The Family as Sub-Contractor for the State

One point I keep on trying to pound home is that political debate in the USA is often fundamentally distorted by an ignorance of what the our history actually was. I would like to extend this argument to family policy.

Today we have two points of view on the family and the state. Both assume that the family and the state as autonomous organizations are opposed: a strong, purposeful state means a weak, passive family and vice versa. Liberals think the state should exercise stronger, more purposeful collective powers over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have less strong, purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Conservatives (especially paleo-conservatives and religious libertarians) think the state should exercise weaker, less purposeful collective power over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have stronger, more purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Strong state, weak family or strong family, weak state. Either/or.

Going along with this assumption of antagonism is a false view of history. Liberal historians look for evidence that the state has traditionally had more powers to regulate families than we think, thinking that this would prove that the autonomous family has weak historical roots. Likewise, conservative historians like to emphasize how even state powers over the family we now take for granted didn’t used to exist in the part, thinking that this would emphasize how families resisting interference from the state is an old, old tradition.

For Eurasian societies as widely distributed as Puritan New England, Württemberg peasants from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and Mongolian and Tibetan nomadic societies*, however, either way of understanding state-family relations was alien. Rather than real family-state praxis, the conventional opposition of family and state reflects only crude and unreflective 19th century post-French Revolution social theories, the phlogistons of social theory. And even today, I think this old praxis survives, despite having no articulation, since the liberal and conservative intellectuals are still divided into "let's have more/less phlogiston!" parties.

In this different praxis the traditional family is itself a sub-contractor of the state (or if you prefer, the community as a whole). As a sub-contracting organization of the state-community, the family is represented by its head. It has a responsibility for producing a number of things for the state: as a rule taxes, in some states trained and equipped soldiers, for some families responsible officials, and in every case, children who will be able to play the contractor role in the next generation. In the Greek city states, performance of such public functions by private families were called "liturgies." Depending on the type of society, this might also involve making sure the children are equipped by literacy to respond to community admonitions (texts, government decrees, scriptures, etc.) It will in any case require that children be trained in the appropriate moral code to be hard-working, responsible contractors themselves. Since the family as a contracting unit for the state/community has a duty to produce both specific persons (soldiers, officials, corvee laborers, as the case may be), and future contractors, unwillingness to procreate is a selfish betrayal of the community/state.

In order to make sure that the sub-contractor can do its job, the state also parcels out to the family a significant chunk of its own authority, entrusting certain police and juridical functions to the heads of the households over the members (and to elders over juniors generally). The head of the family that acts to some degree as an agent of the state’s authority, even as he (or sometimes she, as a widow) resides on his ancestral patrimony. This patrimony is itself a fund for the performance of contracted obligations to the state.

The state/community’s interest in the family is therefore in keeping the sub-contractors functioning. One essential precondition of this is that the family has to have its own resources. The family has to have a sufficient fund of resources, tangible and intangible, to work with to produce the outputs it needs. A family with no land and no skills cannot fulfill its tax obligations. For that reason bad management, such as drinking one’s patrimony away, breaking it up with an irresponsible divorce, and so on, should not be tolerated. And if a family falls into that situation, it needs to have property restored and disciplined so this doesn’t happen again. Moreover, since only a family can produce the necessary outputs demanded by the community, individuals who are without family need to be put into a family.

Social policy in this "family as sub-contractor for the state" assumes a peculiar cast which the liberal-conservative point of view today is almost guaranteed to misunderstand. In it, what looks like charity is simultaneously fiscality: the state gives aid not just to help the individuals involved, but also to get the family receiving the aid back on its feet as a tax-paying/soldier-supplying/official-providing contracting unit. Equality is thus not just, or even primarily, a goal of such assistance, but rather a means to an end: the maximum possible effective provision of necessary persons/goods for the state and community. This is so even when the primary way of supplying such aid is not directly state to family, but lateral: neighbor to neighbor, or even structured by kinship (redemption right of land that might be sold to strangers). For example in the Secret History of the Mongols, we read that the emperor Ögedei ordered one sheep out of a hundred taken from each person and given to the poor in his own unit. This was in part to "let them put their feet on the soil and their hands on the land" but was just as much connected with the periodic renumbering of militiamen in the Mongol army to make sure that each unit had enough prosperous families to supply its share of taxes and soldiers. Among Tibetan pastoralists, Rinzin Thargyal describes how one ambitious lord encouraged the formation of functioning households. When a girl got "knocked up," he would pressure the man responsible into marrying her, loan the new family animals to herd, and hold off on demanding labor service from them until they were a going concern. He did the same with poor immigrants arriving in his estate: find them a wife or husband as needed, loan them animals, and get them going. As a result his estate was unusually prosperous, and his population -- and influence -- grew rapidly. In these cases, charity merges with the aim to preserve family units as sub-contractors of the state. Note also that almost all such societies also had distinctions of families: some produced taxes, others produced soldiers, others produced officials, and these status distinctions are maintained as part of the same system imperatives that forces one family of tax payers to give aid to another family of tax payers facing the danger of break-up and dispersal. In the Tibetan case, for example, the aristocratic household so actively building up its followings' families itself had to supply officials to the Dege principality.

A very common way to maintain households facing crisis is through redemption laws, specifying that households sell their property it may be redeemed from the buyer by a relative or neighbor of the seller. Redemption within the collateral family line, as found in the Mosaic laws in the Bible, is quite common comparatively, and can be found in eighteenth century Germany, as well as Qing dynasty China. Usually interpreted solely as part of compassion for the “poor” (although structurally at least the real poor in ancient Israelite society were not the full-blooded Israelites who had fields subject to such redemption, but the strangers and aliens who did not), this collateral redemption was actually an important part of fiscality (state tax policy) as were the limitations on mobility (in a weak state apparatus, staying in one place so the state can find you is important). Theologically as Christopher H. Wright in God's People in God's Land has pointed out, this works as an analogy: just as earthly kings demand a regimes of sub-contractor families, so the divine King demands a regime of sub-contractor families. Traditional sociological interpretation of this practice/ideal in the context Israelite history has usually read this as a survival of primitive tribalism, resisting the imposition of royal tyranny. In this comparative context, however, I think a better argument could be made that the importance of redemption indicates not "tribalism" but a strong state/community interest in preserving a network of effective sub-contracting and tax-paying militia families.**

Inversely, the elimination of the redemption regime (which took place in Würtemburg for example in the early nineteenth century or in China under the Republic) is not the state going from “respecting intermediate institutions” to “rejecting intermediate institutions” as the libertarian reading of state-family relations would have it, but rather sub-contracting with different units and different calculations. Similarly the family receiving moral guidance and tutelage from the state is not necessarily toxic to family authority—if the state is actually interested in buttressing that authority.

What are some of the implications of this history?

First of all, it helps understand what people are talking about. It is, I think, exactly this sense which is still meant when people, trying to explain why they find the challenge to the traditional constituted family so wrong-headed, say that the family is "the building block" or "foundation" of the country. Not having got the paleo-conservative/social democratic memo that the family and state are inverses -- one can't be a strong institution without the other being weak -- they insist on appealing to real social praxis, rather than the delusions of the political philosophies.

Second of all it points out again how very un-libertarian our Eurasian traditions are. And as Jim has written here, in common law it was taken for granted until the twentieth century that the US state governments had police powers, that is, the right to interfere more or less at will in the life of its members to defend good morals, tax paying capacity, optimal family structure, and so on. In this view, which was the Puritan New England view as David Hackett Fischer emphasized, the state as a sovereign community was, absent any self-limitation, virtually universal in its competence. However, in practice, specific liberties are carved out from this sovereign power and assigned to subcontracting units, such as the family, guild, township, or trading corporation, or what have you. Liberties are thus in the plural, and each one has to be defended either by a specific historical charter, or at least by specific evidence that it existed in the past. Note that it is for this reason that Puritans could join the US constitution. Strong believers in this police power and families as contractors of the state, they could never have joined a constitution that either eliminated these police powers entirely, or assigned them to a non-Congregational government. Only a government that had special liberties above the state (in both senses) could be accepted as the national government.

