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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
In her contribution to Hagar, Sarah and their Children (WJK), Phyllis Trible develops an interesting feminist reading of the story of Hagar. Her targets (surprise!) patriarchy and hierarchy, but along the way she makes some insightful observations on the text. She notes, for instance, that Hagar’s departure from the household of Abraham into the wilderness (Gen 16) is described in language reminiscent of the expulsion from Eden and anticipatory of the exodus. She “suffers affliction” from Sarah, just as Israel will be afflicted in Egypt.
Once in the wilderness, she is the subject of a number of firsts. She is the first and only woman in the Bible to be promised a numerous progeny. She is the “first woman in the Bible to receive an annunciation.” She is the first to weep in the Bible.
Trible’s take on this passage is not compelling, but her interpretation makes it clear that Paul was not making it up when he found an allegory of Israel and the church in the story of Hagar and Sarah.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 7:03 pm
At the same SBL seminar, Rusty Reno examined Genesis 3:1, following the traditional interpretation that the serpent is a disguise for the devil. He dealt with the larger pattern of biblical evidence first, showing that the Bible links the devil and the serpent, and links the devil to acts of temptation.
The bulk of his paper focused on two themes associated with Satan throughout the Bible. References to Satan signal the universal or cosmic dimensions of a local event; and references to the devil, especially in Genesis 3, serve the purposes of theodicy.
Reno developed the second point along these lines. Human beings were created with an embodied freedom. This freedom is not unbounded. This in fact is one of the themes of Genesis 3, that our choices are always bounded by forces outside our own control. We are not self-made; and our decisions and actions are limited by pre-existing conditions outside ourselves.
Following Augustine, Reno suggested that free human actions are motivated actions, and that motivations arise from the perception of the world. The process Augustine has in mind seems to be this: We perceive a good thing in the world, our desires are aroused, and we act according to our desires. Reno suggested that angels, being spiritual, do not act out of this kind of interaction with the creation. Rather, angels make choices, for good or ill, as a pure choice.
Now, if Adam and Eve sinned without Satan tempting, that would suggest that sin arises from the interaction with of human beings with the world, which of course casts doubt on the very-goodness of the creation. Because their sin is not a response to the world but a response to a previously fallen angel. God’s goodness and the goodness of His creation is preserved.
But, Reno asks, doesn’t this undo human responsibility? No, because, as Reno says, all human freedom is led. We are created with a natural inclination to obedience service - to something. That something may be God or may be the devil or may be sin. We are never leaderless. That something is never ourselves, however much we might think so. We may act out of fantasies of self-making, but these fantasies come from elsewhere.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 18, 2007 at 5:51 pm
J. Richard Middleton gave an intriguing paper on Genesis 2-3 at an SBL seminar on the theological interpretation of Scripture. He was trying to answer the question of the nature of the first sin, and concluded that the first sin, which led to a proliferation of sin in succeeding generations, was the violation of the limit that God set. Violation of the boundaries that God sets, the failure to respect the radical otherness of the “Primal Other” unleashed boundary-busting sin that violated the limits and otherness of human others.
Along the way, Middleton made some good observations on the text.
He suggested that the plot of Genesis 2-3 is a matter of Yahweh meeting two lacks in the original creation (much as he meets the “lacks” enumerated in 1:2 during the creation week). The two lacks are a lack of water and man for the ground, and a lack of a companion for the man. Each of these lacks is filled in a two-stage process: Water flows from the earth, and then Adam is created; Adam views and names the animals, and then Yahweh creates woman. The fulfillment of the lack is marked by a pun: <em>adam/adamah and ish/ishshah</em>. After Adam and Eve sin, there is dissonance at precisely these points: Adam is estranged from the ground that will produce thorns and thistles; Adam and Eve turn on one another instead of being harmoniously helpful.
Another pun, on “nude” and “shrewd” (as Everett Fox translates), points to another dimension of the effect of sin. Though the Hebrew words are similar, Middleton suggested that in meaning the two words are virtually antonyms. Adam and Eve are initially naked and open, but when they have sinned they need coverings and protections, and become not naked and transparent but “shrewd,” like the sly serpent.
During questioning, Middleton made a couple of other interesting points. He argued that the tree of knowledge would eventually have been offered to man, citing passages in Samuel and Kings where humans receive the knowledge of good and evil. The reason they didn’t receive access to the tree immediately was that they weren’t prepared; they needed to grow up.
