In my previous reflection on 1 & 2 Kings, I said that one of the purposes of history is to warn future generations of mistakes and negative examples, to guard against future disaster. 1 & 2 Kings, while not totally devoid of good examples, was largely about the wholesale wickedness of the kings of Israel and the few bright spots in an almost equally wicked Judah. The prophets raged and warned to no avail. 1 & 2 Chronicles, without leaving out all of the negative examples, chooses to focus more on the achievements and legacy of the “Jewish” people–now so called as the only surviving tribes are Judah and Benjamin. 1 & 2 Chronicles covers the same ground, but serves sometimes as the flip side of 1 & 2 Kings. People might read 1 & 2 Kings as a warning, but read 1 & 2 Chronicles as an encouraging record of God’s faithfulness.

That is, I believe, the reason for the heavy focus on genealogies and details of the temple construction. Much attention is also given to the records of kings celebrating Passover and other importance Jewish festivals. First, genealogies, considered by many readers to be the dullest part of the Bible. But they’re there for a reason. A historical, chosen people like the Jews would care very deeply about them–their very existence as a people is, for them and for all Christians too, evidence of God’s keeping of his promises to Abraham. In a time of exile and post-exile, when people are scattered everywhere, it was also important to ascertain who genuinely belonged to the Jewish nation, and who their ancestors were in the time when Judah was independent. Maintaining David’s royal line was particularly important, since God had promised that David’s heirs would rule in Jerusalem forever. Eventually this royal line would reach its fulfillment in the birth of Jesus, whose genealogies are also recorded in the New Testament as a way of both confirming his humanity and his connection to David. Genealogies, then, are potent ways to remind a people that they have a history, and that they are alive. They may be different people from their ancestors, but they are the unbroken descendents of a promise. And, in the post-exilic period in which 1 & 2 Chronicles was written, remembering this was of utmost importance.

A few words, though, about a recent trend in evangelicalism that I find both silly and disturbing. In 1 Chronicles, the genealogies clearly have a primary place of importance over narrative events, which are sometimes related in interruptions in the lists. This shows that even people in lists all have stories behind them–they are real human lives who lived in communities, nations, families, and societies. The most famous interruption of all nowadays is found in chapter 4, verses 9 to 10–the passage about Jabez, popularized in Bruce Wilkinson’s bestseller The Prayer of Jabez. Personally, I think that book was a perfect example of isegetical reading–grabbing a passage out of context to say what one wants it to mean. Jabez was obviously important enough to be mentioned in an almost footnote fashion, yes, but the evangelical/fundamentalist way of reading scripture has a glaring tendency to universalize bits and pieces which were not meant to be read so. So Jabez got what he wanted–because he was “more honorable,” it should be noted, than his brothers and also because he had been a cause of pain for his mother and for his whole family. (That is why his name is “Jabez,” if one looks at the meaning of his name. Imagine if your mother officially named you “Labor-Pain” or “Nuisance”!) He is asking that he be spared from the pain that is caused by that curse, and God grants it in the way people understood best in that pre-urban and pre-afterlife-understanding time–an enlargement of territory. That’s wonderful for him, and him only. How could his prayer be taken as a universal model for Christians, when Jesus already told us a much more applicable and universal model–the Lord’s Prayer? The little side-stories in Chronicles are there, perhaps, to remind the Jews reading it at the time of their actual ancestors and the stories behind them, perhaps in the way that people tell quirky stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents. While we Christians share with the Jews a common spiritual heritage, the context for Jabez has long passed. God doesn’t primarily work today by literally giving you more land, or, I would argue, by giving you more stuff in general.

Eventually the lists start getting interspersed with longer narratives about the kings, such as Saul and David. David is a towering figure in any of the Biblical books, but here, he as well as Solomon are lionized as great heroes of the people. David’s sin with Bathsheba is notably absent, as is the war of succession that preceded his rise to power. Solomon’s later idolatry is also not recorded; rather, the details are on the temple construction. I don’t believe this was done in order to whitewash the two men; after all, people could go back to 1 & 2 Samuel and Kings and discover their foibles for themselves. Instead, the focus is on the liturgical, ritual duties of the king. Israel was a real theocracy–a king who is perhaps not quite a priest, but whose actions have real religious significance in the life of the nation. David’s greatest achievement, perhaps, was not to conquer lots of land or slay lots of enemies, but to bring the Ark back to Jerusalem and to pave the way for Solomon’s temple. His Psalms and prayers are included in full to show his piety. His sole sin is the ritual violation of the census, not his adultery and struggles with his bad sons. Scholars of have interpreted this deep focus on liturgy and practice as being evidence that these books were written by the same author(s) of Ezra and Nehemiah, who too are focused on the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. This focus is appropriate for Jews; the heart of their identity is not their race, though it’s important. They are a people centered around worship. As followers of a unique, one God, they had a unique way of worshipping, one which could easily be lost in future days were it not actively remembered and recorded. Presumably, these books were consulted as the exiles rebuilt their temple and worship upon returning to Jerusalem. They are practical and theological in their significance: here is a people bound together by a common liturgy, a common temple, and a common God.

Most of the distinctives are present in 1st Chronicles rather than 2nd, which after the details of temple construction starts closely resembling the Kings books. But even so, the reforming kings near the end of Judah’s history are shown to be celebrating Passover, certainly one of the most important days for a Jew. The celebrations point to overall spiritual revival for the nation, whose fortunes in war rose and fell with their obedience to God. The rest of the book largely overlaps with the records found in Kings, though it should be noted that the close of the book briefly mentions the return of the exiles, which Kings does not. The last words are the decree of King Cyrus, allowing the Jews to return to their homeland.

1 & 2 Chronicles is both a backward and forward-looking book. Like Kings, it is the exiles’ way of understanding their past so not to repeat the same mistakes again. But the genealogies and liturgical details of the Chronicles actually serve a future-oriented purpose. The exiles are coming back to start a new life. They are there to help build upon the foundation of all that was good in the past. There will be more genealogies to record, more animals to sacrifice, and more days ahead to worship God as a free people. They had blown it the first time around, but God is merciful, and has given them a new start. These records–part of his word–are their guide to their long-awaited homecoming.

What is the purpose of history? George Santayana famously warned us that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and this has held true for any age, including the Biblical age. The book of Kings and the book of Chronicles, which were both split in half for reasons of convenience, were the histories that the exiled Jews read–primarily to remind them of what got them in their predicament in the first place, and secondarily to remember the good and glorious moments in their days as independent people. They are records of both God’s judgment and faithfulness. I once said in an earlier Whirlwind commentary that being a covenant people means being singled out for special punishment as well as special blessing, and in the fate of Israel and Judah, nowhere is that more apparent than in the rise and fall of the various kings.

