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2.3 Interpretation in the Scriptures
In this session we look at texts representing the argument in Israel about whether God required child sacrifice, or sacrifice of the firstborn. Human sacrifice makes us so queasy that we often have a hard time understanding how our ancestors in the faith could believe God required such a thing. But ritualized sacrifice worked in much the same way as the sacrifice of Achan, restoring the community’s morale.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Understanding sacrifice
Share your answers to the following questions:
- What crisis is afflicting the community in this scene? How did the human sacrifice work to restore morale in much the same way as the stoning of Achan?
- How do you think the community accomplished what for us is so very difficult, that of excluding the voice of the victim from their account of the sacrifice?
Food for thought
Join the conversation taking place around these questions in the Discussion Forum for this module.
- Were you aware that sacrifice of firstborn children was part of the religious practices of ancient Israel, as of the surrounding nations? How do you feel about that?
- The stories about human sacrifice made Marcion so queasy that he suggested we ditch such passages from our Scriptures.
- Do you feel any sympathy for Marcion’s position? Why would you want to exclude stories of human sacrifice?
- What value is there in including them?
- How has your understanding of the story of Abraham and Isaac changed?
Wrap-up question
In what ways is your understanding of what God requires from religious people changing? What does it mean to be a good religious person?
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Since I also reading the essays, I sometimes lose track of where I am. I meditate daily on the essays because the content is so rich and ever new. I came across Marcus Borg who wonderfully complements Alison by approaching the Scriptures as a human response to God. I am being slowly freed up to open the Scriptures with less fear and playing with new filters. I struggle to keep present and bring alive this “reading the Scriptures through the eyes of Jesus our rabbi” especially when going to church and hearing homilies that for me do violence to the Scriptures. Hope is growing and I am deeply excited to continue this journey.
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Well I participated in a retreat with James since I was last on here and rereading the parable of the Prodigal Son really opened my eyes and I continue to ponder the implications of this father who is self-effacing and ready to take on the role of brother in order to open the way for us to overcome our fratricidal tendencies. It is God coming from behind that I am trying to stay with in order to learn a new way of relating but it will take a long time to assimilate this and I can’t predict where it will take me.I am trying to reread the parables with the help of J. Duncan M. Derrett’s book Law in the New Testament. Too soon for playing with Scripture interpretation to show up in my life.
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I didn’t see the film but it sounds like there is famine and sickness running rampant, out of control. The human sacrifice restores morale because it unites the people and rallies them around their identity as a people of destiny, as special. It stirs up in them the belief that they will not be vanquished by the famine and sickness which fill them with fear. I think the community succeeds in excluding the voice of the victim by its frenzied unity and because they are pouring all of their fear into the ritual as a release valve. When a whole community is caught up in fear of perishing then the desire to be freed from this fear becomes utterly compelling.
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I have sympathy with Marcion but it seems very important to include these kinds of stories in the scriptures simply because this is who we are, this is how we actually do live, how human culture is formed and how the social other forms us. We cannot grapple with that which is swept under the rug; it has to be in the light. In the story of Abraham and God stretching him into a new way of receiving the blessing as gift rather than achievement offers me one more doorway into this new way of receiving our identity from God who likes us just as we are. It challenges me to believe that God’s love for Abraham would not be any less if he had sacrificed his son. We are all trapped in the same games and each one of us is invited to offer our violent mimetic selves to God for transformation.
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My understanding of being a religious person is definitely changing also through some significant encounters with other persons, Christian and not who have learned to not make idols or absolutes out of the forms we use to relate to God. I am beginning to enter more deeply into the work of letting go of the craving to grasp onto a fake identity, facing into despair and waiting in unknowing for God to recreate me slowly in God’s pattern of desire; carving out space for that still, small voice and that partnering with the One who is deathless and fearless.
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Yes, it is very human to have sympathy with Marcion as we all grapple with the paradox of a violent punishing God in some of the Scriptures and the concept that God is Love. James’ wonderful teaching on this shows us that it is our violence which is projected onto God. As you say we are all “trapped in these games and each one of us is invited to offer our violent mimetic selves to God for transformation.” Beautifully put, Maginel.
The “Cloud of Unknowing” and the “dark night of the soul” of John of the Cross, among many others in the contemplative tradition, describe the process that you speak of Maginel.
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“Understanding Sacrifice,” Section 2.3’s subtitle, refers to the sacrifice of society’s innocent and silenced victims. Discussion questions for this section ask the student to reiterate the community crisis described in the narrative vignette; and then to explain a) how human sacrifice worked to restore community morale; and b) how the community silenced the victim’s voice.
