Bible Study

Joshua 2:1 Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, "Go, view the land, especially Jericho." So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there.

Along with Tamar (Genesis 38:13ff), Rahab goes down in biblical history as one of the righteous prostitutes. And the two men who Joshua sent to spy out the land, what of them, when they spent the night with her? What were they up to?

The conservative Christian commentator, Matthew Henry, goes extra-textual to defend the honor of the spies and says, "Rahab, here called a harlot, a woman that had formerly been of ill fame, the reproach of which stuck to her name, though of late she had repented and reformed." [my emph.] That is pretty funny.

According to the Rabbis, the Jewish Study Bible tells us, "she is said to have become a pious convert because of her encounter with the spires, she then marries Joshua and becomes the ancestor of nine prophets, including Huldah.... An alternative solution, based on a wordplay with "zonah," "harlot" -- already found in the Targum and some medieval Jewish commentators -- is the claim that Rabha was an innkeeper, who provided food ("mazon")."

I prefer to accept the unadorned text, which doesn't defend the characters of any of the actors, but simply announces that the two men ("young men" according to LXX), went on this dangerous mission and spent the night with the prostitute Rahab.

This same Rahab appears in the New Testament in three places:

The first is the list of the ancestors of David, and thus Jesus, in Matthew 1:5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse,

The second is in the hymn to faith in the Letter to Hebrews 11:31 By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient,1 because she had received the spies in peace.

Finally, she appears in James 2:25 Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road?

So Rahab appears as the prostitute who was not justified by her previous piety or renunciation of her life as a sex worker but rather because "she received the spies in peace."

As the text of Joshua continues, though, we see that there is more to Rahab. She has a lengthy speech and proves hereself to be a prophet:

Joshua 2:8-9 Before they went to sleep, she came up to them on the roof and said to the men: "I know that the LORD has given you the land,..."

This is a wonderful thing. In the Hebrew scripture, Joshua is the first of the "Nevi'im" -- the prophetic books. The first prophet in The Prophets, then, is this immoral foreign woman. Her actions are peace, and her mouth confirms God's purposes.

For me, Rahab stands as the gracious possibility that God can and does employ the most unlikely, least converted, in the midst of our daily employments to carry out our little (but important parts) his mysterious dance. We may not see the big picture, but we can have a part. There is purpose and hope. And the key is peace.

The book opens with a speech in which God commissions Joshua to accomplish a massive goal. Joshua is to lead the people to possess the land:

Joshua 1:4 From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory.

Joshua and the Hebrew tribes have already settled the territory on the east bank of the Jordan. In Joshua 1:12, Joshua tells the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh (who are to inherit the east bank) to prepare to go with the others to take the west side of the Jordan before they are allowed to rest on the east side. That is the next step of a huge plan. The goal, which God has here given Joshua, encompasses taking Lebanon in the north to the Euphrates on the north and east; and all the Hittite land from the Mediterranean on the west to the wilderness (the Negev desert?) in the south.

In order to accomplish this massive goal, God twice promises to accompany Joshua:

"I will be with you" (v. 5)
"the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." (v.9)

Embedded within and dependent upon this promise, God exhorts Joshua three times, not to be afraid:

Be strong and courageous; (v 6)
Only be strong and very courageous, (v 7)
Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, (v.9)

At the heart of the instruction, God reminds Joshua that the righteous ruler (Dt 17:18) must have the teaching of God always on his lips and in his heart:

Let not this Book of the Teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night, so that you may observe faithfully all that is written in it. Only then will you prosper in your undertakings and only then will you be successful. (TNK, v 8)

Joshua is not required to accomplish the entire project at once. Indeed, it is doubtful that the kingdom ever reached those proportions. But the goal is stunning, and it is natural for Joshua to be fearful in undertaking it. The first lesson of leadership is that a worthy goal, a God-given goal, is likely to seem beyond anything that we can accomplish. In fact, the leader that leads in his or her own strength will ultimately fall because of the reality of her or his own inadequacy. This is the sin of pride.

Therefore it is essential that the leader know the need for supernatural help, and how to find it. The greater the leadership required, the more necessary it is to to seek strength from God, and to yield one's own mind to the mind of God. It is the daily recitation of God's teaching that feeds the soul. Why? It is in Bible study that the leader learns to recognize the voice of God. And it is the through the living voice that God will fulfill his promise to “be with you.”

