Dates in the Prophets and Who Are the Poor?

In the last two weeks, I noted two things in the Bible. I thought I 'd throw them both out and try to keep it brief (hah!)

First of all, while reading the two minor prophets Haggai and Zechariah, I had long noticed how carefully they are dated to so and so year and so and month and day of King Darius. Suddenly, however, it occurred to me that that is more than just specifying the date. Rather it says something important about political leigitmacy. We tend to forget, but years and lordship are intimately connected. In China, for example, years are dated by reign years proclaimed by the emperor. But what if there were two dynasties dividing "all under heaven" and someone in one dynasty referred to something happening in another dynasty? Well, they might use the other other dynasty's dating system, but insert the word wei "bogus" before it. "In the bogus Tranquil Peace years of the bogus Jin dynasty, this or that happened." In the Roman empire, the use of dating to the emperorship of Jesus was contrasted to the dating by the Roman emperor, as we see explicitly in the martyrdom of Polycarp:

Now the blessed Polycarp was martyred on the second day of the first half of the month of Xanthicus, the seventh day before the kalends of March, a great sabbath, at the eighth hour. And he was arrested by Herod, when Philip of Tralles was High Priest, when Statius Quadratus was Pro-Consul, but Jesus Christ was reigning for ever, to whom be glory, honour, majesty and an eternal throne, from generation to generation, Amen.

After the confessionalization of Western Eurasia, the three religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) had their own dating systems -- which one you used depended on which one you believed in.* Recently, Jewish authors began using the Christian system (which unlike the Jewish one has the benefit of not being tied to an impossibly recent date of the creation of the world), but in an unconscious imitation of Chinese practice, they change AD to CE and BC to BCE. They might have just as well have written "In year 1954 of the wei (bogus) Messiah." This usage has spread widely among those writing on topics outside Christendom, in a futile attempt to create a dating system that is neutral.

So then, what does it mean that Haggai begins:

In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the first day of the month, came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet unto Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, saying . . .

And Zechariah:

In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying . . .

Well it means that these prophets recognize the legitimate authority of king Darius, that this Persian king is not an evil emperor, like the Babylonians or Assyrians, but a legitimate king. It is thus one more part of the strongly pro-Persian slant of the later Old Testament (more on that here).


And who are "the poor" in Jesus's first sermon?

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

We all know the two "standard" interpretations: the poor are low-income groups (social gospel), or the poor are the poor in spirit, i.e. those under conviction of sin (evangelical).

But going back to where this passage came from, i.e. from Isaiah's prophetic preaching to exiled Judah, it struck me that not just the second, but the first as well, is distorted by unintended individualism. To whom was Isaiah preaching? Not to the statistically lower 20% of the Babylonian population, nor to all those in Babylonia suffering pangs of conscience, but to a specific ethno-religious group, the Jews, who were despised for their corporate identity. He was promising that their hour of liberation, in which they would be freed of their bonds and strangerhood, was nigh. If a Jew did well in Babylonia and put a little money by (like Daniel), he was still part of a subject nation. He may be rich personally, but if he identifies with the despised community, then he longs for liberation as well -- indeed all the more as he moves out of the Jewish villages along the canal of Khebar and into the mainstream of Babylonian life, and faces head-on the assumptions and prejudices of the average successful Babylonian.

God's deliverance from this in time came about through the Persian armies of Cyrus. And as I've shown, the Jews were properly grateful to their liberators.

But what about sin? Surely there is a Gospel message here? Well, why were the Jews in exile in Babylon in the first place? Because they were sinners and couldn't help sinning and had no free will in the matter, and if given the same kingdom would do exactly the same as their fathers before them. That is bondage. Corporate bondage as a people, as a church. And that bondage was, as prophets like Isaiah kept telling them, the reason for the first bondage.

So if he is announcing the message of Isaiah, Jesus is saying: you of my people are indeed despised and thought to be stupid and backwards. You are poor, even if you have some money saved ( -- unless of course you decide to no longer identify with this despised religion and instead join the Greeks, in which case this sermon and this promise is not addressed to you). But your moment of liberation is coming. But God has also seen your failure to be the people of God. He knows that you have not and cannot live the kingdom life of the people of God. And He will liberate you from this as well, all through His own working.