The “great lament” of this community was crop failure due to drought. The narrative vignette reveals the presence of an innocent, silent and frightened victim. Nothing more is written about her or him, except the priest’s “killing blow.”
At times of prolonged crop failure, of hunger and even starvation, a gathering hollowness claws in the pit of the stomach; followed by an inevitable turmoil of doom-laden anguish and dread. Massive denial is one not so healthy way to cope with dread. Another way is projection, denial’s fraternal twin.
The face of anguish is the recognition of our own mortality. Inchoate longing for immortality trumps any reasoned discourse in the face of anguish’s oncoming visage. Just as our mortal face emerged at birth, so also the visage of anguish reminds us that our eternal face can emerge fully only through death.
Longing just to stay alive; longing for individual immortality; or to leave a lasting personal legacy; or for bodily resurrection are magical responses to the message anguish scrapes on the inside of our very being. Anguish can never be tolerated for long. Projecting this dreadful emotion onto someone else may seem to take away the pain, may seem to make life manageable again.
And so, desperate for the return of the familiar, and willfully projecting the agony lying within, we acquiesce to ritual and/or actual lynching of the silent, innocent one. The one we believe inappositely is the locus of our intolerable pain.
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The stories about human sacrifice made Marcion so queasy that he suggested we ditch such passages from our Scriptures. Do you feel any sympathy for Marcion’s position? Why would you want to exclude stories of human sacrifice? What value is there in including them?
My neice Kara received a Precious Moments Bible http://bit.ly/1J8mPIy from a friend at her church as a High School graduation present. This was a loving and very thoughtful gift, first of all, because it recognized her accomplishment. Kara, who is Downs Syndrome, graduated from high school. Secondly, and equally significant, the gift reflected the reciprocity of an embrace within Kara’s faith community that continues to this day.
While I wasn’t aware of the Marcionite fallacy back when Kara finished high school, I did see the Precious Moments Bible as a reflection of Sunday School ‘nice religion.’ The point I want to recognize here is the cultural prevalence of the Marcionite fallacy. I’m sure James’s explication of the various interpretations of the Abraham and Isaac story were not brought out as precious moments in Kara’s Bible.I took a New Testament class as a college sophomore. One of the things I remember from that class is Rudolf Bultmann’s notion that the Bible comes alive only as it is read. My introduction to that idea began a long stream of learning about demythologizing the Bible. Forgiving Victim adds quite significantly to the volume of that stream, which continues carving a deeper, broader channel into both my understanding and my excitement for scriptural interpretation.
One final reflection, this one on the calling of Matthew. Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew hangs in my treasurer’s office at St. John’s church. As a former IRS revenue agent, this painting seems particularly apropos. Jim, a parishioner at our church, on seeing the painting for the first time yesterday and hearing its name, immediately responded by saying it couldn’t be The Calling of St. Matthew. Just look at the way they’re dressed, he said. How could the subject possibly be St. Matthew when the figures are dressed in sixteenth century attire? http://bit.ly/1J8ydUR Jim’s an attorney, a smart man. He understood my explanation quickly when I compared the artist’s choice of clothing to the use of modern dress for a staging of, for example, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Marcionism is like a Precious Moments Bible, or the blindness of Jim’s initial response to Caravaggio’s painting. We are conditioned to look for what the powers of this world call good, making them into idealized representations of God’s self or God’s intention. And yet, no matter how skillful the conditioning, it cannot obscure the light of our vocation, which Jesus calls forth in faith, even in the particular darkness of Matthew’s ancient, tax-collecting booth.
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How true Rich! And as James tells us the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures were tempted to take the Marcion option themselves. Jeremiah, a Prophet from the north says it was not YHWH who ordered child sacrifice but another god. (Jeremiah 19:3-6), while Ezekiel, says it was YHWH who ordered child sacrifice, but that people would find it so awful they would give it up. (Ezekiel 20:23-26) Their solutions are both what James calls “dangerously secularising” although it is obvious to see that they both agree that true religion did not involve child sacrifice.
And yes, the ‘nice bible’ is an attempt to avoid this violent, vengeful God. But now we know that the violence and anger is in us, which we project to create this god. It’s a revolution isn’t it? And how it changes our lives!
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In what ways is your understanding of what God requires from religious people changing? What does it mean to be a good religious person?