He also suggested, intriguingly, that “original sin” in the sense of the systematic dominance of sin, doesn’t come directly from Adam but develops through the events of Genesis 4-6. Cain still has the capacity to resist and triumph over sin. But by the time of the sons of God, sin has become so endemic that Yahweh destroys the earth and starts over. Systematic sin develops in time, not all at once in the garden.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 18, 2007 at 5:49 pm
James Jordan points out in an essay on the Ascension offering that the early chapter of Genesis follow a sacrificial sequence: Sacrifice outside the garden, then Enoch ascends to the Lord, then the world is washed in the flood, and finally Noah joins his forefather on a high place. This sequence helps to fill out Peter’s claim that the flood is a baptism: It would seem that Noah is saved from the water, rather than saved by water. But in the flood, Noah moves upward as a result of the flood. Because the waters buoy him up, he ends up on a mountain as a new Adam. Baptism “saves” in the same way, by elevating us to the garden on the mountain that is the highest of the mountains of the earth.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 6:51 pm
INTRODUCTION
Raising children is a way of throwing out a line to the future. It is inherently an act of faith, an effort to outlive ourselves. That’s true of all parenting. But Christian parents need to exercise the full range of theological virtues: faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13:13). This wee we look at faith.
THE TEXT
“When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless. And I will make My covenant between Me and you, and will multiply you exceedingly.’ . . .” (Genesis 17:1-27).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, October 29, 2007 at 7:11 am
Even before Cain, there is a hint – only a hint, but a hint – of a better city to come. It is not good for man to be alone, Yahweh says of Adam, and then takes a rib from Adam’s side and makes that rib into a woman.
Eve is not a city. But Eve is the prototype of a different sort of city, a bridal city. The hint is in the strange verb that Genesis 2:22 uses. Yahweh doesn’t make or form Eve from the rib of Adam, but “builds” the woman. Eve is the first thing built in the Bible, and the second thing to be built is Cain’s city – that’s the next use of that verb.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 7:51 am
Girard says that “the Bible unveils the victim mechanism that lies behind polytheism and mythology, but not only behind polytheism and mythology, for its full expression underlies everything we know as human culture. The Bible recognizes this in the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain murders his brother, God bans him from the soil, making him a wanderer on the earth, and God puts a mark on him, a sign to protect him from suffering what he made Abel suffer. Then Cain builds the first city, and so civilization begins. The story of Genesis 4 tells us, in effect, that the sign of Cain is the sign of civilization.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 7:48 am
Two notes about Babel:
1) What does it mean to construct a tower to heaven? Traditionally, this has been understood literally: They were trying to build a tower high enough to reach the sky. But were they really that naive? Surely they had climbed mountains and realized that the sky was much higher. If the tower was to be the temple center of the city (the acropolis), then a “tower reaching to heaven” may simply be a way of describing a building that forms a connection point of heaven and earth. Babel’s tower is an anti-temple, a false portal to heaven.
2) This leads to the second observation. Babel is built by Shemites who assist Nimrod the hunter, a descendant of Ham, in building Babel (cf Genesis 10:9-10). Shemites throw themselves into a Hamite project. When the temple is built, the relation is reversed. Hiram of Tyre, a Hamite, pitches in to help Solomon. The temple is the anti-Babel, a Shemite project to which Hamites attach themselves.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 8:24 am
When Adam and Eve sinned, Yahweh cursed the ground on account of/in relation to Adam (Gen 3:17). Following the flood and in response to Noah’s offering, He declares “I will no more curse the ground on account of man” (ADAM; Gen 8:21). Though the word for “curse” differs in these two passages, the preposition used in conjunction with the verb is the same - “on account of/in relation to.”
Gen 8:21, further, occurs in a passage that clearly renews Noah in Adamic status: He is told to be fruitful, told that he will have dominion over the animals, is given a food law. And this is quickly followed by the fall of Ham.
It appears that the curse laid down in Gen 3:17 is somehow, to some extent, reversed by the process of flood-and-sacrifice.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 6:18 am
The one thing that is “not good” in the original creation is Adam’s loneliness. And how does God go about addressing that imperfection? He puts Adam into deep sleep, tears out a rib from his side, closes up the flesh, and builds a woman from the rib. The solution to what is “not good” is something like death, and something like resurrection.
That’s always the solution. When God sees that something is “not good” in us, in our life situation, He tends not to ease us into a new stage. He kills us, in order to raise us up again. That has to happen, because it is a universal truth that “unless the seed go into the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, March 17, 2007 at 6:28 am
INTRODUCTION
Every family lives between the sometimes contradictory demands of the past and the future. Every family also lives between the sometimes contradictory demands of the “inside” and the “outside.” Families have to develop their own distinctive “culture,” but also have to interact with other families and the wide culture. This too is part of family life on the cross.