Thirdly it highlights how many traditional institutions have been misunderstood by a state vs. society framework. This misunderstanding takes the specific form of a what I call “the great inversion” in which institutions first nurtured by the pre-modern state came under attack in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whether by liberals as blocks to the free circulation of resources in the market or by socialists as buttresses of inequality, but then were rewritten by their defenders. This rewriting of history turned them into pre-state, primitive society institutions that had always served as bulwarks of "the people" against the state. The classic case of this is the obshchina or Russian commune, which began as a tax-guarantee institution: the village owed taxes in common and each family was assigned labor to make sure that each family thus contributed to the tax payments. In the 1840s, an idealistic German, looking for remnants of early communes in Europe's countryside reinterpreted this state-generated institution as such a survival of pre-class society. This interpretation was accepted, written in Russian law in 1861, and became the foundation of the populist idea of the Russian peasants being instinctively socialist and communal.***

In American, as well, this happened very early on with gun rights as shown by Joyce Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms started not as an individual right against the state, but a collective sub-contractual obligation of citizens to the state. The English state required all men to participate in its function of maintaining order, training in long bows so the king of England could have enough soldiers in wartime. With the advent of firearms, this obligation to train as a potential soldier of the king was transferred to from long bows to firearms. In the seventeenth century, this hazardous duty was reinterpreted as a valuable right, and in this form was transported to the American colonies. (Although with the New England Puritans, gun ownership was also requirement of community self-defense, not an aspect of individual defiance of the community. Here, as in so many other aspects the New England Puritans typify the phenomenon of "peripheral preservation" where archaic customs and ideas are preserved in remote, provincial areas.)

Finally, the most important implication is for those adhering to the traditional family as valorized by the laws of the Eurasian religions whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian. Despite their differences, I would argue that virtually every feature of the laws -- indeed the very possibility of having a law of family formation and functioning -- was shaped by the family's role as a sub-contractor of the state’s authority. Adherents of these Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian ethics have to recognize that strong family they love became a social reality only in concurrence with state power and through receiving as a sub-contractor a share in the power of the state. The implication is then that the state, in a fairly strong sense, is a precondition for the traditional religious family life. For those adhering to such traditional religious family ethics, the libertarian argument that the state is thus at best a necessary evil runs directly against the historical facts, since those family ethics themselves were first realized in human society as a result of the existence of the state. The predicating of the family's rights on opposition to the state, as in religious libertarianism or paleo-conservatism, is likely to be as ineffectual politically as it is erroneous historically.

*Some sources on this:
New England Puritans: Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
Württemberg peasants: David Sabean, Production, Property and Family in Neckerhausen, 1700-1870.
Tibetan pastoralists: Rinzin Thargyal, Nomads of Eastern Tibet.

** Maybe more an ideal than a reality. That redemption laws might exist without having much of an anti-market effect is indicated at least by the Neckerhausen evidence as read by Sabean.

***See T.K. Dennison and A.W. Carus, "The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence," The Historical Review 46.3 (2003), pp. 561-82.

Amos and the Consumer Credit Industry

After finishing I-II Kings, I reread Amos, Hosea, and Micah, the great prophets of the pre-exilic Northern Kingdom. They are also the great prophets of justice, particularly Amos. But reading them today, we implicitly translate. What is it they are attacking? Economic development, urbanization, centralization of rule: these are some answers offered by historians for the abstract description of their processes. See this previous post on Jezebel here. A problem with this reading is that if that's the point, they become pretty unusable to us today. Can de-industrialization and return to agrarian life really be an agenda for the church today?

Others say that the enemy described is capitalism as a system of seeking profit, and that today's answer is social democracy: a system of centralization and urbanization that aims to supply as many services in life as possible by tax-funded public programs. The problem with this being the a response to the prophetic denunciation is that Amos, Hosea, and Micah are explicitly harking back to the multi-generational family ideal of the Law, the idea of each family being settled on a particular plot of land, and so being tied to the family before the state. All of this is flatly contrary to any conceivable notion of social democracy (More here and here.)

I would like to suggest abuse of consumer credit (particularly in the housing industry) as the best usable answer today (and by the four laws of intertestamental Bible interpretation, the Bible is always relevant). Here's a shocking article by Elizabeth Warren on the new wild west of consumer credit from Harvard Magazine.

Here's how it starts:

It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the street—and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact. Similarly, it’s impossible for the seller to change the price on a toaster once you have purchased it. But long after the credit-card slip has been signed, your credit-card company can triple the price of the credit you used to finance your purchase, even if you meet all the credit terms.

And here are some of the crazier grafs:

For example, after 47 lines of text explaining how interest rates will be calculated, one prominent credit-card company concludes, “We reserve the right to change the terms at any time for any reason.” Evidently, all that convoluted language was there only to obscure the bottom line: The company will charge whatever it wants. In effect, lenders won’t be bound by any term or price that becomes inconvenient for them, but they will expect their customers to be bound by whatever terms the lenders want to enforce—and to have the courts back them up.

Talk about getting your neighbor’s goods in a way that only looks right! The author explains how long-standing regulations have been virtually voided by imposing the much looser federal regime on the closer state regulations propounded when banking was limited by states. She proposes a Financial Products Safety Commission (modeled on the Consumer Product Safety Commisssion created by President Nixon:

For example, an FPSC might review the following terms that appear in some—but not all—credit-card agreements: universal default clauses; unlimited and unexplained fees; interest-rate increases that exceed 10 percentage points; and an issuer’s claim that it can change the terms after money has been borrowed. It would also promote such market-enhancing practices as a simple, easy-to-read paragraph that explains all interest charges; clear explanations of when fees will be imposed; a requirement that the terms of a credit card remain the same until the card expires; no marketing targeted at college students or minors; and a statement showing how long it will take to pay off the balance, as well as how much interest will be paid if the customer makes the minimum monthly payments on the outstanding loan balance.

Framing the issue this way opens a different perspective on our economic system. Compared to ancient Israel, or any agrarian economy, capital is amazingly cheap today and interest rates over-all shockingly low -- and that's a good thing (sorry, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Barry). Here's a story of credit abuses from the North China under the Mongols in the 1240:

All at the same time, endless schemes were used to push people into accumulating debts. In addition, debts which the clerks in office had borrowed from Turkestanis lending silver each year would double. The next year with the interest added in again it would double again. This was called “sheep’s-lamb-profit.” The debts simply never ended and they often destroyed families and scattered clans, to the point where wives and children had to be pawned, yet in the end could not be redeemed. Yelü Chucai [a Kitan Confucian serving the Mongols] asked His Majesty and all the debts were repaid in silver with official funds, totaling 76,000 ding. He memorialized as well that it be fixed from now on that no matter how many months or years have passed that when the interest has come to equal the principal, then the loan will no longer bear interest. This then became a set rule (from Song Zhen's biography of Yelü Chucai).

In other words, it was a big reform to limit annual interest to -- 100%!! That's rather worse than even credit card debt! And even this reform didn't really work: scarcely twenty years later we read:

As wealthy people loaned money to the civilians, it would happen that the interest would equal the principal, and would then be added into the principal and a new contract drawn up with the interest added. When the term expired, the debts had to be repaid; it was called “sheep’s lamb interest.” The cruelty of their dunning debtors involved, for example, threatening them with fire in the summer or putting them in icehouses in the winter, and the people could not deal with their malice. Lian Xixian [a part Uyghur, part-Kitan Confucian and big fan of Mencius] corrected their suffering. Even though the term had long expired, it was not allowed exceed in settlements the repayment of the original principal and interest. If some one got more, then he had all the contracts seized and burned and then would treat them according to the regulations (from Lian Xixian's biography written by Gao of Henei).

So even enforcing a limit of interest to 100% is tough in an agrarian society!

Capitalism and economic development have created an economy in which in general and overall, consumer credit is available on amazingly easy terms, historically. The thirty-year mortgage is one of the great achievements of equity and humanitarianism. It is all the more valuable as it works to reinforce, not weaken, the family as an autonomous little commonwealth (more on this point here). But as we see in the sub-prime loan scandal, that achievement of a consumer credit industry that serves people and does not prey on them is always threatened by a return to speculation fever, both on the part of big lender Honest-Johns, and the little Pinocchios who think they can play the system.

So the solution is neither mooning after a return to agrarianism, futile prohibitions on lending on interest, or exhortations to never borrow money (people need capital, and rightly managed it is a vital part of ordinary life), nor is it a public housing industry, whole-sale income redistribution, and a generally condemnation of capitalism as built on greed, nor yet a general bail-out of debtors who tried to buy and flip houses, but rather a regulation of the consumer credit industry, limiting it to honest profits, something like what Elizabeth Warren suggests in her article. And specific denunciations of consumer credit loan-sharks wouldn’t hurt.

Framing Stories in I-II Kings

It's been over a month, I know, since my last post. Apart from being just busy, somehow I don't feel like any of my thoughts (and I do have them still!) are really in a shape to be blogged. But since I just got a prod from a loyal reader (hello, Eric R!) , let me give my readers some new content.

Yesterday, I finished I and II Kings (very delayed, I know). The more I read it, the more I believe the kind of reading I've been giving it in previous posts, one which focuses on irony, on disjunction between the narrative voice and the author's, is not a figment of the imagination, but an essential reading.

