Thoughts on Samuel and Kings--God as Oriental Despot

I grew up in a household that viewed itself as "enlightened".  While we were culturally Protestant, with a foothold among the Jews (my father's side of the family), we "knew" that we were better than "UGH!-fundamentalists!" who took the Bible "literally" (although I confess I have yet to meet someone, even the most hardcore fundamentalist, who holds that mountains actually grew feet and skipped when Israel left Egyptian bondage--Psalm 114:4).

For us, it was a given that the God of the Old Testament was "an oriental despot" writ large; and as cultured people who knew the writings of Max Weber and other learned Germans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as being Americans nurtured in a democratic polity, we knew that "oriental despots" were not a good class of people.

God as an oriental despot?  Now that I have been called on to lead an adult Sunday school on Samuel and Kings, it is now as good a time as any to explain how I shed a belief of my childhood and youth. 

Samuel and Kings tie in very nicely with both the books of Moses and the prophets.  Indeed, the Hebrew Old Testament places Samuel-Kings in a ccategory titled "Former Prophets".  From the Septuagint onwards, many translations of the Scriptures describes these books not as One and Two Samuel and One and Two Kings, but as One, Two, Three, and Four Kings.  One thing which stands out in these books is that the Hebrew conscience--embodied in the prophets who wrote the books--had a very ambiguous view of kings. And if God is described as king in various places, the kings are at best a pale reflection of the divine majesty rather than God being an idealization of the kingly office, while at worst the monarchs of Israel are a parody and even an insult to the God in his name they reign.

Israel, between entry into the Promised Land and the Anointing of Saul (1400-1000 B.C., give or take?) is a loose, much put-upon tribal federation led by Judges rather than kings.  While the Book of Judges disparagingly notes "these were the days when there was no king over Israel, and every man did as he pleased", Israel's desire for a king in I Samuel 8 is also a negative moment.

Israel seeks a King to be like "those of the nations round about".  Samuel, the last of the Judges, is grieved, but God tells him that the one who has been rejected is not Samuel, but God himself. Samuel goes on to describe how the manner of the monarch (as the Scots Covenanter Samuel Rutherford interpreted it in 1644) would be to oppress and rob the people, taking the best they had and redistributing it to those close to the throne.  Yet the people persist, so a king is found in the person of Saul Son of Kish.

Saul does not obey God, and increasingly exhibits negative characteristics.  When David appears as the slayer of the Philistine giant Goliath, and becomes a charismatic warrior in Israel, Saul is jealous.  His marrying his daughter Michal to David has all the marks of a suspicious man keeping friends close, and [supposed] enemies closer. David is driven into rebellion, and Saul chides his men who cannot find David by asking if David will give them vineyards and fields--precisely behavior against which Samuel warned the people.

While David is a man after God's heart (someone who receives divine grace, more than a good man whom God finds), he, too, is a failure in important areas.  Moses, in Deuteronomy 17, commands that the king shall not multiply to himself wives (Dt. 17:17), yet David embarks on this path while he is still on the run, taking Abigail, widow of Nabal, as a ssecond wife, and Ahinoam as a third. This comes out all the more in the reign of his son Solomon, whose many foreign wives and concubines turn him away from the LORD.

David's grandson Rehoboam drives ten of the twelve tribes to rebellion, and the kingdom to division.  Succeeding kings in Israel follow the path of Jeroboam Son of Nebat, "who led Israel to sin" (idolatry, not political disloyalty) in a dreary history of apostasy.  Of the kings of Judah, only Hezekiah and Josiah are praised, and it is for the sins of Amon and Manasseh that Judah, the last independent Israelite polity, ultimately goes into captivity.

Nor are the most vividly drawn foreign kings--oriental despots par excellence-- given a good press.  The pharaohs of Egypt forget how Joseph's emergency measures saved their people, and end up the oppressors and would-be destroyers of Israel.  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon proves boastful, and goes mad; his successor to be swallowed up by the Persians.

And herein lies the rub: history may be written by the winners; but sacred history honored by millions worldwide was written by the conservators of a failed state whose dynasty fell (save in Jesus Christ).  Yet these came conservators were also those sustained by God while monarchs who presumed that their monuments would last forever were long forgotten--until a much later age unearthed them as part of the project of illuminating the world in which the Bible was written.

No, God is not an oriental despot, outwardly splendid and inwardly shabby, presumed powerful but, in the end, as easily swept away as a cloud of dust. The exegesis of those in the seat of the scornful is mere waggishness, and ultimately misleading folly. May God forgive me, and any of us, who ever took it seriously.

God is God, the maker and sustainer of the world who does what he will, and keeps faith with those who trust in him.

