In the Whirlwind

God and Humanity in Conflict

Robert A. Burt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780674065666
• eBook ISBN: 9780674069671
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory

God deserves obedience simply because he's God—or does he? Inspired by a passion for biblical as well as constitutional scholarship, in this bold exploration Yale Law Professor Robert A. Burt conceptualizes the political theory of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. God's authority as expressed in these accounts is not a given. It is no less inherently problematic and in need of justification than the legitimacy of secular government.

In recounting the rich narratives of key biblical figures—from Adam and Eve to Noah, Cain, Abraham, Moses, Job, and Jesus—In the Whirlwind paints a surprising picture of the ambivalent, mutually dependent relationship between God and his peoples. Taking the Hebrew and Christian Bibles as a unified whole, Burt traces God's relationship with humanity as it evolves from complete harmony at the outset to continual struggle. In almost every case, God insists on unconditional obedience, while humanity withholds submission and holds God accountable for his promises.

Contemporary political theory aims for perfect justice. The Bible, Burt shows, does not make this assumption. Justice in the biblical account is an imperfect process grounded in human—and divine—limitation. Burt suggests that we consider the lessons of this tension as we try to negotiate the power struggles within secular governments, and also the conflicts roiling our public and private lives.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning

No authority, whether divine or secular, deserves automatic obedience. All authority must justify itself by some extrinsic standard of justice or righteousness. This is the core claim of modern, secular Western political theory. This theory defines itself as fundamentally different from the demand for unquestioning obedience to God’s authority that is supposedly embedded in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.¹ According to this account, the biblical God deserves obedience simply because he is God, not because he is righteous or just as judged by some external standard.

I believe that this conventional view is based on a misreading of the biblical texts. It ignores the fact that God’s specific claims to absolute authority are regularly, if for the most part indirectly, denied in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles themselves. The biblical texts almost never openly challenge God’s authority. But the challenges are there, sometimes buried and sometimes on the surface of the biblical accounts of interactions between God and human beings.

Contrary to modern secular claims, there is a political theory that underlies the account of God’s authority in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and this theory attempts to answer the three questions that are the core inquiries in any normative account of political authority:

1.Why should anyone obey God? In other words, are God’s claims for authority based on anything more than his raw power to coerce humanity?

2.If God claims that his authority is based on standards of righteousness and justice, does this mean that humanity is entitled to make independent judgments of God’s specific exercise of his authority? In other words, does God owe any obligations to humanity?

3.If God does owe obligations to humanity, in light of the vast difference in raw power between him and us, how do we humans enforce these obligations?

Both the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles wrestle with questions about the legitimacy and extent of God’s authority as strenuously as the most skeptical modern political theorist challenges state authority. The challenges are there within the texts, waiting to be seen if only we have eyes to see. But these challenges can only be brought into visibility by a carefully detailed unraveling of the biblical narratives.

We must begin at the beginning, with the account of God’s creation of the universe in the first two chapters of Genesis. These opening chapters present two apparently inconsistent accounts of creation itself—and it is in these inconsistencies that the basic groundwork is established for the political theory of the Bible.

In the first chapter of Genesis, God’s creative acts move pro­gres­sively—dividing Day from Night on the first day; dividing Heaven from Earth on the second day; dividing the earth between dry land and seas and planting seeds for grass, trees, and fruit on the third day; creating the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day; creating animals on the fifth day; and finally, on the sixth day, creating humans—male and female together—“in the image of God.” At successive steps of this creation, the biblical narrator relates that God “saw that [his creation] was good.” Finally, after creating humanity, God looks over his entire effort and concludes, “Behold, it was very good.”

There is a small suggestion in this first chapter of Genesis that God had in mind standards of “goodness” that he was applying to his own conduct—though this is only the barest hint. The biblical account gives no content to the idea of “good” that God was invoking, and it may be that this chapter of Genesis provides no extrinsic standard on the grounds that whatever God wants must be considered by that fact alone to be “good.”

After chapter 1 concludes with God’s supremely self-satisfied evaluation of his creation as “very good,” chapter 2 of Genesis begins as an apparently natural extension. On the seventh day, we are told, God rested from all the work he had done. But then the chapter 2 narrative takes a strange swerve. Without any explanation or any acknowledgment of inconsistency, we are suddenly thrust back to the third day of creation, after God had made the earth and the heavens but before there were any plants or animals or humans; on the eighth day following creation, after God rested, there was only barren dust in the universe. From this dust, God then formed man and breathed life into his nostrils. This man (adam in Hebrew) was initially created all alone on the earth, unlike in the first chapter, where animals had preceded humanity and male and female humans were created at the same time.

