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Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Yahweh curses Israel for breaking covenant. More specifically, Israel will become a sign and wonder to the nations “because you did not serve Yahweh your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things” (Deuteronomy 28:47). What satisfies God is not just obedience, but joyful obedience.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 6:43 am
INTRODUCTION
We should pray God’s promises back to Him. But God has not only issued promises; He has also issued threats. Faithful prayer asks God to be true to both.
THE TEXT
“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. Let my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, as raindrops on the tender herb, and as showers on the grass. . . .” (Deuteronomy 32:1-43).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 6:53 am
According to Deuteronomy 20, any man who had built a house, planted a vineyard, or married a wife without enjoying their benefits and joys was excused from military service. While it was certainly possible for a 20-year-old Israelite to be unmarried and propertyless, it would seem that the military was largely made up of men who already had these benefits of peace. I base this on the supposition that men would be entering on an independent adulthood at 20, the same age they became eligible for military service. Also, I’m assuming that Israelite ages of marriage were comparable to other ancient civilizations; Roman girls, for instance, were considered marriageable at 12 and adults at 14, at which age men would begin to call them “domina.” Thus, Israel’s army would largely consist of men who already had some experience of the benefits of adult life in peacetime.
This has important effects on the makeup and psychology of the military. First, the men going to war had some sense of why they were fighting and what they were defending. Second, home, vineyard, and wife provided a triple anchor that kept an Israelite warrior from getting too attached to the battlefield. This was particularly important in the ancient world, when war was for some men was life, not an irritating interruption of life.
Nearly 99,000 of the total 281,000 members of the Air Force are single, and about 112,000 of the total number are under 25. (See www.afpc.randolph.af.mil/demographics/ReportSearch.asp.) What kind of incentives are we building into our military by sending twentysomethings with no life at home and nothing to lose into battle?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, July 11, 2005 at 7:30 pm
Sandra Richter gave a very stimulating paper on the use of the phrase “place my name there” in Deuteronomy. Her main concern was to argue that the “place where my name dwells” in Dt 12 is fulfilled within Dt in chapter 27, with the ceremony of covenant-renewal at Mount Ebal. She suggested that Ebal looms much larger in biblical history than many have believed.
The most interesting part of the paper for me, however, was Richter’s interpretation of the phrase “place my name there.” Frequently, this is seen as a move toward a more “transcendent” view of Yahweh; He cannot be contained in heaven and earth, and so he cannot dwell in a temple directly. He must instead dwell in his “name,” a quasi-hypostatic reality that is yet distinct from Yahweh. I have pushed this phrase in a Trinitarian direction in the past. (Barth does too, BTW.)
Richter argued, however, that the phrase is well-known in ANE texts, and refers to the erection of a “display monument” marking a victory and a claim to the land where the monument is erected. Originally, “placing the name” meant inscribing the name of a deity on a stele to mark out a particular place as a place claimed by the deity; stele of this sort are frequently found in connection with altars at cultic sites. Eventually the phrase came to refer to the inscription of a stele, whether it was a name or not. In Dt 27, the stele erected at Gerazim and Ebal are not inscribed with the name YHWH, but with the Torah. Finally, the phrase comes to mean simply the erection of a display monument as a whole; the “name” comes to mean the monument itself.
Richter’s doctoral dissertation is on this subject, and includes some discussion of 1 Kings 8’s use of the phrase. I haven’t seen the dissertation yet, so what follows is merely my speculative and hot-brained extrapolation from Richter’s thesis. If by the time of Solomon the “name” referred to the monument as a whole, the temple itself seems to be the monument in view. Yahweh chooses a “place to set My name there” (an alliterative and assonant phrase in Heb), and the name is the temple itself. This is His claim to ownership of the land, of victory over the enemies in the land, and therefore presupposes the rest or peace that Solomon says is the prerequisite for the building of the temple. It is also a sign that Yahweh has bequeathed the land as a covenant grant to His people. Finally, the Trinitarian dimension may still work, but at a different level. If the “name” is the monumental architecture of the temple, then an identification of the “name” with the coming Messiah is still possible. The temple itself is the name, and this anticipates NT talk both about Jesus as temple and Jesus as the Word of the Father. This also helps to explain the “mediatorial” role that the temple plays in Kings; prayer is made “toward this house,” and the house serves as an interchange between Israel on earth and Yahweh in heaven.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 22, 2004 at 8:56 pm
Commenting on Deuteronomy 30:9ff in his new translation of the Pentateuch, Robert Alter offers the following comment on “Who will go up for us to the heavens, etc”:
“The Deuteronomist, having given God’s teaching a local place and habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods. It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm ?Eas Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back the secret of immortality. This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God’s word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 5, 2004 at 9:14 am
Several interesting articles in the current issue of JSOT:
1) Yairah Amit of Tel Aviv University writes on “Progression as a Rhetorical Device in Biblical Literature.” The concept is fairly simple: He’s pointing to places where, in narrative or speech, the biblical writers list a series of events or points, which progress toward a climax (or a nadir). Progression arranges the elements of the text in “an ascending or descending order: from the general to the particular, or vice verse; from minor to major, or the reverse; from the expected to the unexpected; the impersonal to the personal, and so on. Often the final step in the progression is the climactic one, while each of the preceding steps plays its part in expanding or narrowing the sequence, and thereby shedding more light on the subject” (p 9).