1 & 2 Kings covers much of the same ground as 1 & 2 Chronicles, but their purposes are different. The former includes detailed descriptions of the sins of Solomon and the rulers of the northern kingdom, Israel, which are left out of the Chronicles. It is primarily, alas, a record of failure, whereas the Chronicler focused more on the successes of Solomon and the good kings of Judah. A large chunk of 1st Kings, in fact, is taken up by the story of Elijah and Ahab, who was by far the most evil ruler in Israel’s history. One can also compare the many chapters devoted to the building of Solomon’s temple in Chronicles vs. the few chapters expended in 1st Kings on the issue. The purpose of the book of Kings, then, seems evident. Though it is drawn from earlier material (as in the constant repetition after the description of kings, “are their accomplishments not written in the annals of the kings of Israel/Judah?”), the final compilation of the book was obviously done either within or after the exile, as a stern reminder of why the northern ten tribes were lost and the remnant punished so severely for their idolatry and sin. And it worked, too. After the Exile, the Jews never submitted themselves to a foreign pagan god again. Santayana’s principle of history worked.

The books never quite explain why the Hebrews were so susceptible to worshipping the pagan gods around them–after all, many of these gods seem odious and barbaric to our sensibility today. Some gods, like Molech, demanded child sacrifice. There were also “high places” which could be used either to worship the true God or pagan deities, and Asherah poles sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of a bad king’s ascension to the throne. Also, the books assume that save for a few prophets, the people always follow the lead of the king. They are described as “doing right in the eyes of the Lord, as their father David had done” (though not always the latter), or as “doing evil in the eyes of the Lord, repeating the sin of Jereboam/Ahab/other bad kings before them”. Good or evil is measured almost entirely by whether they worshipped the true God or not. Wrath or blessing is poured out on the whole nation depending on what the king does. We tend to forget in our age of religious freedom and democracy that people then were not nearly as free to worship as they please until recently; the king could simply impose his religious views on the citizens, and as most do even in brutal dictatorships, the people usually obey. One political conclusion that can be drawn from this, then, is that rulers can serve as barometers of an entire national ethos or culture–he is the “head” of a kingdom not just in power, but in fact and deed. It’s often said that people get the government they deserve, and nowhere is this more true than in electoral societies such as ours. Perhaps, then, we should be even more wary than the Israelites about the character of our leaders. Judgment–whether from God, or perhaps just from our enemies, can come about by a leader’s actions even if many people within that nation disagree with him.

But that still fails to address a primary question: just why were the people so easily gullible and led to worship not only false, but ineffective gods? Elijah proved that Baal had no power compared to Yahweh at Mount Carmel. We see clues, I think, in Solomon’s time and his actions. The records of Solomon’s wealth recorded in 1st Kings is not just a record of greatness–it’s a record of excess. The man had more women (and hence sex partners) than the wildest Don Juan could ever dream of. They came from everywhere, all over the known world, and they were usually not Hebrews. Solomon eventually not only permits the worship of pagan deities, he participates in worship himself eventually. This bad example may show, among other things, that the kingdom of Israel and Judah was not isolated from the rest of the world at all; it had contacts with all the surrounding cultures, with all the benefits of trade and pitfalls of idolatry this presented. Living in the world is always perilous, because of the possibility of spiritual corruption. But I think the real reason is internal: it is because, as John Calvin says, the human heart is an idol factory. It is an idol factory mainly because idols–whether it was Baal and Molech then, or Mammon, Power, and Technology now–primarily exist to give its worshipper a blessing or benefit with the right ceremony or ritual. It is a god ultimately controlled by the hands who made them out of wood, stone, or metal. Listen to Sennacherib, who taunts Israel’s dependence on Yahweh. How can Yahweh deliver you from us, he boasts, if all the other gods have failed their peoples?

This is what the great king, the king of Assyria
says: On what are you basing this confidence of yours? You say you have the strategy and military strength–but you speak on empty words . . . Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah? . . . . Who of all the gods of these countries has been able to save his land from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand? (2 Kings 18:19-20, 32-35)

Sennacherib and the Assyrians exemplify the pagan mindset. Gods are only worthwhile if they have the power to deliver and to rescue, and they assume that because they are winning so far, they must have the more powerful god. But Yahweh is not like other gods. He knows, and ordains, that even mighty Assyria will fall to Babylon one day, and that even that empire too will fall. He is to be worshipped for his own sake, plus he has the power to deliver military victory over an overwhelming foe. Judah does not triumph by its own strength, but on the strength of God alone, who turns impossible odds into victories. That’s the main difference between paganism and the true worship of God; one is just a simple supplement to human strength, and the other is a transformation of utter weakness into godly strength.

But this offends human pride. It “sticks in our craw,” as theologian Marva Dawn put it. It often entails waiting on God, who doesn’t always bring immediate and desirable results, so the people of Judah and Israel constantly turn away, despite the warnings of prophets who are almost never heeded. It’s so much easier to worship an idol than a demanding God. It makes us feel better, because we know we’re in control. By no means has the temptation disappeared today, though most modern Westerners don’t worship statues any longer. We too love our quick fixes. Any device or prop that helps us assert ourselves at God’s expense is an idol. God takes that sin very seriously, putting it at the top of the Decalogue and punishing Israel severely for it in the end, though he was patient with them for centuries before unleashing judgment.

What we can learn from 1st and 2nd Kings, then, is that worship matters. The false gods turn out to be useless in turning back the tide of judgment and ensuring the prosperity of the people anyway–why not worship the true, living God, who will then reward you for your faithfulness? It also tells us that clear signs from prophets–miracles that include raising people from the dead and eternal food supplies, which echo the miracles of Christ–are still no guarantee of obedience. God needs no signs to be worshipped, and signs are in the end insufficient. Nor are the lone performance of rituals enough, though God does care about how he is worshipped, as the injunction to destroy high places even dedicated to him shows. The New Testament says that God is looking for faith working itself out in obedience. 1 & 2 Kings shows, unfortunately, that in any age, people who practice this are rare. We are always thus in the midst of God’s mercy whenever judgment does not fall upon us. We would do well to repent, as the true Kingdom is near that the petty kings of Israel and Judah are only shadows of.

Second Samuel is really the second half of what was once a single book, and as in the latter half of

most stories, it largely talks about the consequences of the characters’ actions.

David’s rise to the throne of Israel and Judah, and the drama that surrounds his family, is the

primary focus of the book. But the shadow of Saul, the main subject of 1 Samuel, hangs over the early

part of David’s reign as king of Judah and eventually Israel. The book opens with David learning the

news of Saul’s death, and the lament David sings over him and Jonathan–”how the mighty have

fallen!”–perhaps serves as a warning and foreshadowing of the troubles David himself will face in the

near and long-term future. After David becomes king of Judah, he still must contend with Saul’s son,

Ishbaal, as he commands the loyalties of the northern tribes of Israel and has talented military

officials at his disposal, such as Abner. It is primarily through treachery that Abner and Ishbaal are

finally killed, strategies that the good-hearted David is not at ease with. Nevertheless, he doesn’t

really stop Joab and Abishai from carrying out their violent measures, and so at the end of seven years’

time, he becomes the ruler of all the Hebrews, and captures Jerusalem as his capital. It took that long

to root out all the resistance and chaos that was engendered by Saul’s failed reign. Notably, David

shows mercy to Saul’s family by returning their ancestral lands, as a means to put the past to final

rest. On that end, the reconciliation is more complete. But there are more consequences coming for

David.

