Canter Bridge

Readers raised on a hermeneutic of suspicion find it difficult to trace honor in David’s bloody treatment of a rival king’s assassins. David’s words are high-minded, yet the consequences of his judicial murdering—if that’s what it is—are transparently beneficial.

Perhaps suspicion is the right prima facie response. What is patently false is the assumption that the text’s compilers were too dim to glimpse the same suspicious potentialities. That they do not resolve David’s self-described honorable actions into a moral flatline of good or evil is not oversight. It is profound awareness of the human drama, the mixed motives that usually fuel it, and the burden of the recorder not to distort this complexity in the service of clarity. Continue Reading »

Fittingly, the young David makes his debut in a pose that is both small and audacious. A strong instinct visible among Jewish interpreters sees in such personalities the story of Israel writ tiny and personalized yet with suggestive prescience.

Little Israel is at it again, rank to rank arrayed against the mighty Philistines who seem in every way to tower head and shoulders, invincible and mocking, over Israel the dwarf people. Perhaps the giant Goliath, too, is a nation’s story writ personalized—large this time—and with remarkable prescience.

Israel has no hope in the normal calculus of things. She will be overrun by the land’s strong denizens who have more than once before been tagged as invincible, outsized, the stuff of legend. Continue Reading »

Biblical narrative assumes a readerly discernment that works itself out along a wide horizon.

Biblical scholars consider that the book of Judges takes ancient narrative material and then weaves it into a more-or-less coherent whole that is itself part of Israel’s first epic history. By some lights this epic moves from primeval times through to the advent of Israel’s monarch or, in literary terms, from Genesis through Judges. Since such a horizon embraces six books, the term ‘hexateuch’ becomes common in describing the whole.

The result is something decidedly more engrossing than a string of stories haphazardly recalled. Though individual portions often rise to the level of gripping tales in themselves, the wise reader performs his task with wide eyes. This is all the more necessary given the Hebrew Bible’s developed reluctance to engage in mere morality tales. More often than not, the reader is expected to come to his own conclusions about an individual episode and its principals, an estimation that necessarily derives its moral balance from the wider story and the assumptions that undergird it. Continue Reading »

Poetic justice is not the only pattern that the biblical literature discerns amid the apparent chaos of events. It is merely the most recurrent and arguably the most persistent voice arguing for a guiding hand behind history’s flow. Sometimes poetic justice is recognized and even articulated by the Bible’s least likely players.

Take Adoni-Bezek. The very definition of petty royalty, this early victim of Israel’s conquest of the land it was learning to call its own is remembered only because of his odd punishment and the colorful reflection it evoked.

When Judah attacked, the Lord gave the Canaanites and Perizzites into their hands and they struck down ten thousand men at Bezek.

So we are told early in the book of Judges. The language carefully underscores the claim that the land is YHWH’s gift to Israel, a framing of conquest that will occasion Israel’s blessing when recognized and her severest chastisement when amnesia trumps gratitude. Continue Reading »

Easily the most frequent divine command in the entire Bible is ‘Do not fear!’, a fact of the literary landscape that speaks volumes about intentionality and purpose.

Joshua trots it out when he and his adolescent Israel have become the object of an unlikely alliance of petty monarchs, as describable by the differences they bring to this coalition as by their hysteria over an Israel. That latter appears almost juvenile alongside the imperial armies that normally come marching through envied lands and the Bible’s pages.

Yet the alliance is militarily formidable and—by any conventional calculus—capable of putting a quick end to the Israel project. Continue Reading »

By the time the son asked the questions, the stones would have been bleached whiter than when they were carried dripping from the Jordan’s path. Each would have become a fixture in its place, stumbled upon at night. Perhaps the boy who asked the question would have mounted the stone in a child’s victory and proclaimed himself king over the place a year or two before it came to him to ask the awaited questions.

The father must have grinned when it came.

What are these stones?

It is almost an embarrassment that one must say in our time that biblical faith is inter-generational. It is passed to the daughters and sons not by some neutral election of one religion among the menu on offer. Rather, it is inculcated as the default way that ‘our family’ responds to the mercies woven into a story that has been in the telling for generations before it was our shadow that fell upon these stones.

Yet it is just as easily missed that biblical faith is so often evoked, nurtured—in a sense, even born, though not exactly conceived—in a question. The potency of a wondering, the generative energy of an unscripted interrogative is as important to the shape of biblical faith, one might venture, as dogma and its declaratives. Continue Reading »

The Bible’s unlikely cast of heroes and heroines grows by one in the second chapter of the book of Joshua, where Jericho’s village whore welcomes the two spies that Joshua sends to identify the weak links in that city’s defenses. Perhaps stopping in for a bit of warmth, the two spies find that their whereabouts have been detected and their lives placed in danger.

Some have questioned whether this unnamed lady on Jericho’s walls might have been more a respectable innkeeper than a prostitute. This is doubtful. She is identified by words that strongly suggest prostitution and in the Bible’s wisdom literature identify the paradigmatic loose woman of a young man’s dreams and nightmares. Surprisingly, she is named. ‘Rahab’ has a meaning almost too suggestive for print.
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For Deuteronomy, this quintessential treatise of the heart, gratitude is a most powerful force.

One glimpses layers of the Bible’s fecundity in medieval editorializing and in summary declarations. Let’s begin with the medievals: the verse and chapter divisions that were added during that era hew to the side of convention. Chapters in given work are of predictable length, verses are inserted according to patterns that can be recognized and described, and so on.

Against this backdrop of habitual treatment of the text, the lengthy chapter 28 of Deuteronomy-no fewer than sixty-eight verses-is a triumph of coherence over convention. By grouping the mirror-image blessings upon obedience and curses upon forgetfulness in one single chapter, the versifiers made a heroic concession to the poetics of justice and are to be lauded. Continue Reading »

Of all the possible exemptions from military service that one a man might imagine, delighting his new wife might seem the least probable and the most appealing.

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.

Thus does Deuteronomy’s prescription for an integrated society take aim at the peril of absence. Solitude, after all, was the Primordial Man’s first enemy in the early pages of Genesis, a threat long before the serpent appeared. The lawgiver here picks up that threat and assures that the company of the home outranks the camaraderie of the battlefield. Though it may be too much to posit a neat hierarchy of social duties, one that privileges the family over the nation, it is only a small leap to see such social theory beginning its gestation here. Continue Reading »