Blue Cord

As part of my writing for International Biblical Studies Writing Month (held over for a second month due to popular demand), I am writing an exegetical essay on Isaiah 65:17-25 for the Feasting on the Word lectionary series. I came across an interesting aspect of the passage that I thought I would discuss.

It is widely recognized that Isaiah 65:25 alludes to Isaiah 11:6-9. Isaiah 65:25a states:

The wolf and the lamb will graze together; the lion will eat straw like the ox; and the serpent will have dust for its food.¹

It occurs to me that this is a rather odd statement. The first two phrases quoted above envision a return to the conditions of the Garden of Eden. The imagery is right at home in this passage, which envisions God creating a new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17). It also matches the heavenly vision of Isaiah 11:6-9.

But what is going on with the serpent? In Isaiah 11:8, the child will play with the asp and the adder without being hurt. This would make us think that the serpent eating dust is in contrast to its previous predilection. But Genesis 3:14 (which was probably known to Third Isaiah) states that eating dust is the serpent’s punishment. This would suggest that while the other animals are returning to the peaceful existence of the Garden of Eden, the serpent still bears its punishment. This doesn’t match with the thrust of the verse or with the material to which it alludes in Isaiah 11:6-9.

Blenkinsopp offers the following suggestion:

[The author] was apparently convinced that, having been cursed from the very beginning, snakes are the one exception to this ideal scene of harmony in the animal world. The snake is therefore excluded from this transformation of the natural world, this return to the first creation, in which humans and animals are to live in harmony and none will kill for food.²

This explanation leaves me less than satisfied. After all, nothing states that the serpent is not going to live in harmony. It won’t be killing for food, since it will eat dust. And the main animosity in Genesis 3 is between the serpent and humans, not between serpents and other animals.

But I still don’t have a satisfactory explanation for what is going on with the serpent. Does Isaiah 65:25 see this as a positive or negative for the serpent? Is the serpent going to eat dust instead of attacking humans? Or is the serpents fate contrasted with the fate of the other animals through a reiteration of the curse in Genesis 3:14? What is going on?

Anyone have any ideas?

1. My translation. [back]
2. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 55-66, Anchor Bible 19B (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 290. [back]

By the lack of power vested in him, Chris Brady at Targuman declared January to be International Biblical Studies Writing Month. Bibliobloggers have been announcing what they will be writing about during this month–long burst of writing energy, so I thought I would do the same.

I am a contributor to the new lectionary series put out by Westminster John Knox Press entitled Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.  For those unfamiliar with this series, it provides commentary on each of the four assigned readings from the Revised Common Lectionary for every Sunday in the three year cycle. The commentary for each reading consists of an exegetical essay, a theological essay, a homiletic essay, and a pastoral essay. I have been asked to contribute the exegetical essays for three readings from Year C:

• Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21
• Isaiah 65:17-25
• Acts 5:27-32

Why I have been asked to write the commentary for a passage from Acts is unclear, but I will happily accept the $0.08 per word for writing it.

So, in the spirit of International Biblical Studies Writing Month, I hereby vow to have this assignment finished by the end of the month.

John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has an excellent post on the state of biblical interpretation training in seminary. His post has elicited several responses and posts on other blogs. Links to these can be found at the bottom of his original post.

John laments the fact that most seminary graduates have such a poor grounding in the Bible. In a phrase that cuts to the heart of the problem, John states:

Overwhelmed by many other claims on time and mind, students end up with a merely cursory and superficial preparation in the literature that is supposed to be compass, mirror, and anchor of the ministry they will carry out.

I wanted to make two points about biblical studies in seminaries.

The first flows out of John’s statement about the other claims on the time and minds of seminarians. Part of the blame for this comes from the fact that mainline churches — including my own — do not place as much stress on the Bible as they once did. Many other things clamor to be the central mission of the church, including social justice and pastoral counseling. And many parish search committees look more for someone who can be an administrator than someone who can interpret a biblical text. Is it any wonder, then, that the people who go to seminary look to focus more on things other than the Bible?

This is not to say that social justice and pastoral counseling are unimportant. They are, but they are not the reason that the church exists. They flow out of our commitment to the gospel of Christ Jesus, a gospel that is best understood through the Scriptures of the church.

I would be surprised if there were any medical schools out there in which students studied administration more than they studied the human body. Or a law school in which actually reading the law was required in only a quarter of the classes. But that is exactly what we are doing in a number of seminaries.

