difference, the people of Babel—whether knowingly or not—were standing in the way of the diversity of expression that is God’s intent for human beings. So too our own attempts to impose homogeneity on our communities run counter to God’s will.

Jacqueline Lapsley recalls being with Theodore Hiebert at a conference of Reformed theologians and Bible scholars in South Africa. There, he advanced the reading of the tower of Babel story we have advocated in this post: that this story demonstrates God’s love of cultural diversity. But when they heard this, South African scholars present were horrified! It seems that this very text, and a reading very like Hiebert’s, had been “one of the central biblical foundations for apartheid. On the pro-apartheid reading, Gen 11 teaches that God does not want different cultural and linguistic groups to live together” (Jacqueline Lapsley, “‘Am I Able to Say Just Anything?’: Learning Faithful Exegesis from Balaam,” Interpretation 60 [2006]: 23).

Does this invalidate Hiebert’s reading of this passage? I don’t believe it does—although it certainly points up a problem with how we do biblical interpretation (also called “exegesis,” from Greek words meaning “draw out”)!

Lapsley warns against readings of Scripture that “serve our own selfish interests,” or that fail to consider “God’s larger story.” In the end, she proposes,

Exegesis requires certain learned skills—how to attend to the historical, social, and literary facets of the text—but it also requires a disciplined imagination and something even more important—faith that God’s word has power to speak to and for us, and especially faith that it speaks to and for those who are far removed from the prosperity we enjoy (Lapsley, “Learning Faithful Exegesis,” 30).

Reading Scripture prayerfully, guided by God’s Spirit, with disciplined imaginations, we can make wise choices about how to apply the Bible to our own contexts. When we do this, we can readily see that affirming the God-given goodness of our differences leads, not to apartheid, but to learning to live together in love.

The account of Pentecost in Acts 2 clearly draws on the Babel story. Jesus’ followers were waiting together in Jerusalem as he had commanded them, praying in an upper room, when “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:4). Boiling out of that room and into the streets, they met Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman world, who had come to Jerusalem for Pentecost. These visitors discovered, to their astonishment, that they could understand Jesus’ Galilean followers perfectly: “‘in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’” (Acts 2:11).

Please notice that this passage does not say that the people all started speaking the same language—that their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness was denied or undone. The Spirit does not return them to “one language and the same words” (Gen 11:1). Instead, each group hears God’s praise in its own language.

In Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” she relates her first encounter with her first college roommate, in America:

She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. . . . My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

We should not be surprised that the members of the Pentecost crowd all hear the Gospel in their own languages. The entire Bible models for us how to escape the danger of the single story.  Scripture rarely gives us a single story about anything!  At the beginning of our Bible, we find two different accounts of the creation of the world (one in Genesis 1:1—2:4a, and another in Genesis 2:4b-25).   Our New Testament opens with four gospels, presenting four quite different accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Scripture itself calls for us to listen with open ears and open hearts for the truth told, not as a single story, but as a chorus of voices.  Sometimes those voices are in harmony, sometimes they are in dissonance, but always they are lifted in praise to the God who remembers all our stories, the comedies and tragedies alike, and catches them up together in love, forgiveness, and grace.  Racial, cultural, and gender diversity is not a problem to be overcome, but a gift of God, to be celebrated and embraced.

This Sunday, I am honored to be teaching in the congregation served by my former student and current colleague in ministry, Jay Freyer: Beulah Presbyterian Church.  So all day long, “Beulah” has been on my mind, and I’ve been humming and singing old gospel hymns from my youth:

O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
As on thy highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me,
And view the shining glory shore,
My Heav’n, my home forevermore!

I’m living on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky;
I’m drinking at the fountain that never shall run dry;
O yes! I’m feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply,
For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.

So, what is Beulah Land?  Where does this name come from?  In the King James version, Isaiah 62:4 reads,

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken;
neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate:
but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah,
and thy land Beulah:
for the Lord delighteth in thee,
and thy land shall be married.

This passage comes from a section of the book (Isaiah 56–66) often called Third Isaiah, dating from soon after the return from Babylonian exile.  By 587 BCE, the armies of Babylon had taken out all of Judah’s fortified cities, including Jerusalem.  They deported large chunks of the populace, including the king, and destroyed the temple.  So even after Babylon itself had fallen and the exiles came back, they found Judah devastated.

