I’ve been reading God: A Biography by Jack Miles, and have found so many things worth thinking about.  For my preliminary thoughts, see yesterday’s post here.

We are all our fathers and our mothers, in that we inherited 23 chromosomes from one, and 23 from the other.  We have nothing all our own.  That said, we learn about a character (and how she is different from or similar to her parents) by her actions mostly and her words second.  God is the same, except that He has no mother, no father.  We can only know Him by how He’s portrayed by the authors of the Bible.

My question is: is God full of contradictions because He just is, or does it appear so because so many authors collaborated on the effort?  [And for those of you struggling with the idea of any God at all, you might ask, is there really any God at all, or is he a fairy tale?]

“Did the telling of the stories create the God, or did the God, imagined first, provoke the telling of the stories?  By stressing how recalcitrant a subject for storytelling this being without history or desire is, how uninteresting in all ordinary human and literary ways, I have already suggested which answer I think the more plausible.  A shared idea of God must have come first, not that it can have come all at once.  Only the fact that it was shared can explain how so large a number of writers working separately over so long a period of time could have produced a work that, in all its variety, has a deep underlying unity.  Historical critical scholarship, having assigned different parts of different biblical books to different writers as well as, more recently, different and vastly expanded roles to different later redactors, has changed forever the way the Bible is read.  But the unity of the Bible was not imposed entirely after the fact by clever editing.  That unity rests ultimately on the singularity of the Bible’s protagonist, the One God, the monos theos of monotheism.  This God arose as a fusion, to be sure, but not of all prior gods, only of several.  The inner contradictions that were the result of the fusion took shape, quite early on, as a finite set of inner contradictions.  It was the biblical writers’ common intellectual grasp of this set of contradictions–this set and no other–that permitted them, working over centuries, to contribute to the drawing of a single character.”

Here I present tidbits of interest–pieces of God’s personality that emerge over time.  Make of them what you will.

I’m sure you’ve heard that God created man and woman because He was lonely, or perhaps He wanted companionship.  Miles suggests that the text never says this.  “God makes the world because he wants mankind, and he wants mankind because he wants an image.  Other motives could have been operative.  To choose one from the ancient Near East, he could have wanted a servant.  To range later in his own story, he could have wanted a lover.  He could even have wanted a worshiper.  But at this point, he is not–to judge from anything he says–a God who wants love or worship or anything that can easily be named.  He wants an image.  But then, why should he want that?  At this point, we can only guess.”

Later in the book, Miles suggests that nowhere does it say that God loves (up through the book of Isaiah).  That was surprising to me.  I don’t know about you.

“Love has never been predicated of him either as an action or as a motive.  It is not that he has had no emotional life of any sort.  He has been wrathful, vengeful, and remorseful.  But he has not been loving.  It was not for love that he made man.  It was not for love that he made his covenant with Abraham.  It was not for love that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt or drove out the Canaanites before them.  The ‘steadfast love’ of the Mosaic covenant was, as we saw, rather a fierce mutual loyalty binding liege and vassal than any gentler emotion….the text does not say “…his covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whom he loved,” as so easily it might….Classical Hebrew has abundant resources for the expression of emotion, and this passage declines to draw on them.  It is no exaggeration to say that, to judge from the entire text of the Bible from Genesis 1 through Isaiah 39, the Lord does not know what love is.”  [Keep in mind, you New Testament readers, we haven’t gotten to the New Testament yet.  This is the God that the Jews understood and knew.]

There are a few instances of the Lord’s pleasure, however.  The aroma of Noah’s burnt offering.  Moses warns in Deuteronomy that the Lord will take delight in ruining the Israelites if they do not adhere to what He has told them.  And when Solomon (in I Kings) asks for wisdom, “it pleased the Lord…”

Up through Cain and Abel, “God has not yet asked for reverence, much less for worship, from his human creatures [as strictly stated by the Bible or Torah]….”