Bible vs. Qur'an on Violence.

Often, when discussing ferment in the Islamic world, people near anad dear to me say, "The Bible and Christian fundamentalists are just as bad as anything the Dar-ul-Islam can produce." It's a sentiment that grates on me, if only because it reveals a profound ignorance of both the Qur'an and the Bible. It reflects a profound, and even willfully studied, ignorance of the Biblical and Christian influences on Western legal, moral, and political thought and reflects a profound desire to find one's most dangerous enemies at hand (among fellow Americans of the Christian fundamentalist persuasion) rather than face, a long-term existential threat from abroad.
The moral equivalence game is a case of Christianity’s “cultured despisers” who since Marx and Freud have consistently declared all theisms to be equally false joining hands with those nominally Christian elements who lightly declare all theisms equally true, while ignoring the real gaps between Christianity and Islam.
Unfortunately, I have not seen many good blog postings addressing these differences. Worse, many Christians who attempt to do so often take a wrong approach and end up disparaging important parts of their own tradition and faith. Hence, Uncle Cephas takes up the gauntlet. This essay will focus on the question of violence in the scriptures of the two religions.
(I) Grace for Sinners
The first issue is the attitude which the two religions attempt (with or without success is another matter) to inculcate in their followers. Christianity values humility, Islam encourages pride.
As a Christian fundamentalist himself, Uncle Cephas readily admits that Christian fundamentalists can be as bad as any group of Muslims. But the reason for this is that it is a biblical "fundamental" of his creed that we are all conceived in sin (Psalm 51), sin from birth (Psalm 58), and that our hearts are deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). Confession of sin and repentance are part of both daily personal worship and corporate worship on all Lord's Days for most who call themselves Christians. No wonder that one of the most common objections against Christianity that I have heard is that it doesn't let us think very highly of ourselves! Our salvation is not a careful balancing so our good deeds outweigh our bad, for in such a “balancing act”, our sins would invariably outweigh our supposed merits. We confess the necessity of Christ's coming, atonement, and resurrection for our salvation--precisely because God's grace has allowed us to see the deep-seated evil of all human hearts, including our own.
In contrast, if I have heard the Da'wa people correctly, Islam denies that there is any such thing as original sin; and Adam's transgression affects only himself. The Qur'an congratulates Muslims on being "the best of peoples" (Surah 3:110--Al'-Imran). If this is indeed the self-image that Islam inculcates, a serious Christian can only see it as flippant.
The Gospel is not a code, but news: news of the saving work which God has done in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself said of his work, “the Son of Man [a Messianic title taken from Daniel 7] came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The death of Jesus Christ is necessary for our salvation in that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins (Hebrews 9:22). This was why Adam and Eve covering themselves with leaves after their transgression did not suffice; and God made for them garments of skins (Gen. 3:21). This is why the laws of Moses have a detailed system of animal sacrifices described in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, to which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews refers.
Further, the blood of sinful man atones for no sin. This, not a divine decision to outlaw human sacrifice per se, lies behind the test of Abraham found in Genesis 22. The atoning blood must come from one who is sinless—namely, the Lord Jesus Christ. When John the Baptist, on seeing Jesus, declared “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), he was not calling Jesus a cute little animal, but calling attention to how the Messiah came to be the final sacrifice offered for sins; for the lamb was the animal most used in the Old Testament’s sacrificial system.
But the Gospel is not only about death. It is also about the victory Jesus won for us not only in bearing our sin and making atonement for us on the cross, but also in rising from the dead. If Jesus was not truly risen, writes the apostle Paul, our faith is in vain, and we are of all men the most to be pitied (I Corinthians 15:14). But Christ’s resurrection shows that he now has dominion over all things, for the sake of his people.
Yes, Christians are called to do the good works defined in the moral law. But this is not to accumulate merit; rather it is to express gratitude for what God has done.
It is in the light of this, the final revelation of God to man, that Christians read the whole of divine revelation given in the Old and New Testaments.
(I) Scriptural Violence: A wrong approach
The moral equivalence people are correct to note that both the Old Testament and the Qur'an include a plan for political and military conquest of lands. Much of the Octateuch (the biblical books from Genesis through Ruth) is taken up with a blueprint for the conquest of Canaan, including bone-chilling commands to thoroughly exterminate the Canaanites, which even John Calvin himself, that bugaboo of all liberals, theological or anti-theistic, spoke of this as a frightening decree. In these sexually liberated days, it is also popular to note that the Torah decrees death for such sexual sins such as adultery and homosexuality.
Usually, modern Christian apologists speak of a "higher morality" in the New Testament than in the Old, correctly noting that Jesus' final marching orders to his followers are to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19-20) rather than to march through the land on an extermination campaign. This is often accompanied by an appeal to some kind of spiritual evolution between the times of Moses and those of Christ.
Yet this disparages the only Bible Jesus ever read while he “pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14) and was training his twelve disciples. In the Gospels, Jesus neither scorns nor disparages the Old Testament. The image of Jesus as a more highly evolved spirit or rebel against the Old Testament's "primitive" or "unworthy" character has nothing at all to do with what the apostles of Christ, the earliest church fathers, or Jesus himself had to say; but it does have a lot to do with a bacillus which the modern church caught from a number of often fiercely anti-Semitic German academic critics active in the 19th and early 20th centuries--and thank God that He preserved some "fundamentalists" who refused to accept the "assured findings" of such men!