But the LORD promises to be with these returnees. Indeed, as often happens to brides on their wedding day, the LORD declares that Judah will be given a new name:

You shall no more be termed Forsaken [Hebrew Azuba],
    and your land shall no more be termed Desolate [Hebrew Shemamah],
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her [Hebrew Hephzibah]
    and your land Married [Hebrew Beulah],
for the LORD delights in you,
    and your land shall be married (Isa 62:4, NRSVue).

If Judah, now named Hephzibah and Beulah, is the bride, who is the groom?  The very next verse declares,

For as a young man marries a young woman,
    so shall your builder marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
    so shall your God rejoice over you (Isa 62:5 NRSVue).

God will be to restored Judah, not as a king to his vassals, or a mistress to her slaves, but as a husband to a wife! The day of Judah’s restoration will be Judah’s wedding day!

In this metaphor, as my last blog discussed, God’s people are understood to be married to their LORD.  No wonder “Beulah”–married–became shorthand in Christian hymnody for the blessedness of the Christian life, and the promise of God’s eternity.  Indeed, the traditional United Methodist marriage service opens with these words:

Dearly beloved,
we are gathered together here in the sight of God,
and in the presence of these witnesses,
to join together this man and this woman 
in holy matrimony,
which is an honorable estate, instituted of God,
and signifying unto us
the mystical union that exists between Christ and his Church;
which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified
with his presence in Cana of Galilee.

A wedding, it seems, is not just about this particular couple! The gathered congregation is reminded of their marriage, too: of the “mystical union that exists between Christ and his church.”

It is no accident that, in Hebrew, the words for city, land, and world are all feminine in gender. Indeed, although nouns in English lack gender, we too speak of “Mother Nature,” of our native language as our “mother tongue,” and of our high school or college as our “alma mater” (Latin for “bountiful mother”).

Back of this grammatical pattern is the ancient image of a city or a nation as a woman, the mother of its inhabitants.  It is an easy step from that image to the notion of the city or nation as the bride of its god—as in Isaiah 62.

But of course, as all husbands and wives surely know, the wedding is not the marriage!  After all, the LORD and Judah had been “married” before.  The prophet Jeremiah wrote,

Go and proclaim to the people of Jerusalem,
The LORD proclaims:
I remember your first love,
    your devotion as a young bride,
    how you followed me in the wilderness,
    in an unplanted land.
 Israel was devoted to the LORD,
    the early produce of the harvest.
Whoever ate from it became guilty;
    disaster overtook them,
        declares the LORD (Jer 2:2-3 CEB)

Indeed, the prophets treat this idea negatively most of the time, using unfaithfulness to marriage vows as a metaphor for false worship–idolatry becomes adultery (for example, Hosea 2:2–14; Jeremiah 3:1–10; Ezekiel 16:8-22).

A good marriage doesn’t just happen. It takes work for any marriage to work: attention to the other’s interests, needs, and concerns.  But, without love, no amount of work will be enough, and with love, the work often does not feel like work at all!

God calls us Hephzibah and Beulah, friends. We are God’s delight, cherished and beloved.  When we forget that, Jesus, as at the wedding in Cana, stands to ready to remind us—to once more turn the tepid, bland, insipid water of our religion into the rich red wine of true devotion.

AFTERWORD:

Beulah Presbyterian Church has quite a distinguished history!  From their web site:

In 2014, Beulah Presbyterian Church in Churchill marked its 230th anniversary of being a place of Christian worship. It has a long history, deeply intertwined with the early settlement of English-speaking people in the area. Worship has continued there since a gathering of soldiers led by British Brig. Gen. John Forbes who defeated the French at Fort Duquesne in 1758.

The Presbytery officially recognized the church in 1784 and the church– originally called Bullock Pens for the soldiers’ cattle yard there, later called Pitt Township Presbyterian Church — was named Beulah in 1804.

After meeting in two earlier log structures (one a simple cabin, the second a cross-shaped building), worshippers built the first brick church in 1837, and that building still stands at Beulah Road and McCrady Road.

The cemetery holds the graves of veterans from Gen. Forbes’ troops, as well as men who fought in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I and World War II. Grave markers for men, women and children carry names now found on area streets and landmarks: Johnston, McCrea, Lindberg, MacFarlane, Kelly.