Up until Abraham, no one has claimed God as a personal God who will do things for him.  The first true prayer in the Bible comes from Abraham’s servant, who, by order of Abraham, invokes God respectfully, yet still gives God instructions–to please find a girl for Isaac.  “When Abraham, having described the Lord as, functionally, Canaanite El, orders him to cooperate (or at least predicts confidently that he will cooperate) in discharging duties more appropriate to the Mesopotamian personal god, Abraham makes a momentous inference from his religious experience.  He infers that, in his case, El will act as if he were a personal god.  Abraham thus creates something religiously new.  Whether he does so by conscious combination or by simple misidentification we cannot know.  It is certainly conceivable that nomads migrating from Mesopotamia into Canaan may have mistakenly identified the personal god of the region they had left with the high god of the region to which they had come.  All a historian can do is note, after the fact, that, as monotheism emerges in Israel, Israel’s God combines features otherwise best described as those of Canaanite El and the Mesopotamian personal god.”

When Rebekah inquires of the Lord why she exists (when the twins are struggling inside her), it is the first time a woman has spoken to the Lord, other than answering a direct question from Him.

Jacob is a little more brash than his forefathers.  He actually strikes a bargain with God.  “If God remains with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house–the Lord shall be my God.  And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God’s abode; and of all that You give me, I will set aside a tithe for You (Genesis 28: 20-22).”

Miles comments: “In these words, for which there is no parallel in anything Abraham has ever said, Jacob is spelling out the conditions under which he will not accept his grandfather’s and his father’s God as his own.  Unlike Abraham’s wrangle with the Lord before the destruction of Sodom, this is not mock bargaining but real bargaining….Hard bargaining of this sort is far from unknown in the annals of ancient Semitic religion; yet it comes as something of a jolt, within this story, to find the God who began with such laconic mastery grown eager in his promises and, for his troubles, placed on probation by the likes of Jacob.”

When the Lord God appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush, there are whiffs of another god.  “What is novel in this apparition is that the Lord God speaks from amid flame and atop a sacred mountain.  He has never done this before.

“But someone else has.  The history of ancient Semitic religion does know of a god whose signature is mountain and flame: Baal, the dominant deity in Canaan, the region to which Abram came when he left Ur.  Baal was simultaneously a war god, a storm god, a fertility god, and a mountain/volcano god.”

Then there’s Moses.  Why would God go to all the trouble to wrangle up Moses, to lead His people out of Egyptian slavery, when He subsequently tries to kill Moses, as Moses is making his way to Egypt?

Exodus 4:24-26: “At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him.  So Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his [Moses’] legs [euphemism for genitals] with it, saying, ‘You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!’  And when He let him alone, she added, ‘A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.’”

Hmmm…why would God do something like that?  If Moses were not circumcised because he was raised as an Egyptian, then wouldn’t the Lord have known that?

Then the Lord’s first actual appearance to his people comes–as thunder, lightning, and a dense cloud upon Mount Sinai.  It must have been terrifying.  “The iconography of Canaanite Baal is derived from storm and volcanic mountain: thunder and lightning, clouds, smoke, earthquake, and unquenchable fire (see Exodus 24:17 and its anticipation in 3:2).  Almost all those phenomena are in evidence here.  But Canaanite Baal was not a lawgiver like the Lord God.  It is one thing for the setting to be explosive, another for the protagonist himself to seem ready to erupt, to “break out” in the language of the translation.”

The Israelites’ “terms of engagement ahead in Canaan will be quite like those just seen in Egypt….The difference, a large difference, is that…as he [the Lord] announces his plans for the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the Lord does not, to repeat, seem angry with the Canaanites, but the effect is genocidal, all the same, and there is no escaping it.  Unlike the Egyptians, who provoked the Lord by enslaving the Israelites and sentencing all newborn Israelite males to death, the Canaanites’ only offense is that they worship their own gods, and live on land for which the Lord has other plans.”  Stop right here.  Can you imagine us (as Americans, let’s say), using this as our motto–killing all those who worship another god and own land that we want?  We’ve done it in the past; it’s still being done today in many parts of the country (if you substitute “ostracizing” for “killing”).