After this solo appearance of man in the second chapter, God plants a garden in Eden. But unlike the events in the first chapter, in which the entire earth abounded in plants and trees and fruit to feed both animals and humans, this Garden of Eden in the second chapter is a circumscribed place surrounded by the barren earth. God then places Adam alone in the garden and immediately issues his first negative commandment: God says to Adam, you may eat from every tree in this garden except for one, and if you eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “on [that] day . . . you are doomed to die.”

Here is another difference from the first account of creation. In the first chapter, after creating the animals God told them, “Be fruitful and multiply.” God then created humans, male and female together, and gave them the identical instruction, “Be fruitful and multiply.” In this first chapter, it is as if God were saying, “I have given you the potential to procreate, it’s in your essential nature, now go to it.” This is more an instruction and encouragement than a negative commandment. Most notably, God attaches no punishment to this injunction. The implication of his directive is that humans as well as animals might need God’s prompting about the desirability of procreation, but that once clearly informed, they will readily understand that fecundity will be its own reward.

In the second chapter, God’s coupling of his command to Adam with a threat of punishment for disobedience is vastly different in its implications. In this chapter, God relies on a distinctive “command and punish” mode for exercising his authority. From this point through the entire corpus of the Hebrew Bible, God predominantly relies on this “command and punish” mode. But though this mode predominates in the Hebrew Bible, it is not exclusive; on a few notable occasions, as we will see, God returns to the style of authority that he displayed in the first chapter—encouragement more than command, an appeal to his addressees’ own self-understanding rather than threatened punishment as an inducement for compliance. In the Christian Bible, as we will see, this initial mode becomes predominant (though not exclusive).

These different approaches to exercising authority are not the only difference between the first and second chapters of Genesis. There is yet another apparent inconsistency. Immediately after God forbade Adam to eat from that one tree, God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” In the first creation chapter, everything that God created, everything that he touched, was explicitly recognized as “good” or ultimately as “very good.” But suddenly in the second creation chapter, something appears that was “not good”—and, indeed, nothing in the second chapter was described as “good.”

After recognizing this specific shortcoming regarding Adam’s solitude, God immediately set out to remedy it. According to Genesis, God created a virtual zoo of every beast and bird and brought them to Adam for naming. But nonetheless, the Genesis narrator observes, “for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.”

This is a striking admission in the second creation chapter. God avowedly created all the beasts and birds to “make [Adam] a helper fit for him.” But after his vast zoological efforts, it was clear that God had not yet succeeded in his chosen task. Surely an omniscient and omnipotent God would have been able to solve any problem as soon as he had identified it as such. In the first creation chapter, God made no apparent wrong turns; he did indeed seem omniscient and omnipotent. Does the second creation chapter reveal some shortcoming, some weakness in God that had not appeared before? Does this revelation imply some standard of conduct, or at least of efficacy, against which the biblical narrator is measuring God’s performance?

Having failed to accomplish his goal by creating animals to keep Adam company in the second chapter, God now takes a different tack. He anesthetizes Adam and extracts a rib from which he fashions a woman. When Adam awakes and sees Eve, he says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”

These were the first words directly ascribed to Adam since his appearance in Genesis. A literary convention is employed throughout the entire text of the Hebrew Bible that the first words spoken by any actor are especially revealing of his or her essential character.² If we apply this convention to Adam’s first quoted words, Adam is revealed as a person who had been very lonely, who had shared God’s evaluation that it was “not good” for him to be alone. And more than this, as God paraded one animal after another before him, Adam seems to become increasingly impatient, maybe even increasingly despairing, until finally God figured out that what Adam really needed was a helper. “This one at last,” Adam said. Adam thus appears to be a lonely and needy man who is not completely confident that God will adequately respond to his loneliness and neediness.

In Adam’s reaction to God’s creation of Eve, we can see the first hints of human presumption to evaluate God. It is not as if Adam saw himself as having authority to judge God or as having capacity to punish God, for example, by disobeying his orders. But Adam’s impatient welcoming of Eve conveys the barest suggestion that he is prepared to assess God’s conduct with reference to his own needs and wishes. These are the first seeds for human claims to judge God, and they pro­gres­sively grow, as we will see, in subsequent narratives in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

In juxtaposing the two creation accounts in the first and second chapters of Genesis, we have thus seen three themes that will recur, and will become increasingly important—the presence in the biblical text of substantive standards by which God’s conduct might be judged, the claim of human beings to exercise those judgments, and different modes by which divine (and human) authority can be exercised. Moreover, another difference between these two chapters points to a further theme of vast significance in the biblical texts. This difference is signaled by the opening sentence in the first chapter of Genesis.

