FOREWORD: I was honored to be invited to preach last Sunday at the church where  grew up, and where my father and sister still worship: Big Tygart UMC in Mineral Wells, WV.  This is the message that I delivered: I pray that it will prove useful.

Last week, Wendy and I were in Swallow Falls State Park outside Oakland, MD.  We spent a delightful morning hiking the canyon trail, viewing four beautiful waterfalls–but then, it was time to go home.  Our car has a built-in GPS (Global positioning system) with our home address programmed in, so we told it to take us home, and off we went.

At first, we were driving on unfamiliar, but decent roads: two-lane highways, with white lines down the sides and a yellow line down the middle.  But then, our GPS told us to turn left: onto a one-lane blacktop road with no lines that reminded me of Sugar Camp Run, where I grew up and where my Dad and sister still live.

Later we turned onto a gravel road, then onto a dirt track that reminded me Sugar Camp when I was a boy–before tar and chip or blacktop.  Still, the GPS said that up ahead we would turn right onto Route such-and-such, so we weren’t concerned.

But then, the road Teed, and to our right was an unused track with grass growing down the middle, petering out at a closed farm gate!  So we didn’t go that way: instead we turned left, down a pretty good gravel road that led us to a paved and lined highway–but with no route signs.  We learned that that road would take us to Terra Alta–good news, since Wendy knew where Terra Alta was, and was sure she could get us home from there.  But then, before we reached Terra Alta, the GPS told us to turn again, onto another one-lane blacktop road.  So, we turned off the guidance, got out a paper map, and Wendy navigated us from Terra Alta to home.

This week, I have been reflecting on our faulty GPS, and remembering a very different road trip: my own journey of faith, which began here, at Big Tygart United Methodist Church.  From the time I was five, when my family moved back to Mineral Wells, this was our church home.  I gave my life to Christ when I was nine, at a revival at my Uncle Bob’s church (Edgelawn UMC), but I was baptized here by Rev. Seldon Scott, at what was then a deep and wide place in the creek behind the Big Tygart church.

When I was fifteen, there was a revival and a charismatic renewal at Big Tygart, and I was filled with the Holy Spirit.  I found a new passion and zeal in my faith, a renewed love for Jesus, and a deepening hunger for the Word of God.  I pored over my Bible daily, eager to learn more about my God.

And then, my spiritual GPS led me up dead end road.  I read in Hebrews 6:4-6 (KJV):

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

Indeed, Hebrews 10:26-27 (KJV) told me,

For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.

For a terrible few days, I knew that I was damned.  Had I “sinned wilfully” since that night at Edgelawn when I asked Jesus into my heart?  I knew that I had.  Had I sinned since at fifteen the Spirit set my heart aflame?  I knew that I had.  So, as Hebrews 6 plainly said, there could be no repentance for me: it was “impossible.”  I was going to hell.  My Bible said so, in black and white–God said it, I believed it, that settled it.

I remember praying earnestly at the altar that Sunday, with all the saints of the church gathered around me praying for me.  Old Mrs. Deems asked me, “Steve, what is it? What’s wrong?”–but how could I tell her?  How could I tell that dear old saint that I was damned, and that there was nothing that she, or I, or anyone else could do about it?

It took awhile.  But my Dad, my first and best Bible teacher, helped me to see that these two passages in Hebrews were not the whole Bible!  My mother’s favorite passage of Scripture was from 1 John (“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,” 1 John 4:18 [KJV]), so it may have been Mom who led me to 1 John 1:8-10 (KJV):

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”—those words were like cool water on my parched young heart!  Rather than telling me that if I had sinned since I knew Christ then I was damned, this text assured me that if I thought I hadn’t sinned, I was deceived!  And so, God’s love and grace got me back on track.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that the Bible, or Hebrews, was a faulty GPS!  The fault lay not in Scripture, but in my reading of Scripture.  The Bible isn’t easy, friends!  We need to read the Bible, not in small bites, but in big hunks, so as not to miss the connections among texts in Scripture; why, and to whom, these words were said.  It takes hard work, careful and prayerful study, to go from what the text on the page says to what it means, and how it should be applied.

In the case of Hebrews, we need to consider the clues this book offers as to its context and audience.  The community Hebrews addresses is well off: although they have known robbery (Hebrews 10:34), they are still able to help others in trouble, and do so.

In the past, this community had seen signs and wonders–their conversion had been marvelous (Hebrews 2:4)!  But those glory days are long past.  Now, the preacher of this extended sermon (Hebrews 13:22) declares (Hebrews 5:11-14) they have grown complacent and  content.  They are dull of hearing. Although they ought to be teachers themselves, they instead need instruction in the very basics of the gospel.

Some in this community have experienced conflict and trouble because of their faith (Hebrews 10:32-34), but they have not yet known real, bloody persecution (Hebrews 12:4).  Yet, despite their privileged position, the community is weak, ineffectual (Hebrews 12:12).  Their problem is not poverty, or persecution, or even sin, but indifference: indeed, some no longer even gather for worship (Hebrews 10:23-25)!

The author of Hebrews was railing at this community, trying desperately to break through their comfortable, casual Christianity and rouse them again to passionate faith.  The preacher warns them that, if they think they can casually lay their faith aside and then pick it up again at their convenience, they have another think coming!

To understand why those hard, harsh, terrifying words are in Hebrews 6 and 10, and to understand and apply them rightly, we need to read the whole book of Hebrews!

How can we know whether we are reading the Bible rightly?  One test of whether our “GPS” is faulty is the one that Wendy and I discovered coming home from Oakland, MD: if our spiritual GPS takes us up a dead end road, then something is wrong!  Just so, if our reading of the Bible leads us to conclude, as I concluded as a young Christian, that there is no hope for us–that we are beyond the reach of God’s grace, then we need to read again!  If our reading of Scripture leads us to conclude that God is a hard, harsh, and merciless judge, then we need, carefully and prayerfully, to read again.  And, God help us, if our reading of Scripture leads us to think that God likes the people we like, and hates the people we hate; that God shares our prejudices and calls us to expel and exclude anyone, then we need to read again.

The best test I know as to whether we are reading the Bible rightly is in the opening verses of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word
    and the Word was with God
    and the Word was God.

The Word became flesh
    and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory,
    glory like that of a father’s only son,
        full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14).

In the deepest, truest sense, the Bible is not the word of God.  Jesus is the Word of God–Jesus, the Word who brought the worlds into being; Jesus, who reveals to us what God is like; Jesus, who lived among us, who ate with sinners, who lived for us, died for us, rose again from the dead for us, and will come again for us!  Jesus is the Word of God, and if the words of Scripture lead us to Jesus, and to the God of Jesus Christ, then they become for us word of God for the people of God.  If our Bible leads us anywhere else, then our GPS is malfunctioning, and we need, carefully and prayerfully, to go back and read it again.

AFTERWORD: The icon above, from over the interior doors to Jesus the Divine Word Church in Huntingtown, Maryland, depicts Jesus the Divine Word (CS photo/Bob Roller).

FOREWORD:  HEBREW GEEK ALERT!  This blog goes pretty far into the weeds of Hebrew translation and text criticism–feel free to skim it, or even skip it if you must!  Still, I have tried to make this post accessible to non-specialists, who I believe do need to have at least some awareness of these issues to read difficult texts, such as Ezek 28:11-19, knowledgeably.  I hope this post proves useful to you.  God bless you, friends!

By and large, working with the still new New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVue) of the Bible has been fairly seamless.  Reviewing this revision of the NRSV (it is quite deliberately not described as a fresh translation),  I earlier wrote:

While the RSV remains available, the editors have chosen to let the NRSV go out of print (so, for example, it is no longer available at the Bible Gateway website).  I think this decision is unfortunate: I am certain that, as I use this new Bible, I will find still other places where I prefer the text critical decisions made in that earlier version to those in the NRSVue.  Still, so far as I can now see, in most places the Updated Edition has stayed with the critical assessments of the NRSV, which is all to the good.