The blood that flows because of such a belief is astronomical.  Forget genocide.  There’s homicide, too.  When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and discovers that his people have erected an idol, he orders the Levites to destroy the people.

Exodus 32:26-29: “Moses stood up in the gate of the camp and said, ‘Whoever is for the Lord, come here!’  And all the Levites rallied to him.  He said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Each of you put sword on thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin.’  The Levites did as Moses had bidden and some three thousand of the people fell that day.  And Moses said, ‘Dedicate yourselves to the Lord this day–for each of you has been against son and brother–that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.’”

“The next day, when Moses begs the Lord to forgive the people, the Lord refuses and, instead, sends a plague to further afflict the corpse-strewn camp (Exodus 32:35).”

If you want brutality (are you thinking you really haven’t read the Bible through and through?), there’s a doozy of an incident in Judges 19.  [If you’ll remember, there are 12 tribes initially.  The Levites practice as the priests and religious leaders.  The Benjaminites in this story are the descendants of Jacob’s youngest son.]

“In this incident, a Levite (a religious functionary) from the tribe and territory of Ephraim, traveling through the adjacent territory of the tribe of Benjamin with his concubine, is received as a guest in the house of an Ephraimite living in the area.  That night, the Benjaminites, repeating the offense of Sodom, demand sexual access to the visitor: ‘Bring out the man who has come into your house, so that we can be intimate with him.’  As on that previous occasion, the host offers the aggressors his daughter and his own concubine.  The Benjaminites refuse the offer.  The visitor then gives them his concubine, and the Benjaminites spend the night abusing her–raping her, in fact, to death:

‘…and they raped her and abused her all night long until morning; and they let her go when dawn broke.

Toward morning the woman came back; and as it was growing light, she collapsed at the entrance of the man’s house where her husband was.  When her husband arose in the morning, he opened the doors of the house and went out to continue his journey; and there was the woman, his concubine, lying at the entrance of the house, with her hands on the threshold.  ‘Get up,’ he said to her, ‘let us go.’  But there was no reply.  (Exodus 19:25-28)’

“It is a brilliant move by the narrator to place the single most brutal line in the incident in the mouth of the woman’s owner rather than in that of her attackers.  But if the Levite is without pity, he is not beyond rage.  His response to the murder is to cut his concubine’s corpse into pieces and send one piece to each of the tribes of Israel except Benjamin.  The tribes then muster and march against Benjamin, killing all the tribe’s men, women, children, and animals and burning down all its towns.  The only Benjaminite survivors are a remnant of the soldiers.  Afterward, the other Israelites realize with regret that their vow–a part of their reprisal against Benjamin–not to permit any of their daughters to marry Benjaminites means that this tribe must now die out unless they come up with a solution.  And they do: They notice that one Israelite town, Jabesh, has not mustered for the common action against Benjamin, and they send an army to kill all its inhabitants, including women and boys, sparing only virgin girls.  These virgins they bring to the shrine at Shiloh, and the Benjaminite survivors are told that during the merrymaking at an upcoming religious feast, they may capture and rape the girls with impunity, thus preserving their tribe as one of the twelve.”

??!!

Does your stomach turn when you read that?  Can you imagine being one of those girls?  I would assume, if I were one of them, that God cared not one iota for me.  This is a great example (among many) of where I would not accept the standard line, “Well, you know, God’s ways are not our ways.”

I would demand to know why.  I would demand to know how long.  I would demand this from a God who claims to be almighty and protector of the weak.

Wouldn’t you?

[Post image: God the Father by Artus Quellin, 1692, decorating the rood-screen in Bruges Cathedral]