THE TEXT
“This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. . . .” (Genesis 2:4-25).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 12, 2007 at 8:37 am
INTRODUCTION
Scripture demands that we honor our fathers and mothers, the past of our family. But families only exist because of a break with the past. To form a family, a man and woman leave their families and cleave to one another to form a new family for the future. Families have to work out tensions between honoring the past and aiming for the future.
THE TEXT
“And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.’ Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. . . .” (Genesis 2:18-25).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 5, 2007 at 8:25 am
Richard Davidson, writing in the Andrews University Seminary Studies (Spring 2004), shows that the restoration of the world after the flood follows the creation week:
1. Spirit/wind, Gen 1:2; 8:1
2. Division of waters, 1:6-8; 8:1-5
3. Dry land and plants, 1:9-13; 8:5-12
4. Lights, 1:14-19; 8:13-14
5. Animals (birds first), 1:20-23; 8:15-17
6. Animals with man, 1:24-31; 8:18-9:7
7. Sign of the covenant, 2:1-3; 9:8-17
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 4:54 pm
In a discussion of NT Wright’s new book on evil, the question of pre-fall carnivores came up. Both Wright and his respondent basically agreed that animals killed and ate other animals before the fall, and that this was not incompatible with Yahweh’s judgment that this was “very good.” But both also emphasized that this was part of the immaturity of the original creation. That’s as good a way as I’ve heard to make sense of the biblical data: Animals were created to kill and eat one another; that’s good, but it’s not best.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I don’t recall now if I noticed the connections between Isaac and Saul in 1 Samuel. Isaac abuses his divinely favored son Jacob; Saul abuses his son-in-law David. Isaac preferred Esau, the eldest, to the second son; Saul prefers Jonathan to David. One of the key discontinuities is Jonathan’s behavior. He is the anti-Esau, the older son who willingly cedes his place of priority to his younger “brother” David.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Some thoughts on the sun/light symbolism in Genesis, inspired by a number of fine student papers on the subject.
1) The symbolism is set up in the first day of creation. Creation’s original state is dark, formless, and empty; and the work of creation produces a world that is bright, ordered, and teeming. From 1:2 on, darkness is a “reversion” to an original state, prior to the ordering work of the Spirit; light is the beginning of a new creation. Sunset is “decreation”; sunrise is new creation.
2) The sun is first described as the “greater light” in the heavens, created on Day 4. As the greater light, it “divides” light and darkness, and division is an act of creation (God divides in order to form). The greater light also rules, marks times and seasons, and is for a sign.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 11:07 am
The original formless-and-void creation was dark. God created light, and saw it was good. We might think that the creation of light itself would be sufficient to divide light and darkness, but that’s not the way Genesis tells the story. It takes a distinct act to separate light and darkness.
This is the pattern of new creation as well: The light shines into the darkness. Then, in a distinct act, God separates light and darkness. Jesus comes into the world as the light of life; but it takes a “second” act of God to disentangle the light from the darkness that seeks, unsuccessfully, to overcome it. The gospel enters a pagan culture; but it takes time, a “second” act, to set the boundaries between light and dark.
That is to say: Creation and new creation do not come simply by the Word, but by Word and Spirit.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 6:55 am
Allison offers a series of interesting connections between the early chapters of Gen and the early chapters of Ex:
1) Israel is “multiplying” (Ex 2:2) in the way that God commanded the human race to multiply (Gen 1:26-28), concluding, with some help from Samaritan texts, that MOses is another Adam.
2) Citing James Ackerman, he notes parallels between Babel and Ex. Constructing storage cities like the men of Babel, Pharaoh is going to fall.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 5, 2006 at 3:49 pm
1) Jacob goes to Paddan-Aram fleeing from his father’s house; in that far country, he endures abuse and treachery, yet returns with brides and numerous flocks and herds. When he goes out from his father’s house, he has nothing – a staff (32:10) – but he returns to his father’s house with plunder. Like the Son, Jacob goes from his father’s house to a far country to receive his inheritance.
2) The country is the land of the “sons of the east.” He goes east of Eden, into the land of exile, the land of Cain (4:16), the place of Babel (11:2). Jacob is the new Abel, who deftly eludes his murderous brother and his shifty uncle, and rules the both. Through him will be built the true tower that rises to heaven (cf. 28:17), and a true city, the city of God.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 5:25 pm
INTRODUCTION
“You are not greater than our father Jacob, are you?” asked the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar to the stranger who offered her living water. By His death and resurrection, Jesus answers that question: He is the true Israel, greater than Jacob.
THE TEXT
“Then Jacob went on his journey, and came to the land of the sons of the east. He looked, and saw a well in the field, and behold, three flocks of sheep were lying there beside it, for from that well they watered the flocks. Now the stone on the mouth of the well was large. . . .” (Genesis 29:1-12).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, April 10, 2006 at 11:32 am
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