Until the book’s second half, most of the writer’s concern is with David’s military struggles and

victories. The victories are illustrations of God’s favor upon David and the whole Israelite people,

and the result is the consolidation of a single national identity, under one ruler. During the height

of his military triumphs, however, David falls into adultery with Bathsheba. There is an elegaic,

literary quality to the start of chapter eleven, where this near-fatal lapse is told: “In the spring of

the year, when kings go out to battle . . . it happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his

couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing”

(11:1-2, NRSV). We then see an almost diabolical–or is just merely human?–side of David emerge from

this picture. Because he carries the authority of king, he merely needed to summon Bathsheba to his

presence in order to make love to her. One wonders whether either of them were thinking about the

consequences, because the stark manner in which the Scripture presents the aftermath, Bathsheba’s three

words “I am pregnant,” are the sort which would send chills down any Lothario’s spine. Including David,

apparently, by what comes next: first, he tries to get Uriah, the cuckolded husband, to break ritual law

against sex before battle in order to make it seem that the baby is his. That fails, so David outright

murders him by sending him unnecessarily to the front line; the order sent to General Joab is quite

explicit in that Uriah the Hittite is supposed to die. The indifference that the official message to

Joab reveals is frightening: “do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now

another” (11:25). In modern parlance: “oh well, people die in war, you know? Let it go.” This is

first degree murder, as it’s premeditated with incredibly coldness, and by a man who is supposed to be a

man of God. The deadly logic of sin is something to which not even David is immune. If he can succumb,

how much moreso would we in seemingly lesser situations?

The consequences are swift as they are long-lasting. David has enough of a conscience to respond to

Nathan’s rebuking parable–an example, by the way, of the power of storytelling to convict and reveal

the truth–which means that the full punishment which God planned for David was mitigated. But from

that point on, David would have almost no peaceful days left until the end of his reign. “The sword

shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me . . .” (12:10) His family from then on

would endure the greatest unhappinesses: first, the child born to Bathsheba and David will die, though

that child is later replaced by the future king, Solomon. Then, a bloody, sordid family feud almost

deposes David from the throne and turns him into a helpless, despairing father. His is a family where a

brother would rape his half-sister (Amnon, his firstborn, and Tamar), and where his charismatic,

vengeful sibling Absalom used the feud as a springboard to gain the throne for himself. All this

transpired and was allowed to pass because, in my view, David has lost his moral

authority in his own house, perhaps due to his adultery. He “loves” his sons too much

to punish them for similar kinds of transgressions.

“When King David heard of all these things, he became very angry, but he

would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn” (13:21). This is not

the right kind of love that cares too much to see children commit horrendous acts of evil; this is

indulgence born out of despair. And when Absalom finally does the expected thing and revolts against

David, he would rather flee and order his troops to treat him indulgently rather than punish him for

treason, let alone disobedience. Eli was undone by the same leniency, in the previous book, and even a

great man like David too falls under the same spell.

Eventually it is David’s underlings who do all the clever work to restore his rule, and kill Absalom,

but then the pathetic (in the original sense of the word) cry of David goes up from the pages: “O my son

Absalom! My son, my son, Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (18:33)

While heartrending–what parent would not grieve for his son, rebellious or not?–I think he is

rightfully rebuked by Joab afterwards: “you have made it clear today that commanders and officers are

nothing to you . . . for I swear by the Lord if you do not go [to claim victory], not a man will stay

with yu this night; and this will be worse for you than any disaster that has come upon you from your

youth until now” (19:6-7). By this point, David has been reduced dramatically in authority and in

stature; there is almost little left but a grieving, shriveled husk of his old victorious self. Here is

a fundamentally good man, watching over the destruction of his family, much like King Lear does as his

daughters die one by one over the rights to his land. But King Lear was foolish and proud, which David

in general was not; nevertheless, it was still the long lasting punishment for his original sin, his

willingness to transgress when it suited him and his consequent inability to punish later transgressions

by his offspring.

After Absalom’s defeat and death, David gets back on track, showing that repentence and sin are never

forever. A future rebellion by Sheba is handled much more handily, and he gives a wonderful song of

thanksgiving recorded in chapter 22, which is preserved elsewhere in several Psalms attributed to David.

His last recorded words express the confidence and hope in God’s promise that the kingdom will never be

taken away from his family; God’s love and promise triumphs even over major sin. Lists of David’s

cabinets and his notable warriors are a continuing testament of his great deeds and the loyalty he

inspired among many.

The final chapter, in which David takes a sinful census and is punished with plagues until a ritual is

done to atone for it, seems rather strange and out of place by comparison. My Harper Collins study

Bible explains that censuses were taken to estimate how many men were eligible for the military, and

thus as a measure of how strong his forces were. Doing a census apparently made them vulnerable to

“cultic dangers,” since active soldiers had to conform to much stricter ritual purity rites and a huge

lapse would trigger divine disfavor. Even more bizarre is the fact that the text implies that David was

compelled to do it by “the anger of the Lord”–”he incited David against [Israel]” (24:1). I confess

that this chapter still puzzles me–it’s an anticlimactic ending to a throughly linear record of David’s

rise, near-fall, and eventual victory. “I alone have sinned, and I alone have done wickedly,” David

confesses by the end. Perhaps it’s there to remind us that things don’t always end happily or neatly in

real life; the sour ending dashes the idea that force of character, strength, or power alone can ensure

greatness.

David’s life, compared to that of later kings, was actually a pretty faithful and obedient one.

Nevertheless, the mistakes of his predecessor combined with his own mistakes made his reign a turbulent

one, full of ups and downs, which is the way imperfect human life always will be. We rise, stumble, and

fall, but by God’s grace we can get up again if we repent, but we are sure to fall again. But David

never gave up on God. He kept believing and trusting that he could be forgiven if he returned to him,

no matter how badly things went awry because of his own faults, and in the end that made him, in the

Bible’s view, a very good man and king indeed.

I’m doing 1st and 2nd Samuel seperately, though the two books (and indeed, 1 & 2 Kings)
are all actually part of the same single narrative. In some Bibles, 1 & 2 Samuel is actually
known as 1 & 2 Kings, while our 1 & 2 Kings are known as 3 & 4 Kings. I think that numbering
system makes more sense, actually. Samuel is only a real presence in the first of the books
that bears his name; in reality, the main character of 1 & 2 Samuel is David, son of Jesse,
the shepherd-boy turned outlaw turned king of the United Kingdom. His story is one of the most
dramatic, exciting, and ultimately tragic tales found in the Bible. His story has been retold
in various forms many times by modern novelists, even in science-fictional form by the Mormon
Orson Scott Card (Songmaster), because his boyhood, rise to the throne, and tragic
later years are the stuff of great storytelling. I haven’t read these books for a while
and I was astounded at just how rich in character depth and intricacy they were. They
have the ring of reality to them, no matter what one believes about the historicity of the
books. The unknown author of 1 & 2 Samuel had keen insight into the human condition and
the flaws of even great men like David.

Like many epic stories, 1st Samuel begins in humble surroundings, with a barren wife Hannah
imploring God to give her a son–who turns out to be Samuel, the last judge/first prophet
of Israel. The parallels between the birth of Samuel and the birth of Jesus are unmistakable
here. A miraculous (though not virgin) birth prompts Hannah to sing a song eerily similar to
the Magnificat, where she exults the Lord who tears down the rich and the proud and exults
humble maidens like herself. Like Jesus, the text states that Samuel “grew in stature and
in favor with men and with the Lord.” One sees how much is missed when the New Testament,
then, is read apart from the Old, and how much nuance and continuity is lost when
artificial “dispensations” are placed on the text, as if God were different according to
whatever time period humanity is mired within.

