I’ve
been eyeballs deep in the Old Testament. It’s seriously unsteady ground.
Nothing about it fits into neat little packages and the “anemic” descriptions
of “characters” that I grew up with are embarrassing and downright untruthful.
David,
for example, is a selfish womanizing murderer and not just in that “unfortunate
episode” with Bathsheeba. An honest reading reveals there were no heroes of the
Hebrew bible… none. Every single person was warped, twisted and downright human.
Interesting.
The
psalms are 40% laments, Jeremiah rants nearly incoherently at God for an entire
chapter (and often in snippets elsewhere}, Ezekiel isn’t so thrilled with YHWH
himself, the book of Job seems to slyly take shots at typical ‘easy’ answers
and tidy theological explanations and then there’s the book of Lamentations. Each ancient voice saying “whateth
the crapeth?” (that was a joke…)
It seems
to me the ancients regularly questioned, ranted, screamed and left the edges of
their stories raw with inexplaination. As much as the Hebrew bible makes me
want to scream in frustration, as much as YHWH sometimes seems schizophrenic I
prefer this true to life version of faith. I’ve started to understand that what
lies across my lap when I read the bible is the record of a community literally
wrestling with God and most often totally not getting it. There is nothing
static here, there is honesty among manipulation, there is fear, pain, drop kicking
of faith and seeking it out.. Life is messy… there is no cleaning it up.
“He
is not a tame lion," said Tirian. "How should we know what he would
do?...” – The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis
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