Exodus 21: Rules and regulations

The American satirist PJ O’Rourke once remarked that, ‘God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations.’

We spent last night in church looking at Exodus 21, one of those passages which contains a long list of instructions for various scenarios. Perhaps, PJ O’Rourke has read Exodus 21 too, and he reckons it’s texts like this which represent such a drag on God’s reputation. But as I’ve spent time thinking about Exodus 21, I’ve begun to think about similar OT passages in a new way.

One of the strangest things about Exodus 21 is the subject matter of the opening verses: how to treat slaves. Given that the people of Israel have just been delivered from the bondage of Egypt, this is the last thing you would expect to read. It seems like such a letdown to contemplate that in the post-Exodus landscape there will still be those who are owned by others, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is still a world which is governed by some harsh economic realities. However, Exodus 21 does at least affirm that in Israel’s life slaves are to have certain fundamental rights, disappointing to us but a significant piece of progress in 1200 BC.

Thinking about these instructions, I remembered Jesus’ words about divorce in Matthew 19, where he says that Moses only allowed such measures, ‘because you were so hard-hearted.’ These rules and regulations don’t exist to make us better people, they exist to safeguard us and the community when things, inevitably, go wrong. I was also reminded of how, in his letters, Paul seems to have recognised the gap between God’s ideal and what was achievable in the circumstances of his day. In a moment of lyrical rhetoric he proclaimed to the Galatian Christians that ‘there is no longer slave or free,’ but several years later, when he writes to the Ephesians and Philemon, he appears to be much more pragmatic on the issue of slavery. He is still a voice for change, in that he calls on masters not to threaten those they own, but his thinking also seems to be grounded in the realistic understanding that the abolition of slavery would have had catastrophic economic consequences at that point in history.

What has also struck me as I’ve reflected on these passages is the room for manoeuvre offered by many of the rules and regulations. For example, Exodus 21:12 instructs that a sentence of death for anyone guilty of deliberate murder, but the following verse offers the potential for leniency, if the act was ‘not premeditated but came about by an act of God,’ a clause which seems to provide ample scope for flexible interpretation. When I read the Gospels, it seems to me that Jesus never speaks of the law as harsh or restrictive (in fact he says he hasn’t come to take away one letter of it), but he is at his angriest when he finds the Pharisees applying the law with no flexibility, no willingness to look with compassion on what lies behind people’s actions on certain occasions.

I wonder what lessons there are for us from Exodus 21. It seems to me that one of the basic assumptions behind these rules is that you will never guarantee perfect behaviour. People will sin, people will make mistakes. But Israel is given a set of guidelines for knowing how best to minimise the impact of the mistakes on individuals and the whole of the community and we might want to think in that light about our own commitment to Christian standards. So often, it feels like our default option when relating to the world is to throw the rule book at people. We think we have the right to control others, and we forgot our calling is to model something more attractive, and to lovingly help when things go wrong.

A helpful resource on Exodus and violence

A question which has come up a couple of times in recent months, as we’ve been exploring Exodus in Yardley Wood BC, is the issue of divine violence in the Old Testament. I noticed today that Greg Boyd, whose writing I’ve found to be tremendously helpful, has promised a series of posts on this topic on his excellent ReKnew website. You can find out more at: 

http://reknew.org/2013/02/reflections-on-divine-violence-in-the-old-testament/

God, Egypt and nature... some follow up thoughts

Time off this week has offered a welcome opportunity to catch up on viewing and reading, and a couple of items have caught my attention, provoking further thought about a subject we reflected on in YWBC a few weeks ago.

One of the concerns expressed by a number of people in our discussion on the plague stories of Exodus was the suffering experienced by nature and animals during the sequence of afflictions which befell Egypt. For example, animals, as well as humans, are afflicted by gnats and boils, the land is ‘ruined’ by flies, trees and plants are ‘shattered’ by thunder and hail. And, of course, even the firstborn of all the livestock, as well as humans, are struck down.

