An Apocryphal God

Beyond Divine Maturity

Mark McEntire

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781451470352
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451472387
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In Portraits of a Mature God, Mark McEntire traced the narrative development of the divine character in the Old Testament, placing the God portrayed at the end of that long story at the center of theological discussion. He showed that Israel's understanding of God had developed into a complex, multipurpose being who could work within a new reality, a world that included a semiautonomous province of Yehud and a burgeoning Mesopotamian-Mediterranean world in which the Jewish people lived and moved in a growing diversity of ways. Now, McEntire continues that story beyond the narrative end of the Hebrew Bible as Israel and Israel's God moved into the Hellenistic world. The "narrative" McEntire perceives in the apocryphal literature describes a God protecting and guiding the scattered and persecuted, a God responding to suffering in revolt, and a God disclosing mysteries, yet also hidden in the symbolism of dreams and visions. McEntire here provides a coherent and compelling account of theological perspectives in the apocryphal writings and beyond.

2

God of the Defeated and Scattered, Part I

There is a significant overlap between the body of literature contained within the Tanak/Protestant Old Testament and the literature in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. This is made most obvious by the presence of the expanded Greek versions of Daniel and Esther in the Apocrypha and expanded Christian Old Testament canons. Another point of overlap, which receives less attention, is the mysterious existence of the books called Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and 1 Esdras, which are canonical only in some Orthodox Christian traditions. Jubilees falls into the category sometimes called rewritten Bible, and because it presents much of the plot of Genesis and Exodus it is a necessary starting point. The first major section of 1 Enoch is a much larger version of the Watchers story in Gen. 6:1–4, which incorporates other elements of Genesis. The appearance of the last two chapters of the book of Chronicles, along with all of Ezra, in 1 Esdras means the destruction of Jerusalem and rebuilding of the temple will be a part of the divine story examined in this chapter. First Esdras lies somewhere in the murky area between rewritten Bible and translation, because it puts together Greek translations of parts of two books from the Tanak, and an additional story set in the Persian court of Darius.^[1] The discussion will continue in chapter 3 by examining a collection of stories set in the late Babylonian, Persian, and early Hellenistic periods in which Jewish people, scattered about these ancient empires, are protected or rescued by the God of Israel. The wisdom books from the Apocrypha, which appear to be instructions for Jews living in the diaspora in order to live a faithful and productive life, will await discussion in chapter 4. All three of these chapters carry the same primary title because the texts they treat function in the wake of the disruptions of the sixth and fifth centuries and attach themselves to the story of destruction and dispersion.

The discussion of divine-character development in this chapter will give attention to how Israel’s God acts in relation to the Israelite people both in Judah and the diaspora, in both the distant and the relatively recent past. One of the challenges of this presentation is that books like Jubilees and 1 Enoch, which reach into the distant past, also contain significant apocalyptic elements or assumptions. Apocalyptic writings present two problems for any attempt to follow a plot. First, they portray a narrative that is operating on a different plane of existence, an unseen world, which is difficult to connect to the plot that is going on in the ordinary world of human experience. The latter world is something of a reflection of the former, but it is difficult to describe a precise connection. The second problem is that apocalyptic works often project their narratives into a distant future, in which God will act differently than in the present. Most interpreters of apocalyptic literature have recognized the use of both a cosmic dualism and a temporal dualism as this genre’s defining characteristic.^[2] The attempt to follow a plot in this study will mean that some books, especially ones like 1 Enoch, will have to be treated in more than one place on that plotline. Dealing with the cosmic dualism will require recognizing that the stories going on in the two different realms are reflections of each other. The connection between the two parts of the dualistic framework is the revelatory figure, like Daniel or Enoch, who can move back and forth between the worlds, or at least see into the other world in dreams and visions.^[3] The more overtly apocalyptic portions will be treated in later chapters, but many of the same assumptions lie behind the portions this chapter addresses.

The theological questions of this literature appear to be centered around the issues identified by this chapter and the next two, divine judgment and divine guidance. First, how does God interact with God’s people to help them find a productive way of living in a world expanding in size and complexity? Second, how does God act on behalf of God’s people who are scattered around the world, often living in conditions of deprivation and suffering? Both questions are aspects of the problem of the origin of evil, which preoccupies much of the literature of the period. Much of the Hebrew Bible locates the origin of evil in the inclinations of human beings, but a few other possibilities lie buried in the text. In Gen. 2:9 God plants the tree of the knowledge of “good and evil” in the garden, and God’s own voice confirms in Isa. 45:7, “Forming light and creating darkness, making good and creating evil, I YHWH do all of these.”^[4] Is evil inherent in God’s creation? A second possibility is the mysterious appearance of the “sons of God” in Gen. 6:1–4. Much of the literature of the Hellenistic period would develop this tradition in its attempt to understand the origin of evil.

A Judging God

The narrative created by the assembling of this literature begins in the book called Jubilees, which is often understood, perhaps too simplistically, as a Hellenistic revision of Genesis. It continues in the first major section of the book called 1 Enoch, which also focuses on traditions in the book of Genesis, specifically the characters called “the sons of God” in Gen. 6:1–4. Finally, it will require examination of the book called 1 Esdras, which overlaps significantly with the biblical books of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, so it takes readers almost to the end of the story told by the Tanak.