This is indeed Gospel, a collective and apocalyptic good news of redemption from sin and its justified punishment, delivered to His people, and coming soon in the end of days.

Why Two Common Biblical Arguments against the Death Penalty Don't Work

John H has recently posted his rethinking of the death penalty, stressing the importance of the passages in Genesis 4 and John 8, where God/Jesus foregoes applying the death penalty to a person definitely guilty of a capital crime.

I made some snarky comment in his comment box, and now I feel I should pay for it by doing him the courtesy of a reasoned argument why I believe his exegetical case doesn't stand up.

Now, I'm not going to try to convince anybody one way or the other about the death penalty, but I do think both of his Biblical arguments are flawed.

For Genesis 4, I would argue for a more dispensational reading. (Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, right?) .

In Genesis 4, Cain is worried about being killed by a passer-by (not by the state, which doesn't exist). God gives him a mark of immunity. In fact God was simply letting Cain get away with murder. In Genesis 3-6 we have a situation in which God has not given anyone the right to shed blood -- blood of animals or blood of men. Yet the world is divided into those righteous in their generation, who obey God (the line of Seth to Enoch to Noah), and the wicked (all the rest).

So we have a world in which violence and righteousness are completely sundered. Those who obey won't kill, those who don't obey -- will. The only form of killing is murder, and only the righteous are subject to it. We see the result -- the Flood.

After the Flood, the broken post-paradisiacal situation is explicitly revoked and reversed by Genesis 9, and men -- even those righteous in their generation, who obey God -- are given the right to kill: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." And they are also given the right to kill animals: "The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." The two go together, blood vengeance and meat eating.

Together these commandments establish a world in which violence and righteousness are no longer completely sundered -- and hence God will preserve the world from any future Flood.

About John 8, I think it is completely irrelevant to any question of the death penalty -- not for it or against it, but just irrelevant. Too little attention is paid to verse 6:

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

The bolded verse should instantly recall for the reader the other episodes of the Pharisees violating their very own laws in order to attack Jesus. For example, in Mark 3:4-6, Jesus heals on the Sabbath, asks the Pharisees "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" and they respond by breaking the Sabbath rest themselves -- to do evil!: Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

So is there anything in the context that suggests this whole thing is a set up, that the Pharisees and scribes are not even obeying the letter of the Mosaic law, that the whole thing is a stupid, odious trap? Yes, there is. They "brought in a woman caught in adultery." Caught in the act. Alright, so where's the man? By definition, if she was caught in the act, a man was caught with her. The law of Moses is clear: If a man commits adultery with another man's wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death (Lev. 20:10). No exceptions for the adulterer allowed. So where is he? And how convenient that someone was caught in adultery just when the Pharisees need a cleft stick to put Jesus in. One would almost think that the adulterer might have been one of them who arranged the convenient "caught in the act" deal with some po' Judean trash he'd been seeing since who knows when to give them one.

If He says "Let her go" He's breaking the Law of Moses, if He says "Stone her" He's party to what the people know is an injustice -- that's the basis for the accusation they want to make against him.

Without the adulterer the whole thing stinks of a set-up. It's a politically motivated prosecution, prosecutorial misconduct, pulling a Nifong, using the justice system as a partisan plaything -- call it what you will. What it is obviously not is a good-faith effort to apply the law of Moses fairly. And just as when Jesus is presented with other "heads I win, tails you lose" accusations, he turns it around on them.

"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her": this is not some generalized statement about "judge not lest ye be judged" -- this is a specific reading of the hearts of the Pharisees who couldn't give a d**** about the Law of Moses and are simply trying to find a way to do in Jesus and don't care how much damage they do to everyone around them in the process.

If I was on a jury, and a Republican prosecutor brought in a case alleging that some Democratic politician was caught in a kickback scheme, and then it come out in the course of the trial that another, Republican, politician was just as deep or deeper in on the crime, and the prosecutor declined to charge him because, well after all, he's on our side -- well, I would vote to acquit no matter how plain the evidence against the Democratic politician was. And my doing so would say nothing about what I feel is the proper legal penalty for taking bribes.