When we discussed this in church a few weeks ago, I made the suggestion that nature is caught up in the suffering which results from Pharaoh’s intransigence, but also as part of a process by which God will eventually secure for it a better future under the protective care of the people of Israel. At the time of the Exodus, Egypt was regarded as the ‘bread basket’ of the world, a thriving economy that provided food to the surrounding region. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to think about the intensive farming methods that would have been employed by Egypt. In contrast, the new order planned by God for Israel is one where the land lies fallow for recovery every seven years and donkeys get to rest on the Sabbath (Exod 23:10-12).

I’ve been reminded in recent weeks how we read the Bible from a very human-centred perspective, which can blind us to the bigger story God is unfolding, a story of freedom for all creation, for which it longs, groaning as if in labour (Rom 8:22). Over the weekend, we spent an hour enjoying the ‘last chance to watch’ the BBC’s wonderful documentary Africa, on iPlayer. One of the most moving lessons of Africa was the way it demonstrated the terrible hardship, a daily battle for survival, which is experienced by so many animals in our world. Watching Africa, and its account of elephants and zebras walking for days on end in a search for water, I was reminded of God’s words at the end of Job 38:

³⁹ ‘Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
   or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 
⁴⁰ when they crouch in their dens,
   or lie in wait in their covert? 
⁴¹ Who provides for the raven its prey,
   when its young ones cry to God,
   and wander about for lack of food? 

It seems that part of the lesson God is trying to teach Job is that there is work that he is doing in our world, a work of care and provision for his creation, that humans are often oblivious to.

A second point which emerges from Job is the way God is portrayed as wrestling with his creation, seeking to bring order to a world which is beset by chaos. This is an issue which has wider implications for how we understand God’s relationship to our world. Is creation perfectly ordered, a clockwork universe which has been set in motion by a God who now regulates every tiny event of every life, or is God still seeking to lovingly assert his authority on our world, a process only to be completed at the eventual moment when all things are made new? This brings me to the second article I came across this week, the news that the cosmos may be ‘inherently unstable.’ You can read the full story here, the suggestion that research on the properties of the Higgs boson is reviving an ‘old idea that the Big Bang Universe we observe today is just the latest version in a permanent cycle of events.’ Reading Scripture, in light of these new scientific discoveries, seems to me to provide further support for the idea of viewing creation as untamed, and God as one who is lovingly working to bring about its deliverance, as well as ours.

God, Pharaoh and how our own hearts sometimes get hardened

This morning we spent time in YWBC thinking about one of the most troubling parts of the Exodus story, the process by which Pharaoh’s heart becomes hardened. We usually refer to the natural disasters which God visited upon Egypt, in order to bring Pharaoh to his senses and make him aware of the need to set the people of Israel free, as the ten plagues. But Exodus also describes these events as ten ‘signs’ (E.g. Exod 8:23).

As we discussed this morning, my view on this story is not that God has predestined the response of Pharaoh from the beginning. I suspect that if Pharaoh had paid attention to, say, the first three signs, there would have been no need for the final seven. Take a look, for example, at Exodus 4, where God is discussing the creative power he will loan out to Moses to persuade the Israelites of his credibility as a leader. God comes across not as someone with a blueprint, but as someone who is confident he can respond to whatever challenges or objections Moses has to deal with.

In Exodus, the word often used to describe Pharaoh’s hardness is kabed, which means strength – it carries a sense of obstinacy, of arrogance. Even at the beginning of the plague stories, Pharaoh is presented as someone who is stubborn and pride, the sort of person with too much to lose from admitting their own faults or mistakes (not just losing slaves, but losing face as well). There was probably never a strong chance of Pharaoh being flexible with Moses. When God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, it seems like he is merely strengthening a resolve and determination which is already entrenched.

There are some people I know who seem to become more and more set in their ways over time, more bloody-minded and frustrated with the people and the world around them which, unlike them, continues to change. Sometimes we describe these people as becoming a ‘parody’ or ‘caricature’ of themselves, which sums up the way their behaviour becomes more extreme. Whether these people are plain bad-tempered, or just have an air of the ‘prima donna’ or ‘misery guts’ about them, there is one common pattern. Over time, they alienate people. Those around them become frustrated with them or wary, or even plain scared of them (I’ve known ‘scary’ people in every church I’ve been part of), and so these folks drive away the friends who might be able to offer them words of constructive criticism. I’m no expert on psychology, but my sense is that this process does set in very early in some people’s lives, and sadly reaches a point of no return for others. We find ourselves able to predict how they will react badly in circumstances where they don’t get their way.