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After Moses died, the Israelites mourned for thirty days. Even in their loss, however, they are not left without leadership, and as the book of Deuteronomy closes, the editors point to the future:

NRS Deuteronomy 34:9 Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the LORD had commanded Moses.

The unique qualification for leadership is the "spirit of wisdom," a phrase that appears in the Hebrew scriptures only in two other places. One is fairly obscure; in the NRS translation of Exodus 28:3 it reads, "endowed with skill," and refers to those who are commissioned to make Aaron's priestly vestments.

The other reference to the "spirit of wisdom" is Isaiah's prophecy of one who "shall come out from a stump of Jesse":

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. (NRS Isaiah 11:2)

His coming signals the peaceable kingdom in which "the wolf shall live with the lamb, " and "they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain. " (Isaiah 11:6. 9) Christians, of course, recognize Jesus as the prince of peace who fulfills this prophecy.

When Jesus died, he appeared to the 12 disciples and breathed his spirit on them. The Apostle Paul prays that all the rest of us who believe will receive the same spirit of wisdom with which Jesus was anointed

Ephesians 1:17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.

No doubt, the peace testimony of Jesus’ followers is a sign that they have received the spirit of wisdom from God.

We are about to turn to the book of Joshua. We will see how the "spirit of wisdom" worked in Joshua as he led the Israelites into the promised Land. Entry into the land of promise is a typology of the hope to which we all have been called in Christ.

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December 31, 2003

Deuteronomy draws to an end with the blessings of Moses to each of the tribes of Israel. It happens that my favorite of the blessings is also the that of the tribe for which I am named, Benjamin:

Deuteronomy 33:12 Of Benjamin he said: The beloved of the LORD rests in safety-- the High God surrounds him all day long.

It is wonderful to know oneself beloved of God. God is no abstract force or ideology. God is not merely "love." God is a lover! I know something of having a lover from twenty-five years with my wife, whose constant affection and support is slowly penetrating my subconscious to let me know that (as odd as it sometimes seems to me) she actually loves me. Moses tells Benjamin that he is the beloved of God.

The Good News is that in Christ, God has chosen to count all of us as his beloved. Paul writes:

1 Thessalonians 1:4 For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction....

It is the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit that works on us, as my wife's affection has worked on me, to assure us and convince us in the deep places of the soul that we are in fact loved by God. This makes a real difference in how we live.

Knowing that at the center of the universe there is a God who loves us in this was provides a place of safety in which we can rest regardless of the turmoil and anxiety of our immediate circumstances. We do not have to live out of fear.

Moses' blessing goes further to insist that this sense of safety reflects the fact that this lover God is the High God. At the close of the chapter he says:

Deuteronomy 33:26-28 There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, majestic through the skies. 27 He subdues the ancient gods, shatters the forces of old; he drove out the enemy before you, and said, "Destroy!" 28 So Israel lives in safety,...

Our safety is in the objective fact that God has destroyed "ancient gods,... the forces of old." The ancient gods were those weird and fearful forces of sun, moon, rain, forest, and chaotic seas, that needed to be appeased but who nevertheless often acted arbitrarily and cruelly to make life "short, brutish, and mean." These forces are now renamed as nihilism, depriving life of meaning, threatening us with robotic existence, or matrix, threatening a return to slavery to machines or the people who control them.

But our safety and rest is in the assurance that YHWH God, the High God has subdued these ancient forces. At the center is God, and he calls us beloved.

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In Dt 32, God appears, to speak in the first person for the first time in this book. (Up to now, everything has been spoken in Moses' voice.) He predicts the disloyalty of the Israelites (fulfilled in Jeremiah's time) and orders Moses to write a song that will be entered into evidence against the people on that day:

Deuteronomy 31:16 "Soon you [i.e., Moses] will lie down with your ancestors. Then this people will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst, the gods of the land into which they are going; they will forsake me, breaking my covenant that I have made with them. ... 19 Now therefore write this song, and teach it to the Israelites; put it in their mouths, in order that this song may be a witness for me against the Israelites.