My duplicity seems so ingrained that when my falsity and my awareness of it occur simultaneously, then at first I see it as someone else’s. I think, did I say that? Or, did I really just agree to that contract so deeply unfair to the workers? Why did I say no so quickly when asked to say a prayer at a social event? Do I really lack the patience just to listen to what this person is saying? Did I have to honk the horn at that young driver in the intersection. Didn’t the frightened look on her face tell me something about the impact of my impatience?
Generally, I’ve thought of myself as the one searching for God’s presence. As recently as a month ago in this Discussion Forum I wrote : “The concept of progressive revelation gives me the space to discover, to learn the dimensions of the concavity of God’s presence in my life.” A month ago I searched. Now I am beginning to discover that the quest is not mine, but belongs to the Forgiving Victim who pursues me! And I, to some rich and to all no longer a young man; I cannot yet sell all that I have and follow.
So yes, my understanding of living a good religious life is changing. I think of the parable of the coin stamped with Caesar’s image. Jesus said render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; and unto God that which is God’s. The enduring image stamped onto my life is not Caesar, but the image of God. What I am discovering here is how deeply the sediment of my selfish needs have buried God’s image. And yet still, the Forgiving Victim brings the quickening rains of revelation to cut first gullies and then ravines into the flatlands of my complaisance.
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“A month ago I searched. Now I am beginning to discover that the quest is not mine, but belongs to the Forgiving Victim who pursues me!” Absolutely true, Rich! But if the Forgiving Victim is forgiving us, surely it follows that we must also forgive ourselves? None of us is perfect we are all carrying baggage, but I think that ultimately we realise that the quest for God is nothing more than finding God in the other, regardless of how broken that person appears to us. Just as broken as ourselves?
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Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
I’ve been thinking about a couple of billionaires who were being compared to one another recently in the news. Both claim to be “self-made” men with political aspirations, but I was initially led to see a clear demarcation between the two. One came from “humble” beginnings; the other did not. One received $400 million dollars from his father; the other, at the age of 7, watched his father struggle mightily with a broken leg to support his family. I asked: How could two billionaires be more different in their origins? Only one could be truly self-made–or so I thought. The more I thought about this claim, I began to switch my question: How could these two be any more alike in their self-deception. They have exactly the same origin story, and both are utterly blind to it. Whether it be money or a motivation to develop a solid work ethic (this distinction is immaterial my point), these billionaires both received everything that makes them who they are from someone else.There is no humble beginning to human life, we are each and all brought to life by a lavish act of giving from somewhere beyond ourselves. Humility doesn’t pertain to some level of impoverishment; humility describes those who see their riches rightly. The humble recognize the truth and know that they received their identity from someone else. The arrogant claim the impossible: to have made themselves from nothing.
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Indeed, Andrew. That is the process of inculturation that we looked at in previous modules. And, here in 2.3 we have the struggle around interpretation that is not imposed upon Scriptures, but something that happens within them. For a rather important example, we’ll look at the different interpretations offered by Jeremiah and Ezekiel around the question of God’s involvement with child sacrifice. We’ll see how the Binding of Isaac passage from Genesis 22 reflects the movement away from understanding God as a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
I look forward to your next post.
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Were you aware that sacrifice of firstborn children was part of the religious practices of ancient Israel, as of the surrounding nations? How do you feel about that?
Yes, but I still find it very striking to be reminded just how matter of course the practice would have seemed.–The stories about human sacrifice made Marcion so queasy that he suggested we ditch such passages from our Scriptures. Do you feel any sympathy for Marcion’s position? Why would you want to exclude stories of human sacrifice?
The inclination of cultures to remove stories of human sacrifice from our heritage is not unlike the inclination of individuals to remain silent about certain unflattering stories from their youth in which they behaved rather inappropriately in comparison to what they now consider to be properly decorous. I’m quite sympathetic to people (groups or individuals) who don’t what to look too closely at all the missteps they took along the way to becoming who they are.What value is there in including them?
If rituals of human sacrifice are mimetic reverberations of the spontaneous scapegoating episodes that lie at the origin of every human culture, then including these stories in scripture has the value of directing people towards the truth of how we became people. It’s one thing stop telling the stories of debauched rabble-rousing that marked my youth because I simply am not that person anymore; it’s quite another for my brother and I to just stop talking about the results of our genetic tests once we notice that we only seem to share about half the same DNA. In the latter case, I can’t just say, “Oh that online genetic testing was just a quirky gift-giving thing we did for the holidays last year—there is nothing to talk about now”—even if I might be tempted to hide my head in the sand and convince myself that concealment (or “lack of candor”) might make it easier for everyone to carry on as before.If human sacrifice is simply something some of our unruly ancestors dabbled in, then our scriptures wouldn’t lose all that much if those episodes were edited out. If human sacrifice is directly linked to the moment of hominization, then it is not an accident of ancestry that these episodes appears prominently in scripture. They mustn’t be ignored, if we don’t wish to remain ignorant.
