Blue Cord

Last week I made reference to an article by Denis Prager in which he claimed that you could predict where someone would stand on certain political issues by knowing whether or not they accepted the authority of the Torah. One of the issues he mentioned was “the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people ‘evil’.”  This was the one issue from his list on which he and I agreed.

But it is always good to check yourself when quoting the Bible.  If you are going to claim that the Bible supports your position, you better make absolutely sure that you know what the Bible says on that issue.  And if you are going to use the Bible to attack others the way Prager did, your responsibility to do so is even higher.  So, I went to see what the Torah had to say about evil people and evil nations.¹Â Â  I am limiting myself to the Pentateuch because Prager makes his claim based on the Torah.

The word “evil” appears 30 times in the NIV translation of the Pentateuch.  Of these, not a single one refers to a person as evil.  Only once is a group referenced as evil, and that group is the people of Israel (Deut. 1:35) .  Nor are any nations or regimes called evil.  Instead, what the Torah labels as evil are actions and intentions.

In the rest of the OT, the story is pretty much the same.  The only place that a nation is called evil is in Jeremiah 8:3, where the nation is Judah.  People are called evil in a number of verses, usually in Wisdom Literature and in the Psalms.   But the vast majority of instances of the word evil refer to actions and intentions.

The Torah, therefore, does not support calling any people or nation evil except your own, and even in that case I would recommend not doing so unless you have divine revelation.  I am more than willing to call actions evil, but calling people evil seems to move into the realm of judging people.  It is God, not we, who will judge.

Prager may or may not be correct that someone’s position on calling people evil can be predicted by knowing that person’s position on the authority of the Torah, but the willingness to call people evil is not something people get from the Torah.

1. I am writing this while I am on lunch break at work, so I don’t have a Hebrew Bible handy.  I am relying on on-line copies of the NIV. [back]

Joe Cathey has put up a poll asking what his readers think the center of Old Testament theology is.  His choices are covenant, holiness of Yahweh, God’s self-revelation, communion, or none of the above.  I voted for none of the above, because I do not think it is any of these.  But none of the above suggests that I prefer another center, which is not that case.  Instead, I do not think there is a center to OT theology.
The practice of OT theology is actually two different practices that are related.  The first is merely a descriptive task, which outlines the theology of the different books of the OT.  The second task is a creative task, in which we try to systemize the theology of the whole OT by finding a single rubric that provides the key to understanding the Old Testament.  While I am very much in favor of the first task, the second task seems to me to be not only an impossible task but also not a desirable thing to do.

Finding the center of the OT is a standard way of organizing a book on OT theology.  But it is not a necessary step.  Of the two great OT theologies from the last century, only one of them sought a center.  This was Walther Eichrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament, which identified covenant as the unifying feature.  But Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology did not need such a center, instead focusing on the development of the theology.

The problem with covenant as a center is readily apparent: wisdom literature does not deal with the idea of covenant.  In fact, covenant is inappropriate in wisdom literature, since wisdom is a universal feature, while covenant is a particular one.  Eichrodt himself seemed to understand this, which is why wisdom literature received such poor treatment in his book.

A center for OT theology cannot be found within the text itself.  This much is clear from the multitude of studies which have tried and failed to find such a center.  This center can be created, however, and whenever someone writes a theology with a center this is what they are doing (whether they recognize it or not).  And it might be possible to create a theology that did justice to the whole Old Testament.  But such a theology would be, to a certain extent, external to the OT itself.  It might make some people happy, but it would be artificial.

What stands behind this search for a center is the conviction that the OT presents us with one theology that we can find and elucidate.  Increasingly, however, we have come to recognize that the OT contains not one theology but many.  The theology of Isaiah and the theology of Jeremiah were different.  Song of Songs is different than Psalms.  And wisdom literature is certainly different from anything else in the canon.  When we try to reduce all these various voices to one voice, we squash the diversity in the Bible and do not do justice to the text itself.  Usually, we end up interpreting one set of texts in the light of another set that we view as primary.

Why we would want to do this is not clear.  Why not let the Bible speak for itself?  Why not allow the various voices in the text to each have their own say, unfettered by what other texts say?  This seems to me to make the text much more useful, since it would allow it to speak to a variety of situations today.  True, finding a center would help us to tame the text, but to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the Bible is not a tame book.

Recent OT theologies have been following this pattern.  Most notable is Walter Brueggemann’s  Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.  It seems to me that we should be seeking centers of OT theology, instead of reducing the text to one center.  Covenant serves well for the priestly writings, but not for other texts.  Let’s not force the text to fit into our preconceived notions of what constitutes theology.