Restorative Readings

The Old Testament, Ethics, and Human Dignity

Claassens, Birch

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270878
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Bible has the unfortunate legacy of being associated with gross human rights violations as evident in the scriptural justification of apartheid in South Africa as well as slavery in the American South. What is more, the Hebrew Bible also contains numerous instances in which the worth or dignity of the female characters are threatened, violated or potentially violated, creating a situation of dehumanization in which women are viewed as less than fully human. And yet the Bible continues to serve as a source of inspiration for readers committed to justice and liberation for all. But in order for the Bible to speak a liberative word, what is necessary is to cultivate liberating Bible reading practices rooted in justice and compassion. Restorative Readings seeks to do exactly this when the authors in their respective readings seek to cultivate Bible reading practices that are committed to restoring the dignity of those whose dignity has been violated by means of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination, by the atrocities of apartheid, by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and by the dehumanizing reality of unemployment and poverty.

part 1

Old Testament, Ethics, Human Dignity:

Framing the Question

1

The Moral Trajectory of the Old Testament Drama:

Creation, Exodus, Exile

Bruce C. Birch, Wesley Theological Seminary

Introduction

The theme for the “Restorative Readings Conference” held in September 2013 at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, which offered the impetus for this book, brings together three categories: Old Testament, Ethics, and Human Dignity. That juxtaposition itself begins to bring focus to our conversation. Ethics connotes critical reflection on the moral dimensions of human experience. Such reflection encompasses both the character and the conduct of individuals or communities. Related to the Old Testament, interest in ethics may focus on discovering, understanding, and critically assessing the morality of ancient Israel. This enterprise would seek to discover the world behind the text. But the ethics of this ancient world can never be fully recovered or systematically described. We catch glimpses of the moral world behind the text, and can gain enriched understanding of particular moments and social contexts, but such glimpses reflect different moments and voices in a rich and diverse story that does not reflect any unified system of morality for ancient Israel that can be recovered.1

The texts of the Old Testament have been passed on to us by processes in the ancient Israelite community that made judgments on witnesses that should be preserved and passed on to future generations. Another way of understanding the relationship of ethics to the Old Testament is to explore the world of the text created by the formation of canon. Although individual books may be studied for their moral witness (and at times diverse voices within single books), the formation of the canon sets up a larger conversation. There is a moral dialogue created by the existence of the canon itself that includes convergences, tensions, juxtapositions, continuities, and contradictions as ongoing generations receive the authoritative collection of witnesses, and engages those witnesses in light of the claim that these texts are Scripture handed on from generation to generation.

The introduction of a third category, i.e., a focus on “human dignity,” makes clear that our concern is not simply with the morality of ancient Israel nor even the canonical witness as an end in itself. Human dignity is introduced as a moral category central to modern ethical challenges and placed as a social mandate in key documents such as the South African Bill of Rights and the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights. We come together because, as Christians, we want to discover in our own Scripture the resources and the challenges that affect our engagement with the moral struggle for human dignity in today’s world.

When we bring a particular arena of moral concern, such as human dignity, to the Old Testament the tendency is to seek guidance for moral conduct. In other words, we ask the question, “What shall we do?” Can we turn to the Old Testament as moral agents seeking guidance for ethical decisions, actions, and strategies that will promote and enhance human dignity in our contexts?

A significant segment of recent work on Old Testament ethics argues that we cannot. In a widely admired work, Eckart Otto2 has concentrated on legal and wisdom texts as the only literature in the Old Testament focused on explicit moral norms.3 He defends his focus on explicit moral texts as a protection from the collapse of Old Testament ethics into Old Testament theology or history of Israelite religion. But he further argues that these explicit moral texts are so closely tied to ancient social contexts in Israel that no “application” of insights from Old Testament ethics on any direct line to ethical concerns today should be attempted.

It is certainly true that the Old Testament, even in explicit legal or wisdom guidance, cannot be used as a simple manual to make moral decisions for us as modern people of faith. But how Israel made such decisions, and the values and principles undergirding such decisions, can be meaningful for our reflection on the Old Testament as a resource for our own moral formation.