It’s easy to read the plagues story as just a demonstration of God’s greatness over the powers of the Empire. But the case of Pharaoh’s hardened heart offers a deeper, personal challenge. And it’s also worth reflecting that this is not the only part of the Exodus narrative where people are becoming increasingly stubborn or ‘stiff-necked.’ In the second half of the story, it’s Israel itself displaying increasingly hardened behaviour. Pharaoh’s an easy target for insider readers of the story, but sometimes the barriers to God within his people are as big as the barriers outside. Specks in the eyes of others, planks in our own etc etc....

On God’s forgetting and remembering

Last Sunday we started our new sermon series on Exodus, reflecting briefly on the closing verses of chapter 2, which describe how the Hebrew slaves cry out to God about their suffering and oppression. God’s response to their groaning is described by the Exodus writer in the following way: ‘God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.’ As someone pointed out to me after the service, this statement is troubling, in so far as it suggests God has forgotten the plight of the slaves. It raises the very question they posed to me: ‘Can God forget?’

In part, making sense of what is said here depends on our understanding of the Hebrew word for remember, zākar, which doesn’t so much convey the idea of recalling something forgotten, but rather God deciding to be actively involved in a situation in light of previous commitments he has made. This explains the way the word is sometimes used in the Psalms. For example, in Psalm 25:6, when David asks God to ‘remember... your great mercy and love,’ as the NIV translates it, he’s not trying to jog God’s memory about one of his characteristics. Rather, he wants to see that mercy actively applied to his situation. For this particular verse, the NRSV translates zākar as ‘be mindful,’ which seems to me to be a rendering of the word which gets closer to its real meaning.

All of which is interesting, but only up to a point... we’re still left with the problem of God’s apparent inactivity, the fact that he comes across as sitting on his hands while his people are suffering.

I make no claim to have ‘solved’ this conundrum, but offer below a brief summary of where I’ve got to in my own thinking on this verse over the last few days.

One thought concerns the issue of whether or not God is ‘static’ or ‘unchanging’ with regard to his attitudes and resolve. There are some of God’s attributes which we understand to be unchanging. We know he is always loving, holy and faithful, for example. But does this mean he always feels an equal amount of determination to act in each and every situation? For example, in Exodus 5 we read of how Moses goes to Pharaoh, requesting the people of Israel be granted a three day leave of absence to celebrate a festival in the wilderness. This strategy appears to backfire, when Pharaoh cruelly demands that the slaves be required to gather their own straw for bricks. Pharaoh’s callous attitudes appears to provoke a greater sense of urgency in God to deal with him, implied in God’s words in Exodus 6:1: ‘Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh: Indeed, by a mighty hand he will let them go; by a mighty hand he will drive them out of his land.’

Could it be that God is inclined to a peaceable solution with Pharaoh, that the dreadful destruction of the plagues narrative is not his preferred option, but only something he is driven to by the continued intransigence of the Egyptian ruler? (I’m aware this statement raises the conundrum of Pharaoh’s ‘hardened heart,’ an issue I hope to address in a few weeks’ time). Such an idea seems, to me, to fit with the picture we have of God in the warnings to Israel concerning exile. Exile will be the inevitable result of the people’s continued rebellion, but it is not, in itself, inevitable. There is another option made available by God, the option of repentance. This openness of possibilities appears to be implied in Jeremiah 18:7-11: ‘At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.’ (Emphases in italics are mine.)

The end of Exodus 2 also raises the issue of how the specific ways in which God can intervene may sometimes be affected by circumstances. As I mentioned on Sunday, there seems to be no coincidence in the fact that the time when the slaves begin to groan is a moment of regime change in Egypt. As Greg Boyd points out in his excellent book God at War, scripture does not present us with a picture of a God who plans meticulously everything which happens to us, good or bad. God never wills evil, but always fights against it, and sometimes his battle is against strong forces which hold great power in certain times and places. The death of one Pharaoh, and his replacement with another, seems to present an opportune moment for change. I suggested on Sunday that this could be compared with the regime changes in South Africa and the USSR where the incoming governments of FW De Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev presented the possibility of the end of Apartheid and Communism. After the service, someone pointed out to me that this doesn’t mean God wasn’t doing anything during the darkest moments of these regimes, which is an important point to bear in mind. People were praying, God was intervening in certain ‘micro’ cases, but the timing wasn’t right for the ultimate ‘macro’ downfall of these evil structures.

