The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

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

Against Christianity

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

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Bible - OT - Genesis: Augustine, feminist?

Augustine defends Abraham in his fathering a child with Hagar on several grounds (Contra Faustum 22).  His intention was to father a child, not to satisfy lust.  Since evil is in the will, and Abraham acted with good will, his action was not adultery.  Sarah shows the same virtue: She doesn’t cling to her husband with carnal desire but instead encourages him to father the child that she cannot give him.

More interestingly, Augustine cites 1 Corinthians 7:4 (wife has power over the husband’s body) to defend the claim that “Although in the other acts that pertain to human peace, a wife owes obedience to her husband, in this one aspect by which the two sees are distinguished in their flesh and joined together by fleshly intercourse, a husband and a wife have similar power over each other.”  A bit later he adds, Sarah “in no way abandoned her marital fidelity or denied the authority of her husband [while in Pharaoh's harem], just as he was not an adulterer when he obeyed the authority of his wife and consented to father a child from her maidservant.”  Abraham doesn’t sin because he is submitting to proper authority in the use of his body, the authority of his wife.

This doesn’t give blanket permission to couples to have “open” marriages: “whoever took as an example in his own defense the action of Abraham’s sleeping with the maidservant of his wife, because he fathered a child by Hagar, would be corrected  - chastised not just with rods but even with clubs, so that he would not meet with eternal punishment along with other adulterers.”

Bible - OT - Genesis: Seizing wells

In  Genesis 20, Abimelech takes Sarah.  In chapter 21, Isaac is born and Hagar is sent away.  At the end of chapter 21, though, Abimelech is back, and Abraham brings up a complaint against Abimelech about the seizure of his wells.

As Larry Lyke notes, “Following the events of chapter 20, it is hard to miss the significance of Abraham’s complaint that Abimelech has taken his ‘well.’  The juxtaposition of these texts is as close as our text comes to making explicit the association of women and wells in our narratives.”  Reinforcing this is the fact that the well is named Beer-sheba, the well of the oath or the well of seven – a reference to the seven ewes that Abraham gives to Abimelech: “The association of the well of Beer-sheba with sheep connects this passage to the betrothal scenes.  This all suggests that the cultural and literary competence that informs these texts strongly links women, wells, and sheep – all symbols of fertility.”

Bible - OT - Genesis: Jacob the Sacrifice

The Bible first mentions “fragrance” in connection with Noah’s sacrifice following the flood.  He offers up a pacifying (a “noachic”) fragrance by turning animals to smoke (Genesis 8:21).

The next time there’s a fragrance, it’s Jacob dressed in borrowed clothing, seeking blessing from Isaac (Genesis 27:27).  As Yahweh “smelled the smell” of Noah’s sacrifice, so Isaac “smells the smell” of the firstborn’s garment on the second-born’s body.  Isaac corresponds to Yahweh, Jacob to Noah (or, more strictly, to Noah’s sacrifice).  Sacrifice is clothing, a covering of fragrance that covers over out natural aroma.

It is poetically and theologically fitting that the verb “smell” puns with the noun “aroma.”  Poetically because of the sound: Yahweh and Isaac both ruach a reyach.  Theologically because the verb “smell” is spelled identically to the noun for breath, wind, Spirit.  Yahweh’s exhalation is ruach but the same word is used for His inhalation.  And this suggests a running pun throughout the Old Testament: Wherever there is “fragrance,” breath/Spirit is lingering nearby.  And this suggests another dimension of sacrifice: It is a clothing of fragrance because it is the clothing of Spirit.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Noah’s Ark

Faustus doesn’t believe that the Old Testament provides testimonies of Christ, and Augustine sets out to prove him wrong:

“The ark was three hundred cubits long so that, all told, it was six times fifty cubits, just as all the time of this world is stretched out over six ages, in all of which Christ never ceases to be proclaimed.  in five ages he was predicted by prophecy; in the sixth he had been made known everywhere by the gospel.  The ark’s height rises to thirty cubits, the number that the length of three hundred cubits contains ten times.  For Christ is our height, and when he was thirty years of age, he consecrated the teaching of the gospel, testifying that he did not come to destroy but to fulfill the law.  But the heat of the law is recognized in the ten commandments.  Hence, the length of the ark is completed by ten times thirty cubits.  And for this reason Noah is counted as the tenth from Adam.  The timbers of the ark are glued together with pitch on the inside and on the outside in order to signify the tolerance of love in the framework of unity, so that fraternal unity does not yield to the scandals that try th Church, whether from those who are inside or from those who are outside, and so that the bond of peace is not destroyed.  For pitch is a very hot and strong glue that signifies the ardor of love, which tolerates all things with great strength in order to maintain a spiritual community.”