I want to argue, however, that our definition of ethics is often too narrow to allow us to fully claim the resources of the Old Testament for the moral life of God’s people today. Christian ethics is not simply concerned with moral conduct but also with moral character. Here the operative question is “Who shall we be?” The focus is not on moral decisions but on moral decision makers, individuals, and communities. I propose that we are shaped as God’s people by the entire canon of Scripture handed on to us. We are shaped by the biblical story and its many different types of literature. We are shaped by witnesses in the text to Israel’s encounter and relationship with God and to stories of success and failure in living faithfully within that relationship.4

As important as the legal and wisdom traditions are to Old Testament ethics, the explicit moral guidance they give does not exhaust the moral resources of the Hebrew canon. Far larger portions of the Old Testament are taken up by narrative and prophetic traditions, and these unfold a dramatic biblical drama where the moral relationship of God and Israel are shaped in relationship that begins with creation itself. Narrative accounts and prophetic proclamation reveals dimensions of a moral vision that continues to shape the community of faith from Israel through many generations to our own life as the people of God today.

Given that the entire Old Testament canon is seen as a shaping moral influence on those who claim its story as their own, one could hardly attend to its entirety in a single essay. For the purpose of this essay I will sample this story and its power to shape our moral life at three crucial points: creation, exodus, and exile. We cannot engage in close exegetical treatment, but will instead point to some of the elements in these witnesses that can shape us as moral agents concerned for human dignity.

Creation

It is significant that the Hebrew canon opens with witnesses to God as creator of all things. The God we encounter in the opening chapters of Genesis is not Israel’s God alone. The creator God in these chapters is universal in scope. Before the Old Testament begins to tell the story of God’s relationship to a particular people in promise and covenant it is important to encounter God as creator in relationship to all persons and all things. This universality of God’s relationship to all creation provides a framework for all of Israel’s story as a particular people of God. To begin the biblical story with God as creator of all is a reminder that God cannot be claimed as identified with any segment of humanity over another.

At the end of each day in Genesis 1 God declares the goodness of creation, and in v. 31 God declares the entire creation to be “very good.” As I have argued elsewhere,

It was not everywhere evident in the ancient Near East that the created world was good. In other ancient religious traditions the world was filled with hostile and potentially dangerous powers. . . . The Hebrew creation testimony . . . proclaims that God has created the world as benevolent. The Hebrew word טוֹב is capable of indicating both moral and aesthetic qualities. On the one hand, it indicates the creation as beautiful, pleasing. It is something God takes delight in, and therefore is to be regarded with delight by us—not regarded with suspicion or fear. On the other hand, there is a moral dimension. As good, the creation is declared to be in harmony with the divine intention. . . . The affirmation of creation as good stands over against all efforts to consider the material world or our own full humanity as inherently evil, or as spiritually debilitating.5

The Yahwist creation narrative of Gen 2:4b–25 makes clear that in the Hebrew concept all of creation is related. אָדָם is not self-sufficient. A garden is provided for food and beauty (2:9). God declares that “It is not good that the אָדָם should be alone” (v. 18). God first creates animals and then, out of the human’s own flesh, a companion (עֵזֶר). The introduction of man and woman implies social existence in all of its possibil...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Old Testament, Ethics, Human Dignity: Framing the Question
• Chapter 1: The Moral Trajectory of the Old Testament Drama: Creation, Exodus, Exile
• Part Two: Violence
• Chapter 2: Violence, Mourning, Politics: Rizpah’s Lament in Conversation with Judith Butler
• Chapter 3: Outrageous Terror and Trying Texts: Restoring Human Dignity in Judges 19–21
• Part Three: Injustice
• Chapter 4: “It’s the Price I Guess for the Lies I’ve Told that the Truth it No Longer Thrills Me . . .”: Reading Queer Lies to Reveal Straight Truth in Genesis 38
• Chapter 5: Contending for Dignity in the Bible and the Post-Apartheid South African Public Realm
• Part Four: Xenophobia
• Chapter 6: The Strangers in the Second Half of Leviticus
• Chapter 7: De-Ideologizing Ezra-Nehemiah: Challenging Discriminatory Ideologies
• Part Five: Responses
• Chapter 8: Dignity for All: Humanity in the Context of Creation
• Chapter 9: Human Rights, Human Dignity, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic
• Chapter 10: In Conversation: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Human Dignity