Notes for the future: the Elijah-Elisha cycle is introduced by a mother and child story (the widow of Zarephath and her son), just as the Samuel-David cycle (Hannah seeks a child), and the Solomon cycle (the two prostitutes quarreling over a child). In each case this is a metaphor for Israel and her king. How does this story reposition our reading of the Elijah-Elisha cycle? Elijah saves the widow's child, after she reproaches him for having given her hope of a child when she didn't even think of it, and then letting her darling die. So what is the implicit story then? God and His prophets save the kingship, when Israel reproaches God for first giving her a king when she hadn't even thought of it, and then letting her darling monarchy die. The framing story and my reading of it thus highlights Elijah and Elisha's implicit symbiosis with the kingship, their "pulling their punches" and ultimate support of it in the struggle with Damascus. Reread the whole thing -- you'll see it works out.

The systematic repetition of the Elijah and Elisha stories (almost everyone is a doublet) is worth noting (just like the Isaac-Abraham doublets). If we don't accept the source critical explanation (that there were a series of standard prophet-legends, some with Elijah's name on them, some with Elisha's, and the two were combined without recognizing them as the same), we need another explanation.

It should be noted, though, that the notorious bear tearing the kids episode is a good lead into Elisha's role as the one who promotes (despite his tears), the massacre of Jezreel (Jehu's ascension, cf. Hosea 1:4). Stories involving children seem to have a key framing role everywhere in the Deuteronomistic History.

Another point I noticed is how the message of the Rabshakeh (=field commander) of Assyria to Zion is strikingly parallel to the prophetic messages: idols will not keep you safe, your kings cannot protect you, siege and exile is coming, but if you accept this as judgment it won't be so bad and you will sit under fig tree and vine. When the king hears it he tears his robes. It is of course rejected by Hezekiah, and Isaiah, and God, but it is an important reflection of the Deuteronomistic History's theme of the ambiguity of prophetic utterance: prophets lie all the time. Here is a prophecy that is entirely true, and is not a prophesy of smooth things, but of judgment and woe -- and it's all a lie too! But when Josiah (a sort of second Hezekiah) finds a book that prophesies woe and exile, and tears his clothes: this is true prophecy.

I can't help but note here the reading of Richard Polzin, that the prophet of Deuteronomy 18 is the author of the Deuteronomistic History itself, and the insight of Richard E. Friedman that Josiah is described in the Deuteronomistic History as the best king bar none, the only true leader since Moses, and that the Deuteronomistic History was written by Jeremiah or an associate, first in the time of Josiah, with the rest added after. (The close association of the Deuteronomistic History with the language and concerns of Jeremiah is widely acknowledged.) Put them together and the two go together: the Deuteronomistic History is leading up not just to the rediscovery of Deuteronomy's Law but also the apprehension of the course of Israel's history by Jeremiah (or Baruch) as author of the Deuterenomistic History.

But the interpretation of Friedman's, dependent as it is on a two-fold compilation process, first under Josiah, and then an epilogue, so to speak, written in exile, would then leave the post-Josiah history of Israel hanging. It would be more satisfying to see the whole as a single story, with the end envisioned from the beginning. What's the point, then? That even when, through the Hegelian mission of the prophets to describe to Israel her story, the truth is set forth before Israel, the truth is not accepted. The moment of insight -- does nothing, and destruction follows.

Where the Division of 2 Samuel and 1 Kings Ought to Have Been Made

From the very beginning of 1 Samuel, the theme of the Deuteronomistic History is replacement; replacement of one priest by another, of one king by another. And more specifically that God replaces those who disappoint Him, and enthrones those with whom He is pleased to place in power. (I was about to say "seek to please Him" but that's definitely a wrong reading of the text, as I will show later). At some point, this replacement has to end, correct? After all, Jerusalem will get a Davidic line and a permanent temple, so one would say that under David this replacement is no longer the main theme.

But that is not correct; in fact the theme of replacement ends with a bang, but only in 1 Kings, chapter 2, where the true permanent king is installed. Not David, but his son. The chapter ends: "And the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon." But if there is ever a demonstration that openness to irony (that is, any disjunction between what is stated and what is meant), is necessary equipment for reading the Deuteronomistic History, it is this passage. Contrary to the naive reading, the narrative voice is not God's voice. Rather God's voice is heard by listening to the man of God, who is the author of the book, as he weaves the narrator's voice as only one among the many voices here.

1 Kings 1 and 2 recap almost too perfectly the themes set out in 1 Samuel 1 and 3. Or rather I should say, recap it in a way that sounds too good to be true; because it certainly is.

1 Samuel 2 prophesied the deposition of the house of Eli from the priesthood and their replacement. Well, Eli's sons were killed at the end of 1 Samuel 4, when the ark was captured. But just as the ark reappears, so Eli's family reappears under Saul in 1 Samuel 14:3, and again under David in 1 Samuel 21 (the key genealogical link is in 1 Sam. 22:9-12). But in 1 Kings 2, the final displacement of Abiathar, the last of the Elid priests takes place and the prophecy is (or so the narrator tells us) consummated (v. 27). What was his crime? He backed the wrong horse in the succession struggle, supporting Adonijah, not Solomon. Here, if we believe the narrator's voice, is the fulfillment of the song of Hannah. No more injustice, Israel has a king, and there will be no more replacement, and no more loss of the ark. The sons of Eli will beg bread from the new priests, the sons of Zadok, for ever.

Shortly thereafter, in chapter 2, Solomon succeeds in fulfilling David's death-bed mandate to make a clean sweep of all those who had backed Abijah, killing Adonijah, Joab, and Shimei. As if to emphasize the end of the replacement theme, these lines are not just displaced, but killed off -- no descendants to come back and possibly replace the new order.

So in chapter 3, we have a new world, new themes, new phrases: the author introduces in this chapter all the themes that will dominate the history until the end of 2 Kings. We have the house of God and the high places (the first place in the whole history that this is introduced as a problem) and the house of the king and the Pharoah's daughter, introducing the whole theme of alliance with the powers. And in 3:16-28 we have the famous story about how the real mother of a baby is known: she would give him up rather than see him chopped in two. A story of Solomon's wisdom? Yes, but more importantly a prefiguring that Hannah's prayer has not finished its work.

Hannah was a mother who gave her child up; now we have another true mother, a prostitute, who does the same. But we have seen that Hannah as mother is Israel and her son the king. And we will see later kings like Jeroboam and Rehoboam splitting Israel and Judah rather than giving way. So what is the conclusion? That Israel and Judah fall well below the standard of the prostitutes in the story; they would each rather see the kingship and the nation divided rather than give up dominance. So the story of the judgment of Solomon is as much to say, Israel and Judah are not true mothers but lying whores (named Oholah and Oholibah, no doubt).

But there is the dream, right?, in which Solomon asks only for wisdom? and all the fantastic things happening under Solomon as a result? Donald Redford calls these stories, in contrast to the gritty realistic details of David's kingship childish fantasies. Actually, he's not far off. Where I would disagree is his assumption, common enough among exegetes both pro- and anti-, that the historian himself was unaware of the difference. Solomon's reign is indeed a fantasy, a dream, a fantastic dream. And the historian knew it to be such.

What is striking is how account of Solomon's reign explicitly tops the Torah and reverses its rules. In Exodus 38, the Torah carefully lists the gold, silver, and bronze used. But in 1 Kings 7:47, the amount of bronze used by Solomon is explicitly said to be too great to be numbered. And in Numbers 7, the dedicatory sacrifices of the 12 tribes are listed, but under Solomon, the number here, too, is countless (1 Kings 8:5; later a fantastic -- pun intended -- number is given, v. 63). Top that, Moses -- if you can!

Solomon is certainly trying very hard to please God -- This is rather unlike his father David, who is never said to be going out and seeking God, but instead is just "a man after His own heart" (1 Sam. 13:14). It is characteristic of David, that he is approved of as one who passively endures God's choice (cf. 1 Sam. 16:7), not that he is "passionate for God" or any other such thing. In fact what David's heart seems to desire is the pleasures of kingship -- and God has no problem with that as long as he stays within the law (2 Sam. 3:21, cf. 12:8). But Solomon is always striving for God, seeking him

And of course Solomon explicitly reverses the rules about multiplying horses and wives: compare Deut. 17:16 to 1 Kings 10:28 and 17:17 with 1 Kings 11:13. Well, since Sunday school we all know, Solomon started off great, but then married strange women, and so in the end of his life went a little crooked. Early Solomon good, late Solomon bad. Isn't it curious how this resembles the excuses ordinary people offer after the guy they enthusiastically supported turned out to be a disaster. He started off good and we only found out how bad he was after he fell.