I recently encountered a fresh surprise in (and disagreement with!) this fresh revision.  In my most recent Bible Guy blog, I wrote that in his lament over the “king of Tyre” (Ezek 28:11-19), the prophet Ezekiel identifies Eden with Zion. In the NRSVue, the relevant verses read “You were in Eden, the garden of God. . . I placed you on the holy mountain of God” (Ezek 28:13, 14).  But elsewhere in their version of  Ezekiel’s lament the editors of the NRSVue have made significant changes from the NRSV:

You were a cherub;
    I placed you on the holy mountain of God;
    you walked among the stones of fire.
You were blameless in your ways
    from the day that you were created,
    until iniquity was found in you.
In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence, and you sinned,
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and I drove you out, O guardian cherub,
    from among the stones of fire (Ezek 28:14-16).

Through these same verses, the NRSV, largely staying with the RSV, reads,

With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you;
    you were on the holy mountain of God;
    you walked among the stones of fire .
You were blameless in your ways
    from the day you were created,
    until iniquity was found in you.
In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and the guardian cherub drove you out
    from among the stones of fire.

Note in particular the highlighted differences between “With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you . . . and the guardian cherub drove you out” (Ezek 28:14, 16, NRSV, compare RSV) and “You were a cherub . . . and I drove you out, O guardian cherub” (Ezek 28:14, 16, NRSVue), which entirely change the meaning of the passage!  For the record, the NRSVue follows here a similar approach to the CEB, the KJV, the NIV, and the ESV, as well as the Latin Vulgate.  But before we deal with the reasons the NRSV team made different (but I will argue, better) text critical decisions, we need first to know what a cherub is!

At the head of this blog, you will find the image that likely comes to the mind of most readers when they see or hear the word “cherub”–a chubby little baby with wings!  We describe adorable toddlers as “cherubic,” and many churches call their preschool music program the “cherub choir.”  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that use of “cherub” and “cherubic” goes back to 18th century England.

But in the Bible, cherubs (Hebrew kherubim) are  terrible guardian spirits: bizarre semi-divine heavenly beings, represented elsewhere in the ancient Near East as winged sphinxes.  The golden lid of the Ark of the Covenant was molded in the image of two kherubim, their wings overlapping to form a seat (Exod 37:1-9)–a cherub throne, as the divine title “the LORD, who is enthroned on the cherubim” indicates (for example, 1 Sam 4:4; Ps 80:1).

This detail of a 13-14th century BCE ivory plaque from Megiddo depicts such a cherub throne.  In Solomon’s temple, the Most Holy Place held a massive one: two cherubim stood side by side facing the main chamber of the temple with their inner wings touching, overshadowing the ark, and their outer wings stretching out to the chamber walls. (1 Kgs. 6:19–28//2 Chr. 3:8–13).  However, the throne was empty–the LORD was believed to be enthroned invisibly above the cherubim. The Ark itself thus served as the LORD’s footstool, making it the intersection of divine and human worlds, and the place of the LORD’s special presence.

Returning to the NRSVue of Ezekiel’s poem: it must be said that this revision faithfully adheres to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible used in the synagogue, upon which our Old Testament is based. Ezekiel 28:14 does read ‘att-kherub, “you were a cherub,” and 28:16 reads wa’abbedka kerub-hassokek, “I drove you out [i.e., “to be destroyed”], guardian cherub.”  By this reading, Ezekiel compares the imminent fall of the proud king of Tyre to the fall of an angel/cherub from heaven.

Traditional Christian interpretations read Ezek 28:11-19 together with Isa 14:3-23, a taunt song directed against the king of Babylon which alludes to the fall from heaven of helel ben-shakhar, “morning star, son of dawn” (Isa 14:12).  Both passages are believed to describe the fall of Satan (the name “Lucifer,” or Light-bearer, is derived from Isa 14:12 in the Vulgate).  So Tertullian cited Ezek 28 as proof that Satan was created good, but became corrupt through his own choices (Adversus Marcionem 2.10), while Theodoret of Cyrus wrote, “Forcing the text, someone might apply these things even to the historical prince of Tyre, but the text truly and properly corresponds to that demon which produces sinfulness” (Comm. Ezek 28).

Marvin Pope proposed that both Isaiah and Ezekiel referred to the fall of the Canaanite god El, displaced by the vigorous young storm god Baal (depicted above)—a story not told outright in the Ugaritic sources, but reconstructed indirectly (Marvin Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts [Leiden: Brill, 1955], 97-103). A more likely parallel for Isa 14:3-23 is the Canaanite myth of Athtar, an astral figure who claimed Baal’s throne for a brief time before being expelled from the heavens for his overweening pride and audacity (KTU 1.6 i; see W. G. E. Watson, “HELEL,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, Second Edition, Extensively Revised, eds. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst [Leiden: Brill, 1999], 393).

But there are problems with the NRSVue’s rendition of Ezekiel 28:11-19, and with the “fall from heaven” interpretation of the passage as well.  In Ezek 28:14, the Greek Septuagint (LXX) reads meta tou cheroub (“with the cherub”), which presupposes not the ‘att-kherub of the Masoretic text (“you were a cherub”) but ‘eth-kherub (“with a cherub”), a reading also found in the Syriac translation.

Remember that Hebrew was originally written with consonants only.  In the Masoretic Text (MT) of our Hebrew Bible, scribal families called the Masoretes have added a system of marks above, below, and even within the consonants to record what they heard when the text was read aloud.  This included not only the vowel sounds, but also the voicing of the consonants (as well as doubled letters in spelling), rising and falling inflections, and pauses.

The consonantal text (את־חרוב) is the same for both  ‘att-kherub in the Masoretic text (“you [were] a cherub”) and ‘eth-kherub, assumed by the LXX (“with a cherub”).  But in support of the LXX and the Syriac traditions, it must be noted that ‘att is the feminine form of the pronoun “you,” unlikely to be used either for the king of Tyre or the masculine noun kherub.  The NRSV chose rightly, then, to follow the LXX and Syriac rather than the MT, and read “With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you.”

Similarly, in Ezek 28:16, the LXX kai egagen se (“and he led you away”) apparently reads the consonants ואבדך not (with MT) as wa’abbedka, the first person preterite (simple past tense) of the verb אבד (“and I destroyed you/drove you [i.e., the cherub] out”), but as we’ibbadka, the third person perfect tense: “and he [i.e., the cherub] drove you out,” with the cherub as the subject, not the object, of the verb.

Two features of Hebrew support the LXX reading.  First, in Hebrew syntax, the subject usually follows the verb: so we’ibbadka kherub hassokek would naturally mean “the guardian cherub drove you out” (with the NRSV).  Second, definite direct objects are typically marked in Hebrew by ‘eth, so if the cherub was the object rather  than the subject of the verb, we might expect ‘eth-kherub (we do find definite objects marked elsewhere in the Tyre oracles: see 26:4, 11; 27:5, 26; 28:6).

Since the consonantal text of Ezekiel 28 permits both the Masoretic and the LXX interpretations (with different pointing), we can legitimately ask which reading best explains the other. Here, the LXX arguably represents a more natural reading than the MT. Probably, then, the cherub is a supporting character in this drama after all, rather than the lead.  The NRSV, rather than the NRSVue, best represents the meaning of this passage.

The mention of Eden in Ezek 28:13, together with the “guardian cherub” expelling the addressee of Ezekiel’s lament from that garden in Ezek 28:16, suggests to many readers that Ezek 28:11-19 is a retelling of the Garden story in Genesis 3, or perhaps even its source.  By this reading, the fall of the king of Tyre is compared to the fall of the primal human. Such an interpretation certainly appears convincing. After all, the lament declares, “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezek 28:13). The list of precious stones in that same verse brings to mind the wealth associated with the rivers of Eden in Genesis 2:10-14. Further, the lament goes on to describe the expulsion of its protagonist from Eden for the sin of pride, and specifically, for desiring forbidden wisdom (Ezek 28:17; compare Gen 2:17; 3:1-6). In both stories, a cherub seems to enforce the sentence of expulsion (Ezek 28:14, 16; compare Gen 3:24).

But many features of the narrative in Ezek 28 do not fit the Genesis Garden Story. The protagonist in Ezekiel’s lament is expelled from Eden, not simply for pride or seeking forbidden wisdom, but for unjust trade practices and violence (Ezek 28:16, 18).  Indeed, many aspects of Ezek 28:11-19 do not fit its alleged target, the “king of Tyre,” either. Among the accusations raised against the “king of Tyre” is “you profaned your sanctuaries” (Ezek 28:18). What could this possibly mean, applied to the king of a foreign city? The language used for the expulsion of the “king of Tyre” is also odd: God declares, “I will cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God” (Ezek 28:16). The verb used here, khalal, appears predominantly in Ezekiel (23 times) and in Leviticus (14 times), where it is used for the profanation or desacralizing of a person or thing (for example, Lev 21:12; Ezek 7:21). A better rendering of Ezek 28:16, then, would be “I will deconsecrate you”—language more appropriate for defrocking a priest than for removing a king from power.

