“Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers who
rule this people in Jerusalem. Because
you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an
agreement; when the overwhelming scourge passes though it will not come to us;
for we have made lies our refuge and in falsehood we have taken shelter”;
therefore thus says the Lord God, See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone,
a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation: ‘One who trusts will
not panic.’” Isaiah 28: 14-16
One of the most mind-bending cross-cultural courses I have
ever taken was “Introduction to the Old Testament”. They were real people, the ones who
originally told and wrote down those stories.
They had reasons for recording what they did in the way that they did
it. The scanty records they have left us
tell us so much and so little about their lives and what they thought was
important and why.
Distant from us in space and time, they nonetheless have
great influence on our lives to this day.
And, of course, our understanding of them is not helped at all by the
centuries of interpretation and debate that lie between us and them.
Taking these stories seriously requires readers to suspend
their own perspectives and assumptions.
We have to remember that we are reading about a world we have never
known and cannot know directly. Our
cultures here and now would be just as incomprehensible to them as their
cultures are to us.
That’s one of the main reasons why it’s so hard to talk
about “the Bible and politics”. Because
it’s so difficult to cross the chasm of understanding between us and them and
to enter imaginatively into their culture(s), we mostly take the easy way of
assuming that the Bible says what we want it to say.
But politics in the Bible is about authority and resistance
to authority. They didn’t have a wide
range of different types of political organization to compare with each other
as we do. They really just had personal
authority – men in power – who used power well or badly.
Prophets like Isaiah predicted the future only insofar as
they told people in power that God would destroy them if they did not deal
justly with the poor. They interpreted contemporary
events according to how they saw God’s covenant being fulfilled by the nation’s
leaders. Politics for them was about how
well (or badly) the leadership obeyed God’s will, and if it was badly, they
said so at great length.
If the stories of ancient peoples are going to tell us how
to live here and now in such a way that we will be prepared to participate in a
future that neither they nor we can fully imagine, we have to learn to let go
of what we think we know and hear their stories with new ears. Now there’s an intercultural challenge!