But what if this was just a dream? A fantasy? from the very beginning? It is strange, for example, that Solomon only turns bad when he was old (11:4), but that the Lord stirred up an enemy against him for "all the days of Solomon" (1 Kings 11:25; cf. 4:25). And did Solomon put the people of Israel to forced labor or not? 1 Kings 9:20-21 paints a reassuring picture: Solomon only put the Canaanites to forced labor; the Israelites are the captains and armed men. Indeed v.22 is a nice negation of the bad predictions Samuel had made about the kingship in 1 Sam. 8:11. See? this passage says, kingship's not so bad. But 1 Kings 5: 13-14 says "king Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month by courses: a month they were in Lebanon, and two months at home: and Adoniram was over the levy." That sounds not so fun for Israel. Especially when we see the Israelites stoned Adoniram to death as soon as they thought they could get away with it.

And if indeed Israelites were never put to levy, where did this come from? "And Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came, and spake unto Rehoboam [Solomon's son], saying, 'Thy father made our yoke grievous: now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.'" (1 Kings 12: 3-4). Huh? I thought the Israelites were eating, drinking, and being merry "all the days of Solomon"? (4:25). There's something screwy here, and it's not the result of our historian suddenly going senile.

When the congregation of Israel addresses this demand to Solomon's successor, the old men counsel him: "If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy servants for ever." But the young men say, "Thus shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, 'Thy father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins. And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.' " Rehoboam followed the young men's advice and the rest was history: Adoniram, the chief of forced labor, was stoned and the chopping in half of the baby -- something only threatened by Solomon, but done by Israel -- became a reality in the kingdom.

As anyone reading the Bible in a Presbyterian church knows, this is the point: old men are always wise, and calm, and right. Young men are impetuous and wrong. But what is less noticed is what the old men are actually saying. Stripped of the gloss, their advice is: "Lie to them this day like your father did, promise them the moon, and you will fool them into serving you for the rest of your life." The young men's advice was a problem, only because it was too honest: "Tell them the truth: Solomon was worse than David, and I'll be worse than Solomon."

Truthfulness is the issue here: the truthfulness of history. In Solomon's reign, Jeremiah for the first time appeals to the famous unimpeachable sources that ritually conclude the account of each reign: "And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon?" and the book of the kings of Israel? and the book of the kings of Judah? Usually this is read as a naive appeal to royal documents. "See? I'm not making this up!" But it is curious that the content of the book thus summarized, even when the king is painted by Jeremiah in the most savagely negative terms, is always positive: "all his wisdom . . . and his might . . . and his wars . . . and his buildings" and so on. Again, I emphasize: this disjunction is not the result of a senile, aphasic author who can't remember what he wrote.

What's the problem? That people lie. And especially lie about what the word of God is. Like in 1 Kings 13, a man of God comes to denounce Jeroboam for making golden calves (Solomon took them back to Egypt for horses, Jeroboam for idols). He was told to go straight home without eating or drinking. But an old prophet (one of those old men again), came to the man of God* and cleverly said that God had changed his mind. The young man was fooled by the old man's worldly cleverness: "'I am a prophet also as thou art; and an angel spake unto me by the word of the LORD, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water.' But he lied unto him." He LIED -- and the man of God died.

This is the whole point of the reference to the annals of Solomon: they LIE. "You want to know why I wrote all about this stuff about carefree happiness under Solomon, when the people were groaning under the forced levy (and it's the same word used of Pharoah's levy)? Because I read it in the king's own propaganda, THAT's why." These annals tell a lie, a fantasy, a dream about the carefree life under Solomon. Just as they tell lies about the wonderful kings and their might and their wars and their monuments, all the way to Zedekiah and exile. A lie that a king could break every law of the king in the Torah and God would approve. And they write that lie into their histories. Jeremiah was well aware of the lying pen of the scribes: "How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us'? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie." (Jer. 8:8).

And why do these annals suddenly get mentioned under Solomon and not under David? Especially when the annals of Solomon are all fantastic boasting compared to the true story under David? Crucial to interpreting this question is the fact that the very author of the Deuteronomistic History, either Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch, was a priest of Anathoth, the home town of the descendants of Abiathar, last of the Elid priests (cf. 1 Kings 2:26 and Jer. 1:1) . Under David, the family of Eli was there to tell the truth, and the result is the extraordinary narrative of 1 Samuel 1-1 Kings 2. With their exile in Anathoth, the way is free for the lying pen of the scribes, and the result is pure fantasy. When Jeremiah refers to the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah, his aim isn't to back up his own history; his aim is to contrast his Torah-true history with the propaganda of the kings and the Zadokite priests. And that's why the theme of replacement is suddenly replaced: because no one as honest and humble as Jeremiah's ancestor Eli is there to hear the Lord's Word prophesying it.

And yet --, and yet --, there it is in 1 Kings: Solomon's extraordinary prayer of 1 Kings 9. And the presence of the Lord in the temple, just as it was in tabernacle (cf. 1 Kings 8:10-11 to Ex. 40:34). And Solomon's recognition of the possibility of exile, and the need for a mediating place between man and God. Solomon's striving and searching creates this thing. Just when you think Jeremiah is a straight forward partisan paleo-conservative, railing against Lincoln and Roosevelt in the name of preserving the old constitution that kept a sharp distinction between armed Israelites and Canaanites doing forced labor, he makes it impossible for you to read him that way. He who gives us Samuel's speech against kingship also sums up the age of Judges by saying, "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit." I can't sum up Jeremiah's "point," his "application," his "take home message" -- apart from saying that all these things happened to Israel, and things often aren't what they seem, and the histories often lie.

*In the Deuteronomistic History, a "man of God" is always good, but a "prophet" is frequently very bad.

Joab

To continue on with my reflections on the Deuteronomistic history, I finished 2 Samuel, with the coda of 1 Kings 1, on Monday. After reading it, I read Matthew Henry's commentary as a representative of typical Christian interpretation. All of which confirmed my existing impression that 1) Joab gets an incredibly bad rap in typical Christian commentary; 2) that David is a highly ambivalent figure (and no, I don't mean just with the standard Uriah-Bathsheba story, the only aspect of David's history ever paid attention to by Christians today); and 3) the whole thing is a lot more like Three Kingdoms (which I finished for the third time on Saturday) than the Gospels.

(Interestingly, Jewish midrash on Joab is much more favorable than Christian commentary. Compared to them, the "critical" position discussed at the end simply assumes a flat-footedly unironic reading of the history).

Quick version: Joab is Zhuge Liang, David is Liu Bei, and the killing of Abner is like the occupation of Sichuan and the seizing of Liu Zhang's land.

In Three Kingdoms, the turning point comes when the brilliant, single-minded advisor Zhuge Liang insists that his leader Liu Bei follow the entreaties of the local officials and by betraying his host and kinsman, Liu Zhang, seize Sichuan as a base. Liu Bei's acquiescence marks the end of Liu Bei's political innocence and his realization that full integrity is in reality incompatible with founding a new regime. David's acquiescence in Joab's murder of Abner has the same significance. And in both cases, the ruler's tears of regret, however sincere, are secondary to his acceptance of the fruits of the betrayal.

The idea that Abner's survival would have been compatible with David ruling in actuality is simply absurd; having disposed of Ishbosheth, Abner would have soon disposed of David the same way. And of course the fact that Abner humiliating Ishbosheth by taking one of Saul's concubines is the very same thing that Solomon executed his half-brother Adonijah for merely proposing only confirms it. Joab's betrayal by David (who slyly waited to have his son Solomon do deed) is only the mirror image of the betrayals Joab had to commit to build David's kingdom.

What is the archetypal image of David's rise and rule, almost from the beginning? It is him mourning over the immensely convenient death of every rival, and so winning over the rival's people. The pattern starts with Nabal and Abigail, continues with David mourning the death of Saul and Jonathan that brought him to power in Judah, continues with him mourning the death of Abner, and Absalom, and Amasa. While it was the Philistines who do the job on Saul and Jonathan, and Joab who was the man stuck with the job of whacking Abner, Uriah, Absalom, and Amasa, God Himself was the hatchet man in the first archetypal case, that of Nabal. Regardless of the mechanics, Joab is a man who has identified himself with God's purpose as He founds the Davidic dynasty: that while David will keep his hands clean, all those who stand between him and the throne are doomed. (Not to speak of that opponent's wife and people being made over to David.)

Another facet is Joab's position (along with the priest Abiathar) as the leader of the old Israelites, as opposed to the purely royal and heavily non-Israelite establishment coalesced around the David's royal establishment, with his Cherethite and Pelethite guards, the mysterious Jerusalem priest Zadok, and Bathsheba, the former wife of the Hittite Uriah and her son Solomon. It is thus no accident that it is Joab alone, not Nathan or any other prophet, who speaks against David's plan to conduct a census and hence to tax Israelite and non-Israelite together without any reference to the old tabernacle tax. (The coronation of Solomon was the nightmare come true for the palaeo-conservatives of ancient Israel -- an alliance of immigrants, alien mercenaries, new-fangled big-city religion, and royal taxation agents.)