Sad to say, I knew more than one person in my seminary who could quote from memory more lines of T.S. Elliot’s poems than verses of Scripture.¹

My second point is that I am not sure requiring Hebrew and Greek of seminarians would improve this situation, especially if we mandated just the one year that some denominations require. If we are trying to create students who can responsibly use Hebrew and Greek, then no less than three years should be mandatory in each.

Obviously, few seminarians are going to go for this, and I am not convinced we should make them. Not all seminarians are cut out to be linguists (as my friend the Peripatetic Polar Bear can attest) nor should they be. But one year of language study creates a dangerous situation. We have all heard sermons where the preacher made basic mistakes in handling the original languages, and it often comes from thinking that they know enough of the language. Giving students one year of language equips them to make mistakes but does not really give them enough to understand the text better. I think Alexander Pope’s caveat needs to be recalled here:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

Are we really convinced that Hebrew and Greek are such simple languages that two semesters of each gives the would–be pastor the tools to delve deeper into the text? I think the student’s time would be much better spent taking additional classes on interpreting the text in English.

1. Granted, T.S. Elliot is de rigueur for us Episcopalians, but the Bible should be too. [back]

Claude Mariottini has a post entitled “The Golfer and the King” about a sermon illustration given by Joel Osteen in his book Your Best Life Now. He raises the question of whether the anecdote related by Osteen is one that actually happened or a story that Osteen invented to illustrate his point.

In my own sermons, I always make sure that I carefully distinguish between stories that are true and ones that I have made up (or someone else has made up).  Usually, stories in the latter category are jokes, so it is obvious that they are not true. And it always annoys me when preachers illustrate sermons with stories that are not true.

It seems to me that if the gospel is true, there should be enough true stories to illustrate it without us having to make ones up.

Last week, I wrote a post about humanism ransacking religious festivals and rituals for their own purposes. Several people have picked up on this and written their own posts on the subject.

James Pate had some thoughts and musings in a post whose title says it all: “But It Is My Tradition, Too”. James writes,

What exactly is wrong with Christians holding a seder, or incorporating elements of Judaism into their faith life? The Exodus is part of the Christian tradition as much as it is part of Judaism. And, sure, there are things that the Exodus means to Christians that it does not mean to Jews, such as the Passover lamb pointing to Christ’s sacrifice. But why can’t a Christian celebrate God’s activity in history on behalf of his people Israel? And why can’t a Christian do so while acknowledging that the Exodus story has specific significance for him, a Christian?

James is correct, of course, that the exodus is a part of Christian tradition. We should celebrate it as an example of God’s liberating work. The seder, however, is not a part of Christian tradition. Early Jewish Christians still celebrated Jewish holidays, but Gentile Christians did not, at least not in their original form. The seder became the Eucharist. The exodus is the central saving event for Jews. But for Christians, that event has been eclipsed by the cross.

The seder is central and unique to Judaism. It is almost a sine qua non. When outsiders, even well-meaning outsiders, take the seder and use it for their own purposes, they are taking something central and using it in a peripheral way. That to me seems insulting. It also amounts to cultural plagiarism, since we are taking something that our culture did not create and saying that it is ours to do with as we please.

In other words, we can celebrate the exodus as Christians, but we need to find a means other than the seder for doing so.

Aside from the seder, James does agree that syncretism is a bad thing, a point that is also picked up by John Hobbins in his post “Why Unitarianism is on a Roll”.  Both James and John (and Peter, I assume) point to an essay by John Levenson entitled “The Problem with Salad Bowl Religion”.  Levenson has some great things to say about syncretism.  The following paragraph cuts to the heart of the matter:

At the deepest level, an act performed in order to subordinate one’s own will to the will of God is vastly different from the identical act performed in pursuit of other goals—self-expression, aesthetic pleasure, familial nostalgia, ethnic identification, whatever. The motivation, of course, is not transparent, and if we go only by appearances, syncretistic worship that includes Jewish elements looks like a hyphenation of traditional Judaism with other things. In fact, it is only the semblances of the Jewish observance that have been imported. Their deeper authorization—the unique claims of the Covenant of Sinai upon the people Israel—have been tacitly but thoroughly denied.

The problem with the buffet style approach to religion is that it gets things backwards.  When we pick and choose from religions, we mold the religion to fit us.  But religion is supposed to be about religion molding us to be the people that God wants us to be.

The comparison with a buffet is apt.  When we eat meals chosen by a trained nutritionist, we have a well-balanced diet that provides us with all the protein, carbs, fiber, and vitamins that our bodies need.  I don’t know about you, but that is not what happens when I go to a buffet.  I end up eating foods I like, and the foods I like are not particularly healthy.  In the same way, few people are able to design their own well-balanced and nutritious spiritual diet.