Identity - Lesson 2

Dr. James Houston

Identity

th731-02

Identity of Israel—Family Narrative

Lesson Transcript

The contribution of Shem has been a spiritual one; whereas, of Ham, it has been a technological one. And of Japheth, it’s an intellectual one. In the process of history, these contributions were made effective in this order: first Ham, then Shem, then Japheth,. This in turn reflects upon the threefold capacities or needs of our humanity. We have a capacity to worship, a capacity to reason, a capacity to create. As Hugh Dryden has remarked, man’s life at its fullest is a trinity of activity: mental, physical and spiritual. Man must cultivate all of these if he is not to be imperfectly developed. And likewise, Viktor Frankl the psychiatrist, who survived the Holocaust, has written man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the bodily, the mental and the spiritual. What is truly psychologically true of an individual is true of a whole culture. A high civilisation develops when all three are developed in harmony, or when one has collapsed or is missing as a component. Could it be that Shem is given priority for man’s spiritual needs to come first, while his physical needs, as Ham, come next, and his mental or intellectual needs come last as Japheth?

What all Biblical scholars affirm is the uniqueness of the Old Testament. There are no other compilations of texts into one book as ancient, as exhaustive, as extensive, in the ancient world as the prayer book of the Hebrews that we call the Five Books of Psalms. These themselves range over 1,500 years in their compilation. And embedded in them are sources from the hymns of Ancient Egypt, of Sumer, of Babylonia, of Syria, possibly Persia too. The Book of the Law, or the Torah, is further embedded in reform movements later, such as the texts of Deuteronomy and in the two books of Chronicles. The story of David is uniquely detailed and expansive like no other figure of the ancient world. Like a Colossus, the literature about him is like no other in the ancient Near East texts.

Again in cultural anthropology, no other human beings are ever conceived of or of having such identity as the Israelites developed. Biblical anthropology is unique, as various scholars have described. Roland de Vaux in his book Ancient Israel, Hans-Walter Wolff in his book the Anthropology of the Old Testament, or James Muilenburg in his neat little book The Way of Israel, these are classics that you should all study at some time. And an outline of the human/divine drama of the Old Testament has been well developed in the book by Samuel Balentine Prayer in the Hebrew Bible. That is to say, that the Israelites have given us a remarkable literature, surrounded as they were by peoples who worshipped many different gods. We too are idolaters of many gods, whether it’s money or sex or pleasures and, above all, the self. And consequently, we need to reflect very deeply on our history as the scriptures give to us.

[00:04:27]

Like no other people, the Israelites continued to experience in ever more intensifying ways the presence of God in their midst. There was the presence of God in the ordering of creation. There was the judging presence of God in the entry of sin into the hearts of Adam and Eve. There was the accompanying presence of God with the journeying of the patriarchs. As well as of the presence of God in the ultimate sacrifice that Abraham was tested to make on Mount Moriah. There was the presence of God with Moses at the burning bush, as well as later with the Israelites carrying the Tabernacle in the wilderness. There’s the renewed presence of God in the temple in its restoration, in the reform movements of its development. All these indicate how profoundly the reality of the Old Testament is that God is with His people through many vicissitudes, through many evolutions, through many, many different circumstances.

It’s in the light of this that Abraham Heschel has argued in his excellent book The Prophets if God is a being of absolute self-sufficiency then the entire world outside Him can in no way be relevant to Him. This is actually a Greek principle of divine impassibility that was foundational to the Islamic conception of God as Allah, leading to the intrinsic fatalism of ‘If Allah wills it’, which so tragically is affecting us today. Whereas in the prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible, the question of divine relatedness to humanity is paramount. As Heschel argues, the supreme issue is not the question of whether in the infinite darkness there is the ground of being which is an object of man’s ultimate concern, but whether the reality of God confronts us with pathos. For the Greeks, the embrace of impassibility stemmed from two metaphysical concepts: apathy and sufficiency, apatheia and autarkeia. Aristotle’s God is the unmoved mover with no conceivable capacity for change.

[00:07:16]

Emotions however are so much more important, as we’re realising today, than simply having a rational mind. And suffering, which is so much in the context of our emotional constitution, is also something that is so profoundly affective of our awareness of time and change and matter. So the Greeks argued that God, being eternal, is atemporal, is incorporeal, is absolute. The Greek God must be incapable of suffering argues Moltmann, which is an intellectual barrier against the recognition of the suffering of Christ, for a God who is subject to suffering like all other beings cannot be God.

Yet Heschel sought to affirm that divine pathos is the central summary of Jewish theology, as a functional, not an ontological, category of God. He’s explored then in The Prophets, notably in Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah and Isaiah, how God can be wounded and suffer, indeed, as a woman in travail—the most daring metaphor to attribute to God. Heschel saw that for Biblical ethics the nature of the human response to the divine corresponds to the context of his apprehension of the divine. Thus, it is upon God’s heart that Israel can relate with him personally, as Job 9:4 states, His heart is wise and His strength is great who can successfully defy Him. Or again, Psalm 33:11 celebrates Yahweh’s plans hold forever the intentions of His heart from age to age. But God’s anger, which is referred to more than 200 times in the Old Testament, also reveals His heart, for just as a loving parent needs at times to punish a child so does God direct His anger towards a wayward sinner. Yet, unlike human anger, which can become uncontrollable, God’s love shows restraint, as Hosea recites, Ephraim, how could I part from you? Israel, how can I give you up? My heart recoils from it, for I am God and not man. I am the Holy One in your midst and have no wish to destroy: Hosea 11:8–9.

Likewise, in the dedication of the temple the Lord speaks I consecrate the house you have built. I place my name there forever. My eyes and my heart shall always be there—1 Kings 9:3ff. The consequence is that God raises up to serve Him leaders who have a heart for God, promising I will raise up shepherds after my own heart and these shall feed you on knowledge and discretion—Jeremiah 3:15. And Psalm 78, 70–72, describes how He chose David as His servant for his unblemished heart.

[00:11:12]

This background I have given broadly in order to then help us to understand the family narrative is God’s primal way of showing Israel’s identity. It’s the story of families. Genesis 1:1–2:3 expounds on the creation story as if to say that this is the stage on which God’s relationship with man was started. In other words, what precedes creation is redemption of God’s relationship with man, to create Him in His image and likeness. It’s, of course, a picture of cosmogony that’s inconceivable by contemporary science or indeed any cosmogony of the ancient world. This is unique.

So we enter into the family history of Israel in the passages that we have in the beginning of Genesis. Five times over in Genesis 2:4–11:26, it’s described these are the generations. That is to say, these are the families of mankind. Then follows the core patriarchal narrative of Genesis 11:27–50, which is nearly five times longer than the earlier narratives, for there the distinctive descendants of Israel are traced, as we’ve already mentioned. Certain common themes thread their way through these family narratives, such as the choice of the younger son, Abel not Cain, Jacob not Esau, Ephraim not Manasseh, then Zerah and Perez, the ancestors of David. We see the same choices made with Joseph and with David.

Exploitation of a father’s weakness is also illustrated in Noah’s drunkenness, in Jacob deceiving his father, in Reuben sleeping with his concubine, as well as Sarah ends up in a foreign harem for Abraham’s lack of candour, or also with David’s adultery. Yet, redemptively, both the Jacob cycle in Genesis 25–35, or the Joseph story of Genesis 37–50 are the stories of family reconciliations.