Take that, Faustus.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Sevens

In his lively recent study of creation, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder, William Brown uses the typical weapons to neutralize the historical claims of Genesis 1: ANE parallels, hermeneutics, a one-sided view of biblical authority.  He takes contemporary scientific theories far too seriously, and bends the Bible until it fits.

But there are some valuable things here too.

Like: “God ‘saw’ and pronounced created ‘good’ seven times, ‘earth’ or ‘land’ (same word in Hebrew) appears twenty-one times; ‘God’ is repeated thirty-five times.  The number seven, or multiples thereof, also crops up within certain discrete passages: Genesis 1:1 consists of seven words; 1:2 features fourteen words; Genesis 2:1-3 renders a word count of thirty five.  In fact, the total word count of the narrative proper (1:1-2:3) is 469 in Hebrew (7 x 67).”

Like most commentators on Genesis 1-2, Brown recognizes the connections with temple-building, but goes further to suggest that the text actually forms a triadic structure matching the structure of Israel’s sanctuary: Day 0 (1:1) is the portico, the six days form the nave, and the Holy of Holies is the Sabbath.  The temple-building includes the installation of an image of the Creator, the creation of man on Day 6.m

Bible - OT - Genesis: World of lust

John Paul II offers a profound and subtle analysis of the  the sources of sexual deviance in his theology of the body.  The steps are:

1. Lust is a disorder of the spirit, and breaks the natural bond between body and soul.  Men no longer act as single simple beings, their bodily actions an expression of a person.

2. This is linked to shame.  Due to the breakdown of the unity of spirit and body, human beings lose the confidence that their bodies express their persons.  Lacking such confidence in the “spousal meaning of the body” and the gifted character of creation, men want to hide their bodies from visibility.  They no longer are certain of their right to signify their presence in the visible world, no longer confident of being images of God.

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Bible - OT - Genesis: Sex as theistic proof

Why is it not good for man to be alone?  John Paul II said it was because Adam needed an other in order to realize the relation of mutual self-gift that is the fullness of humanity’s imaging of the Triune life.  In the process he suggests a kind of theistic proof from sexual difference.

The reality of mutual reciprocity is evident in the body, and in the specific forms of the bodies of male and female: “Exactly through the depth of [Adam's] original solitude, man now emerges in the dimension of reciprocal gift, the expression of which – by that very fact the expression of his existence as a person – is the human body in all the original truth of its masculinity and femininity.  The body, which expresses femininity ‘for’ masculinity and, vice versa, masculinity ‘for’ femininity, manifests the reciprocity and the communion of persons.  It expresses it through gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence.”

The similarity and difference between male and female bodies, their created suitability and “fit,” points to the fact that male and female are created to give themselves to one another.  And this is a theistic proof of sorts:

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Bible - OT - Genesis: Living House

No human being gets anointed in Genesis; only pillars (Gen 28:18; 35:14).  The pillars represent the “house” of Yahweh, the cornerstones of the future temple.

It’s not until Exodus 29 that we read of a human being anointed with oil.  Aaron is the first Christ.  He is also Bethel, the gate of God, the living house of Yahweh.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Bone of the day

The odd Hebrew phrase “in the bone of the day” (translated as “the very same day”) occurs in Genesis 7 (Noah enters the ark), Genesis 17 (circumcision of Abram’s household), Exodus 12 (Passover), and Leviticus 23 (day of atonement).

Though the phrase is used a few other times in the OT, perhaps the repetition of the phrase joins these events together.  In the flood, the world is “circumcised” and we have a foreshadowing of the Passover and the ultimate atonement.

