[Dialogue] 7/23/09: Spong: The Origins of the Bible, Part XXVIII: The Chronicler, Final Chapter of the Old Testament

Thu Jul 23 14:46:56 CDT 2009

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Thursday July 23, 2009 

The Origins of the Bible, Part XXVIII
The Chronicler: Final Chapter of the Old Testament

The Old Testament, as we Christians organize it, closes in the post-exile period of Jewish history. That would date its final works in the mid to late 300s BCE. The biblical story thus comes to a conclusion in a very difficult period of Jewish history. They were a defeated nation returning from exile and trying to lay claim to their former country, which had now been settled by other people for several generations. Those settlers were not happy to welcome the returning Jews, nor did they recognize the Jewish claim to their land. So it was that resistance against the Jews was high and hostility toward them was intense.
Survival20required that the Jews erect symbols of their permanence. This meant rebuilding the protective wall around Jerusalem, rebuilding the city itself and ultimately rebuilding their Temple, which was an outward symbol of their claim to live in this land. The Temple proclaimed that this land belonged to their God, who had given it to them. Some of the less inspired minor prophets like Haggai, Nahum, Zephaniah and Obadiah, whom we treated with only a brief paragraph in this series, spoke for this nationalistic fervor. They were tribal figures in the service of a tribal religion. The four final books that I will cover to complete our study of the origins of the Old Testament are products of this period. They are I and II Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. 

Most people have no sense or image of the books of the Chronicler. Much of the material in them is also contained, sometimes verbatim, in the books of I and II Kings. Ezra and Nehemiah were originally part of the corpus of the Chronicler, so all of these books are deeply interrelated. The Chronicler, however, was not a historian in the sense that he made no effort to discover the facts of history; he was rather a theologian whose primary purpose was to retell Jewish history from his particular theological perspective. He wanted to inform the Jews of his generation of what it would be like to be properly the people of God. He did this by describing the reigns of Kings David and Solomon not as they were, but as they ought to have been. So, in th
e books of Chronicles, we get idealized kings who are not really human. 

Nowhere is this idealized theme better noted than in the Chronicler's description of King David's final sickness, in which the king was portrayed as laying out in minute detail the plans for the building of the Temple. This was the Chronicler's way of suggesting that even the Temple was the product of David's reign rather than of Solomon's. Compare that with the story of King David's final days as told by the much earlier book of Kings. Here David is a sick and incapacitated old man, who could not govern in his weakness, so a court intrigue developed around his heir. Solomon, who was hardly the firstborn son of King David, became the eventual winner of this struggle. His claim to the throne was modest to say the least. He was the second child of the adulterous relationship between King David and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, whom David had had murdered. David had many older and more nobly born sons who might have succeeded him. The most obvious candidate was Adonijah, who was backed by both Abiathar the priest and Joab, David's military chief of staff. Solomon, however, aided by his mother, who had obviously become as close to a queen as David ever had, joined with Zadok, the priest, Nathan the prophet and Benaiah, a military leader, to pull off the coup that had Solomon crowned king with David's blessing even prior to David's death, dashing the hopes of all potential challengers.

It was also suggested in
 the book of Kings that as he neared death King David was suffering from chills that could not be overcome even with many blankets. So his attendants decided on a new strategy. They would conduct a "Miss Israel" contest to determine the most beautiful woman in the land. The winner's prize would be to lie with the sick king to warm his chilled body with her own. When Abishag the Shunammite was chosen, she immediately entered Jewish folklore and was said to have been the inspiration for the romantic material in the biblical book known as "The Song of Songs" or the "Song of Solomon." I submit that this is a rather different end of life story from contemplating the dimensions of the yet to be built Temple.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are also the work of the Chronicler. In one of the later returns from captivity the group was led by Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor. One learns more, however, about Ezra by reading the book of Nehemiah than one learns about Nehemiah. Two things, however, occur in these last two books of the Bible that shape later history. The first is that a story is told (see Nehemiah 8) about how a new and expanded law, or Torah, was brought to Ezra the priest to read to the assembly of the people. After this reading, the people covenanted with God to obey this law and to enjoin its precepts on the common life of the newly established Jewish nation.

Many scholars believe that this is the only biblical reference to the completion of the Torah (Genes
is to Deuteronomy, also called "the books of Moses") that was done during the Babylonian Exile and was subsequently incorporated into Jewish life as the most holy of all Jewish writings. You may recall that when we began this series on the origins of the Bible, we identified at least four major strands that made up the Torah. The earliest was a work now called the Yahwist document because it called God by the name of Yahweh. The author was a court historian, probably during the reign of King Solomon (ca. 960-920 BCE), who was charged with writing the sacred history of the Jewish people. He did so extolling the institutions that gained prominence at the time of King David. Those institutions were four in number: the royal line of David, the city of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the office of the high priest. These four institutions were the strength of the Jewish people and this first strand of their sacred scriptures told the story of the origin of these institutions and the favor with which God looked upon them. 

The second strand was known as the Elohist document because it called God by the name of Elohim, or El. It was the product of the 9th century (ca. 850 BCE) in the Northern Kingdom. This narrative was written to justify the rebellion of the Northern Kingdom after its secession from Judah, Jerusalem, the Royal House of David, the Temple and its priesthood. When the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, someone brought this version of Jewish sacred writing to Jeru
salem and in time the Yahwist and the Elohist versions were woven together, with the original Yahwist version of the earliest history of the Jewish nation dominant. 