Early members of the church, believed to be one of the first Christian churches west of the Alleghenies, later founded other Presbyterian churches in the region: East Liberty (1828), Crossroads (1836), Hebron (1849), Wilkinsburg (1866), Turtle Creek (1878), Forest Hills (1904).

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is an extraordinarily odd love poem!  Indeed, until the last two lines, we may well think that he is insulting rather than praising his (unnamed) mistress.  With those final lines declaring his love, and his beloved’s rarity, Shakespeare’s point becomes clear.  He is lampooning the hackneyed conventions of romantic poetry in his day, declaring them incapable of expressing true love, rather than idealized infatuation.  Metaphors, taken literally, become nonsense: hence, “false compare.”

Rather like Sonnet 130, the Song of Songs (often called the Song of Solomon) seems to us a very odd love song–but in this case, it is the metaphors themselves that are obscure.  For example: in our time, and in our Western culture, it seems very strange to compare a woman’s eyes to doves, or her hair to a flock of goats (Song 4:1)!  Yet make no mistake:  the Song of Songs is intensely erotic love poetry–just the erotic poetry of a different time and culture than ours.  But even so, its passion and intimacy come through across the years.

Certainly, the Song is a very dear text to me personally, and to my beloved wife Wendy.  At our wedding, our old friend Mike McKay read Song 2:10-13 from the RSV, which is still a favorite passage:

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away;
for lo, the winter is past,
    the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
    the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
    is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
    and the vines are in blossom;
    they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away.

Inside my wedding ring, Wendy had engraved Song of Songs 5:16: “This is my beloved and this is my friend.”

As we might expect, its frank content makes the Song controversial even now (another old friend, my seminary roommate Matt Blanzy, proposed that the Song was included in the Bible so that the book would sell!).  Indeed, when the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was coming together in the first century, many questioned whether the Song should be included.  Did this book indeed “defile the hands”–that is, is it a sacred text, not to be touched or handled casually?  But Rabbi Akiba said,  “Let no one in Israel claim that the Song of Songs does not defile the hands!”

For the whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies (Mishnah Yadayim 3.5).

The reason for this very high view of the Song was the way that this poetry was read–not as a celebration of human love, but as an allegory for divine love:

The loving relationship of Songs of Songs was reinterpreted as a metaphor for the ardent love between God and Israel, on display most dramatically during the holiday that recalls the Exodus from Egypt. Some Jews also read Song of Songs every Friday night, as a kind of renewal of the vows between God and Israel. As Rabbi Akiva passionately argued, it has become a permanent part of the Jewish canon.

Similarly, early Christians read the Song as an allegory for the love between Christ and his bride, the church (see Ephesians 5:22-33; Revelation 19:6-9; 21:9-27).  Accordingly, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 82 sermons on the Song!

Without doubt, this is a potent image, capturing something of the intensity and passion of our worship and devotion to the Lord, and of the deep, committed love of Jesus for us, love which led him to the cross.  Note, though, that in the Song, the relationship between the Lover and the Beloved is not only mutual, but equal.  This is clearly not true to our relationship with the Divine, where the initiative and authority are all God’s.  However, we also must not conclude from the marriage metaphor that God is male.

Nor should we misread Scripture and claim for human husbands something like Divine authority over human wives!  While some readers have understood Ephesians 5:22-33 to stipulate the proper roles of husband and wife (“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands. . . Husbands, love your wives,” Eph 5:22, 25 KJV), the author of Ephesians, following prophetic precedent (for example, Hosea 2:16-18; Jeremiah 2:1-2), is using marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between the community of faith and its Lord. This writer’s citation of Genesis 2:24 (see Ephesians 5:31) is explicitly metaphorical, as the old NRSV made quite evident: “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church” (compare Eph 5:32 NRSVue).

Shakespeare’s poetic critique of “false compare” should remind all of us, but particularly theologians and students of Scripture, not to confuse a metaphor with the reality to which it points.  We are compelled to metaphor, for God is God, and not an object in the world.  But whatever image of God we have in our heads, God is not that. 

Our language is limited, particularly when we strive to speak of God. Can we pay close attention to what we say, understanding the power of words to wound and to heal? Can we strive in our talk about God to be faithful to the God revealed to us in Christ Jesus, who calls us, not to dominate one another, but to lives of love and service?