Once the referent of the lament has been identified as the high priest in Jerusalem rather than the “king of Tyre,” solutions to numerous difficulties in this passage fall into place. The use of khalal (“profane”) for the “expulsion” of this figure makes far better sense if the passage describes the defrocking of a priest rather than the deposition of a king. It also makes perfect sense for priests to be castigated for defiling their sanctuaries; indeed, Ezekiel elsewhere accuses them of this very offense (Ezek 23:38-39). Nor is priestly involvement in violence and dishonest trade any surprise (Mal 1:6-8, and in the NT, Matt 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46; John 2:14-22).

Which returns us, once more, to Ezekiel’s cherub!  To understand the role that the cherub plays in this poem, we need to ask about the meaning of another word: the Hebrew sokek , rendered “guardian” in both the NRSV and the NRSVue of Ezek 28:16 (see also Ezek 28:14, where the NRSVue follows the LXX and skips over mimshakh hassokek [“anointed as guardian”?]).  However, sokek is never used for a guardian anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It is used, however, for the cherub’s wings overshadowing the Ark (Exod 25:20; 37:9; 1 Kgs 8:7; 1 Chron 28:18),  So the JPSV of Ezek 28 speaks rather of the “shielding” cherub, while the KJV reads “covering.” Both translations depict the function of the cherubim in the Temple, rather than the guard duty performed by the cherub in Gen 3:24.  But that protection of the sanctity of Temple and Ark makes the temple kherubim the natural instruments of God’s judgment upon Jerusalem’s corrupt priesthood.

Robert Wilson argues that Ezek 28:11-19 is “a dirge which was ostensibly concerned with the king of Tyre, but which in fact was so laced with allusions to the Israelite high priest that the real thrust of the dirge could not possibly be missed by Ezekiel’s audience” (Robert Wilson, “The Death of the King of Tyre: The Editorial History of Ezekiel 28,” in Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin Pope, ed. John Marks and Robert Good [Guilford, CT: Four Quarters, 1987], 217). Ezekiel declares that because of his pride, greed, and corruption, the high priest in Jerusalem will be expelled from the Temple and destroyed.

I propose that Ezekiel’s priestly editors, unhappy with his condemnation of the high priest, have redirected his lament, adding a new heading identifying its referent as the king of Tyre (not mentioned after Ezek 28:12). Contrary to the NRSVue of Ezekiel 28:11-19, this passage is not about the fall of a cherub from heaven. Nor, however, is it about the first Human, or even the king of Tyre!  It is a judgment oracle against Jerusalem’s high priest.  However, it also serves to clarify both the identification of Eden with Zion, and the iconic function of the Temple cherubim.

Readings of the Eden story in Genesis 2:4b–3:24 often ignore an important theological concept: the idea of Eden itself, the center of the earth, on the true Mount Zion, from which its rivers flow to bring life to the whole earth.  Within the Hebrew Bible, the identification of Eden with Zion is certainly implied in Isaiah’s famous “peaceable kingdom” texts, which imagine the mountain of God as an Edenic paradise (compare Isa 11:6-9; 65:17-25 and Gen 1:29-30). But in Ezekiel 28:11-19, a lament over the “king of Tyre” that concludes Ezekiel’s oracles against Tyre (Ezek 26:7—28:19), the identification of Zion with Eden is unambiguously made:

You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering . . . On the day that you were created they were prepared. With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God, you walked among the stones of fire (Ezek 28:13-14, NRSV).

“The holy mountain of God” (Ezek 28:14, 16; cf. 20:40) is certainly Zion, site of the Jerusalem temple. Yet Ezekiel calls this place “Eden.”

The association, and even the identification, of Zion and Eden is found in Second Temple and rabbinic texts as well. In 1 Enoch 25:3-5, the visionary sees the Tree of Life (Gen 2:9) planted on a beautiful mountain, situated among six other beautiful mountains in the northeast. The angelic interpreter Michael tells him,

This tall mountain which you saw whose summit resembles the throne of God is (indeed) his throne, on which the Holy and Great Lord of Glory, the Eternal King, will sit when he descends to visit the earth with goodness.

Zion is clearly the referent, so in this second- or third-century BCE apocalypse, Eden is Zion. On the other hand, in Jubilees 8:19, Eden and Zion remain distinct, although closely associated with one another:

And [Noah] knew that Eden was the holy of holies and the dwelling of the Lord. And Mount Sinai (was) in the midst of the desert and Mount Zion (was) in the midst of the navel of the earth. The three of these were created as holy places, facing each other.

Still, the concept of Zion as “the navel of the earth” also points toward a connection with Eden. As the center of the earth, Zion is the source of life and meaning for all creation.

There are several references in rabbinic literature to Zion as the navel of the world. Midrash Hashem Bekhokmah Yasad ‘Arets declares that the Lord created the world just as an embryo grows, from the navel outward. Another midrash, Tanhuma: Kedoshim 10, cites Ezek 38:12, which says that the people of Israel live ‘al-tabbur ha’arets: literally, “at the navel of the earth.” This demonstrates, according to the midrash, that Israel is the center of the world, just as the navel is the center of a human being. Little wonder, then, that according to Rabbi Eliezar the Great, creation began with Zion (b.Yoma 54b).

The importance of place in the Bible’s Eden/Zion traditions, and their notion of the center, is reminiscent of those same features in the primal religious traditions of indigenous peoples. Oglala Sioux author Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote:

Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible and gradually the structure of ceremonial reality became clear. . . . The vast majority of Indian tribal religions, therefore, have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. This center enables the people to look out along the four dimensions and locate their lands ( Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 2^nd ed [Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994], 67).

Cayuse leader Weatenatemany (“Young Chief”), when asked to sign a treaty in 1855 ceding land rights, replied, “I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said?”

Though I hear what the ground says. The ground says, It is the Great Spirit that placed me here. The Great Spirit tells me to take care of the Indians, to feed them aright. . . . The ground, the water and the grass say, The Great Spirit has given us our names. We have these names and hold these names. . . . The same way the ground says, It was from me man was made. The Great Spirit, in placing men on earth, desired them to take good care of the ground and to do each other no harm (cited in Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, ed. T. C. McLuhan. NY: Promontory Press [reprint of Outerbridge & Dienstfrey], 1971, 8).

Such traditions preserve a sense of closeness and kinship with the natural world. In tension with the estrangement from the natural world evident in Gen 3:17, Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in his autobiography,

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as ‘wild’ . . . Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us.  When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began (Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle. New Edition. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2006 [orig. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933], 38).

For Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow, who died in 1932, the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo by white hunters marked the end of the world: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” In sharp contrast is the attitude of Native American hunters toward their prey, evident in the Navajo “Stalking Way:”

I am the Black God, arising with twilight,

            a part of the twilight.

Out from the West, out from the Darkness

            Mountain, a buck of dark flint stands out before me.

The best male game of darkness, it calls to me,

            It hears my voice calling.

Our calls become one in beauty.

            Our prayers become one in beauty.

As I, the Black God, go toward it.

            As the male game of darkness comes toward me.

With beauty before us, we come together.

            With beauty behind us, we come together.

That my arrow may free its sacred breath.

            That my arrow may bring its death in beauty (Tony Hillerman, People of Darkness [New York: Harper & Row, 1980], 171).

Deloria proposed that the major difference between Native American and European world views is that, while indigenous peoples think in terms of place, Europeans think in terms of time: “American Indians hold their lands—places—as having the highest possible meaning . . . Immigrants review the movement of their ancestors across the continent as a steady progression of basically good events and experiences, thereby placing history—time—in the best possible light” (Deloria 1994, 62).

Hehaka Sapa, also known as Black Elk, was a famed shaman of the Oglala Sioux who became a Roman Catholic Christian. Regarding the Native American view of time, he wrote:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves (cited in McLuhan 1971, 42).