So who was right? Joab or Benaiah, Adonijah or Solomon? Abiathar or Zadok? Well, I prefer what the reactionary Ariq-Böke said when his defiance of his progressive brother Qubilai Qa'an reached its bankruptcy:

When he arrived at the Court of the Qa'an orders were given for a large body of troops to be stationed there, and the Qa'an ordered him [i.e. Ariq Böke] to make his submission. Now it is their custom in such cases to cast the door of the tent over the shoulders of the evil-doer. He made submission covered in this manner and after a while was given permission and entered. He took his stand among the bitikchis [scribes]. The Qa'an looked at him for a time and was moved with brotherly feeling and sorrow. Ariq Böke wept and tears came to [his brother] the Qa'an's eyes also. He wiped them and asked: "Dear brother, in this strife and contention were we in the right or you?" Ariq-Böke answered: "We were then and you are today" (Successors of Genghis Khan, p. 261).

The dynasty must be founded, and Joab has do wield the hatchet necessary to found it, so that the founder David may have clean hands. And the dynasty once founded must evolve beyond the narrow rural provincialism, and the hoar head of Joab and his militiamen must go down in blood before the Jerusalem temple-state. He was right then and Solomon is right now. And Jeremiah, descendant of the rejected priest Abiathar, who wrote the book, weeps for him and for Judah.

But it will not surprise anyone familiar with the political style preferred by those Protestant pastors who like to talk politics that their commentaries are always written in a pile-on delight in partisanship, and never in tears.

I doubt any one will read this, but it helped clarify my thoughts. The fact that Joab's story, utterly absorbing in the Bible, is unknown, is a testimony that the Deuteronomistic History, Jeremiah's story of the rise and fall of a kingdom, is today read as anything but that of the rise and fall of a kingdom.

How Does One Come to Believe in Moses?

In the essay below, I explained what I see as a three-step process by which those outside the Church come to believe in the inerrant/infallible authority of the Scriptures. In it, I focused on the Gospels, which from the point of view of inerrancy are truly the oddest part of the Bible, in which we have four documents, each testifying to Christ yet showing numerous unreconciled small discrepancies that Christians have labored over for centuries to smooth away. Some such efforts may be fruitful (such as the different Roman and Jewish hour systems used in John and the Synoptics), while others have been fruitless. But the Christian church has not held any specific solution of these puzzles to be authoritative, nor has the ability to produce reliable solutions to these discrepancies on demand been seen as a condition for adhering to inerrancy and Biblical authority.

Does this have any relevance to the Old Testament? In point of practice, for Christians, rather little. For us, as non-Jews, the Old Testament remains to some degree a letter written to someone else, one which we can only approaching by identifying with one particular Jew, Jesus. To put it differently, we believe in the Old Testament, seek wisdom from it, and model our lives on it, because He obviously did and as Christians we wish to do as He did.

But certainly the Old Testament can be teated, and by past generations of Christians (let alone the Jews, of course), has been treated as testament with its own authority. If this is the case, we may ask how exactly this authority could come to be established in the eyes of someone who has not imbibed it with his mother‘s milk? I would argue in exactly the same three stages as outsiders to the Church go through in accepting the authority of the Gospels.

First, they see that the Law of Moses and the history of the Judges and kings of Israel and Judah are plausible historical records, able to be read with the same general presumption of veracity as Snorri Sturluson on the Norwegian kings or Sima Qian on the Chinese dynasties.

Second one realizes that these plausible records testify to an extraordinary people, a people that has despite innumerable hardships, has survived and still exists today. Such a people, who have maintained their Law, when Egyptians and Assyrians, and Mayans, and Chinese have all forgotten theirs is something special, a miracle and a proof of God.

It is pregnant with meaning that the first and the second non-Biblical references to the name "Israel" occur in boasts that the nation has been destroyed. The first is found in the Hymn of Victory for the Pharoah Merneptah, dated to the fifth year of his reign:

. . .

The princes are prostrate, saying “Mercy!”

No one raises his head among the Nine Bows

Desolation is for Tehenu; Khatti [the Hittite empire] is pacified;

Plundered is Canaan with every evil;

Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer [the Philistine cities];

Yanoam [a city in northern Palestine] is made as that which does not exist;

Israel is laid waste, his seed is not

Hurru [the Horites] is become a widow for Egypt!

All lands together, they are pacified;

Everyone who was restless, he has been bound by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt: Ba-en-Re Meri-Amon; the Son of Re; Mer-ne-ptah Hotep-hir-Maat, given life like Re every day.

(Ancient Near East, p. 231).

But today, this Pharoah is known first and foremost for having once mentioned Israel.

And the second is the famous inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, dated to around 830 B.C.:

I am Mesha, son of Chemosh-[. . .], king of Moab, the Dibonite -- my father had reigned over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my father -- who made this high place for Chemosh in Qarhoh [. . .] because he saved me from all the kings and caused me to triumph over all my adversaries. As for Omri, king of Israel, he humbled Moab many days, for Chemosh was angry at his land. And his son followed him and he also said, “I will humble Moab.” In my time he spoke thus, but I have triumphed over him and over his house while Israel hath perished for ever! (Ancient Near East, p. 211).

He goes in that vein about how he has destroyed Israel, slaughtered Gad, annihilated Nebo, so that Chemosh triumphed over YHWH. But he who laughs last, laughs best, and as with Pharoah and Assyria, and Babylon, and . . . , we all know who getting the last laugh.

Down through the centuries, one thing has been certain: great empires will boast of having wiped Israel out for ever, laying him waste so his seed is not -- and it will be Israel who will write the history of this new Haman that the next generation will read. People feel differently about this miracle of survival, but it is a fact of history worth pondering.

Thirdly one realizes that what this plausible record says, is that it is the record itself, the Law of Moses and its commentary, which has created and ensured the continuity of this extraordinary people. If the Law and the Prophets are the means by which the miracle of Jewish survival has been effected, then the Law itself must be something divine. Something capable of defeating the ravages of time, Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, and Hitler must be extraordinarily perfect to achieve its aim and such perfection is not compatible with error.

Now, the Jews themselves will stop there with a divine Torah, Prophets and Writings, making up the Hebrew Bible. Pascal followed a well-worn Christian apologetic when he then argued that for such a divinely-commissioned people to have a mission to make God known and then to have never done it is absurd. Therefore, the Jewish Law must have been made known to the world in some form, and one need only further decide on whether it was so done through Jesus or Muhammad.

But whether or not one makes that step, the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible thus can be reasoned as divinely inspired, entirely apart from the Christian New Testament. But, this is only the case as long as the initial plausibility of the story of Abraham, slavery in Egypt, Moses, Joshua, Judges, and monarchy can be accepted. This is, however, exactly the point at contention in recent research on early Israel (more here, here, and here). The conclusion of recent scholarship has been overwhelmingly that, no, the Torah does not possess the minimal plausibility to be taken as a more or less correct of the origin of the Jews. It's not quite in Book of Mormon territory in that respect, but it is getting there, if the minimalist account prevails.

In this situation, if my analysis is correct, the primary arguments needed to get people to open themselves to the truth claims of the Mosaic revelation are not arguments why it is inerrant, but rather arguments why it is plausible -- a very, very different issue. Nitpicking arguments of detail and harmonization to prove the first agenda are actually counter-productive for the second agenda.

"Israel, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten kings?"

The Advent season is always misplaced for me. The period from Thanksgiving to about a week before Christmas is always filled with the finals and decisions that come from the end of the semester. Nor do we do big decorating in my house.

But on the first Sunday of Advent, I found myself reading 1 Samuel, and realized that this time I had stumbled on powerful Advent reading. (Now why haven't I written about this before? Go read that first paragraph again, please.) As many know, Hannah's song is the model for Mary's Magnificat:

And Hannah prayed, and said,
My heart rejoiceth in the LORD, mine horn is exalted in the LORD: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies; because I rejoice in thy salvation.
There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.
Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth: for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.
The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength.
They that were full have hired out themselves for bread; and they that were hungry ceased: so that the barren hath born seven; and she that hath many children is waxed feeble.
The LORD killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up.
The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.
He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and he hath set the world upon them.
He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail.
The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon them: the LORD shall judge the ends of the earth; and he shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed.

A few years ago, I read Robert Polzin's reading of 1 Samuel, Samuel and the Deuteronomist. In one way it's a very typical inter-testamental exegesis delighting in irony (that is, any disjunction between surface meaning and deep meaning), but in another way it's very UN-inter-testamental, preferring ambiguous characters to clearly good or evil, and deeply involved in questions of narrative voice. (More on these features of inter-testamental Bible reading here.) In his reading Samuel emerges as a profoundly ambiguous figure, responsible for Saul's destruction. I don't agree with all his readings -- in part because as a Christian I read it all in the context of a different canon, that includes the Gospels -- but as the blurb for another volume of his says, having read his work, I can't read 1 Samuel the same way again.