Some of Amit’s examples are particularly illuminating. He points out, for example, the sequence in the account of the results of the battle of Aphek in 1 Sam 4: Israel is routed, many die, the ark is taken, and Eli’s sons are killed (vv 10-11). This follows the same order as the introduction to the battle in vv 2-4, which records another defeat of Israel, the fact that many were killed, and then indicates that the ark was brought by the priests (vv 2-4). Thus, these two progressions form an inclusio around the account of the battle. But within that inclusion, there is a sharp contrast between expectation and result, particularly in the last two elements of the sequence: the arrival of the ark and priests in vv 2-3 evokes hope of victory, but the climax of the story shows the ark in captivity and the priests dead. The same events are found in the announcement to Eli later in the account, but the order of the last two elements is changed: Israel fled, a great slaughter, sons dead, ark taken. And it is the last element that causes Eli to topple from his seat and break his neck.
Another interesting example is the story of Delilah and Samson (Judg 16:4-21). There is no progression apparent in Samson’s lies about the source of his strength, but there is an increasingly manipulative and aggressive response from Delilah. At first, she asks politely to know her lover’s secret; then she complains, but still politely; the third response is more aggressive and vigorous, and lacks the polite touches Delilah deployed earlier; finally, she questions Samson’s love for her, which causes him finally to give in.
2) Ronald Bergey traces the intertextual links between the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 and the prophecy of Isaiah, particularly chapters 1, 5, 28, 30. He is excruciatingly careful about assessing the verbal parallels, and makes a good case that Deuteronomy 32 plays a “compositional role” in Isaiah’s prophecy and that Deuteronomy influenced Isaiah rather than the reverse. This has important implications for the dating of Deuteronomy, the hinge of the documentary hypothesis (which still, astonishingly, has wide acceptance). It may also have a number of interesting implications for NT theology. NT Wright has argued that the latter chapters of Deuteronomy provide a narrative subtext for much of Paul’s theology, and showing that Isaiah is expanding on Deuteronomy (at least at some points) could enrich the background of Paul’s teaching. Working in the opposite direction: Baker is publishing a series of volumes examining the influence of Isaiah’s “new exodus” theme on the gospels and Acts, and noting the links with Deuteronomy 32 would enrich our understanding of the gospels. Putting these two together, seeing the links between the two OT texts might be an important aspect of an effort to show the continuity between the gospels and Paul.
3) Keith Bodner offers what in my judgment is an unsuccessful treatment of the role of Eliab, David’s older brother, in 1 Sam. Eliab is the brother who appears before Samuel, and is also the brother who rebukes David when the latter inquires about the reward for defeating Goliath. Bodner says that Eliab’s narrative role is to reveal (to the reader) complexities and dark corners of other characters. In particular, his harsh rebuke to David, that he has an “evil heart,” is partly true, or at least a warning to us that David is not so squeaky clean as he might appear. I’m not at all persuaded, partly because this interpretation relies on recent work that presents a much more negative picture of David than the Bible itself does (”David’s secret demons,” and all that). When a scholar finds things troubling in David’s actions that the biblical writers do NOT find troubling, we seem to have reason to suspect that the scholar is bringing his own sensibilities to the text rather than explaining what the ancient writer wanted to convey. Some modern scholars don’t like David, and find him unnerving; but they shouldn’t pretend that the biblical writers thought the same. Further, Bodner’s treatment misses a crucial element of the typology in this section of Samuel. David is being presented as a new Joseph: the youngest son in a family dominated by males; he is successful and “acts wisely” in his service to Saul (ch 18), but is persecuted unjustly; and, his brother attacks him when he offers to take care of the giant, as Joseph’s brothers resented and attacked him. Bodner perhaps would respond by defending Reuben, Simeon, and the rest, or be suggesting that the character of Joseph is as “artfully complex” as David’s. It’s far more plausible that the writer of Samuel surrounded David with an aura of Joseph-ness to commend the young hero, and to present him as a “savior” of Israel. Bodner’s article is a good example of how literary-critical treatments of the Bible can go astray, mainly by assessing biblical narratives as if the writers had the same literary interests as modern novelists.
4) L. Daniel Hawk has a fascinating article on the parallels between the Oresteia and the account of the rise of Israel’s monarchy. I want to read this one more carefully before summarizing it, however.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 7:26 am
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