There are many motifs running through 1 & 2 Samuel, and one of the most prominent is
the consequences of bad parental discipline. Before we are introduced to Samuel,
the reader is told that Eli, the current priest/judge, has two rebellious sons who
are designated as his successors, but their wickedness guarantees them to certain doom.
Samuel is directly called by God in order to take Eli’s place, because God not only
blames Eli’s sons for their indiscretions, but also Eli himself, seeing that he had
opportunities to rein in their behavior but chose instead to indulge them. Eli is otherwise
a godly, upright man, which is what makes the story so sad, in retrospect, when similar
things happen to David when Absolom and Ammon stir enormous trouble. One sees time
and time again that God’s threat in the Ten Commandments, that sins would be visited
upon the third and fourth generations for the sins of the fathers, is not so much a
threat as it is a fact of human nature. In our modern age we think that we alone
are responsible for the acts we do, and we often excuse ourselves by saying, “it’s
not going to hurt anyone else.” How wrong we often are! Our children pay whatever
price we have not paid ourselves.

The story of Saul and his family is one of the saddest examples of great God-given
blessing and talent gone to waste, to incredibly harmful effect to not only Saul
himself but upon his entire house in the years to come. Samuel warns Israel that
demanding a king would be more trouble than they imagine, but God, once again,
changes strategies and accomdates their ill-motivated request to be just like
every other nation around them. (Peer pressure has always gotten the Israelites
in trouble.) King Saul’s story seems to be God’s object lesson of what happens
when otherwise decent men take on the mantle of kingship and use it wrongly. Saul
is a meek, indecisive man, but he is tall, handsome, and charismatic. Like many a
hero, he is reluctant to rule, and at first his reign is a success, especially
on the military front. But clearly the role overwhelmed him; he begins to sin
not with major offenses, but by usurping the role of Samuel as prophet and of
the priests by offering sacrifices to God by himself. One might think that
compared to the outright idolatries of the Judges period, this is small pickings
for God to reject Saul’s kingship, but God is perhaps less concerned about the
exact rules as he is about Saul’s spiritual pride. He is overstepping his bounds
as king and proud enough to believe that he can deal with God on his own, and for
that, the kingship must pass to an even humbler, unlikely candidate–the shepherd son
of Jesse, David, descended from a Moabite woman who converted. It is not as if
Saul weren’t earnest to do God’s work–every time he is reproved by Samuel, he
makes some effort to repent. He wonders why God is so concerned with technicalities
like not leaving livestock or the king of a Canaanite nation alive for a moment.
He is, in many ways, like all of us, trying to excuse ourselves for our sins.
But God is holy, and he will not be mocked, and David is clearly the better man–
at that time, at any rate.

David is good because he has endless confidence, kindness, and talent all springing
from his closeness to the Lord. His warrior prowess is proven in the famous battle
with Goliath–as well as his confidence in God to use the puniest of weapons to
bring down a giant. God has a preference for using humble instruments. He is a
loyal friend to Jonathan, Saul’s son, and he is a talented poet and musician. Men
like David would once be called “Renaissance men,” people with well-rounded abilities,
and it is all coupled with an earnest love for a deeply flawed man like Saul and for
the God that protects him. He wins Saul’s favor and murderous rage at various
points in the narrative, and he spends much of 1st Samuel on the run from the one
who Saul sees as the usurper to the throne. Yet, given two opportunities, he refuses
to kill Saul and take his rightful God-given place on the throne; his sense of right
and wrong is so acute that he still regards Saul as God’s anointed–though Samuel has
clearly revoked that status. He also does it out of consideration for Jonathan. Right
away, David’s humanitarian virtues and instinct for mercy, even at his personal expense,
are shown. His conscience is not only formed by a duty to God, but for a duty to his
fellow man.

Some have speculated that Jonathan and David, whom the text says loved each other
more than they would have loved a woman, were homosexual. I believe this is a misunderstanding
and an illustration that our age is so sexualized, it can no longer imagine extremely
intimate, non-sexual friendships between two men. (Our culture seems to have more
tolerence for women sharing closeness together, though.) In either case, they were willing
to live and die for each other, with Jonathan risking his life at several moments to ensure
David’s safety. It is no wonder that many of the ancient and medieval theologians
used the relationship of David and Jonathan as a model for philo, friendship,
par excellence.

While David is on the run, Saul grows more paranoid, twisted, and desperate, until
he reaches his nadir when he consults a clearly forbidden medium to resurrect Samuel’s
spirit–which, of course, proves to be of no help at all. Some have wondered whether
this is indeed Samuel or a false spirit posing at him. It hardly matters, really,
when the spirit does not tell him what he wishes to hear: that he and his son
are to be killed and that the Philistines will win the battle. One can see
how small sins, then, become much larger ones when left unchecked. Lapses
in ritual become defiance of Samuel, the appointed prophet, to jealousy of David
and attempts to murder the next king, and so forth. “How the mighty have fallen,”
later verses say about Saul’s reign. Saul could have been mighty, had he not
be disobedient even in the small things. His story is a warning to us as well–
we are not to take our sins or God lightly, lest we stumble much farther than
we think we might.

1st Samuel ends with the deaths of Saul’s son, and with Saul’s suicide.
The spiral of despair has completed; the scattered remnants of Saul’s house
will continue to be bitter at the ascending house of David, and an outlaw
will become king. To this point, David has had good fortune from the hand of
the Lord. His reign will later be considered a glorious one, the best in
all of Israel’s history, but a closer examination reveals that there is
much, much heartache in store for him as well.

One of the best concrete examples of God’s providential goodness during
that whole period of history is recounted in this short, delightful book
called Ruth. And amidst Scripture that often seems extremely hostile
to Gentile/non-Israelite peoples, Ruth, a Moabite, bears the name of
the book and has the extremely high honor of being the grandmother
of none other than King David, the ultimate Jewish hero after Moses.
This story is included in the Bible not only to highlight God’s rewards
for people who are faithful to him–even foreigners–but also to
show that his love and care can extend even to otherwise hostile
peoples and nations.

Ruth is a convert to Judaism. According to the historical note
by Adele Berlin in my Bible, such an occurrence was extremely rare; one of the reasons
why entire peoples were punished in the Old Testament is because
each group of people or nation was supposed to have its own god(s),
and it simply did not enter into most people’s minds that anyone
from other nations would follow other deities. In order to wipe
out the worship of other gods, one had to wipe out all his worshippers,
too. Not so with Rahab or, in this case, Ruth: “your people shall
become my people, and your God shall be my God,” she vows to Naomi.
Berlin notes that this is not just a change of religion, it is actually
also a change of ethnicity; to follow the God of Israel means
becoming an Israelite too. One can see, then, that it is not ultimately
the blood that God cares about; God is not a racist, or else no one
like King David would ever have a mixture of Moabite blood. What is
important, instead, is that for Ruth, changing her religion also meant
changing communities. Faith is only concretely found among
a People of God: for Israel the chosen people of Jacob’s blood;
for Christians today, the Church. It is with intense loyalty to
the people that one can see, touch, and hear that helps ensure
the continuity of faith; Ruth became an Israelite primarily
motivated by her loyalty to Naomi. There is thus an intimate
connection between our relationship with God and our relationship
with the people with whom God resides. Loyalty to one and to the
other is not always the same. But they are related, and are
both necessary.