Finally, there’s no escaping the importance in this Exodus story of the role of the slaves themselves. The end of Exodus 2 describes their groaning rising up to God, and somehow mobilising him, causing him to become active in the circumstances of Israel. Could it be that there are moments when our own despair and lack of hope, our servile acceptance of circumstances or belief that things will never change, limit the extent to which God can work in our lives and our church? 

Supermarkets, quotas and challenging the powers

This week the markets are pronouncing judgement on the UK’s supermarkets. As each of our leading retailers announces their crucial Christmas sales figures, analysts are crunching the numbers as they try to work out who’s up and who’s down. You’ve probably read some of the news stories. Sainsbury’s and Tesco have so far reported strong numbers, and it appears that M&S is set to be this year’s fall guy, disappointing shareholders and analysts with news of a 1.8% drop in sales over the festive period. Look behind the headlines and you discover that things aren’t as bad as they might appear at first. M&S did sell record amounts of food and it says profit margins are improving, which seems pretty encouraging for a company that last year reported pre-tax profits of £658m, but... not good enough. What the market demands is year on year growth. On Thursday morning, M&S shares fell by 4.5%.

I thought about M&S this week, while preparing my reflections for Sunday evening, when, as a church, we’ll be thinking again about the theme of ‘Challenging the Powers,’ from the perspective of Exodus. We’ll be focussing our thoughts on Exodus 5, when Moses goes to Pharaoh for the first time, requesting that the Israelites be released from their labour for three days so they can go out to the wilderness for a celebration festival in honour of God.

Pharaoh’s response is to show no flexibility, no willingness to compromise. It seems he fears any relaxation of his rules, any possibility that production will slow down. Indeed, his response is to ratchet up the economic targets: ‘Go and get straw yourselves, wherever you can find it; but your work will not be lessened in the least.’

Quotas, targets, an insistence on relentless growth... such are the demands of the Empire. It’s always been this way. As God’s people, what responses can we make which demonstrate our desire to challenge the constantly acquisitive and driven nature of our world? This is one of the themes we’ll attempt to unpack on Sunday evening. It would be good to know your thoughts, either shared on Sunday or as a comment here.

Book recommendation – The Madness of St Paul

Christmas means holidays, and holidays means a chance to catch up on reading. I took a few hours to work through Richard Dormandy’s The Madness of St Paul, a refreshing and realistic perspective on Paul’s state of mind, particularly when he writes 2 Corinthians, a roller-coaster of a letter where the Apostle’s language implies nervous exhaustion and a suspicion, verging on paranoia, about the way he’s been treated by the church in Corinth. As Dormandy points out, most of us revere Paul to such an extent that we usually give him the benefit of the doubt when reading sections where he seems defensive or sarcastic. We may even credit him with deliberately adopting a rhetorical strategy which he has chosen to be the most appropriate for the audience to which he is writing.

But what if the reality was further away from that ideal? What if Paul was driven in part by his own vanity, and his need to be taken with the utmost seriousness by everyone around him? What if part of the problem was on his side, an insistence on always being in charge, even in churches which he’d planted some years previously and moved on from?

Dormandy’s book isn’t one which has caused me to completely revise my opinion of Paul, but it has caused me to look at 2 Corinthians in a fresh light. And it also raises important questions about how we regard the authors of the Bible. There are probably books waiting to be written called The Madness of Jeremiah or The Madness of Elijah – does the fact that we regard Scripture as ‘inspired’ mean that we think it’s invalid to question the behaviour of any of its authors? And isn’t there another danger in putting characters like Paul on a pedestal? We assume that the only appropriate ‘biblical’ behaviour is to be in a permanent state of mind that consists of being ‘content with whatever I have.’ But the reality is that even the person who wrote those very words had his moments when there was a gap between belief and experience.