The third strand of the Torah was the work of the Deuteronomic writers, who created not only the book of Deuteronomy, which was added to the growing text, but who also edited the entire sacred corpus in the light of the Deuteronomic insights. This revision occurred around the year 625 BCE. Finally, there was what we call "the Priestly Version," a product of the exile itself, including the years of the return, in which all of the rules governing both liturgy and ethics were recorded. The book of Leviticus is a typical piece of the material composed by the priestly writers. It covers every jot and tittle of Jewish life. 

Whenever the Torah was changed, the people had to authenticate the new version in a liturgical setting. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah thus record the moment in post-exilic Jewish history when that final version of the Torah reached acceptance. Most scholars believe that the Torah has been relatively the same from that day to this.

The final note that needs to be lifted up from this last strand of material to be incorporated into the Hebrew Scriptures was the rising presence of ethnic isolation. The Jewish people were torn between two realities. First, they believed that they were God's chosen people. Second, they were a defeated, exiled nation. That was a strange way for God to treat the chosen people. The Jews=2
0thus spent much time trying to understand this dilemma. What had they done wrong? Why was God punishing them so severely? How had they failed? Who were the culprits? After much discussion, a consensus emerged and was reflected in the book of Ezra. It suggested that many Jewish people had corrupted their ethnic purity by intermarrying with Gentiles. This, the pundits argued, had corrupted the faith and practice of the Jews by allowing foreign practices in their life and worship that had angered God. The punishment of the people for this violation of their call to ethnic purity was defeat and exile. To avoid a catastrophe like this from ever happening again, Ezra, the priest, propounded a doctrine of racial purity and ordered the non-Jewish partners of Jewish citizens and any half-breed children that were produced by these unholy unions to be banished from the land. The new Judah was to be for Jews only! Ethnic cleansing began in the land of the Jews. People had to defend their bloodlines up to fourteen generations as vigilantes roamed the land. Prejudice against non-Jews became rampant. Before these passions had run their course, as all religious zealotry always does, it had produced two pieces of protest literature that were also included in the Bible. One was the book of Jonah, in which God ordered the prophet to preach to the unclean Gentiles. When Jonah refused on the basis of his understanding of ethnic purity and its assumption that all Gentiles are unworthy even to hear "the word of God," he had t
o endure the adventures, including the great fish, which made the book of Jonah so exciting. The second was th e book of Ruth, a whimsical story about a Moabite woman who served her Jewish mother-in-law well and finally married a man named Boaz who turned out to be David's great-grandfather. The purpose of this book was thus to state that King David had a Moabite grandmother and was thus by Ezra's rules unclean. 

We have now completed our survey of the Hebrew Scriptures, the first part of our Christian Bible. In September, we will begin our journey through the New Testament. I hope you will stay tuned. 

– John Shelby Spong

Log in to the archive at JohnShelbySpong.com
to read the full series on the Origins of the Bible.

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Al Muro, via the Internet, writes: 
First, I have purchased all of your books and to use an old cliché have been blessed by them, although the evolution of my theological development was slow. Thank you so very much for your insights.
Recently you wrote an article about your new book out in September on Eternal Life. I can hardly wait to read it. In that article you wrote that the church did not "reflect the impact of such shapers of modern thought as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein." I keep a shelf full of books on Einstein and I recently read the National geographic article on Darwin — it was great. Question: The shapers you referred to are=2
0all men. What about the women? I am for egalitarianism and I am a feminist, so the absence of any reference to women as shapers in your article caught my attention. The feminists of the 70s had a profound impact on our society.

I believe that our wholeness depends on the equality of men and women and their interaction with each other, in some fashion, such as the recognition and use of the anima and animus as prescribed by Carl and Emma Jung.

I have written a book (not published), titled Dad's a Minister, Mom's a Cop. Being somewhat liberal in the early days of my ministry, it was difficult to serve in evangelical churches, but I stuck to my beliefs and had at my side a wife (California's first patrol woman to drive a squad car alone) who helped me exemplify our egalitarian ways. Some shapers, although not at the level of the men you mentioned, were helpful to me: Joseph Campbell, Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Gould Davis to mention a few. Recently, I have read books by Karen Armstrong and Louann Brizendine that can be considered contributors to the shaping of modern religious thought. Again, thank you for all you do, you are truly a shaper.

Dear Al,

Thank you for your letter. I share your passion for egalitarianism. Unfortunately, there are few people who have shaped the way human beings think like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. The women you mention are great people and among those you mention I count Karen Armstrong a close friend, but none of these20will be remembered 400 years later as Galileo is or 200 years later as Darwin is.

Of course, the primary reason that the shapers of our changing world-view were all males is that in that patriarchal society women were not granted the privilege of education at universities. The inclusion of women in our higher educational process did not occur until the beginning of the 20th century. It was prejudice, not lack of ability, that was the culprit. One trusts that it will be different in the next thousand years.

I appreciate your raising my consciousness on this issue. Like you, I will welcome the full emancipation of women so that the geniuses among them might rise to the level of shaping the world in the next millennium.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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