Preferencing time over space, Deloria argued, has led Christians to devalue the earth: “The idea of defining religious reality along temporal lines, therefore, is to adopt the pretense that the earth simply does not matter, that human affairs alone are important” (Deloria 1997, 70). Yet curiously, a major consequence of this loss of place is the dehumanization of ethical decision-making: ““Ethics seems to involve an abstract individual making clear, objective decisions that involve principles but not people. Ideology unleashed without being subjected to the critique to the real world proves demoniac at best.” By contrast, “Spatial thinking requires that ethical systems be related directly to the physical world and real human situations, not abstract principles, are believed to be valid at all times and under all circumstances” (Deloria 1997, 72).

How, Willie Jennings asks, has this loss of place affected Christian theology?

How does that removal of true speech, true sight regarding the materiality of the world affect a doctrine of creation? A Christian doctrine of creation is not dependent upon geographical precision; however, it is not wholly independent of geographical accuracy. Belief in creation has to refer to current real-world places or it refers to nothing (Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. [New Haven: Yale University, 2010], 85).

Jennings addresses this question historically, by examining the reasoning behind papal bull Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope Nicholas V on January 8, 1455. This bull, which gave the prince of Portugal permission to enslave Africans and forcibly convert them to Catholicism, was based on a particular reading of Gen 1:1, specifically, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (Jennings 2010, 27-28): “These actions inscribe the contingency of creation itself within the will and desire of the church and the colonial powers. The inherent instability of creation means all things may be altered to bring them to proper order toward saved existence” (Jennings 2010, 29).

Jennings persuasively argues that the loss of place in the Christian imagination has produced our ideas of race, for race becomes a “stand in for landscape in its facilitating characteristics,” a “substitution for place and place-centered identity” (Jennings 2010, 289). In this way, Jennings writes, “we have been transformed into racial identities. Our racial identities enfold imagined connections to land inside our individual bodies and construct racialized boundaries and racial kinship” (Jennings 2010, 289). Rather than building cross-cultural communities, learning from one another and celebrating our differences, we have built walls of isolation and exclusion.

Meanwhile, “colonialism established ways of life that drove an abiding wedge between land and peoples.”

Rather than a vision of a Creator arising through the hearing of Israel’s story bound to Jesus who enables peoples to discern the ways their cultural practices and stories both echo and contradict the divine claim on their lives, the vision born of colonialism articulated a Creator bent on eradicating people’s ways of life and turning the creation into private property (Jennings 2010, 292).

As I write this, we are experiencing record high temperatures worldwide; indeed many scientists are saying “The past three days [July 3-5, 2023] were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history.” Runaway wildfires in Canada have resulted in visible smoke here in Pittsburgh, and difficult breathing conditions, particularly for children and the elderly. All reputable climatologists agree that our climate’s warming is human-driven, caused especially by the use of fossil fuels that have increased the proportion of heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” in our atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. Indeed, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say that the current heat wave in the South and in northern Mexico, with its triple-digit heat index, is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would have been absent climate change.

Yet we do not even agree that there is a problem, let alone a solution! According to a 2014 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, “About one-quarter (23%) of Americans say that climate change is a crisis and 36% say it is a major problem, while nearly 4-in-10 Americans say climate change is a minor problem (23%) or not a problem at all (16%).”  Sadly, a major predictor of climate change denial is being white and Christian: “White evangelical Protestants are more likely than any other religious group to be climate change Skeptics” (39%) and “are much more likely to attribute the severity of recent natural disasters to the biblical ‘end times’ (77%) than to climate change (49%).”

In a seminal 1967 article that gave birth to the ecological movement, historian Lynn White, Jr. placed the blame for “our ecological crisis” on Christianity: “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,” which “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends” (Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” Science 155 (1967): 1205).

White acknowledged the complexity of Christian faith, including views counter to those he had described:

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation. He failed (White 1967, 1207).

Still, White was persuaded that the crisis remained, at its root, a religious one, requiring (“whether we call it that or not”) a religious solution: “Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. . . . We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny” (White 1967, 1207).

For people of the Word, rethinking our nature and destiny begins with rereading our sacred texts, asking humbly what we may have missed, or gotten wrong. Jürgen Moltmann advocates a reading of Gen 1 whereby “the human being is the last being God created and therefore the most dependent of all God’s creations.”

For their life on earth, human beings are dependent on the existence of animals and plants, dirt and water, light, daytime and night-time, sun, moon, and stars, and without these things they cannot live. . . . The other creatures can all exist without the human being, but human beings cannot exist without them (Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Hope: Theology for a World in Peril. Trans. Margaret Kohl and Brian McNeil [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2019], 18).

Moltmann challenges us to

read the Bible not from the beginning but from the end. . . . The perfected creation does not lie behind us in a primal state, but ahead of us in a final one. We await the consummated creation and, together with the cosmos, we are now existing in its prehistory (Moltmann 2019, 66).

I remember as a boy singing an old Gospel hymn, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ thru. / My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. / The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, / And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” But what if this world is my home, after all? What if salvation is not about escape from this world, but about God’s transformation of this world?  Then, as Moltmann reminds us “Men and women will not be redeemed from transience and death from this earth, but together with the earth” (Moltmann 2019, 19). Then, we will seek to be a part of what God is doing, here and now, to bring in God’s kingdom.  We will want to be found at our Lord’s coming doing those things that Jesus did among us: feeding people, healing people, freeing people, proclaiming the good news of God’s salvation and the completion of God’s creation.

On Father’s Day, I was back home in Mineral Wells, WV with my Dad, reminiscing with my sisters about growing up together.  One story that we nearly always revisit is the time that Tammy ran over me with her bicycle.  We have never agreed on exactly what happened.  I remember playing in the dirt road in front of our house with my G. I. Joe, when suddenly I was hit from behind.  My face hit the dirt–I can still taste the dust, and for a long time, until it was worn smooth, I could feel with my tongue the chip in my front tooth.The bike ran right over my back–it may have actually skidded over me as Tammy tried to stop.

The thing is, Tammy is sure that I dared her to run over me, even lying down in the road so that she could do it!  Tracey was tiny then, and Dee Dee hadn’t even been born, but they tend to side with Tammy (perhaps because they know me so well)–and they may be right.  What really happened?  Who knows?  And why does it matter?  Sharing the story is the main thing!

Much of the Hebrew Bible feels like that: family stories, told and retold, remembered a little bit differently depending on who is telling them!  In Genesis, that family circle includes Jewish and Arab peoples: both alike descended from Abram, whose name means “exalted father.”

In both the Bible and the Quran, Ishmael is remembered as the firstborn son of Abraham and the ancestor of the Arabian people. However, in the Quran, Ishmael is a prophet, and he, not Isaac, is the child of promise (Sura 19:54).

The Hebrew Bible reading for Sunday in the lectionary is Genesis 21:8-21:

On the day [Isaac] stopped nursing, Abraham prepared a huge banquet.  Sarah saw Hagar’s son laughing, the one Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham. So she said to Abraham, “Send this servant away with her son! This servant’s son won’t share the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

This upset Abraham terribly because the boy was his son. God said to Abraham, “Don’t be upset about the boy and your servant. Do everything Sarah tells you to do because your descendants will be traced through Isaac. But I will make of your servant’s son a great nation too, because he is also your descendant.” Abraham got up early in the morning, took some bread and a flask of water, and gave it to Hagar. He put the boy in her shoulder sling and sent her away.

She left and wandered through the desert near Beer-sheba. Finally the water in the flask ran out, and she put the boy down under one of the desert shrubs. She walked away from him about as far as a bow shot and sat down, telling herself, I can’t bear to see the boy die. She sat at a distance, cried out in grief, and wept.

God heard the boy’s cries, and God’s messenger called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “Hagar! What’s wrong? Don’t be afraid. God has heard the boy’s cries over there. Get up, pick up the boy, and take him by the hand because I will make of him a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. She went over, filled the water flask, and gave the boy a drink. God remained with the boy; he grew up, lived in the desert, and became an expert archer. He lived in the Paran desert, and his mother found him an Egyptian wife.