Let's go back to Hannah. Did you notice the part at the end? About the king and the anointed? The odd part of that is of course Hannah is singing this at the time of the Judges, when Israel has no king. Higher critics explain this, of course, by saying that this psalm is a monarchic-era psalm retrojected to the time of Hannah. Or that the song is actually about Saul: Hannah says in 1:27 that she "asked for" (sha'ul) a son, and sha'ul is the Hebrew of Saul. So "really" the song is about Saul.

Polzin follows an entirely different tack -- a literary one. What is the author trying to say here? Remember the context: traditionally Joshua to 2 King (minus Ruth which was part of the Writings) were all one book. Polzin follows Noth's identification of this as one work with Deuteronomy, a single history beginning with Moses and concluding with the destruction of Judah. The book is unified by language and themes that form a history and a meditation on the Israel's experience with the Word of God and the monarchy.

So back to Hannah: this song is a foreshadowing of monarchy, of Israel's desire for a king. And why? To have triumph over her enemies, to be able to sing: Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD (Is. 54:1). Her enemy is Penninah because Penninah had children and Hannah had none, just as the nations had kings and Hannah had none.

Hannah's lord tried to comfort her, saying "Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten sons?" but she would not be comforted. She must have sons; she will not bear to be bested by her rival. And so the theme of the work from 1 Samuel to 2 Kings is set: Israel must have a king, she will not bear to be bested by the rival nations. And all along the Lord speaks to her "Israel, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? Am not I better to thee than ten kings?" And Israel's stubborn refusal to listen to this gentle persuasion is the beginning of the Messianic promise. (Just as Israel was right when she protested: "Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not" Deut. 18:16).

And so she bears Samuel. One might think (with the higher critics) that there
has been a mistake here, that Samuel is not a king. But no mistake has been made here. For we soon see the theme: the priest Eli has two evil sons, and God pronounces judgment on him to condemn his sons and overthrow the priestly dynasty of Eli. Israel had been ruled by a priest with at the ark. And in 1 Samuel 4, the promise is fulfilled. The priest's family is struck down, and the "glory has departed from Israel." After comic adventures among the Philistines, the ark ended up in a family of Judeans, Abinadab and Eleazer his son, while Israel mourned the absence of the Lord (1 Sam. 7:2-3).* Who then takes up the mantle of authority? Samuel, son of Elkanah, who is an Ephraimite, who judges Israel, holding both religious and political authority simultaneously.

In other words, literarily, 1 Samuel has cued us to respond to Samuel's exaltation as a proto-kingship, a simultaneous exercise of priestly, prophetic, and political authority. And so when Samuel makes his sons rulers after him (1 Sam 8:1-3), we can hardly be surprised -- he is already a dynastic ruler.

And we know what will happen: he too will be replaced, just as Eli was replaced. And the new replacement is introduced in just the same way Elkanah was introduced (compare this passage: Now there was a man of Benjamin, whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bechorath, the son of Aphiah, a Benjamite, a mighty man of power: And he had a son . . . to this: Now there was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim, of mount Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite: And he had two wives . . .)

Now we have all been primed by everything we read outside the text to see the people's demand for a king as unequivocally bad, when they demand of Saul, "now make us a king to judge us like all the nations." Samuel then is unequivocally good. After all, as Americans we know that monarchy is bad, and that knowledge is essential to reading Scripture. And after all as heirs of the Greeks we know that the "regime question" (i.e. what's the best type of government, in the abstract) is the most important question we can ask. This passage MUST be about republic vs. monarchy, because that's what we want to know.

But is that what the text is cuing us to hear? After all the people once before demanded an intermediary, in Deuteronomy 18, and the Lord approved. And Hannah asked for a king, and she received one. And when Samuel as a small boy told Eli that his family was rejected, he said quietly "It is the LORD: let him do what seemeth him good."

But Samuel refuses to accept this! He is angry with the people! God tells him "Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee." Well, we can read God in two different ways here, as a passive-aggressive figure who says one thing but means another, or we can see Him as a figure who, while knowing the people's hearts, has determined before hand what He would do. So how does Samuel read him? The first way!

And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the LORD.

And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city.

God doesn't really mean what he says! He's just complaining! He not actually expecting me to do anything about it! So Samuel sends the people away. Not until he meets Saul, is he willing to anoint his successor, and even then, only secretly.

Well there is much more to say here, but suffice it to say that in listening to 1 Samuel he hear Hannah singing the carol:

O Come, O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.

But we will also hear the doubts: will the existing dynasty accept the voice of the people? Or use the sins of the people to ignore their voice? And will this new dynasty, born of a mother-to-be's triumphant receipt of a child-king, become a corrupt worldly kingship (whether it has the name like Saul's or doesn't like Samuel's)? And will we then wish there had never been kingship in Israel?

* One can see here the narrower sense of Israel excluding Judah, the biggest of the tribes, which was always somewhat separate.

A Curious Passage from Joshua on the Environment

A Christian discussion of the environment will usual start with Genesis 1-3, make copious use of the word "steward" and move on from there. It is curious, though, that there is only one passage I know of which gives specific, hand's on advice on how to deal with an problem in a way that takes account of the environment. I've never seen it referred to in that context, so I'll talk about it here.

Here was the problem: the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim were given land in the forested hills and in the lowlands of Canaan. The uplands were hard to farm because of the trees, while the lowlands were the richest lands and had long been farmed. But, the Canaanites (with, historical research suggests, their Egyptian garrisons) occupied the lowlands and were hard for the Hebrews to dispossess. (A big irony is noted by Barry Beitzel in his Moody Bible Atlas, that distribution of Jews in Israel today and in the Judges period is almost exactly inverse. With the exception of the Gaza Strip, the Jews of modern Israel settled almost entirely the Canaanite/Philistine/Egyptian lowlands, while the Jews of pre-Davidic Israel settled almost exclusively the Palestinian lands of the West Bank, the Nazareth area of Galilee, and Jordan.)

So much of their allotment was inaccessible. What to do? Here is Joshua's advice from Joshua 17:

And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, "Why hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing I am a great people, forasmuch as the LORD hath blessed me hitherto?"

And Joshua answered them, "If thou be a great people, then get thee up to the wood country, and cut down for thyself there in the land of the Perizzites and of the giants, if mount Ephraim be too narrow for thee."

And the children of Joseph said, "The hill is not enough for us: and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are of Bethshean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel."

And Joshua spake unto the house of Joseph, even to Ephraim and to Manasseh, saying, "Thou art a great people, and hast great power: thou shalt not have one lot only; But the mountain shall be thine; for it is a wood, and thou shalt cut it down: and the outgoings of it shall be thine: for thou shalt drive out the Canaanites, though they have iron chariots, and though they be strong."

So here's Joshua's answer: first clear the hill country by cutting down the forests. Then you will get stronger and can eventually subdue the Canaanites (as happened during the days of the monarchy).

This is also a nice illustration of the peculiar mix of confirmation and incongruities that reading the Bible against archeology gives. As I mentioned before, the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition (what I would correlate with the Deborah age of the Biblical record) is marked by a dramatic increase in dispersed settlements in the upland areas, establishing the Israelite distribution pattern. This reference to clearing the upland forests and then dominating the lowlands is archaeologically confirmed; that is indeed how Israel grew (The upland nature of Israel was observed by those around: see 1 Kings 20:23 And the servants of the king of Syria said unto him, Their [i.e. Israel's] gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they. Cf. Judges 1:19: And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.)

But as Donald Redford would undoubtedly note, the "Canaanites" here are, if this account is to be fitted into any plausible historical framework, ruled by the Egyptians of the New Kingdom. So how come Egyptians aren't mentioned? Huh? And the iron chariots seem anachronistic as well. What we seem to have is an account in which real historical realities are being phrased in language that makes sense to the writers, probably in the seventh century.

But back to the environment. Here is a case where clearing forests is seen as a proper response to lacking farmland. Presumably, if we wish to turn to the Bible for teaching on environmental issues, this passage should be front and center.

The Book of Joshua Isn't Fictional

Christians who have studied the Galileo case like to point out that what the church condemned him for was not so much for denying the literal words of Scripture as for denying the natural-philosophical doctrines, stemming ultimately from Aristotle, that had become attached to these words. I don't know if that is true but if it is, it is a very nice metaphor for what happened to the historicity of Joshua. The process of proving the Bible through archeology inevitable results in a kind of amalgam of Scriptural words with archaeological / historical / sociological commentary. Within this amalgam it is generally the commentary that has proven most amenable to criticism and refutation. The Joshua event as a case of nomadic invasion dated to 1225 BC, or as a case of peasant revolt in 1225 BC -- what have proven most vulnerable in these formulations is the date (1225 BC) and the sociological model (nomadic invasion or peasant revolt) -- not the idea of a massive destruction of Canaanite/Amorite cities connected with a Canaanite Exodus (voluntary or involuntary) from Egypt.

