Old Testament Ethics: A Guided Tour

John Goldingay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830873623
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What is ethics? Ethics is not merely about tricky situations or hot topics. Instead, ethics asks questions about what sort of people we are, how we think, what sort of things we do and don't do, and how we ought to live our everyday lives. How might we learn ethics from the Old Testament? Instead of searching for support for our positions or pointing out problems with certain passages, trusted guide John Goldingay urges us to let the Old Testament itself set the agenda. In this volume, readers will encounter what the Old Testament teaches about relationships, work, Sabbath, character, and more. Featuring Goldingay's own translation and discussion questions for group use, Old Testament Ethics: A Guided Tour is a resource for ethics like no other. Topically organized with short, stand-alone chapters, this book is one to keep close at hand.

PART ONE

QUALITIES

We have noted that ethics asks about what sort of people we are, and the Old Testament’s rules and sayings and stories are often concerned to give concrete expression to what sort of people we are and what sort of people we might long to be. In part one of this book we will look at some of the personal qualities the Old Testament wants to inculcate: godlikeness (especially in the combination of love and toughness), compassion, honor, anger (expressing the good kind and renouncing the bad kind), trust in God (a key to ethical behavior, the Old Testament implies), truthfulness, forthrightness, and contentment.

1

Godlikeness

“Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2). So what is God like? A little earlier in the story of Israel at Sinai, he makes a proclamation about his own nature:

Yahweh, God compassionate and gracious, long-tempered, big in commitment and truthfulness, preserving commitment toward the thousands, carrying waywardness, rebellion, and wrongdoing; he certainly doesn’t treat people as free of guilt, attending to parents’ waywardness in connection with children and with grandchildren, with thirds and with fourths. (Ex 34:6-7)

While this proclamation is designed to shape our thinking about the God we serve, the terms God uses are also ones that recur explicitly or implicitly when the Old Testament discusses the qualities that ideally describe human beings. So this proclamation also makes us think further about the God we are to resemble. He is

• Compassionate. The word is the plural of the Hebrew word for a woman’s womb. It’s a feeling you have that’s like the feelings of a mother (see chap. 2 on compassion).
• Gracious. It’s the attitude you show to someone when you treat them with favor even if they have done nothing to deserve it.
• Long-tempered. It’s the attitude you take when you have good reason to get angry and to act accordingly, but you don’t.
• Big in commitment. It’s the generous loyalty you show to someone when you are under no obligation to them, or that you keep showing when they have let you down.
• Big in truthfulness. It’s the reliability and steadfastness you show when you are consistently faithful to people.
• Preserving commitment toward the thousands. It’s the generous loyalty that you keep manifesting year in year out, decade in decade out.
• Carrying waywardness, rebellion, and wrongdoing. It’s the forgiveness you offer when you live with the consequences of people’s actions rather than making them carry the consequences.
• Not treating people as free of guilt. It’s the firmness you manifest when you refuse to let mercy triumph over justice in a way that treats right and wrong as things that don’t matter.
• Attending to waywardness in connection with children and grandchildren, thirds and fourths. It’s the toughness you show even though it’s costly through the fact that we live in one web of life.

One feature of God’s self-description that may seem strange is that the word love doesn’t come in it (though it does in some translations of Exodus, as a rendering of the word hesed, which I translate as “commitment”: see chap. 34). For that matter, the ordinary word for “love” comes only twice in the entire first half of Genesis (for instance). Both times when it does come, Isaac is involved. The nice one is when Isaac’s father, Abraham, sends his chief of staff to find Isaac a wife, and he brings back Rebekah. Isaac loves her, and incidentally recovers from his loss of his mother two or three years previously (Gen 24:67).

But earlier, God has referred to the fact that Isaac’s father, Abraham, loves Isaac (Gen 22:2), yet that affirmation is preliminary to God’s telling Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice. Subsequent references to love in Genesis are also quirky. Isaac loves one of the twin sons whom Rebekah bears, and Rebekah loves the other (Gen 25:28), which causes problems. Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah (Gen 29:18-32), which also causes problems (Deut 21:10-17 seeks to deal with some of them). Shechem loves Dinah and rapes or seduces her, which is not the last problem in that story (Gen 34). Jacob loves Joseph more than his other sons, which issues in complications of one kind or another (Gen 37). Whereas love can seem so simple and straightforward, in reality it isn’t.

Love is (among other things) an emotion, and like any emotion it can be fruitful, but it can also be problematic. Maybe it’s no wonder that Genesis doesn’t explicitly talk about it much, even though one could properly say that creation was an act of love and that God’s promises to Abraham were an act of love. And maybe its’s no wonder that Exodus 34:6-7 doesn’t use the word love even though love is what it’s talking about.

When we do think of creation or of God’s summons of Abraham as acts of love, we are presupposing that love isn’t just an emotion. Indeed, it may not be an emotion at all. Only in Deuteronomy 4:37 does it become explicit that God loved Israel and its ancestors, and there the expression of love was that God chose Israel and got Israel out of Egypt. Love was an action. It fits that this declaration about love soon leads into a famous command about love: “Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God Yahweh one. You’re to love Yahweh your God with your entire mind, with your entire being, with your entire might” (Deut 6:4-5).

Why does the word love suddenly appear in Deuteronomy, and what does it mean? In the background of this innovation is the fact that love was a political word in the Middle East. A superpower expected its subordinate powers to “love” it. The superpower didn’t care much whether it was loved in the emotional sense. It did care whether its underling peoples were loyal to it. Deuteronomy picks up that way of speaking about love to urge Israel to give Yahweh its exclusive loyalty. Israel is to give nothing away to other gods. It’s to place no reliance on them. It’s never to ask them for anything. Israel’s entire mind, being, might is to belong to Yahweh. So in this passage, one could translate the Hebrew word for “love” as “be loyal to.”

That other great commandment, as Jesus calls it (Mt 22:35-40), requires love for one’s neighbor (Lev 19:18; see chap. 19). While exclusiveness is not the point here, love as action and as loyalty is again the point.

If we look back over the Old Testament story from that point where God says “Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2), what do we discover God is like, and therefore what we should perhaps be like?

• At the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1).

So be creative.

• There is to be light! (Gen 1:3).

So brin...