In the Hadith (a collection of Muslim teachings and traditions related to the Quran in something like the way that Talmud is related to the Hebrew Bible), the story of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness is retold:

Abraham brought her and her son Ishmael while she was suckling him, to a place near the Ka’ba under a tree on the spot of Zam-zam, at the highest place in the mosque. During those days there was nobody in Mecca, nor was there any water. So he made them sit over there and placed near them a leather bag containing some dates, and a small water-skin containing some water, and set out homeward. Ishmael’s mother followed him saying, “O Abraham! Where are you going, leaving us in this valley where there is no person whose company we may enjoy, nor is there anything (to enjoy)?” She repeated that to him many times, but he did not look back at her Then she asked him, “Has Allah ordered you to do so?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Then He will not neglect us,” and returned. . . When the water in the water-skin had all been used up, she became thirsty and her child also became thirsty. She started looking at him (i.e. Ishmael) tossing in agony; She left him, for she could not endure looking at him, and found that the mountain of Safa was the nearest mountain to her on that land. She stood on it and started looking at the valley keenly so that she might see somebody, but she could not see anybody. Then she descended from Safa and when she reached the valley, she tucked up her robe and ran in the valley like a person in distress and trouble, till she crossed the valley and reached the Marwa mountain where she stood and started looking, expecting to see somebody, but she could not see anybody. . . . When she reached the Marwa (for the last time) she heard a voice and she asked herself to be quiet and listened attentively. She heard the voice again and said, “O, (whoever you may be)! You have made me hear your voice; have you got something to help me?” And behold! She saw an angel at the place of Zam-zam, digging the earth with his heel (or his wing), till water flowed from that place. She started to make something like a basin around it, using her hand in this way, and started filling her water-skin with water with her hands, and the water was flowing out after she had scooped some of it. . . . Then she drank (water) and suckled her child. The angel said to her, “Don’t be afraid of being neglected, for this is the House of Allah which will be built by this boy and his father, and Allah never neglects His people” Hadith 4:583.

In the Hadith, this story is set in Mecca, not Beer-sheba, and connected to the building of the Ka’ba (the destination of the pilgrimage, called the hajj, that all pious Muslims who are able are to make at least once in their lives) by Ishmael and Abraham.  The Hadith also seems a bit kinder to Abraham than the Genesis account!  Arabs and Jews remember their shared past differently–but then, that is how memory works. What we remember, and how we remember it, depends to a great degree on who, where, and how we are.

Last Monday, June 19, was a relatively new federal holiday, established by the passage of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, signed on June 17, 2021 by President Joe Biden.  Juneteenth recalls June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war was over, and that the enslaved were now free. This was over two months after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, and two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, delivered on January 1, 1863. Yet Black Americans in Galveston remained enslaved until the arrival of General Granger’s regiment overcame local resistance to the idea of liberation.

Although denigrated by some as a new, “woke” holiday, Juneteenth has long been celebrated in African American communities, especially in the South, and particularly in Texas!  That many of us white folk had not heard of this day and its significance says more about whose stories we have heard, and how we have chosen to remember our past, than it does about the day or its significance.

Some Americans, concerned that exposure to the darker and more painful aspects of our past will prevent patriotism, have urged that history texts, at least in younger grades, should avoid tragic aspects of our history–particularly regarding slavery. But significantly, the Hebrew Bible never does that! Israel’s past is recalled with clear eyes, and its heroes are depicted in all their humanity: even David, even Moses, even (as Sunday’s Hebrew Bible passage reminds us) Abraham.

Our personal histories, and our own memories, can reflect those same struggles and temptations.  We may pump up our own accomplishments, and downplay our own failings.  That is when we need our siblings, in family and in the faith, to remind us of how they remember our actions—which is bound to keep us humble.

However, conversely, we may find ourselves trapped by our memories: unable to escape the trauma of our past. Psychologists now give this a name: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  Although commonly associated with veterans struggling with wartime violence and trauma, painful memories can cripple victims of child abuse, gun violence, or of neighborhood crime, too.

Jesus never promised that all would go well for his followers—indeed, he told us we should expect to be no better received by the world than he was: “If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul [that is, a devil!], it’s certain that they will call the members of his household by even worse names” (Matthew 10:25).  Nor does Jesus call us to deny, or forget, our past—as though we could. He does promise that God’s light will reveal all: that God sees all, even those who think that their abusive acts are hidden (Matthew 10:26-27).

Jesus also promises that God, who knows us thoroughly and sees us clearly (“Even the hairs of your head are all counted;” Matt 10:30), also loves us and cares for us. He whose eye is on the sparrow (Matt 10:29-31) certainly watches, knows, and cares for us.

How we remember our past can either bless or curse our present and our future.  But God can heal our memories, too, so that we can face them honestly without being controlled by them.

AFTERWORD:  If you are struggling with painful memories that you cannot escape, please do not suffer alone!  Talk to your pastor or physician for referral, or check out these resources.  If you are a veteran, the Department of Veterans Affairs has a crisis center you can contact for guidance and help.

Hebrew has no capital letters–which makes recognizing names a bit of a problem.  As a beginning Hebrew student, I still remember doing what many of my own beginning students did later–failing to recognize that a name was a name, and laboriously trying to translate it.  In my case it was David’s home town, “Bethlehem,” which I dutifully rendered as “house of bread”–until I pronounced the Hebrew aloud and realized what I was seeing.

The proper name “Adam” is of course used for the first man.  However, in Gen 2:7, we find not a name, but the word ha‘adam (that is, “the human”), translated “human” in the CEB, but “man” in the NRSV.  In the Hebrew text, ‘adam is not explicitly a name (presented without the article ha [“the”]) until Gen 4:25: “Adam knew his wife intimately again, and she gave birth to a son. She named him Seth.”  However, in the Aramaic Targum, Adam is a name from Gen 2:7 on, while in the Greek Septuagint and the Vulgate, Adam is a proper name beginning with Gen 2:19, as the KJV reflects.  So, what is the significance of this variation?  Just when does ha’adam become Adam?

The creation of the Human is the first explicitly described creative act of God in this second creation account. Having first moistened the ground, “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Gen 2:7 NRSVue).

There are several key terms to unpack in this verse. The verb translated “formed” in the NRSV is the Hebrew yatsar, the term for what potters do (for example, Isa 64:8 [7]; Jer 18:11). The Lord God is working in the wet soil, fashioning the human the way a potter fashions a pot on the wheel, or a sculptor fashions a statue from a bit of clay. In this story we are formed, intimately and intricately fashioned by the Lord God’s own fingers.  However, the Lord God fashions ha’adam, the Human, not from potter’s clay, but from “the dust of the ground” (aphar min-ha’adamah).

“Dust” (Hebrew ‘aphar) suggests a dryness and sterility in curious contrast to the description of the now-moistened ground. In the Hebrew Bible, the word ‘aphar can connote human fragility and mortality (for example, Pss 119:25; 7:5; Dan 12:2), particularly in the phrase ‘aphar we’epher, “dust and ashes” (Gen 18:27; Job 30:19; 42:6). Likely, that usage derives from Gen 3:19:

By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
    for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return (NRSVue).

But in Gen 2:7, the dust is specifically “the dust of the ground” (aphar min-ha’adamah), or better “the soil;” the Hebrew word ‘adamah is used in particular for arable land. Here, then, ‘aphar would appear to refer to the loose dirt at the surface of the ground that is plowed and planted—that is, the topsoil (see the CEB of this verse: “the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land”). It is this rich dirt, moistened with the water from beneath the earth, that is molded into ha’adam, the first human.

The Hebrew text deliberately puns on the words ‘adamah and ‘adam.  Adam, we might say, is the mud man, fashioned from the soil. To capture that pun in English, we may think of ha’adam as the human made from the humus, or the earthling made from the earth.

The Human lives in the beautiful garden of Eden, with access to all the fruit ha’adam can eat, surrounded by beauty, and with fulfilling work to fill the Human’s days. Yet, there is something missing, and God Godself recognizes the 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).

The Hebrew phrase rendered “helper that is perfect for him” is ‘ezer kenegedo. The word ‘ezer simply means “helper,’ which could perhaps be understood to mean something like “assistant.” But in the Hebrew Bible, ‘ezer is most commonly used for God (half of its citations: see Exod 18:4; Deut 33:7, 29; Pss 20:2[3]; 70:5[6]; 121:1-2; 124:8; 146:5), so subordination is unlikely to be the point. The fascinating expression kenegedo means “corresponding to him; in relationship to him.”

