Prophetic Tradition and History

I grew up on the notion that the Hebrew Scriptures were the recorded history of Israel. That was meshed together with the notions in school that talked about how the victors write the story. While the Bible was held in esteem as being of a different character, it was still presented with the same flavor that it must be the positive description of Israel’s history, lauding the accomplishments of Yahweh’s people across the centuries of revelation.

As time went by, however, I came to appreciate a different aspect of the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the writings of the New Testament. They may indeed have been penned by the victors in some sense, but they were not written from the perspective in which we cast history as the lauding of our heroes of old and the mythos of their accomplishments making us greater than all comers. There is a very different aspect of the Hebrew Scriptures than what we find in that kind of historiography.

While the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament do include elements of history, that was never their focus. At times, the narratives are indeed a creative retelling of some element or another of the people’s history. That telling, however, does not follow the model of a national or religious supremacy. Rather, it is always a prophetic retelling, which has an altogether different flavor.

Some of the narratives we find are critiques of the mythologies and theologies of other nations. We find a lot of that in the first chapters of Genesis. We find a recasting of the known creation myths in which the concept of a cosmic battle among the gods is reduced to Yahweh’s personal action to bring about order in the midst of chaos, creating room for establishing life upon the face of the earth. The only role the other gods find in this retelling is Yahweh’s announcement, “Let us make humanity in our image.” Then Yahweh marches ahead and accomplishes that single-handedly.

We find the flood narrative surrounding Noah, the one individual deemed worthy and blameless, the same description given earlier to Enoch, who also walked with God until God took him. In stark contrast to the Atrahasis epic, Noah is a silent actor who simply follows Yahweh’s direction in silent submission. The narrative presents the flood as a divine initiative to do away with sin. Noah is directed in the building of a wooden box. Yahweh fills it with animals and shuts the door. At the conclusion, Yahweh has restored the creation destroyed by human sinfulness. Then with Noah’s first utterance, sin has once again contaminated it all. We are not left with a story that tells about an historic event of God acting in condemnation. We are left to ponder how futile it would be for Yahweh to attempt to eradicate evil by capital punishment, for it would not change our very nature in opposing God.

Like that narrative, most of the Hebrew Scriptures are a call to reflection—theological reflection. They are a challenge for us to lift up a mirror in these narratives to view the quality of their actions and measure our own in the same manner in which we would accuse or excuse those Biblical actors. They are narratives that are more often than not critical of the players. The judges presented to us all fail to live up to the example of Othniel, about whom we know nothing beyond that Yahweh brought deliverance through him. Each successive judge failed in increasing ways to deliver Israel from their enemies and call the nation back to Yahweh, their original sin.

Just like the wilderness wandering, Joshua’s failure to conquer the entire land, and Saul’s quick departure from following Yahweh, the rest of the narratives call us to question why this people would continue to abandon Yahweh time and time again, generation after generation. Unlike the histories penned in Egypt of the heroic exploits of their kings, we find stories calling the kings, judges, priests, and prophets to account for their failures to seek the ways of Yahweh and implement the justice and economic standards they were supposed to put in place.

Rather than become the nation Yahweh called them to be, they just wanted to be like all the other nations. That is the difficulty they had in accepting Jesus, for in large part he called the nation to give up on their great desire for national and military prominence in the world. He called them instead to honor the principles upon which Yahweh had founded the nation.

A quick read of the Gospel of Mark will show just how this critical, prophetic role of Scripture was for those who honored especially those texts the Jews called The Prophets. Joshua, Judges, Kings, Samuel, and Chronicles all belong to that category. They were all critiques of Israel’s failure. Mark presents the disciples in the role of the failed followers of Yahweh. They are always asking Jesus the wrong questions, misinterpreting his words, and misapplying Scripture and tradition to life around them. Time after time, Jesus has to redirect them toward understanding what it means to love all people, to offer forgiveness with abandon, to execute justice, and to live the principles of mercy and compassion for all without distinction.

And so we must likewise be aware that the failful prophetic voice in Scripture is not there to offer a critique to the larger world we inhabit. It stands before us to allow God to raise up a mirror in front of our own eyes that we might take a good long look at our own experience, our own actions, our own heritage and received traditions. Gazing into that mirror should focus our attention on those places where we still need to grow and be transformed.

We do not need to view our history or our Scriptures after the model of “the victor writes the story.” Rather, we do best when we write the narratives in a manner that offers a critique, that allows us to look at the failures of the past and avoid them in the present. The business world understands this at some level. We look at issues from a standpoint of quality control, saying, “How can we do better?” That is the point of the Scriptures before us and their call for us to be holy. How can we become more like the Jesus we claim as Lord? How can we truly love one another as Jesus has demonstrated before us? That is the purpose of the prophetic texts before us. What will our history with them become?

— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

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