What makes these “bone” days?  Literally, the “bone of the day” has been taken as a reference to noonday – the “strength” of the day.  That may be, but why describe strength as “bone”?  Bones are  structuring organs for the human body.  The bone of days are days that provide a skeletal structure to time.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Knowledge

How do we know things?  Experimentation, deduction, observation?

In Genesis, knowledge is first associated with two things – with food and with sex.  There is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit opens the eyes of Adam and Eve so that they perceive that they are naked.  Then Adam knows his wife and she conceives Cain.

If we want a strictly biblical answer: Knowledge is eating.  Knowledge is sex.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Flesh of flesh

John Paul II suggests that Adam’s wedding song, celebrating Eve as “flesh of flesh” and “bone of bone” should not be understood merely as a statement of derivation.  Even is “flesh of flesh” not merely because she was taken from flesh; the phrases are superlatives, like “holy of holies” or “Song of songs.”  Eve is not just more human flesh; she is the perfection of flesh.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Adam’s solitide

In one of the early meditations in his Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body, John Paul II mused on the anthropological import of Adam’s initial solitude in the garden. He notes that the story of Adam’s naming the animals points to the fact that “self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of this world, of all visible creatures, of all the living beings to which man has given their names.” This is self-knowledge, and not merely knowledge of the other creatures because in naming the animals Adam discovers “his own dissimilarity before them,” so that “with this knowledge, which makes him go in some way outside of his own being, man at the same time reveals himself to himself in all the distinctiveness of his being.”

The naming of the animals, which takes place before the differentiation of Adam into male and female, is thus a way of displaying humanity’s distinction from the animals, the fact that “he cannot identify himself essentially with the visible world of the other living beings.”  And this, in turn, places man in his fundamental relation, with God: “the created man finds himself from the first moment of his existence before God.”

And yet (beyond John Paul): It is not good for him to be alone before God.  Before God, not merely in his “cultural” work of filling and subduing, man needs a helper suitable to him.  He needs a liturgical partner.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Seed

The word “seed” is used six times in Genesis 1, twice each in verses 11, 12, and 29.  None of these refers to a human being.  The first use of the word for a human being comes in 3:15, which is the next time the word is used after chapter 1.  Again the word is doubled: “enmity between your seed and her seed.”

The distinction and analogy between “seed” and “seed” is important.  Fruit trees bearing seed are types of men – or, better, women – bearing seed.

The numerology is important too.  The seventh use of the word is a reference to the seed of the serpent.  As the seventh seed, he owns the first week of human history.  But there’s another seed coming, “her seed,” the seed of the woman, the eighth seed who begins a new week.

The next time the word is used in Genesis is 4:25, to describe Seth.  Neither Cain nor Abel is “seed.”   But Seth is, and specifically he is a seed appointed by God, to replace Abel, the second second-born.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Tragic brotherhood

Citing the Oresteia, Kass points to the “tragic” character of sibling relations in heroic societies.  Though he does not mean the word “tragic” in this sense, it seems that this is bound up with the essentially backward-looking character of brotherhood.  Cain and Abel are bound only by their common origin; everything else, Kass points out, diverges – occupation, names, birth order, Eve’s enthusiasm at their birth.  Nothing beckons from the future, drawing them to comic cooperation and co-belligerency.

For brotherly rivalry to be healed, there must be a common destiny, a common project.  Eschatology is the medicine the solves sibling rivalry.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Sororocide?

In his meditation on the births of Cain and Abel (The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis) , Leon Kass notes the difference between male/female and brother/brother relations.  Man and woman “are defined relative to each other, and their relationship is incited by desire seeking fusion, which in turn points forward toward offspring.”  Brothers are not complementary; though they share the same parents, they are not oriented to each other: “the relation of the sons to one another [is] rather like parallel lines, not intersecting ones,” both lines pointing backward to parents.  To be man and wife is to look ahead to children; to be brothers is to look backward to common parents.