The KJV famously renders ‘ezer kenegedo as “an help meet”—that is, fitting, or appropriate—“for him,” which unfortunately spawned the term “helpmeet,” or “helpmate,” for a housewife duly submissive to her husband. The NRSV rendering “a helper as his partner” appropriately recognizes that the LORD God does not aim to find a subordinate, someone less than or under ha’adam.   The Human is alone, and the quest is to find a being corresponding to ha’adam, with whom the Human can be in relationship.

The LORD realizes that a being truly corresponding to ha’adam must be fashioned from ha’adam’s very being; out of ha’adam’s own stuff:

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man [ha’adam], and he slept; then he took one of his ribs [‘akhad mitsal’ohaw] and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib [tsela’] that the Lord God had taken from the man [ha’adam] he made into a woman [‘ishah] and brought her to the man [ha’adam] (Gen 2:21-22 NRSVue).

While most translations render the word tsela’ as “rib,” in the Hebrew Bible this word 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 Bereshit Rabbah 8.1, 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)’” (translated by Jacob Neusner). 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 an ‘ezer kenegedo, basically splitting ha’adam in two!

That mutuality is the point of this narrative is underlined by what ha’adam says upon meeting the Woman:

“This one finally is bone from my bones
        and flesh from my flesh.
She will be called a woman
        because from a man she was taken” (Gen 2:23).

Here at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh! At last I have somebody to talk to. At last I have someone who is like me and yet unlike me, with whom I can be in a relationship of equals.

In the PBS series Genesis: A Living Conversation, scholar and preacher Renita Weems says, “What do I think when I hear the phrase — ‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh?’ This is the first love song a man ever sang to a woman.”

Here for the first time in this narrative (although most English translations obscure this), we find not ha’adam, the Human, but ‘ish, Man. Once more the Bible makes a point with a pun: just as ‘adam was taken from the ‘adamah, so ‘ishah has been taken from ‘ish. We should note that there is actually no etymological relationship between the words ‘ishah and ‘ish; they come from different roots in Hebrew. But just as the Human is inexorably bound up with the earth, so for this writer Man and Woman are inexorably bound up with one another.

The Greek and Latin versions, followed by the KJV, introduce the personal name Adam at 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.  That’ll preach, friends.

When I was a young Christian, I remember reading, and sharing, a mimeographed sheet (in the days before the internet, that was the way that such rumors were spread) quoting Harold Hill, president of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore and consultant to NASA at the the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.  Mr. Hill claimed that NASA’s calculations of the location of objects in space, necessary for placing satellites and people in orbit, had revealed a lost day in time:

Finally, a Christian man on the team said, “You know, one time I was in Sunday School and they talked about the sun standing still.” While they didn’t believe him, they didn’t have an answer either, so they said, “Show us.”

He got a Bible and went back to the book of Joshua  . . . Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the enemy and if darkness fell they would overpower them. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right — “The sun stood still and the moon stayed — and hasted not to go down about a whole day!”   (Joshua 10:12-13)

The astronauts and scientists said, “There is the missing day!” They checked the computers going back into the time it was written and found it was close but not close enough. The elapsed time that was missing back in Joshua’s day was 23 hours and 20 minutes — not a whole day. . . . Forty minutes had to be found because it can be multiplied many times over in orbits.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible where it said the sun went BACKWARDS. The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but they got out the Book and read these words in 2 Kings that told of the following story:

Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet Isaiah who told him that he was not going to die.

Hezekiah asked for a sign as proof. Isaiah said “Do you want the sun to go ahead 10 degrees?” Hezekiah said “It is nothing for the sun to go ahead 10 degrees, but let the shadow return backward 10 degrees.”

Isaiah spoke to the Lord and the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees BACKWARD!

Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in Second Kings make the missing day in the universe!

According to the Goddard Space Flight Center, nothing like this actually happened.  While Mr. Hill was indeed president of the Curtis Engine Company, and while he was indeed employed for a short time at Goddard as an engineer, he was never a NASA consultant, and was never present when launch trajectories were being calculated.

Further, a bit of thought should have revealed the problems with this still-circulating bit of misinformation.  Why would anyone dealing with satellite trajectories need to know “the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be 100 years and 1000 years” into the future–satellites don’t last that long!  Why would they ever need to know those positions in the distant past?  Indeed, if time was “missing,” how could that be discerned?  What evidence could possibly reveal it?

Of course, it did not occur to zealous, teen-aged me to ask such questions.  All I needed–or wanted–to know was that science had proven the Bible to be true.

Sadly, this was far from the only time that I, as a young Christian, trafficked in misinformation.  In high school, I did a science fair project “debunking” the theory of evolution, citing in particular the absence of transitional forms.  If, say, whales had developed from land animals as scientists claimed, then where were the transitional forms in the fossil record?  Why were there no fossils of whales with legs?

The answer, of course, is that there were.  Transitional forms for the evolution of whales are well documented.  However, the Fundamentalist sources I was using back then were either ignorant of that evidence, or chose to ignore or deny it–and some are still denying it.  I, on the other hand, no longer see any conflict between evolution and God’s creation of the world.  Indeed, I have written:

There is a consonance between Genesis 1, where God empowers the world to bring forth life [Gen 1:11, 20, 24], and contemporary evolutionary biology.  Biologists strive to understand the emergence and development of life in naturalistic terms, just as an engineer designing a dam or an astronomer calculating the orbit of a planet strives to make predictions based on observable, natural laws.  Genesis 1 is not biology.  Israel’s ancient priests knew nothing of DNA or mitochondria or the evolution of species.  Their description of creation proceeds from their idea of God, not from investigation into the world’s workings.  However, their insight that God empowers God’s world for self-creation, and invites its participation in its own coming into being, lends support to the biologist’s quest for understanding.

These cases came to my mind as I read of Texas Justice Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling on the commonly prescribed abortion drug mifepristone:

Whatever the outcome of this legal case, the issue I want us to consider right now is how ready many Christians are to embrace disinformation–as I was with the “lost time” legend, or concerning the fossil record.  Far too many people of faith today seem ready, even eager, to believe the worst of their adversaries (of course the FDA and the medical establishment are deliberately poisoning women!), and to embrace flimsy, even false arguments if they confirm their beliefs.

As a result, Christians–specifically white Evangelical Christians–have proven all too willing to be caught up in lies, from anti-vaxxing to “election fraud.”  In a survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center, one statement to which participants were asked to respond was, “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites”–a central claim of QAnon.  Among those who regarded that bizarre statement as mostly or completely true, 27% were white Evangelicals.  Evangelical leader Eric Metaxas has claimed, without any evidence at all, that Donald Trump won re-election “in a landslide,” calling the attempt to “steal” the election from Mr. Trump “the most horrible thing that ever happened in the history of our nation.” Indeed, Mr. Metaxas compares faith in Mr. Trump’s stolen election to faith in Christ:

To be sure, the role of science and evidence, of proof  and facts, is limited–truth is larger than fact.  As Christian author Frederick Buechner (may light perpetual shine upon him!) wrote in Wishful Thinking,

We are saved, not by demonstrable facts, but by faith.   However, faith does not mean, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, “believing six impossible things before breakfast.”  Facts matter.  We cannot advance the Gospel by deception, of others or of ourselves.  I wish that I had understood that sooner.

In the early church, when believers met one another in the holy season of Easter, they would not just say “Hello.”  Instead, they would greet one another with a hearty and enthusiastic Christe anesti–“Christ is risen!”–to which the only possible response is Allthos anesti–“He is risen indeed!”  On this boisterous, rollicking, joy-filled day, it is surely appropriate to do a bit of shouting!

In celebration of this holiest of holy days, St. John of Damascus wrote the glorious hymn below.  Have a joyous Easter, sisters and brothers and friends: Christe anesti!

Come, you faithful, raise the strain
of triumphant gladness!
God has brought forth Israel
into joy from sadness,
loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke
Jacob’s sons and daughters;
led them with unmoistened foot
through the Red Sea waters.

’Tis the spring of souls today:
Christ has burst his prison,
and from three days’ sleep in death
as a sun has risen.
All the winter of our sins,
long and dark, is flying
from the Light to whom we give
laud and praise undying.

