The God Who Acts in History

The Significance of Sinai

Craig G. Bartholomew

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467458016
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Did the decisive event in the history of Israel even happen?

The Bible presents a living God who speaks and acts, and whose speaking and acting is fundamental to his revelation of himself. God's action in history may seem obvious to many Christians, but modern philosophy has problematized the idea. Today, many theologians often use the Bible to speak of God while, at best, remaining agnostic about whether he has in fact acted in history.

Historical revelation is central to both Jewish and Christian theology. Two major events in the Bible showcase divine agency: the revelation at Sinai in Exodus and the incarnation of Jesus in the gospels. Surprisingly, there is a lack of serious theological reflection on Sinai by both Jewish and Christian scholars, and those who do engage the subject often oscillate about the historicity of what occurred there.

Craig Bartholomew explores how the early church understood divine action, looks at the philosophers who derided the idea, and finally shows that the reasons for doubting the historicity of Sinai are not persuasive. The God Who Acts in History provides compelling reasons for affirming that God has acted and continues to act in history.

CHAPTER 1

The Puzzle

The decisive event in the spiritual history of our people was the act that occurred at Sinai. . . . It was an event that happened at a particular time and also one that happened for all time.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel¹

It seems safe to say that the structure of Exodus 19–24 presents more unanswerable questions than any other part of the Old Testament. . . . Sinai may have been from the beginning, then, less a part of history and more a part of worship than the other traditional materials used in the Pentateuch.

—Donald E. Gowen²

In the Hebrew Bible God is known through his engagement with his people in history.³ We only know about his nature and how he relates to the world through such engagement. As Heschel notes, “The God of the philosopher is a concept derived from abstract ideas; the God of the prophets⁴ is derived from acts and events. The root of Jewish faith is, therefore, not a comprehension of abstract principles but an inner attachment to those events; to believe is to remember, not merely to accept the truth of a set of dogmas.”⁵ According to Miskotte, “It is precisely the act-character of God’s being that distinguishes himself in the world from the world. . . . From God’s deeds there grows the knowledge of his ‘virtues’ and in the knowledge of his virtues his nature.”⁶

It would appear, then, that God acting in history is fundamental to Jewish and Christian faith, and that one would expect such an emphasis to be expounded and defended among their representatives. Somewhat surprisingly, this is often not the case.

The Puzzle in Jewish Scholarship

Jewish scholarship has attracted my attention because of its overt public dimensions, an emphasis not nearly so common in Christian scholarship as it ought to be. Its public dimension involves taking all aspects of life seriously as worthy of attention and effort, an emphasis related back to Sinai and the Torah of the HB/OT. It is puzzling, however, that this Jewish emphasis on human action, on our action in history and in the world, often goes hand in hand with a pronounced skepticism about God’s action in his world.

An example of this quandary is found in Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution.⁷ He acknowledges that through the centuries religious men and women have found both a record of God’s actions in the world and a guide for themselves in the narrative of the exodus. However, he is adamant: “my subject is not what God has done but what men and women have done, first with the biblical text itself and then in the world, with the text in their hands” (x). Walzer wants to retell the story of the exodus in political history “even though it is also, in the text, an act of God” (7). Walzer resists making any claims about the authorial intention of the text or to any view of the history of the exodus and Sinai. “What really happened? We don’t know. We have only this story, written down centuries after the events it describes. But the story is more important than the event” (7).⁸

Walzer reads the exodus as a paradigm of revolutionary politics. He notes that “the Exodus is an account of deliverance or liberation expressed in religious terms, but it is also a secular, that is a this-worldly and historical account. Most important, it is a realistic account” (9). Exodus is the story of a people, “hence not a story simply but a history” (12). For Walzer, the exodus shapes the Jewish conception(s) of time and breaks with the cosmological kind of storytelling.⁹ “Exodus is a literal movement, an advance through space and time, the original form (or formula for) progressive history” (15).

Walzer’s reading of the exodus is what we today would call a literary—and perhaps theological, certainly political—reading, but one that brackets out the question of whether or not God acted in the exodus and at Sinai. In the text, according to Walzer, the exodus is indeed an act of God, but the story is more important than the event. At the same time the exodus is a this-worldly and history-like account that gave permanent shape to the Jewish view of time and history. Walzer’s reading of the exodus is thus riddled with major tensions between God who acts and the extraordinary influence and paradigmatic significance of the exodus while leaving open the possibility that it is entirely imaginary.

Jewish scholar Jon Levenson is rightly well known for his creative work on the Hebrew Bible. In his rich and fecund Sinai and Zion he observes that “the experience of Sinai, whatever its historical basis, was perceived as so overwhelming, so charged with meaning, that Israel could not imagine that any truth or commandment from God could have been absent from Sinai.”¹⁰ As with Walzer, we find an emphasis on the epochal nature of exodus-Sinai, which, “whatever its historical basis,” betrays the same quandary. Indeed, Levenson uses much stronger language: “What really happened on Mount Sinai? The honest historian must answer that we can say almost nothing in reply to this question.”¹¹

Michael Fishbane is another major Jewish scholar from whose work many have benefited. In 2008 he published Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology.¹² Fishbane is adamant that Jewish theology finds its inception at Sinai. Sinai is the formative event for Israel. It is the time when the Israelites are called upon to embrace God’s rule personally and over history and the entire world. According to Fishbane, “For Jewish theology, there is no passage to spiritual responsibility that does not in some way cross the wilderness of Sinai and stand before this mountain of instruction” (47). At Sinai the Israelites received from God the basic theological principles that were to govern their life and thought, including the Decalogue, “which forms the matrix of covenant values” (46). The Sinai covenant contains apodictic and casuistic laws signaling the comprehensive nature of God’s reign over Israel. “Sinai set the standard. It is a metaphor for cultural nomos. It is an axial moment of consciousness” (47). In the HB and Jewish tradition ongoing development connects laws and other materials to the foundational event of Sinai. So powerful is Sinai that it becomes for Jews an ever-contemporary reality. “Focused on God’s teachings, and their meaning, the adept was ever bound to the foundational moment of Sinai and its theological core” (49). For Fishbane, “One might even say that there is no authentic Jewish theology outside this covenant core, however diversely it might be conceived or elaborated. For it is the Sinai covenant that has shaped Jewish life and thought over the ages” (49).