As a result, brothers are natural rivals, not naturally complementary.  Sisters too are rivals, he admits, but the rivalry is different.  Instead of rivalry for mastery and primacy in the world, sisters (Leah/Rachel) are rivals over the power of procreation and the love of a husband.  Thus, “the prototypical story of sibling rivalry to the point of fratricide is not sex-neutral.  It is not by chance a story about brothers.”  He adds: “Very likely for the same reason, there is no special word for sister killing; ‘sororocide’ is not an English word.”

This is a very provocative line of argument, and highlights, among much else, the difficulty of healing brother-brother relations.  It is no less a miracle of the Spirit that brothers get along than that sinners are restored to fellowship with God.

Bible - OT - Genesis: Company of Nations

Chee-Chiew Lee has an interesting article on the phrase “company of nations” in Genesis 35:11.  She links the promise that Jacob will become a company of nations to the promise that Abraham would be a father of many nations in Genesis 17:4-5.  But 35:11 adds an important gloss to the earlier promise:

“While the promise that Abraham will be the ‘father of many nations’ may still be fulfilled to some extent by his physical descendants, the promise that Jacob will become ‘a nation and a company of nations’ can only be fulfilled beyond his physical descendants.”  The phrase thus indicates that Israel will include not only the physical descendants of Jacob but also other nations.  Ultimately, the promise to Jacob is fulfilled in the new “Israel of God” that consists of Jews and Gentiles (Galatians 6:16b).

Bible - OT - Genesis: Adam and Elohim

Paul Niskanen has an insightful analysis of Genesis 1:27 in the latest JBL.  He starts with the question of whether Barth’s view that the image of God is found in relationality and specifically in sexual difference has any exegetical support.  He reviews the current discussion, and notes that there is a “virtual consensus” that views dominion as the content of the image of God, with the corollary that relationality and sexual difference are not essential to the image.  Niskanen differs on a number of grounds.

1) Phyllis Bird, Richard Middleton and others have disputed the idea that Genesis 1:27 (“male and female He created them”) is part of the description of the image of God begun in 1:27a (“elohim created ha’adam in his image”).   In most Hebrew poetry, Middleton argues, a third line isn’t parallel but introduces a new thought.  Niskanen disputes this for several reasons.

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Bible - OT - Genesis: Jacob the priest

When Rebekah sends her younger son to her husband, she clothes him in goat skins (Genesis 27:15-16).  To this point in Genesis, the only other people to be clothed were Adam and Eve, clothed with skins as they left Eden (3:21).  Rebekah stands in the place of Yahweh to “invest” her son.

In the light of later uses of this verb, we can infer that Rebekah is clothing her son as a priest.  She “fills his hand” with savory food, sends him into the inner room to his father, in hopes of winning a blessing.

(The investiture theme in Genesis culminates with the robing of Joseph in 41:42.  His garments are not animal skins but linen, along with a ring and a gold necklace.)

Bible - OT - Genesis: Twins

“When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.”  That’s Genesis 25:24, and it’s talking about Rebekah pregnant with Jacob and Esau.

“It came about at the time she was giving birth, that behold, there were twins in her womb.”  That’s Genesis 38:27, and it’s talking about Tamar pregnant with Perez and Zerah.

These are the only twins in Genesis; in both cases, there’s a reversal of primogeniture; within the tribe of Judah, the history of Jacob and Esau is lived out.

One of the things that intrigues here, however, is the parallel this suggests between Rebekah and Tamar.  Both deceive men in order to ensure that God’s purposes are done.  Both are heroines.  If Isaac didn’t anticipate Judah’s words, he should have: “She is more righteous than I.”

Bible - OT - Genesis: Cutting off flesh

In Genesis 9:11, Yahweh promises not to “cut off flesh” by water.  That is the covenant with Noah.

A few chapters later, Yahweh tells Abram that he must cut off the flesh of all male children of Israel, not by water but by a knife.

That means that Abram’s children receive the “cutting off” that all flesh deserves, and got, in the flood.  Or, it means that Abram’s cildren are the people who live beyond flesh, the people who have passed under the knife and through the flood that removes flesh.

It also means that the Noachic covenant is over.  The world that then was was destroyed by a flood, and a new world came into being.  But now God does again cut off flesh through water, the water, the water of baptism.

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