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How has your understanding of the story of Abraham and Isaac changed?
Sheelah, James lost me on this one. You’ll need to help me sort it out. Do I understand this correctly? I’ve enumerated the steps I see James taking, so that you can pinpoint where I go wrong.[1] James suspects that there are various ways to tell the story of Abraham sacrificing at a mountain in Moriah. Some versions of the story have been lost to history.
[2] Among those lost to us (but known to Biblical authors) is at least one rendition of the story in which Abraham slaughters his son.
[3] For James, inferring the existence of this gruesome version that predated Genesis 22 provides an explanation for the otherwise difficult image of Abraham returning from the sacrificial ordeal without Isaac (22.19).If [1-3] is an accurate extraction of some of what James is proposing, then some of what James is proposing is contrary to Girard’s assessment of Biblical revelation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Girard considers mythology to be the accounts of founding murders which mitigate references to murderous behavior. Conversely, the Bible, for Girard, is a collection of stories that move toward an unmitigated presentation of founding murders in gruesome detail. If we surmise that an earlier non-Biblical parallel to Genesis 22 provides a unvarnished depiction of child sacrifice, and that the Biblical version “tones down” the human-against-human violence with the help of a ram-form-nowhere who is sacrificed in the boy’s stead, then we are affirming a trajectory of the Abraham-and-Isaac story in which Genesis 22 is not revelatory (in Girard’s sense of revelatory). In this lecture, I think I heard James suggests that Genesis 22, as we have it now, is further away from a true picture of human sacrifice; I think I heard James suggest that we should reconstruct a mythological precursor to the Biblical narrative that gave a clearer account of human sacrifice than the Bible. This is the opposite of how Girard relates the Bible to mythology.
I understand that James wants to say that, through the eyes of our resurrected Lord, we can read the “Big Bad Book” and embrace the queasiness it makes us feel. Genesis 22.19 is unsettling; it should make us queasy. It is very much about child sacrifice. But why does James suggest that there was some earlier version of Abraham and Isaac at Moriah that was more capable of embracing the queasiness of the story than Genesis?
I would have expected James to do precisely the opposite. If we were are going to speculate on some earlier version of what becomes Genesis 22 and maintain that the Bible reveals more than what precedes it, then we would need to infer the existence of a pre-Biblical story like the following: Abraham is intent on blood sacrifice (perhaps by divine mandate). He is ascending a mountain in Moriah with all the sacrificial accoutrements except for a lamb, when his donkey turns and says, “I see the fire and the wood, but …” [Let this story proceed more or less like the one we know—ram and all.]
Now, you see what I mean? Why didn’t James assume that the precursors to the Biblical version were even more opaque with respect to the child’s demise? Why did he assume Genesis was the version covering up the possibility of child sacrifice?
If my imagined story were the precursor to Genesis 22, then the Bible would be revealing something new to the people who already knew the talking-donkey version. Genesis 22 would be a familiar animal-talking tale with a twist, namely—there ain’t no animals talking in this animal-talking tale. (“Wasn’t it always kind of weird that the donkey started talking in that Abraham-at-Moriah story?” the original Biblical audience would ask each other. “No that you mention it, that was weird!” “Well, the truth is: it was never a donkey; it was his son!!” [for thus who’ve read _Life of Pi_, think of that moment when you realize exactly what Pi means when he says stories are just better with animals] “And we always thought—naively—that Isaac stayed at the foot of the mountain!” “Oh my God!” says one original listener who is finally gets the point of the retelling, “Remember how in the old version, Isaac was like ‘So, what happened to the donkey, Dad?’ and stuff—here Abraham comes back without Isaac … and nobody even asks a single question!”) The take-away, in my imagined context, would be that the Biblical audience’s forefather wasn’t the one who stopped performing a sacrifice as benign as donkey slaughter (as people had once thought)—in actuality, Abraham was the one who stopped sacrificing children!