Neither could the gates of death,
nor the tomb’s dark portal,
nor the watchers, nor the seal,
hold you as a mortal:
but today, among your own,
you appear, bestowing
your deep peace, which ever more
passes human knowing.

Alleluia! Now we cry
to our Lord immortal,
who, triumphant, burst the bars
of the tomb’s dark portal;
Alleluia! With the Son,
God the Father praising;
Alleluia! Yet again
to the Spirit raising.

AFTERWORD:

The above translation of John of Damascus’ sixth century hymn is by John Mason Neale: likely better known for his Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslas”!  I have usually sung this to St. Kevin, a tune by Arthur Sullivan.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Hallelujah!

This past Saturday I was visiting my Dad, and the two of us were sitting in his living room, having our morning devotions together.  I was reading the Palm Sunday texts for the Liturgy of the Passion on my iPhone, when suddenly, I realized that in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ suffering and death, nothing is said of his being nailed to the cross!  Stunned, I did a quick search on my phone for mentions of nails in the Bible and found that nothing was said of Jesus being nailed to the cross in any of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion.

I have often said that I learn something new every time I open my Bible–that sometimes, even a familiar text will  reach out, grab me by the throat, and show me something I have never seen before.  You would think that, by now, the Bible’s unceasing newness would no longer surprise me–but it still does, every time.  Please note, friends–this does not mean that Jesus was not nailed to the cross.  But it is a reminder that what I have always assumed the text says and what it actually does say are not the same.

Our word “crucifixion” comes from the Latin words for “cross” (crux) and “fasten” (figere, from which we also derive our word “fix”).  The Romans fastened naked victims to a cross, usually with ropes, but sometimes with nails, then left them to die from pain, exhaustion, and exposure: an end that usually came only after hours, even days, of suffering.  Sometimes (as in John 19:31-37), death was speeded by breaking the legs of the crucified; the victims, no longer able to push up to relieve the pressure on their lungs and diaphragm, would soon suffocate.

The  Gospel account that comes closest to specifying how Jesus was crucified is John 20:25, where Thomas (having missed Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to the disciples), says “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.”  Likely, it is this passage that leads to the universal Christian tradition that Jesus was nailed to his cross.

Outside of the Gospels, two passages may support what John’s account of the wounds on the resurrected Jesus confesses–although that evidence is uncertain.  The first is Peter’s Pentecost sermon, where he accuses the religious leaders in his audience,

In accordance with God’s established plan and foreknowledge, he was betrayed. You, with the help of wicked men, had Jesus killed by nailing him to a cross (Acts 2:23). 

The Greek verb prospegnumi (apparently meaning “fix, or fasten”), it must be noted, occurs in the New Testament only here, and while the NIV agrees with the CEB’s reading, many other translations do not: the ESV, the NRSVue, and even the KJV say here only that Jesus was crucified–not that the means of his crucifixion involved nails.

The second passage is Colossians 2:13-14:

When you were dead because of the things you had done wrong and because your body wasn’t circumcised, God made you alive with Christ and forgave all the things you had done wrong.  He destroyed the record of the debt we owed, with its requirements that worked against us. He canceled it by nailing it to the cross.

This time, the Greek for the phrase “nailing it to the cross” is proselosas auto to stauro: a phrase used for crucifixion by a variety of writers in late antiquity, including the Greek physician Galen and the historians Diodorus Siculus and Josephus (Jewish War 2:308)–although again the use of nails is not always explicit.

The verb proseloo occurs nowhere else in the NT.  Although the BDAG lexicon proposes the translation “nail (fast),” the verb is used in 3 Maccabees 4:9-10 for deported Jews fastened into their shipboard berths with chains:

They were driven like animals, constrained by the power of iron chains. Some were fastened by the neck to the ship’s benches; some were secured by their feet with unbreakable shackles. Moreover, they were plunged into total darkness due to thick planks positioned above them so that they would receive the treatment due traitors throughout the entire voyage.

Surely, this passage is a grim reminder of the slave ships in our own nation’s history.

It is clear from Colossians 2:14 that our debt is cancelled–put to death–on the cross; however, that this passage supports the use of nails in Jesus’ crucifixion is less clear.

We know about the Roman practice of crucifixion from contemporary accounts:

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, wrote in 40AD that the process of crucifying someone varied greatly: “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in different ways: some have their victims with their head down to the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms.”. . .

The Roman orator Cicero noted that “of all punishments, it is the most cruel and most terrifying,” and Jewish historian Josephus called it “the most wretched of deaths.”  

Rome didn’t inflict this humiliating and horrifying death on thieves, or rapists, or even murderers.  It reserved  crucifixion for slaves, and for insurrectionists–those who rebelled against Roman authority.  The words posted above Jesus’ head on the cross, then, were not an epitaph, but an accusation– the accusation that brought him to the cross: “Jesus the Nazarene, the king of the Jews.”

When Christians reflect on the cross, we cannot forget this obvious truth: Jesus was a political prisoner, executed by the Roman state on the charge of insurrection.  The Jews did not kill Jesus, friends– Rome did.  Or, speaking theologically rather than historically, since Jesus died for your sins and mine, we killed Jesus.  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).

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%).

Even so, the scholars seemed unsettled that roughly 30% of U.S. Catholics didn’t know (9.6%), thought no one is to blame (9.6%) or openly blamed Jewish people (11%).

Given the sad resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary American politics, I wonder what a similar survey of Protestant Christians would reveal?

Although the Roman practice of crucifixion is widely attested in texts, archaeological evidence is scant.  This is because the bodies of crucifixion victims were customarily left unburied, to rot in the open and be eaten by scavengers (Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999], 89).   That is why, in John’s gospel, the religious leaders ask for a quicker death for Jesus and his fellow sufferers–not out of mercy or pity, but because unburied corpses defile the land (Deut 21:23; for Paul’s use of this passage, see Gal 3:13).  It was important for these leaders that the condemned men died before sundown, so that their corpses would not defile the Sabbath–particularly that Sabbath, of Passover.

That is also what makes Jesus’ burial, and Joseph of Arimathea’s request for his body, so unusual–although all four gospels agree that this was done (Matthew 27:57; Mark 15:43; Luke 23:51; John 19:38).  However, we do have evidence for the burial of another crucified man, which also provides our only material evidence for someone nailed to a cross:

In 1968, archaeologist Vassilios Tzaferis excavated some tombs in the northeastern section of Jerusalem, at a site called Giv’at ha-Mivtar.  Within this rather wealthy 1st century AD Jewish tomb, Tzaferis came across the remains of a man who seemed to have been crucified.  His name, according to the inscription on the ossuary, was Yehohanan ben Hagkol.  Analysis of the bones by osteologist Nicu Haas showed that Yehohanan was about 24 to 28 years old at the time of his death.  He stood roughly 167cm tall, the average for men of this period.  His skeleton points to moderate muscular activity, but there was no indication that he was engaged in manual labor.

Of course, the most interesting feature of Yehohanan’s skeleton is his feet.  Immediately upon excavation, Tzaferis noticed a 19cm nail that had penetrated the body of the right heel bone before being driven into olive wood so hard that it bent.  Because of the impossibility of removing the nail and because the man was buried rather than exposed, we have direct evidence of the practice of crucifixion.

I see no reason to question the tradition that Jesus, like poor Yehohanan ben Hagkol, was nailed to his cross.  Nor do I doubt the witness of Thomas, whom Jesus invited, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” (John 20:27).  But I am, once more, astonished by the Bible’s continual capacity to take me by surprise, and reminded how important it is to consider what the text actually says, rather than what I have always assumed it to say.

In this Holy Week, may Jesus’ suffering for us shame our pride, and challenge us to bear witness to his life, death, resurrection, and coming again.  This prayer for Holy Week comes from Revised Common Lectionary Prayers, Consultation on Common Texts (Augsburg Fortress, 2002):

Almighty God,
Your name is glorified
even in the anguish of your Son’s death.
Grant us the courage
to receive your anointed servant
who embodies a wisdom and love
that is foolishness to the world.
empower us in witness
so that all the world may recognize
in the scandal of the cross the mystery of reconciliation. Amen.