Ruth and Naomi could have become destitute–the fact that they
had to glean grain from Boaz’s fields shows that they were poor,
and being widows, they were bereft of protection or support. It’s
also interesting how Ruth and Naomi take the initiative in persuading
Boaz to marry Ruth, with a tactic that might well have been sexually
provocative in its day. Stories that feature women as main characters
and driving the main action were probably few and far between in the
literature of that day, and even in the Bible. God’s protection
is over them the entire way, though nothing supernatural ever
happens in this book; it is in the fortuitous details of ordinary
life instead where God operates. There is thus an immediacy to
this book that makes it easier for a modern to relate to, a story
on an individual/family level that ultimately becomes of divine and
national importance. Such ordinary things like an inheritance deal
and a marriage are the circumstances that set up the royal line of
Israel.

Ruth is, then, a beautiful story about how in the midst of overall
national disaster, ordinary, poor people trying to get on in their lives
can find that their decisions, actions, and God’s providence over them
can be of immense significance. This is true even if one is technically
outside God’s chosen people. Ruth, like all of us who are Christians or
Jews, has been adopted by God into his family, and God regards
all of his children with love, from the least to the greatest.

Judges, on the whole, tells a dismal story. “People just ain’t no good,”
the goth ballad singer Nick Cave once sang, and a casual reader might honestly
draw the same conclusion after a reading of the constant screw ups committed
not only by the Israelites, but even sometimes by the judges that God appoints
to liberate and lead them into righteousness. Gideon, a nervous and unsure man
to begin with, leads Israel to miraculous victory over Midian–and then afterwards,
leads the nation back into idolatry. His 70 sons are later murdered by Abimelech.
And the last judge mentioned in this book, Samson, sometimes reads like a parody
of Hercules: a man with supernatural
physical strength with the sexual appetite of Zeus and the hedonistic impulsiveness
of Dionysius. The chaos and civil war that follows his 20 year “reign” is nothing
but an absolute nadir in the moral life of the chosen people, a tale of gang rape,
dismemberment, and near-genocidal war. If God ever had a reason to wipe his people
out, the constant unfaithfulness of Israel in the judges’ period would be
a better time than any thus far. At one point, he almost does, saying
“why should I listen to your cries for help anymore? Go call on your idols,
since you have turned to them. Aren’t they going to save you?”

And still–and still–the people survive. The tribe of Benjamin is not
wiped out by the end, even though it takes the kidnapping of other nations’
virgin women to ensure its survival. Samson is a dolt, but a dolt that
(probably unintentionally) subdued the Philistines. Not everyone is a
nasty, either; Deborah and Barak seem to have judged/fought without
stumbling into one mistake or another, and the Song of Deborah that
follows their account is a fine example of ancient battle poetry.
12 judges in all are accounted for in this book, 12 times that God
relents and allows the Israelites to turn back to him and be freed from
foreign oppression. God’s patient must have been so sorely tested
throughout this time period. Even a human reader of Judges can be
shocked by how quickly each generation after liberation forgets and promptly
returns to the worship of Baal, Asherah, and any other god that happens
to be in the neighborhood. But he or she should not be surprised. Our
own history bears the same pattern of repeating the past’s mistakes
over and over again. Santayana’s adage about forgetful people being
condemned to repeat the past is more than a warning, it is the immutable
fact of human nature. Sin, among other things, wipes the memory.

It’s interesting to note that whatever orders were given initially
to wipe out all the Canaanites, Joshua and the subsequent generation
were unable to do so anyway. As both an accomodation and a punishment,
God now decrees that the nations will not only live, they will stand as a
constant temptation and a nuisance in order to “test” the faithfulness
of Israel. He will, in fact, not allow those nations to be wiped out
any longer. We get a better glimpse, then, of how God is in charge
of history. It is not just by direct manipulation or instruction of
specific people or even necessarily ensuring that his orders are
obeyed to the letter (though he would undoubtedly prefer that, and
almost always punishes those infractions in some way). Rather,
his sovereignty is largely at work by “making the best of a bad situation,”
even if that situation is odious and terribly offensive to him. The way
the tribe of Benjamin is preserved is immoral by any standard, as is
the civil war that preceded it, but yet it is quite clear that at least
the war was given on God’s orders. But after that war, under Eli and
Samuel, things began to stabilize and turn for the better.
Judges gives some clear hints what the solution to the crisis was:
over and over it states “in those days, there was no king. Men did as
they saw fit and was right in their eyes.” A better description of
anarchy is hard to imagine. Without properly constituted authority,
either in an earthly or a heavenly ruler, the disorder in Israel was inevitable.
And it doesn’t actually matter whether that ruler holds the title of judge
or king, as long as that ruler also acknowledges the authority of God
over him. So God uses people, messed up people in messed up circumstances,
to accomplish his will. It is no deterministic universe that God runs;
it is as if the free will of humanity is ultimately the tool that
God uses to accomplish good, and usually in ways people cannot envison
or imagine. That is how God seems to work, here and elsewhere in
Scripture.

It took so many centuries to get to this point: now, the Israelites could at last claim the promises that God made to their ancestors. They had to pass through centuries of Egyptian slavery and 40 years of wilderness wandering, with all the suffering and death that accompanied those trials. They didn’t go quietly, either, always finding some excuse to rebel or to disobey their appointed leaders, defying God in his very presence. So enshrined in the holy texts and the memories of the Israelite people are records of their own failures and sins, an account so unlike the self-glorifying records of other nations and civlizations. The Bible is very realistic about human nature and does not contain hagiographies–even the great men seriously stumble at times. This is because the Bible is less about God’s people than about God himself. It is about his faithfulness and his acts throughout history on behalf of those he loves, who do not love him as they ought in return. All glory and praise and honor are for him, and any glory given to the people who serve him is reflected glory and not their own.

Indeed, it is God who does everything in this book, with Joshua and his men simply obeying orders. Other people recorded their accomplished military feats, but when Israel writes of military victory in this book, they write to remind themselves that their accomplishments belong solely to God. This holy war is fought only on God’s instruction and on God’s terms, and any victory is God’s victory. Joshua reminds them constantly: “you shall not fail, because the LORD is fighting for you.” The Israelites build altars instead of national monuments or statues. They do not conduct conventional sieges but instead, in the capture of Jericho, march around the city for seven days and collapse the walls with only a trumpet blast. Military defeat comes not by poor strategy or a lack of supplies, but by disobedience of God’s instructions in the Achan episode. (Once again, collective guilt and the need for absolute purity among the whole people is the overriding theme.) The capture of Ai is somewhat more strategically conventional, but once again it is God who devises it and passes it along to Joshua. God is the commander-in-chief here, setting strict limits on what can be taken as booty and what should be destroyed (or “devoted,” as the NRSV translates). Every time a city is put to the sword and burned, it is done only because it is “just as the LORD had commanded to Moses,” or to Joshua, or to Joshua through Moses. There is a clear line of authority involved at all times: God–>Moses–>Joshua. But Moses and Joshua are only servants, and ultimately it is God who does everything through his servants.