One must also insist that models cannot be allowed to dictate what happened. Nomadic invasions may be rare in the Bronze Age, as are peasant insurrections. But can we really eliminate the possibility of either? Given the diversity and unpredictability of human affairs, what matters is not what probably, or even plausibly, happened -- because so much of our history is not probable, or even plausible -- but what did happen. Think of the Mongols building the world's largest land empire in the Middle Ages: how probable, or even plausible, is that?

I have just finished Donald Redford's Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, which is vigorously contemptuous of Biblical religion. Here's an example a propos my previous post on Exodus vs. Joshua. He'll have none of this Exodus good, Joshua bad business -- it's all bad:

One final irony lies in the curious use to which the Exodus is put in modern religion, as a symbolic tale of freedom from tyranny. An honest reading of the account of Exodus and Numbers cannot help but reveal that the tyranny Israel was freed from, namely that of Pharoah, was mild indeed in comparison to the tyranny of Yahweh to which they were about to submit themselves. As a story of freedom the Exodus is distasteful in the extreme . . . (p. 422).

As (despite his disclaimers) a rather fanatic partisan of Egypt, he twice suggests that Canaanites sold into slavery in Egypt or captured as prisoners of war were happy to be enslaved, because at least they had food (pp. 53, 221).

OK, so he doesn't like the Yahweh cult and its worshipers. But he makes a vigorous case that the basic structure of descent into Egypt-sojourn in Egypt in high status-enslavement-Exodus matches roughly the historical sequence of Canaanites moving into the late Middle Kingdom Egypt (c. 2025-1803), the Hyksos ("Foreign Ruler") domination of Egypt (c. 1720-1575) based in the Nile Delta, the conquest of Egypt by the Theban (Upper Egyptian, far southern) 17th dynasty, and the consequent expulsion of the Hyksos kings and the Canaanite population. Archaeology has shown how a basically Canaanite culture was established east of the Nile Delta after the Middle Kingdom, and lasted until the 17th dynasty when the cities therein were burned; Canaanite elements subsequently disappear from the material remains (see pp. 100-102, 114-15, 128-29).

Not only that, he even notes Egyptian records of strange events accompanying the expulsion of the Hyksos: "a roar was emitted by the Majesty of this god [Seth]," "the sky rained" (this is Egypt, remember, raining is not normal), and in an inscription from the reign of Ahmose (c. 1550-1525) which may refer to the same event:

The sky came on with a torrent of rain, and darkness covered the western heavens while the storm raged without cessation . . . . [the rain thundered？] on the mountains, louder than the noise at the 'Cavern' that is in Abydos. Then every house and barn where they might have sought refuge was swept away, . . . and they were drenched with water like reed canoes . . . and for a period of [. . .] days no light shone in the Two Lands (p. 420; cf. p. 128）.

As he also admits:

Nearly every major town in Palestine and southern Syria is found, upon excavation, to have undergone a violent destruction sometime after the close of MB [Middle Bronze] IIC -- that is, the cultural phase roughly contemporaneous with the last stage in the Hyksos occupation of Egypt (p. 138).

This is usually attributed to Egyptian arms, but he points out there is no record of Egyptian sieges being so effective, even in the powerful 18th and 19th dynasty empires. After noting the complete absence of contemporary written sources on this catastrophic event, he speculates that this may actually have been due to a movement of Mitanni and the Hurrians south from the area between Assyria and the Euphrates River (roughly the area on the Syrian-Iraqi border today) -- despite the fact that there is no evidence of any such violent irruption. (There is evidence that Mitannians and Hurrians were not in Canaan around in 1600 and were in 1450, so his speculation is not completely arbitrary.) But a connection with the Joshua narrative is quite as plausible. So in broad outline, one could say that Redford himself sees something like the Exodus event found in Egyptian records and archeology and that the Joshua events are also plausibly associated with archaeological events.

The missing event here is the "Sinai event," that is, the reformation of the Canaanite culture by the Yahweh cult into a new Hebrew culture. (Hebrews and Canaanites were basically identical in material culture and language; what made them different was religion alone, kind of like Dutch and Flemish, or Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats.) Redford himself believes that this descent to Egypt-Exodus-return to Canaan had nothing to do with the origin of the Yahweh cult, which he finds originated a century or two later in the Edom-Midian area (modern southwest Jordan). Around 1425 B.C., 150 years after the Joshua event had smashed the Middle Bronze Age cities, there is an Egyptian record of a shrine to YHWH in the land of the Shasu ("Nomads") around Seir (the older name for Edom).

This reference to YHWH stands alone; there is no direct record of how this cult relates to the Hebrews of Israel. But in the Bible the association of YHWH with the mountains to the south of Israel (not just Sinai / Horeb, but occasionally Seir / Bozrah, cf. Judges 5:4, Is. 63:1) is common. (Cf. also Jethro/Reuel, the priest of Midian -- also southeast of Israel --, and his son Hobab, and the Kenites, who who join the tribe of Judah and seem to be natural Yahwists.)

Redford hypothesizes (note that word! this is a theory based on one enigmatic passage) that the Hebrews as nomads moving into Canaan in 1225 or so, about two hundred years later this reference to "YHWH of the Shasu." (Basically he goes back to the nomad infiltration thesis, but separated from the "conquest", which actually happened much earlier.) Only as the "utterly barbaric" Yahweh cult (his term, p. 276) became nativized in Canaan, and absorbed the distant descendants of the expelled Hyksos, did they adopt their legendary version of the Exodus-Joshua story, merging it with the Sinai legend.

One may have noticed that I have phrased things in a way which no one adhering to the orthodox dating and view of the documents would follow: e.g. "but a connection with the Joshua narrative is quite as plausible." Obviously if the Joshua story was an inerrant account written by Joshua himself, the connection is not just "plausible", but certain and obvious.

This brings up the whole status of the documents (Torah-Former Prophets) in which the Biblical narrative is recorded. If the Torah is by the pen of Moses, then the historicity of the events he records is beyond question. (Theoretically the narratives of the patriarchs could still be legendary). Likewise if the book of Joshua was written by Joshua, the traditional attribution. This would be so even if one did not accept these books as inspired. Let us say Joshua was an evil conqueror; if we had an evil conqueror's first hand view of his actions, we would understand his conquest far better than most historical events of the ancient Near East.

However, the traditional attribution is accepted by essentially no scholar today without a prior theological commitment to inerrancy. And Redford most certainly is not such a one.

This is the point Redford addresses insistently: what is the dating of the Biblical documents? And given their dating, what can they be expected to be accurate on?

Answering this brings up the whole question of what it means to place the Bible in the context of history. And that's another big issue.
(to be continued)

Is the Book of Joshua Completely Fictional? (Cont.)

(Continued from here)

It is a commonplace that the slavery in Egypt and deliverance by Moses is a peculiarly meaningful theme in Afro-American Christianity. Those who have been historically oppressed identify with the theme of liberation and the overthrow of the powers that be by God's righteous hand.

The other side of this, of course, is that the Joshua event, at least as it is written in Scripture, has peculiarly uncomfortable overtones for liberation-centered Christianity. While one can get some liberatory mileage out of the idea of poor Israelites shouting down the great walls of Jericho, the bottom line is, the book celebrates conquest, and more than that, racially- and religiously-based genocidal conquest (no use softening phrases, that's what it says). As the concept of conquest and replacement of alien races gradually moved from being a natural part of human history to a criminal act (a movement that certainly began no later than the 1770s, was still of not great significance in 1914, but had achieved dominance in 1945 and was certainly completed by 1975), the book of Joshua likewise went from being natural to extremely troubling.

As a result, as the archaeological case evaporated for a historic Joshua event in the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age transition, it was natural that the idea of a Joshua event would undergo a transmutation. There was little evidence of an invasion and an invasion would be grossly inappropriate for glorification by Scripture in any case: well, then, perhaps Joshua can be turned into something liberatory, something Exodus-like. And if you know what the ideological climate was in the 1960s, you will know know what the war of Joshua was turned into: a peasant rebellion.

This move was first made by George E. Mendenhall, a Lutheran scholar (non-LCMS, of course) -- bio notice here, picture and interview here. It has to be remembered that Mendenhall was not attacking just the Biblical account, but the fusion of the Biblical account with historico-anthropological explanation that analogized the Joshua event with the Arab conquest of the seventh century: supposedly an explosion of purely nomadic egalitarian Bedouin monotheists who invaded from the desert and overthrew the empires of (East) Rome and Persia.