For Fishbane, Sinai is not a one-off event but one for all times; it “stands at the mythic core of religious memory” (49; emphasis added). Having placed such strong emphasis on the Sinai event, it is somewhat surprising to encounter this expression: “the mythic core of religious memory.” That Fishbane here moves away from any kind of strong affirmation of the historicity of Sinai is confirmed when he moves on to articulate the center or core of the Sinai event, stating that “this last query is less a historical question than a hermeneutical one” (49). It is fine and good to assert that “Jewish theology thus begins at Sinai—but it is hermeneutically so much more” (62). We might further enquire as to whether it indeed began at Sinai, and if this matters.

Yair Zakovitch is rightly well known for his creative, close readings of the HB as a Jewish scholar. His book on the concept of the exodus in the HB is extremely useful and he demonstrates the centrality of the exodus throughout the HB. Indeed, he asserts that “the Exodus, the central event in the historiography of the Bible and in the collective memory of the biblical period, represents an historical watershed. It shapes the recounting of events both before and after it: at the dawn of history and the time of the patriarchs, as well as events and periods long after the Exodus itself.”¹³

Zakovitch begins his book on the concept of the exodus in the Bible with a quote from the Passover Haggadah: “Therefore, even if we were all sages, all men of understanding, and all experts in the Torah, it would yet be our duty to tell of the departure from Egypt, and the more a man tells about the departure from Egypt, the more praiseworthy he is.”¹⁴ Zakovitch asserts that no other event is given as much attention as the exodus in the Hebrew Bible. In his “Preface” he expresses his gratitude for being able, with this book, to observe Exod 13:8: “And you shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt.’ ”¹⁵

Once again, we are led to expect an affirmation of the historicity of exodus-Sinai. Astonishingly, then, some two pages later, Zakovitch says that “historical issues find no place in such a study as this one. We need not consider whether the Exodus actually took place, who left Egypt, or in what numbers. It is a different history altogether that engages us: the history of ideas.”¹⁶

The impetus of Walzer’s, Levenson’s, Fishbane’s, and Zakovitch’s work appears to push strongly in the direction of the exodus-Sinai event as historical revelation of the living God. However, they resist this direction and appear content or compelled to live with a view of Sinai as remarkably generative and yet something about which we can say nothing or little historically. This constitutes a genuine puzzle: Why do they feel that they cannot affirm the historicity of an event that they regard as so epochal for Israel and the entire world?

The Puzzle in Christian Scholarship

There is a sense in which we would expect Sinai, and YHWH as “the One of Sinai” (Judg 5:5), to be of more consequence for Jews than Christians. However, historical revelation is central to Christian theology with the Jesus event regarded as the fulfillment of the Old Testament and thus Christian understanding of Sinai remains of major importance. Surprisingly there is a lack of serious theological engagement with Sinai by Christians, and in what engagement there is, we find a similar reticence about its historicity among Christian scholars.

In his commentary on Exodus, Durham has a section on the exodus in history and the exodus as history.¹⁷ He helpfully alerts the reader to scholarship that has established what he refers to as the contextual plausibility of the story of the exodus¹⁸ but asserts that we lack proof of any one part of the narrative. Durham never elaborates on what he understands by “proof” but says that we should be content to speak about the narrative of Exodus in history rather than speaking of it as history. Either way, for Durham, historicity is the province of historians and other disciplinary specialists and not that of the commentator. Certainly, in his view, the question of historicity should not be a primary concern of the commentator, who has so many other tasks to attend to. Durham assumes a late date for the exodus in the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt, “but the chronology of the events described in Exodus is of little importance to the theological message of the book in its present from, a form vastly removed from the connection of any of these events with an historical time-frame.”¹⁹ As with the Jewish scholars discussed above, here again we find exegesis and theology separated from historicity.

The distinguished twentieth-century German theologian Emil Brunner is clear that historical revelation is utterly central to the Bible. He argues that everything the Bible teaches us is based on revelation in history.²⁰ Indeed, Brunner argues that we find in Scripture a unique conception of world history that has no parallel in the ANE or among the Greeks. He is adamant that outside of the particular history we find in Scripture “we do not know the living God” (198).

The HB/OT is clearly central to such historical revelation, and yet Brunner asserts that “the picture of ‘revelation-history’ which is given to us in the Old Testament can no longer be ours. Historical research has shown it to be a later Priestly theological construction, which probably contains historical elements, but at the same time conceals as much as it reveals of the real course of events” (199). However, in subsequent pages Brunner goes on to assert that unique to the HB/OT is the view that God acts in history, in events like the exodus, the deliverance at the Red Sea, and the formation of a covenant people at Sinai. Indeed “there is something in the Old Testament which does not exist outside it . . . the revelation of the Living God of History, of the Holy and Merciful God, of the God who marches towards a goal with his people” (201). The book of Scripture is of less importance to Brunner than the fact that God has intervened in history.

Of Israel, he notes that it “is the only nation in wo...