The actual record of military victories only occupies about one third of the book’s length. The first six chapters are concerned with ritual preparation for battle–including circumcision–and of the fateful crossing of the Jordan River. That event is a turning point in the Scriptures, as it marks the start of God’s fulfillment of the promises. The latter half of the book is a record of the boundaries allotted to each tribe, as well as a list of the peoples and kings defeated in battle. Again, as before, such seemingly dry details are for the purpose of making concrete the fact that God has kept his promises; they are, indeed, a record of blesings. Once written, no Israelite can doubt that God has richly blessed them as his chosen ones. This is why Joshua, in his last speech, is so stern with the people when he urges them to give up their ancesteral pagan gods and not to be seduced by the Canaanite gods. All the blessings that God has given them are witnesses against them when the Israelites rebel; how could they ungratefully rebel when they have a record of God’s goodness to them? At that particular moment, the people vow, “We will serve the Lord!” and Joshua replies, realistically and with great sadness, “No, you will not. You are unable to.” We can see here even in the OT that it is God who enables people to have faith, and any purely human effort to worship him is sure to go wrong. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve,” Joshua says, choosing the Lord for himself. But, as later books will attest, the Israelites will invariably choose the idol over the true God. We will always choose wrongly if not for God’s intervention and grace, even if we construct ways to remind ourselves of his goodness. That’s our sin nature, only conquered by God himself through Christ.

Indeed, while the book ends with the triumph of Joshua, his elders, and the people of Israel, time will tell that they have not actually been as obedient as they should. Whatever one might think of the command to slaughter all the Canaanites, that was the instruction, and it was never fully executed. There are still many survivors, such as the Philistines, who will be thorns in the side of Israel and will eventually entice them to the worship of idols. While Joshua largely succeeded and was counted faithful to God, even he and his comparatively obeident generation are not perfect; even they were human and thus affected by sin. And any imperfection will cause trouble in the long run, which the book of Judges dramaticaly illustrates. The Israelites lived in a world just like ours, where sin’s effects have not been wholly conquered and things have not yet come to fruition; they only will when the Lord returns again. Zealous attempts to root out all evil are the marching orders, but human beings cannot perfectly fulfill them, and human beings will have to live with the consequences. Perfection is supernatural. And only the supernatural savior can really eliminate it, and so he will, at the end of time.

Until then, like Joshua, we can rest in the knowledge that God has blessed us, but we must also remember that nothing is complete. Not all the promised lands are conquered yet. Not all of God’s vows have been fulfilled entirely, but we can be sure that they will be one day. For it is, after all, God who does the conquering and the saving, and not us, and he does things in his time.

With the closing of Deuteronomy, we come to the end of the Pentateuch and the beginning of the collection of books known as the “historical” books: Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, and 1&2 Kings. (The Chronicles were written much later and are part of the post-exilic literature that includes such books as Nehemiah.) All in all, the first five books constitute the founding stories of Israel, about how the disparate Hebrew people were gathered into a single nation in the land of Canaan. It is not just any nation, either; the entire people is considered one congregation before the LORD, a community defined not only by blood but by faith. The question and difficulty of faithfulness are recurring themes through the history of the Israelites, so it is not that the people are exactly marked by faithfulness, but rather by the fact that God has chosen them first and that whatever may happen, it is their religion and relatioship to God that distinguishes them from others.

At the book’s beginning, the new generation is on the threshold of crossing the Jordan River and claiming the Promised Land, but first, Moses gives a farewell speech to the congregation, intended to encourage the people to obey the Law and not to forget God when they conquer Canaan. Two thirds of the book’s contents, in fact, is simply exhortation along the lines of, “please, my people, for your own sake obey the Lord and follow his precepts, so that it may go well with you and that land may prosper.” The book is also filled with stern warning after warning about the curses that will fall upon the people should they succumb to idolatry and injustice; after numerous capital crimes are named, the concluding sentence is always, “so you shall purge the evil from the land.” Also many other laws are promulgated with the promise, “so that your days may be long and you shall live on the land that the Lord has promised.” There is a clear link between covenantal obedience and material prosperity, security, and well-being overall. No bad apples are allowed to exist in the community, either–sorcerers, idolators, adulterers, and others guilty of serious crimes are to be stoned to death by the whole community, or else the whole community will suffer the consequences of the individuals’ sin. Collective guilt is a difficult concept for moderns to swallow, but I think it illustrates the interdependence of societies and how easily corruption can spread among sinful humans. The purity of the land itself, the Israelite community, and especially of worship areas like the tabernacle are overwhelmingly emphasized; social justice, especially for the widowed, poor, and the immigrant/alien, forms a secondary ethical theme. The two aspects–holiness and justice–are related; Moses constantly reminds the Israelites, “you were once aliens in Egypt, and so you shall treat the alien well”–though this injunction apparently does not apply to the peoples that they are commanded to destroy in Canaan. What is perhaps surprising too is that the killing of all people (and all livestock) is not as emphasized in those passages as much as the destruction of the foreign gods. The people there are wicked because they worship wicked gods, often with child sacrifices, and also with ritual prostitution (another common Biblical metaphor for apostasy). So, the kind of holiness/purity that is required to maintain prosperity is largely of the religious kind; that is the reason why intermarriage is forbidden as well, not as much for racial as for religious reasons.

I am struck by how deeply pessimistic the outlook of this book is, especially on the part of Moses. Part of this, surely, is because he is able to see Caanan on the top of the mountain, but is not allowed to join his people across the Jordan. But most of it is due to the fact that both he and God know that despite the eloquent pleas he’s giving to stay away from idols and injustice, the peple are going to fail. God in fact tells him that after his death, the people will quickly fall into sin, and that all the warnings and curses that he is proclaiming are in fact going to pass. One of the most remarkable passages is chapter 32, which contains a commemorative song. While initially it is a celebration of God’s mighty acts to liberate them from Egypt, the bulk of the song is about God’s faithfulness in the midst of Israel’s deep unfaithfulness. It concludes with some curses, though, on other nations that will oppress Israel in the future. Philip Yancey, in his book The Bible Jesus Read, notes that this is a very bizarre sort of “national anthem,” one that highlights the failures of the people rather than their glorious victories or their virtues. It is, in other words, an utterly realistic assessment of not only the people but of human nature, one that is enshrined in the national memory because people need to be reminded all the time of their propensity for failure and sin. The situation is such that the reminder is far more likely to be ignored than to induce massive guilt attacks, such as the kind that often seized the Christian monks and figures such as Luther and Augustine–it is usually only the most saintly people who are the most aware of their faults, after all, and God knows most people are not “saints” in that sense. Ordinary people need confidence in a faithful God, but they also need to be humbled by their limitations and their flaws–and, of course, every single person on earth is an “ordinary” person. Israel is no different.