This Sunday, Palm Sunday, is also called Passion Sunday, as it marks the  beginning of Holy Week. Four of the Old Testament readings for Holy Week are poems from Isaiah 40—55: a portion of this prophetic book commonly called Second Isaiah, set in the Babylonian exile. These four passages, Isaiah 42:1-9; 49:1-7; 50:4-11; and 52:13—53:12, are called the Servant Songs.  All deal with the Servant of the LORD, a mysterious figure whose mission involves not only the deliverance of Israel, but also the transformation of the world.  Appropriately, the Hebrew Bible reading for Good Friday’s remembrance of Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, death, and burial is the fourth Song,  Isaiah 52:13—53:12: the song of the Suffering Servant.

The suffering of the Servant is a common theme in the Songs, from the first Song, where the world threatens to crush the Servant (Isa 42:4) to Isaiah 50:6, where the Servant bares his back to the smiters, and offers his cheek “to those who pulled out the beard.”

However, the Servant’s suffering is the major theme of the fourth and final Song:

He was despised and avoided by others;
    a man who suffered, who knew sickness well.
Like someone from whom people hid their faces,
    he was despised, and we didn’t think about him (Isa 53:3).

The Servant’s suffering is never accidental, or incidental. Rather, the Servant suffers deliberately, purposively: in solidarity with others. So, the vindication of the Servant becomes their vindication as well; when the Servant is strengthened, his fellow-sufferers too find strength.

Christian readers have long seen Jesus in Isaiah’s Suffering Servant of the LORD.  So, in Acts 8:26-38, when the Ethiopian eunuch asks if the prophet speaks in Isa 53 “about himself or about someone else,” Philip wastes no time in sharing with him “the good news about Jesus.”

In 1 Peter 2:21-25, that writer, alluding to Isaiah 53, declares of Jesus

He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

We Christians still cannot help but see Jesus in Isaiah’s Servant.  But that does not mean that we must, in triumphalist fashion, see Second Isaiah as predicting Jesus’ coming; as though the prophet’s words had no meaning for his own time or people.

The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber suggested that the Servant Songs do not describe one particular person, but rather set forth the way of the Servant, a new understanding of Israel’s past and future particularly as revealed through suffering. The Servant’s way is “the work born out of affliction,” culminating in “the liberation of the subject peoples, laid upon the servant, the divine order of the expiated world of the nations, which the purified servant as its ‘light’ has to bring in, the covenant of the people of the human beings with God, the human center of which is the servant” (Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlyle Witton-Davies [New York: Macmillan, 1949], 229).  The way of the Servant is the path of redemptive suffering deliberately chosen, which will render the tangled history of God’s people meaningful.  Jesus, we can certainly say, deliberately set out to follow that way, which led him inexorably to the cross.

Jesus has been linked to Isaiah 52:13—53:12 in particular, not only because of the Servant’s innocent suffering on behalf of others (Isa 53:4-6), but specifically because of Isaiah 53:10, where many English translations read that the Servant’s life has been made (or will be made) “an offering for sin.”

Christians have often understood Jesus’ death on the cross in just this way: as a sacrifice for sin.  In our New Testament, the book of Hebrews understands Jesus as at once high priest and sacrifice, offering himself as a sin offering for the world (Heb 9—10).  There are some indications that Jesus may have thought of his own death in that way.  So, in Matthew’s account of the Last Supper.

He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from this, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many so that their sins may be forgiven” (Matt 26:27-28, CEB).

Notice, though, that this passage uses no sacrificial language, saying only that it is now, in his death, that Jesus fulfills the meaning of his name: Yeshua, that is “savior,” for “he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21).

Similarly, it is unclear that Paul intended us to see Jesus’ death as a sin offering.  That may seem a strange claim, in light of Romans 3:23-25 (NRSV):

since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.

But the Greek word translated “sacrifice of atonement” in the NRSV (the KJV has “propitiation”) is hilasterion.  This Greek word is used in Leviticus 16, the biblical description of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  It refers, however, not to the sin sacrifice or to the scapegoat in that ritual, but rather to the lid of the ark, where the blood of the sacrifice is applied (Hebrew kapporet).  At least in this famous passage, Paul refers to the cross not as a sacrifice for sin, but rather as the place of atonement (see the NRSV translator’s footnote on this phrase), where God and humanity are reconciled.

Another translation problem occurs in Isaiah 53:10. Although several English translations have “offering for sin,” the word “sin” does not appear in this verse, and the Hebrew word for the offering is not khattat (Hebrew for the sin offering), but ‘asham: used in Leviticus 5:14-26 for what is commonly called the “guilt offering.”

While ‘asham is often translated as “guilt,” it more precisely means “to incur liability,” and is used for payment of damages. This is the only offering in ancient Israel’s sacrificial system that involves a fine as well as a sacrifice–indeed, for which a fine can be substituted.  Jewish scholars Baruch Schwartz (in the Jewish Study Bible) and Jacob Milgrom (in the HarperCollins Study Bible) both propose “reparation offering” as a better translation.   In the NRSV and the NRSVue, this section of Leviticus carries the heading “Offerings with Restitution.”

As the ‘asham is described in Leviticus, it is an offering to be made when an act has been performed, even accidentally, that brings defilement upon the community or upon the holy things.  So, this is an offering for when you suspect you have done something wrong, but do not know what–making the traditional rendering “guilt offering” fitting after all!  An ‘asham is offered when something isn’t right, in my life or in my community, but I can’t say what it is–so, perhaps I have somehow, inadvertently, brought defilement upon the community and the holy things. The ‘asham, we could say, addresses free-flowing Angst!

What might this mean in the context of our Song?  First, whatever else Isa 53:10 may mean, it does not mean that the Servant is a sacrifice for sin.  In the CEB, this verse is translated “his life is offered as restitution”–a more accurate rendering, but what might that mean?  Translator’s notes in the NRSV and NRSVue acknowledge, “Meaning of Heb uncertain.”  Perhaps the point, as the Song as a whole implies, is that by identifying with those who suffer guilt, pain, and shame, the Servant eases that suffering, mysteriously shifting it onto himself.

Perhaps this is a better way of thinking about the suffering of Jesus, too.  The Oxford English Dictionary dates our English word “atonement” to the early 16th century, when it was coined out of  the phrase “at one”–influenced by the Latin word adunamentum  (“unity”), and an older word, “onement:” from the obsolete verb form, “to one,” meaning “to unite.”  The word was particularly used to talk about the reconciliation of God and humanity through Christ.  What “atonement” originally meant was not the assuaging of divine wrath with a blood sacrifice, but being reunited (“at one”) with God.  As the apostle Paul writes:

If we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son while we were still enemies, now that we have been reconciled, how much more certain is it that we will be saved by his life? And not only that: we even take pride in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the one through whom we now have a restored relationship with God (Romans 5:6-11).

In Christ’s death, we are reconciled (Greek katalasso) to God.  The gap between humanity and divinity is bridged.  In Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, God experiences all that being human means, in joy and in sorrow.  Life learns what it is to die.  Absolute power learns what it is to be weak.  God Godself experiences God-forsakenness.  In Christ’s resurrection, we mortals are given the hope and the promise of our own deliverance from death.  By entering into our life, and even into our death, Jesus draws God near to us, and us near to God.  He brings God’s divinity down to where we are, and lifts our humanity up to where God is.

Of course, if Isaiah 52:13—53:12 cannot be safely restricted to a sacrificial act which Jesus alone could, and did, do, we are brought back to asking what this passage may mean for the living of our lives.  But after forty days of penitential Lenten reflection, we are likely eager to move on.  Palm Sunday leads to Good Friday, of course, but that in turn leads to Easter–and we are naturally eager to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, and the promise of our own!

But, let us not hurry to the empty tomb too quickly, friends. Let us stay with the cross awhile, and ask what it might mean for us to follow Jesus on the way of the Servant; to surrender authority and privilege, and stand with the suffering and oppressed.  After all, did Jesus not say, ““All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (Matt 16:24)?

1 Peter definitely sees the cross in Isa 53, but does not therefore think that we are relieved of the responsibility to walk in this way ourselves. Indeed, this Christian writes, “You were called to this kind of endurance, because Christ suffered on your behalf. He left you an example so that you might follow in his footsteps” (1 Peter 2:21).

So too, the writer of Hebrews calls Jesus “faith’s pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God’s throne” (Heb 12:2).

What might it mean to follow such a pioneer—to, in the words of the old Gospel hymn, “go with him, with him, all the way”? What might it mean to say, with Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20)?