In a 1962 article (you can read it here if you, or your university, subscribes to JSTOR), he pointed out that the "anthropologized" version of the Joshua event, in which the conquest is a nomadic conquest of ethnically alien sedentary people did not fit with the usual pattern of nomadic-sedentary relations or with the archeology of the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. Bedouins didn't really exist in the Bronze Age, and even if they did, Middle Eastern nomads and sedentaries are usually integrated by kin and economic networks. This viewpoint was later elaborated in later books, beginning with the Tenth Generation.

He then argued that what happened was not an invasion, but a rebellion. Around a small core -- maybe only 70 families -- of Habiru/Hebrew "transgressors" or "rebels" who had rebelled against Egyptian rule*, rebels rallied to their message that YHWH is Lord and therefore Pharaoh/Jabin** isn't. Listening to the freedom riders who had escaped from Egypt bearing a new theology of liberation, the oppressed serfs of the arrogant imperialists in Canaan rose up -- and the walls came tumbling down. The Conquest was really an Insurrection.

Notice how not just conquest, but the idea of racial or religious exclusivism has been eliminated from the Biblical picture, and instead transmuted into their opposites. The assimilation of Rahab has gone from being the exception to the rule.

Mendenhall's Peasant Revolt model operated with the theologian's traditional idealist explanation in which egalitarian theology generates egalitarian sociology. Norman Gottwald, whose massive Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050, was dedicated to the Viet Cong, developed the idea with a materialist twist. Yahwism, and all the other basic religious concepts of early Israel, are simply the ideological reflections of the fundamental reality of the egalitarian, anti-urban revolt:

'Yahweh' is the historically concretized, primordial power to establish and sustain social equality in the face of counter-oppression from without and again provincial and non-egalitarian tendencies from within society. 'The Chosen People' is the distinctive self-consciousness of a society of equals created in the intertribal order and demarcated from a primarily centralized and stratified surrounding world. 'Covenant is the bonding of decentralized social groups in a larger society of equals committed to cooperation without authoritarian leadership' (p. 692).

In short, those who are committed to social egalitarianism are living out Yahwism, and those who aren't, aren't.

(Mendenhall later accused Gottwald of trying to 'force the ancient historical data into the Procrustes' Bed of nineteenth-century Marxist ideology.' Actually, of course, Marx was a big fan of cities; the particular Procrustes' Bed here is not nineteenth-century Marxism, but twentieth-century Maoism and the idea that the rural areas are the bearers of liberation and Lin Biao's slogan "surround the cities from the countryside!" One wonders if Gottwald's rejection of even Mendenhall's limited role for Mosaic freedom riders from Egypt was also influenced by the contemporary Maoist attempts to minimize the significance of Soviet Comintern advisers in the origin of Chinese and Vietnamese Communism.)

This picture was influenced by the archeology, but it is impossible to deny that both Mendenhall and Gottwald's theories are shaped throughout by the need to fashion the Joshua event into something that is non-racial, non-exclusive, non-conquest, and non-genocidal -- a usable theological past, whether it be for a liberal civil rights activist like Mendenhall or a for far left peasant warrior liberation theologian like Gottwald.

But if the Joshua event was really a peasant rebellion, how did it become a conquest? Here is where the monarchy fits in. The formation of the monarchy (whether of the charismatic Saulian type in Ephraim and the North, or of the dynastic Davidic type of Judah and the South) was according to this scenario a betrayal of the original egalitarian message of Yahwism. The revolution having been betrayed by a new revisionist, imperialist ruling class of pseudo-Yahwist bureaucrats (just as Khrushchev's revisionists betrayed the original Leninist revolutionary vision), the history of the revolution was rewritten in the usual direction of pagan imperialism -- legitimation of rule by conquest. Thus what was really a peasant revolt was rewritten as a conquest -- precisely to legitimize the hierarchical, urban version of Yahwism centered on the temple and priesthood in Jerusalem or Bethel, Dan, and Samaria that had supplanted the original egalitarian vision. Yet still within the ruling narrative a counter-narrative of liberation remained hidden in the texts -- to be excavated by Mendenhall and Gottwald in the twentieth century.

Gottwald's magnum opus came out in 1979, exercised a big influence for a while but has now faded. The main grave digger was the Danish scholar Niels Lemche, who did to Gottwald what Gottwald and Mendenhall had done to the Albright-style "nomadic invasion" thesis. Remember what they had done was taken a historico-anthropological explanation of the Joshua event, founded in the last analysis on an analogy (in the earlier case with the Arab invasion), and demonstrated that the supposed analogy was anachronistic and implausible. In his 1985 Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society before the Monarchy (review here for those of you with JSTOR), Lemche did the same to Gottwald. He pointed out that rural and urban society is generally symbiotic, that "tribes" are not generally egalitarian, that the anthropological schema used by Gottwald is based on a narrow and skewed reading of social anthropology, and in short that the whole peasant revolt scheme lacks solid comparative foundation.

Lemche went on to become one of the founding "minimalists". (Probably the best popular presentation of their viewpoint is Silberman and Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Here's a short presentation of the viewpoint that appeared in Harper's magazine.) Keith Whitelam (more here) has probably been the most explicit in linking this new minimalist school to the contemporary anti-Zionist point of view.

To understand their significance, it is important to keep in mind what Mendenhall and Gottwald still retained of the traditional narrative. They agreed that the Israel of the Judges period (i.e. pre-monarchic Israel) was conscious of their radical break with Canaanite society, and that the Joshua event was a mythologized version of that radical break. They also agreed that the monarchic period, and particularly the forced labor under Solomon was historical, and marked a kind of covert "restoration" of many features of Canaanite society, centered on the urban temple. This restoration was, however, a betrayal of a previously existing radically anti-Canaanite Yahwistic vision.

To the minimalists, however, pre-monarchic Israel was simply a spatially reorganized Canaanite society. There were different, more dispersed settlement patterns (this is documented by Iron Age I and II archaeology), but no real ideological break. It is natural then that the monarchies which developed in the tenth century BC were Canaanite in style. The monarchies were not a betrayal of some earlier unified egalitarian vision, since we have no evidence that such a vision existed. Since David and Solomon were, as the minimalists famously contend, mythical, there were originally two Canaanite kingdoms: Israel and Judah.

So when did the idea of a radical break with Canaanite society happen? First in the declining years of the Judahite kingdom the ideas of monotheism were explicated by a minority. But it is only in the post-Exilic period, when the colonial Zionist settlers returned from Babylon, that an ideology of "We are different! We have nothing to do with these natives! We are not Canaanite! We are not the 'People of the Land,' but conquering immigrants!" became codified in the form of a historical narrative.

This historical narrative was designed to legitimate stealing the land from the native Samarian/Philistine/Idumean/non-fanatic Isrealites (the Palestinians of their day), with a fictitious Exodus event, a fictitious Joshua event, a fictitious unified monarchy under David and Solomon, and a distorted view of the real and historic dual monarchies of Israel and Judah. This distorted view, codified in the fifth or fourth century BC in the creation of the Torah and the Deuteronomistic History anachronistically foisted on those earlier kingdoms the same "We are not Canaanites!" ideology that in fact only become the majority report among the Diaspora. So the Joshua event was indeed a mythical event following the usual pagan Near Eastern ideas of justifying possession by conquest. But rather than being a royal mystification of what was originally liberation, it was all along an ideology of dispossession by a racially and religiously exclusive elite of religious fanatics. In short, there is no theologically usable past in the basic narrative Hebrew Bible, and theologically; the task is to excavate the fundamentally oppressive and exploitative lineaments of the narrative and so liberate ourselves from them.

At present, the idea that there was no Joshua event has been widely accepted. Remember how this happened: 1) Albright and company pegged it to the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age transition (roughly 1250-1210 BC), and analogized it to the Arab invasions. 2) The Arab invasion analogy was shown to be faulty and the archeology of the LB-Iron Age transition shown not to evidence of foreign conquest. Hence the new idea was indigenous peasant revolt; 3) the indigenous peasant revolt model was also shown to be faulty, and the scattered archaeological evidence of destruction of the LB-Iron Age transition in a few lowland cities seemed to have nothing to with the new settlement patterns in the uplands, settlement patterns which were taken as the visible birth of what would later be Israel.

Hence the Joshua event is not even a mystified version of a real conflict; it's just a fiction.

The only conflict left among critical scholars is whether it's a fiction of the monarchic period made to justify monarchy (the mainstream critical viewpoint), or else a fiction of the Persian period made to justify the return from exile and the founding of an exclusivist theocratic temple state (the minimalist position).

(to be continued)

NOTE: A big source of this has been the essays in Ronald E. Clements's World of Ancient Israel.
*This is meaning (at least according to Mendenhall) of the term 'Apiru, found in many Middle Bronze Age cuneiform texts from Assyria (Nuzi) to Egypt (Amarna) which he associates with "Hebrew". This association is controversial for a host of reasons.
** Jabin, king of Hazor, the greatest city of Canaan, appears in inscriptions from Hazor, but it appears to be a title, like Pharaoh, not a name.