In Deuteronomy, though, we begin to find a prophetic motif that is repeated time and time again throughout the rest of the Old Testament: after judgment always follows redemption. The long list of graphic (and often ironic, Murphy’s Law-ish) curses in chapter 27 does not end with the curse: instead, Moses describes then that after judgment, the people will repent and God will redeem them. You will turn back to your God, he says, who only meant to chastise you as a parent disciplines children, and he will forgive, restore, and heal you because he will remember the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the Bible, judgment is never alone; redemption is always included in the plan. The Old Testament is often stereotyped as being all law and judgment, but God’s abiding love is actually evident everywhere in the pre-Christian books. A modern reader can be overwhelmed by the seeming harshness and high standard demanded by God, but God is equally willing to restore as to punish. Ultimately, as St. Paul notes, the keeping of the law is not what saves, and it only makes the conscientious people aware of how far short they are of God’s glory. The law is not an end in itself, and besides, by God’s standard, “this law is not too difficult or unclear” (as Moses says)–which shows that if people have trouble obeying clear cut law, they are going to have to look elsewhere for their redemption. Because only God finds the law easy and clear, it must be He who can fulfill it perfectly, in the person of Christ.

The final chapter of Deuteronomy is an editorial valediction on Moses, who has done things that no one else has done at that time. He is commended for knowing God “face to face.” From this point forward, only a select few will also know God face-to-face, but they will carry often hard, unpleasant messages from God to his always-struggling, wayward people throughout their history.

Sorry for the brief lapse; we should be back on schedule for today. Deuteronomy is next in the next few days.

So far in my reading, Numbers is definitely the least “cohesive” book of Scripture–it contains a hodgepodge of different kinds of material, including two census counts, law, historical record, and much larger chunks of narrative. All these elements are supposed to reflect, I guess, the sum total of Israel’s experience in the 40 years’ wandering in the desert, as the book ends with the impending deaths of Moses and Aaron and the book is spiced with accounts of the military struggles with the border peoples of Canaan. The following book, Deuteronomy, is entirely taken up by Moses’s final speech, and the passing of the torch to Joshua as they enter the Promised Land. With books like Numbers, though, one can see why many modern scholars believe the Pentateuch was cobbled together from various sources, oral, legal, historical, etc. Not being knowledgeable in such matters, I’m going to suspend judgment on the Mosaic or non-Mosaic authorship of the Torah and concentrate on its meaning in this devotional.

The consequences of unfaithfulness seem to be the controlling motif throughout most of the narrative portions of the book. It is in this book that God condemns the entire original Exodus generation to wander in the desert, which includes Moses and Aaron. Faithfulness and exact obedience, it seems, is rare indeed; only Caleb and Joshua qualify to enter Canaan, when somoene with the stature of Moses and Aaron themselves cannot cross the border due to their disobedience at Meribah. (Exact instructions, again, play a role; striking a rock rather than speaking to it might seem a minor difference, but the LORD does not countenance mistakes, unintentional or willful, from the lowest slave or from Moses.) The grumbling of the people and the repeated attempts at subversion and rebellion (by Korah and even by Aaron and Miriam) are more serious, however, and point to the utter inability of human beings to stay obedient for long under any kind of authority. A phrase that is sprinkled throughout the Torah, “and the people did everything that the LORD commanded them through Moses,” describes a state of affairs that is actually rather uncommon for these people. In either case, this rather dismal record of the very generation that had seen the mighty works of God in Egypt proves again that God never chooses his people on the basis of merit, but only by grace. The thing about being a chosen people is that they are chosen, no matter what, and that means that they are equally reserved for special punishment as for special blessing. It’s not easy to be chosen, as Abraham, Moses, the judges, the prophets, and Jesus all knew. It usually means that you’ll have to put up with a lot more from your neighbors and your God. But it also means that you have been set aside for ultimate redemption and triumph in the grander scheme of things, even if it does take 40 years or more.

The strange, humorous story of Balaam and his ass seems out of place, but closer inspection reveals how related it is to the theme of how “irresistable” being chosen is. Balaam is asked to curse Israel, but because he is obedient to the LORD, he in fact not only will not curse them, but cannot. He can’t help but do it, even when his resolve wavers and God resorts to the silly measure of having his donkey speak to him on the way to King Balak’s court. Afterwards, though, Balaam’s stance is clear: he looks out over the encampment of Israelites, and heaps blessings on them, almost as if against his will in some way–as an oracle, he does not speak his own words but only what God reveals to him. Even outsiders like him know, then, that Israel cannot help but be chosen, no matter how much others try to deny this. And indeed, so many other powers have discovered this for themselves in history, from Egypt to Balak to Haman to Antiochus to Caesar to the Crusaders and even down to Adolf Hitler: the Jews will just not go away, no matter how hard one tries. I’ve read somewhere that the reason why the Jews aggravate everyone they come in contact with is because they are the visible reminder of God in a godless world; their chosenness is a testimony to God’s faithfulness. Everyone has to acknowledge this, Jew or Gentile. And it applies no matter how unfaithful the actual Israelite people are.

The military aspects of the narrative seem rather barbaric and bloody to us, especially given that the sanction comes from God himself and that the order is often to kill everyone, women and children included. This has troubled many modern commentators, including myself for many years, not only because God seems to be ordering genocide here but also because what’s to stop him from telling, say, a bunch of Crusaders, to do it again? I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that this is all part of “progressive revelation” and God’s accomodation to the practices of the time. The people of Canaan are described as wicked and are to be punished, thus teaching the Israelites about the consequences of sin; the command to destroy all is to emphasize the absolute purity of God’s standards, with no mixing of religion or (in this case) blood allowed. Moreover, the war is also about survival–often the Israelites are attacked first by the surrounding peoples, and it’s fairly well known that Bronze-age Middle-Eastern warfare did not take too many prisoners. In a “kill or be killed” situation, and where a Promised Land is involved, conquest is justified if it comes directly from God. Moreover, God is not going to let his people slide–he will hold them to a higher standard than the expelled Canaanites, on the pain of death and exile as well. We will see those consequences directly later on in the Old Testament. The battle for Canaan may be a holy war, but it is not just any holy war, and most certainly God is not ordering any literal holy wars on his Jewish or Christian people nowadays. When man takes his own initiative on such matters, such as with religious-based terrorism, the consequences reek more of hell than holy incense.

Numbers ends with many of the borderlands safely within the hands of the Levites and two of the tribes. The people are on the precipice of the Promised Land. And the two who led them out of Egypt, Moses and Aaron, will be left behind: but Moses will have the last word before his foolish, restless people go in. That ground is covered in the next book, the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy.

If any book were in a competition for “most boring book of the Bible,” Leviticus would probably be the winner. There is no narrative, poetry, or prophecy (in the usual sense) in this book at all: it is entirely filled with laws, rituals, instructions for festivals, and even guidelines for economic transactions (more on the last later–they are actually fairly interesting). The foreign-ness of the latter half of Exodus continues in this book, full tilt, and most of the practices detailed in it are not even performed by the most observant Orthodox Jews any longer. So why bother reading it as a modern Christian? Why is this in the canon? Is there any “devotional” or “application” value to Leviticus?

I say there is. But not in the sense that we as evangelicals usually think of those terms.