Of course, this is wild conjecture on my part. I am unaware of any such story in the Ancient Near East. I have no good reason whatsoever to believe anybody ever thought of Abraham as the father of all peoples who stopped slaughtering donkeys or camels or something. It seems highly inadvisable to argue for the existence of some talking-beast-of-burden-about-to-be-sacrificed folktale, simply to salvage my positive assessment of the Bible as revelation. Neither, however, do I support James contention that Genesis was more bashful about Abraham’s complicity in child sacrifice than some pre-Biblical accounts. It may well turn out to be that there existed scriptures more revelatory than the Bible, but I’m not prepared to accept an invitation to simply assume that is the case.
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Andrew, here is a brief summary of what James is explaining.
The struggle around interpretation is not imposed upon Scriptures, but something that happens within them. For a rather important example, this session looks at the different interpretations offered by Jeremiah and Ezekiel around the question of God’s involvement with child sacrifice. We’ll see how the Binding of Isaac passage from Genesis 22 reflects the movement away from understanding God as a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
The Marcionite and fundamentalist temptations were faced by the authors and editors of the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. ? The people we now call the people of Israel had as a regular part of their basic culture the sacrifice of firstborn children.
Jeremiah, a northern prophet, offers a pre-Marcionite interpretation when he says that it was not YHWH that commanded child sacrifice but another god.(Jeremiah 19:3-6)
Ezekiel, a fairly conservative Temple priest from Jerusalem, seems to have the fundamentalist temptation. He is saying that yes, child sacrifice was commanded by YHWH, but it was so people would find it so awful they would give it up. (Ezekiel 20:23-26)
Both prophets faced the same problem yet despite their different solutions they were both dangerously secularizing – they both agreed that true religion did not involve child sacrifice, contrary to their religious contemporaries.
The story of circumcision as a covenant of peace inserted into the narrative about Egypt may have been part of a history of the interpretative dealing with the moving on from child sacrifice.
The passage called the Akedah or the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19), may have been an edited version of an earlier story in which Isaac was sacrificed. So the current version, as it appears in our Bibles, reflects moving on from a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
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Yes, Sheelah, thank you, your synopsis does indeed help. I was attempting to read the Akedah like Girard reads one of those stories which relate a founding murder. These are stories of violent encounters. When told by mythologers, the violence is obfuscated. When told by Biblical authors, the violence is brought into focus. I correctly understood James to say that the Akedah seems to be replacing a slaughtered human with a slaughtered ram. I took this to mean James was (inadvertently) implying that the Akedah falls on the side of obfuscation, as opposed to clarification. My mistake, I see now, was to try and read the Akedah as an origin story. James never reads it as such in this lecture and, so far as I know, Girard never does so either.
Genesis 22 is not one of those stories that emanated from a founding murder; rather, it is a story about the sacrificial rituals that emanate from a founding murder. While a mythological perspective necessarily buries its head in the sand with respect to the spontaneous collective violence at its origin, those who adhere to a mythological perspective in their telling of origin stories need not have any qualms about embracing wholeheartedly the rehearsed collective violence of human sacrifice.
The idea of the archaic sacred is that God demands the shedding of blood. This is a useful lie which conceals the truth: people, having accidentally stumbled upon the benefits of temporary reconciliation through bloodshed, have begun to demand ritual bloodshed all of themselves. In the Bible, the Akedah is a case in which the death of a ram suffices “God’s” demand in an instance in which the death of a human was presumably called for. Here the substitution is not an obfuscation of some violence formerly perpetrated. Instead, the substitution suggests that a clarification to the human understanding of ritual bloodletting: the success of rituals depends less on what people believe they heard God to demand and more on whether or not all the people involved are left satisfied when it is over.
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In what ways is your understanding of what God requires from religious people changing? What does it mean to be a good religious person?
I am having a hard time using the word ‘religion’ because I am living in linguistic circles in which the connotative value of that word fluctuates wildly. Sometimes it is associated with perfunctory repetition and is negative; other times it is associated with a reverence for God and is positive. I think some rituals are a way to manufacture a phony reverence, but I also think virtuous habits developed over time can become so second nature the communities we live in that we should call them rituals.I suppose a good religious person would be the one who reveres the God who really is, who and doesn’t take shortcuts so as to play the game of being reverential without bothering to actually behold the God who really is. I should add that I have been finding James’ phrase “forgiving victim” to be quite productive in making sense of theological questions. This is another case in point. The “God who really is” is the forgiving victim; the “shortcuts” are means by which we can cover over our victim and thereby preclude any chance of us seeing him forgive us.
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