Jubilees

Biblical scholarship was virtually unaware of Jubilees until the middle of the nineteenth century because it had only been preserved in the Ethiopic tradition of Christianity. Whether this piece of literature had a significant place in Second Temple Judaism was a matter of dispute until a century later when fragments of numerous copies were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. With its place within Judaism thus assured and additional manuscripts available, scholarship on Jubilees has accelerated over the past half century, and it is now an essential component of a study like this one.^[5]

There has not yet been an extensive and careful debate about the composition of Jubilees. In the most comprehensive study of the subject to date, Michael Segal contends that most interpreters “share the assumption that Jubilees is a unified, homogeneous composition.”^[6] This is a somewhat confusing statement, since it is obvious that the books of Genesis and Exodus served as sources for Jubilees and were combined with other materials. Segal seems to mean that most interpreters assume that a single author both revised the biblical material and wrote all of the additions, but he argues, seemingly to the contrary, that the writer of the book of Jubilees took an already revised version of Genesis and Exodus and added the additional elements, which he characterizes under four headings: laws, chronological notes, angelology, and priestly elements.^[7] Segal bases his argument primarily on observations of contradictions and tensions in Jubilees that can best be explained by constraints placed on a final author by a preexisting source. James Kugel argues, on the other hand, that Jubilees is the product of two distinct authors, whom he calls the “original author” and the “Interpolator.” As the name of the latter suggests, his work consisted primarily of insertions. The primary concern of the Interpolator was to assert a purely divine origin for the law. Texts concerned with the “heavenly tablets,” like 1:29 and 6:17, resist the sense in some other texts that parts of the law are the product of human initiative (e.g., 7:20).^[8] This study is not concerned with the compositional history of Jubilees or the delineation of sources as subjects in and of themselves, but the observations in Segal’s and Kugel’s work reveal a great deal about the final form of Jubilees, and these may point toward some of the purposes of the writers.

Jubilees recalls so much of Genesis that it has sometimes been called the “Lesser Genesis.” It is important, however, not to let such a description disguise the way Jubilees does its work of recollection. An account of the creation of the world very similar to Genesis 1 appears in Jub. 2:2–17, followed by an extensive elaboration of Sabbath law in 2:18–33. This observation may immediately generate curiosity about what comprises the first chapter of Jubilees. The book does not begin with creation, but with the meeting of YHWH and Moses on Mount Sinai. The framing divine activity on this occasion is the “teaching” of Moses. In 1:5–17 God summarizes the full story of the people of Israel, including the promise of the land to the ancestors, the disobedience of the people in the land, and the resulting destruction and captivity. As early as 1:13, Jubilees contains a divine declaration of the intent to “hide my face from them.”^[9] The act of divine concealment, which becomes so prominent by the end of the plot in the Tanak, is now placed at the beginning, as an element of divine intent before the plot even begins. Perhaps the cue to make this expression of intent part of the conversation between YHWH and Moses comes from a similar conversation, near the end of the Torah in Deut. 31:14–22, in which God makes a similar comment about the intent to “hide my face” (v. 18), but the Deuteronomy comment seems more of a threat than the foregone conclusion with which Jubilees opens.^[10] Jubilees 1 ends, however, with a divine promise of restoration, an event for which Moses himself prays to YHWH in 1:18–20.^[11] Jubilees balances the divine intent to “hide my face” with a divine promise that “I will not forsake them” in 1:17. The opening of Jubilees insures that the stories of the ancestors and the exodus event reside within a framework that already acknowledges the exile and restoration of Judah.

The final verses in the first chapter of Jubilees (1:26–28) introduce the figure called “the Angel of the Presence,” who writes the story of Israel from creation to the building of an eternal sanctuary. YHWH also commands Moses to write down all of the words. So when Jubilees 2 opens the angel is providing Moses with the story of creation, and the text invites the audience to see both of them writing the story; the communication framework of Jubilees is thus layered and complex. Divine speech to Moses in Jubilees 1 transforms into angelic speech to Moses in Jubilees 2, and this mode of speech continues to the end of the book, which, having recounted the Israelite story all the way to the events of Exodus 12, elaborates the Passover legislation in Jubilees 49 and expounds on Sabbath law once again in Jubilees 50. This is the opposite direction of movement from the pattern typical in the Tanak, where the initial encounters of human characters are with the “angel of YHWH,” but transform into more direct divine interactions.^[12] The divine meeting with Moses in Exodus 3 is the classic example of the pattern. The different pattern of divine representation means Jubilees presents itself as Moses’s copy of the words the Angel of Presence writes, at the command of YHWH. Helge Kvanvig describes the important distinction at this point between “narrative” and “story.” The outer narrative in Jubilees is a conversation on Mount Sinai, with YHWH, Moses, and the angel as its characters, while the inner story the conversation tells is primarily a retelling of Genesis 1– Exodus 12.^[13] This keeps the reader several steps away from the story and keeps the presence of the divine character at a distance from the world and the religious experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• God Moves On
• God of the Defeated and Scattered, Part I
• God of the Defeated and Scattered, Part II
• God of the Defeated and Scattered, Part III
• God of Revolt
• God of Dreams and Visions
• God of the Future
• Where Do We Go from Here?
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Authors
• Index of Ancient Texts