Leviticus can be divided into a main two-thirds and a latter one-third, the former focusing on temple ritual, sacrifice, and purity, and the latter third on justice and morality. In all cases, though, the main object and rationale for all of these sometimes bizarre rules is God’s holiness. Repeatedly, the text proclaims: “I am the LORD your God, and I am holy. I brought you out of Egypt, and I am the LORD, and I am holy.” This, more than most other Biblical books, is where the “wholly otherness” of God is turned on full blast, and while the focus is on recognizing God’s holiness in worship, it also covers all of life. Sex, festivals, and the distribution of land are all included under the things that fall under the holy rule of God. And this is a God that means business. The curses for disobedience outstrip the blessings for obedience by about five or six to one. Aaron’s sons are put to death for what seem like minor infractions of ritual procedure. The demand, continually, is for perfection and for restitution when perfection is not reached. In Leviticus, I see God demanding three major kinds of perfection:

• Ritual cleannness
• Unblemished sacrifices
• Worshipful, morally upright lives

I’ll briefly discuss all three in a more theological, modern context than on the particular details of the text.

Sacred Quarantines: Ritual Cleansing
What are all these bizarre rules concerning how if someone touches unclean animals, blood, bodily fluids, etc., he or she must be cleansed by a priest and sit around for at least one night before being allowed to worship? And, moreover, violation of the cleanliness rules can mean exile or death? Like the other aspects, it is part of God’s demand for perfection at root, the external imperfections reflecting the internal reality of our “dirty” sins. The main concern in these purity laws is so that God’s space, the tabernacle, would not be contaminated or polluted, because the holy LORD does not abide by pollution of any sort.

On a more literal level, some of the purity laws concerning blood, leprosy, and infectious diseases make sense, as do the quarantine procedures for sickened people. Places of worship are great opportunities for disease and infection to spread like wildfire, as a substantial number, if not everyone, in the community is present. Draining the blood of animals also helps get rid of many food toxins and reduces the chances of food poisoning. Basic hygiene is something that has taken human beings generations to develop, and still doesn’t exist in many countries around the world. Part of God’s care is to protect his people’s health on a rudimentary level, and he takes it seriously enough to exact some stiff punishment for violators who thus endanger the community through negligence.

Highly related to purity is the idea of holy seperation. Clean animals and unclean animals are made distinct, as are clean and unclean people–and even things like mixed fabrics are forbidden. The priests are to “make a distinction between the common and the holy,” because they understand that not everything is acceptable in God’s sight. This is not to support a clean divide between secular and sacred–anything that touches a holy object, for example, becomes holy too–but rather, to reinforce the idea that God demands the very best, and whatever isn’t is to be kept away for other uses or for destruction. Many of the rules now seem arbitrary, but God being God, he certainly has his reasons and the right to declare some things “clean” and “unclean” on a ritual level. He alone determines what’s acceptable.

The Perfect Animal: Unblemished Sacrifices
Highly related to seperation and purity is the idea that sacrifices of any kind–of animals, grains, bread, or even the symbolic sacrifice of the firstborn all have to be “unblemished.” No lame, disabled, or diseased sacrifices are allowed. Christians see this as a foreshadowing of the need for the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, who is the scapegoat, paschal lamb, whose blood is what makes us ritually clean. God not only requires unblemished sacrifices, he also demands the first-fruits: the firstborn livestock and son, the first harvest, the fat of an animal, etc. Later, in Malachi, we find that the usual human tendency is to skimp as much as possible–Malachi rails against how people disobey God by precisely bringing him lame animal sacrifices and small portions of their income. From the beginning here in Leviticus, God makes it clear that this is unacceptable, precisely because he is the holy God who demands, as the old hymn goes, “my soul, my life, my all.” Because God is first, he gets our first things as well.

A Life Lived Before God
Ritual is almost the exclusive focus of the first two-thirds of Leviticus, and while the ritual/sacrificial rules do not disappear later, they are augmented by moral, economic, and social regulations. Here, the goal is to achieve social seperation, not just ritual seperation: Israel is to be different from Egypt and Canaan, with their sexual immorality and injustice. The prohibitions against all sorts of incest, homosexuality, idolatry, and especially child sacrifice to Molech all distinguish God’s idea of justice and right from the human standard, which is so perverse that the text describes the land “vomiting” the sinful people out. (is there an ecological subtext here? The land punishing the people for its misdeeds might apply much more in our abuses in a literal fashion.) And lest the Israelites gloat over their conquest of Canaan, the same standard is rigorously applied to themselves; the text is full of stern warnings that describe in graphic detail the famines, massacres, cannibalism, exile, and destruction that would fall upon the chosen people were they to break the covenant. The historical notes say that it is formulated in a similar fashion to numerous “suzerein” treaties of that age, but in either case, the consequences were known in advance and were clear. And, of course, history shows that that never stopped anyone from sinning.

Some attention must be paid to the economic system instituted by God here: every seven years, all farming must cease; every 49 years, all land is to be returned to its original owners, regardless of who bought it in the meantime, and all slaves were to be freed and debts cancelled (the famous Jubilee year, which scholars speculate never actually took place at all in ancient Israel or Judah–yet another example of disobedience). Would we ever try something like this today? This is much more radical than communism in some ways. No land is to be permanently owned by anyone, because ultimately it belongs to God, as opposed to the nation collectively or to the king, and the selling or compensation price is only the value of the land up to the jubilee year. Also, people are not allowed to hoard their harvests; some must be left for the poor to pick and glean. So our modern notion of “social justice” is actually built in to Israelite society, but one can almost see why the ancient Hebrews never put most of this into practice. Our modern world would likely collapse were we to go back to no-interest loans, periodic debt-cancelling, and period land redistribution. This is because these rules here were to be executed directly under God; every attempt in human history, like Communism, to accomplish something similar has been by human effort and human government. People playing God usually turn out to be the worst of tyrants. In either case, the overweening concern for God’s own glory and justice is evident in this system; it seems set in place to counter any notion that the people somehow are entitled to their land or possessions. We could use a lesson or two like this in our consumerist age.

Conclusions
The crucial parts of life and society are covered in Leviticus’s laws, showing the dominion of God’s rule and holiness over all things. This admittedly pre-modern, difficult book is easy to give up upon, but the attitudes that it presents–awe and reverence to God, consideration for the poor and the alien, and circumspection in morality–are things that are eroding in modern society. The solution, ultimately, is not to fall back on a new legalism, as might seem the solution after reading a detailed rule book like Leviticus. God gives rules for a reason usually, and so the task of the modern interpreter is to discern that reason and to apply it appropriately today. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, the Jews had to embark on this task with the Mishnah and other oral and written interpretive traditions; Christians who do not have animal sacrifice and other rituals may use Leviticus as a foreshadowing of Christ’s priesthood and sacrifice (see the book of Hebrews) or as a glimpse of the perfection of the Lord, a perfection unattainable but by grace. Israel’s later history would show the trouble it had to maintain this law, and really, any law is easy to keep by God’s standard compared to having a right heart pursuing him always. The impossible demands in Leviticus, as Paul later commented, show our inadequecy all the more, perhaps no more than in the seemingly arbitrary rules. And that, perhaps, is what will drive the repentent to God Himself, through Christ, because it is not the law that saves. God incarnate is not a rulebook, or even the Bible. No, human beings are only saved by a God who became a human being for our sake.