The often unreflective acceptance of the New Testament as a "higher stage" than the Old in distinguishing Christian ethics and beliefs from those of Islam also serves to obscure profound differences between the Old Testament's theology, spirituality, anthropology, and ethics on the one hand and those of the Qur'an on the other.
Many portions of the Octateuch catalogue sins of the Canaanites, which the Israelites were forbidden to practice. Deuteronomy 18:9-14 lists sins of spritism, necromancy, and witchcraft; Leviticus 18 gives a list of forbidden marriages (generally defining the sin of incest), in the midst of which we also find a prohibition against burning one’s children in honor of Molech. It was for such sins that the Canaanites were to be dispossessed. Yet God, in his mercy, reserved a portion of the Canaanite nation for himself. Such, no doubt, was Melchizedek, to whom Abraham offered a tithe of the spoils of the war he waged against the kings of the east in order to rescue his nephew Lot (Gen. 14). When God promised Abraham the land of Canaan, he was told that he could not inherit it himself, “for the sins of the Amorites [also known as Canaanites] was not full (Genesis 15:16). This “filling up” of the sins of Canaan occurred some time later, shortly before the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.
Yet a surprising lack of self-righteous self-congratulation appears in Hebrew Scripture. The land was not given to the Israelites on account of their own righteousness. Deuteronomy 6-9 reminds them that they were a stiff-necked people, and that God was remembering his promise to their forefathers. Further, should the conquest tempt Israel to boast of its own prowess and might, or should Israel fall into the selfsame sins of the Canaanites, Israel itself would perish from the land (Dt. 8:19).
Indeed, Israel is repeatedly warned in Numbers and Deuteronomy that it would be punished for the sins committed by the Canaanites. The sin is a sin regardless of who commits it; and not even those chosen by God are exempt from the curses of the moral law. This should always been considered whenever the ban on Canaan is read—for, potentially, Israel may also find itself under a similar ban.
(II) A Unique Event and the Flow of Biblical History
The following Old Testament history and prophecy reveals the unfolding of Israel’s apostasy and punishment. The prophets arose as God’s prosecuting attorneys, reminding the Israelites of their sins against the covenant which God had made with them. Yet throughout the history of the Hebrew kings, there is the depressing refrain that “he walked in the all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat …wherewith he made Israel to sin” (I Kings 16:26).
The end of all this was that the Assyrians and Babylonians came down on Israel and Judah, destroying their kingdoms and exiling their peoples. Isaiah spoke of the invading Assyrian as the “rod of God’s anger” (Isaiah 10:5 ff.). Covenant-breaking not only destroyed the people of Canaan, but destroyed ancient Israel and Judah as well, exactly as Moses had warned.
Thus, the horrific command to exterminate the Canaanites can be understood only in the context of the whole of Old Testament history; a sacred history inspired by the Holy Spirit himself. The ban on Canaan is not an eternal instruction on how to wage war, but a warning that certain nations and men can become so hardened in sin that they must be swept out of the way. Perhaps this is a judgment to be left to the Almighty, since we do not today possess prophets (and those who claim to be such in our time sooner or later tend to prove themselves false). It is not at all a call to put aside all compassion, but it does remind us that God does execute his judgments in time and space, and that today, as then, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7).
The ban against the Canaanites is a reminder that God is judge not only of individual souls, but over whole nations and peoples. Nor do God’s judgments spare his own people. This should remain a practical warning even to Christian peoples in the period since the coming of the Messiah Jesus. If we are careless or scoffing towards what God has revealed to us, our churches also may be destroyed, as Jesus himself warns in Revelation 1-3. Perhaps the blight of Islam over much territory that once was the cradle of Christianity, or the degeneration of once great churches in Europe in our own time may well be a more recent out-working of the same warnings which God gave to ancient Israel. The lesson is not to engage of a self-righteous love of war and punishment, but to seek God’s forgiveness and cleansing.
(III) Conlcusion
The extermination of the Canaanites was a unique event in Scripture; not the blueprint for just war in all ages. Indeed, the bulk of Scripture, Old Testament as well as New, praises the man of peace and calls us to seek it. Christians therefore are not to disparage the command to exterminate the Canaanites as “inferior” or “less evolved”, but to recognize in it the fearfulness of God’s wrath against sin, and to therefore rejoice that God chose to deal with us in mercy, through Jesus Christ, who bore the wrath and curse of the broken covenant in his own body on the tree.
Further, it is proclamation of the “good news” (evangellion in Greek), ethical example, and prayer that are the spiritual weapons which God gives his church for the subduing of nations; not sword and spear. The command to exterminate the Canaanites is to be remembered in humble recognition of divine justice; but the latest marching orders the church possesses call not for the extermination of nations, but that they may be made disciples (Matthew 28:19-20).
This is a stark contrast to the place of violence in the Qur’an. It is true that many Muslims prefer to read the command to jihad as an inner struggle to purify oneself; but no school of Islamic thought rules out aggressive, violent jihad as a means to spread the faith and the subsequent humiliation, oppression, and exploitation of the conquered.
At most, the holy war ideal in the Bible and Qur’an are only superficially similar. But underneath, they reveal a very different understanding of the relationship of God and man. The Qur’an calls for pride and self-righteousness; the Scriptures—even in their “scariest” verses, call for humility.