The traditional translation of this first sentence is “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This translation reaches back at least to the King James version of the Bible in the seventeenth century. But this is not the only possible translation of the biblical Hebrew. Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently offered an important variation. He translates opening words of the first sentence as follows: “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep . . . ” There is an important difference here. The traditional translation seems to imply that God created the heavens and earth from nothing, that nothing at all existed before this initial moment. Alter’s translation, by contrast, makes clear that something existed before God created the heavens and earth. That something was “welter and waste and darkness over the deep,” but it was not nothing.

Neither Alter’s translation nor the traditional version is obviously correct; both are grammatically permissible readings of the Hebrew. And if we read the second sentence in the traditional translation with close care (“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”) we can find the same implication—that something (that is, “darkness”) existed before God said, “Let there be light.” But Alter’s more direct translation gives us a handle for un­der­standing the apparent contradictions between the first and second accounts of creation that we don’t get from the traditional translation. If something existed before God created heaven and earth, that something was chaos—“welter and waste and darkness.” And God did not create something from nothing; he created order out of chaos.

This is the implication of God’s entire creative effort in the first chapter of Genesis—he differentiates light from darkness, day from night, the heavens from the earth, dry land from the sea on the earth, and so on. If we understand the Genesis account of God’s creation as imposing order on chaos, then we can read the Genesis account of the second creation in a different light. After God finished the six days of the first creation, on the seventh day he rested, but after this rest period in chapter 2, God seems to resume work almost all over again. Now, however, we can see that something might have happened at some time during the seventh day: that while God rested, the forces of chaos might have returned and unraveled much of what God had done, rolling us back to the third day of the initial creation when the earth was nothing but barren dust, with no plants, animals, or human beings.

Chapter 2 of Genesis does not say this explicitly. But if we read this possibility into the text, then many things in the second creation account become clear that are otherwise inexplicable. Why, for example, was there one forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden? If God didn’t want Adam to eat the fruit of this tree, why was it in the garden? Did God put it there or, if not, why didn’t he remove it?

Several possible answers seem plausible. First of all, God may not himself have planted this forbidden tree. The tree may have sprouted like a noxious weed that God did not invite and perhaps even could not control—like the primordial chaos that persisted notwithstanding his creative efforts.³ God’s command to Adam against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil could be, from this perspective, his attempt to control chaos—or at least to control Adam and to keep chaos away from him even if he could not entirely eradicate chaos. (Perhaps by this hortatory effort, God meant to protect Adam against infecting himself by ingesting the noxious weed that God could not— or chose not to—exterminate on his own.)

Even if God did himself plant the forbidden tree, we could understand this planting and his negative command to Adam as God’s testing his capacity to control the human he had created. In his first creative efforts, in chapter 1 of Genesis, God had seen no need to test his command of any part of the universe that he had made. God had simply assumed that his powers were so vast that he controlled all that he saw. For this reason, God was able to survey all of his creation at the end of the first chapter and declare that it was “very good.” In the second chapter, by contrast, God never bestows any praise on his new creative efforts. To the contrary, in the second chapter, God’s only evaluation of his handiwork was in the negative, when he stated that it “was not good that [Adam] should be alone.”

I’ve noted that after God made this observation, it took him a long time to remedy this error, this design flaw, running through all the animals before he finally realized that Adam needed Eve to keep him company, and I stated that this long search process, which Adam impatiently endured, implicitly raised some question about God’s omnipotence and omniscience. If we now surmise that chaos had returned to unravel God’s initial ordering of the universe, we can see an even stronger reason that God himself would question his own power, and why he would be moved the second time around to test the extent of that power, which he had previously taken for granted.

We can also see why the redactors of the Bible would have purposefully omitted this missing link in the account of the second creation, the link that chaos had reasserted itself while God rested. To openly acknowledge that God’s powers might be limited was, at the least, disrespectful, if not sacrilegious; but even more, this acknowledgment would be unwelcome and even exceedingly distasteful to the general audience for whom the redactors were compiling the biblical text. If God could not conclusively control chaos, how could he be depended upon to protect the human beings that he had created?

The redactors’ silence about the stubborn force of chaos can be understood as an attempt to pursue the same goal that God had sought when he tried to bar Adam from eating from the tree that would give him knowledge of “good and evil.” I read this juxtaposition of “good and evil” as equivalent to the distinction between order and chaos, and so long as A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 In the Beginning
• 2 The Appearance of Authority
• 3 God Gives, God Takes Away
• 4 God’s Promises: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
• 5 Loving Power: Moses
• 6 Love Offered, Love Commanded: Moses and the Children of Israel
• 7 Grief and Grievance: Moses and Job
• 8 As We Forgive Those
• 9 A Renewed Testament: Mark, Matthew, and Luke
• 10 The Same Old Testament: Paul and Jesus
• 11 Eliminating Doubts and Doubters: John
• 12 The Insoluble Problem of Politics
• 13 Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue
• 14 Reconciling with Injustice
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index