More on Jonah--Crisis and Faith

But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep. So his shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call uon thy God, if so that God will think upon us, that we perish not. (Jonah 1:4-6)

Jonah has gone way off course. God wanted him to go east, but the prophet has chosen to go west. In doing this, he causes great loss to himself and to those with whom he travels. But in this, the Holy Spirit teaches us that trouble is often God's way of waking us from our carelessness and slumbers. In Jonah's case, "slumbers" can be taken in both the idiomatic and literal sense!

We are taught that God is sovereign. Here, this is shown by his control of the winds and waves. "Who is this, whom even winds and waves obey?" asked the apostles of Christ when they saw Jesus still the storm on the sea of Galilee. But here, we see God raising rather than stilling the storm when his prophet disobeys.

But not only Jonah needs to be awakened from his pre-dogmatic slumbers!

The sailors appear to be either heathens, who have long been accustomed to worship false gods, or Israelites seduced away from the divine covenant. Their reaction to danger is to call on their various gods to save them, even as they cast their cargo overboard to lighten the ship.

This is instructive. Probably, the sailors were Phoenicians, those intrepid traders and explorers of the ancient Mediterraneans; and the Old Testament gives little indication of the Israelites having seafaring proclivities. Indeed, it seesm that Solomon's ships of Ophir were manned by crews provided by his ally Hiram of Tyre, a Phoenician ruler. The Phoenicians were a folk eager for gain, and no port from the Levant to the southwestern corner of Britain--where tin was to be had--was ignorant of them. One Phoenician mariner, Hanno, was even the first to circumnavigate Africa. Yet these famed traders are willing to sacrifice their material wealth in the form of their trade goods in danger, even while they cling to their gods.

Nothing else so clearly reveals man as a a worshiping creature. This is evident even today, in those who claim to be "free" of religious taint. None have been so fanatically purposive in the pursuit of pleasing their gods as those who call themselves "athesits"--meaning that they disbelieve in the Christian God. Communists have made great sacrifices in the service of what Arnold Toynbee once called the goddess Historical Necessity. Others, in the name of the goddes Liberty, have made themselves into the worst of tyrants. Nietsche drove himself insane (perhaps aided by syphilis) in his search for a Godless intellectual integrity.
This has been the case with man since Jonah's Phoenician shipmates cast their costly goods into the sea down to the present day. It is no wonder then that many a Christian theologian has concluded that the worshiping impulse is one great evidence of man being created after the image of God.

Yet, oddly enough, while his shipmates worship their gods and sacrifice their livelihoods, Jonah is asleep. "It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows; for so he giveth his beloved sleep," says Psalm 127:2. Perhaps Jonah is an odd perversion of this great truth, for he sleeps as he flees God's mission and his companions are in danger. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the sinful complacency and silence of the church in too many ages! People perish without hope of salvation, yet we remain asleep. It takes the heathen captain's intervention to rouse God's prophet from his slumber.

The military chaplains say that there are no atheists in foxholes. The behavior of Jonah's shipmates is instructive. In crisis, man seeks God. But will those who have the truth be there to help them?