The song begins by proclaiming the justice of God:

The Rock! -- His deeds are perfect,
Yea, all His ways are just;
A faithful God, never false,
True and upright is He. (TNK Deuteronomy 32:4)

in contrast with the faithlessness of his people:

Children unworthy of Him --
That crooked, perverse generation --
Their baseness has played Him false. (Deuteronomy 32:5)

After recounting the saving work of God and God's blessings, the song predicts that wealth will corrupt the people and cause them to turn away from God:

So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked --
You grew fat and gross and coarse --
He forsook the God who made him
And spurned the Rock of his support. (Deuteronomy 32:15)
................
The LORD saw and was vexed
And spurned His sons and His daughters. (Deuteronomy 32:19)

Then, God, who has always been a warrior on behalf of Israel, says:

I will sweep misfortunes on them,
Use up My arrows on them: (Deuteronomy 32:23)

In this case, “My arrows” are in fact the arrows of Israel’s enemies. The only thing that keeps God from using Israel’s enemies to utterly destroying Israel is the possibility that Israel's enemies would misunderstand that it was their own prowess that has brought about Israel's defeat.

But for fear of the taunts of the foe,
Their enemies who might misjudge
And say, "Our own hand has prevailed;
None of this was wrought by the LORD!"

For they are a folk void of sense,
Lacking in all discernment.
Were they wise, they would think upon this,
Gain insight into their future:

"How could one have routed a thousand,
Or two put ten thousand to flight,
Unless their Rock had sold them,
The LORD had given them up?"

For their rock is not like our Rock,
In our enemies' own estimation. (Deuteronomy 32:27-31)

This is of ultimate importance to all who believe that they are "on God's side." The possibility is always before us that our God may come to be against us! Could our Rock “sell us up?” This song declares that is precisely the fate of a people who were blessed by God but came to believe that it was their own strength and worthiness (rather than God's grace) that had made them wealthy, and so turned away from God’s justice.

Then, God may turn around and use the unrighteous followers of other gods to punish the no-longer-faithful people of God.

In the song, it is only when the people are once again humbled and rendered without strength or might that God is willing to again vindicate his people:

For the LORD will vindicate His people
And take revenge for His servants,
When He sees that their might is gone, (Deuteronomy 32:36)

The United States of America has come to rest in our own mighty power. And mighty we are -- spending each year more on military preparations than the rest of the world combined. In doing so, we have removed ourselves from under the wings of the Almighty. We should humble ourselves, lest we be humbled.

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December 28, 2003

Moses concludes his instruction with this summary:

KJV Deuteronomy 30:15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil...

The words "good" and "evil" bring to mind the story of the Garden of Eden. There, God had planted a tree whose fruit was the knowledge of good and evil:

Gen 2:9 Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

and it was of that tree, alone of all the trees in the garden, that God forbad adam to eat:

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Of course, adam did choose to eat from this tree; and death followed: the murder of Abel by Cain, the vengeance of Lamech, the earth so filled with violence that by the time of Noah God repented of creating the earth. Eating from this tree was symbolic of the human decision to make moral judgment about good and evil independent of God. Because of human subjectivity, we inevitably make unrighteous judgments, and death results.

The story that followed is about God calling the family of Abram out of Ur (Iraq) and entering a covenant with them so that they could become the recipients of God's knowledge of good and evil.

Here Moses offers a sort of redemption from the fall.

What is so amazing is that the speech clearly assumes that Israel will choose disobedience:

Deuteronomy 30:1-3 Deuteronomy 30:1 When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you, 2 and return to the LORD your God, and you and your children obey him [literally "listen to his voice] with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today, 3 then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you,

Even here, embedded in the heart of the Mosaic covenant, lies the kernel of the Christian Gospel. We prove ourselves unable to judge good and evil rightly. We do "go astray." In short, we are all sinners. And consequently we do experience the curses that God laid out, and we do stand in need of the grace that Moses also foresaw: the compassion of the Lord, who will bless those who "listen to his voice" with unmerited love.

Listening to the living voice of God is the alternative to making moral judgments about good and evil independently of God. It is to the practice of listening to that living voice that Jesus Christ has made available to all that the Quaker faith calls us.

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December 27, 2003

In the previous two chapters, the people were required to say "Amen" to a series of curses that would fall on the disobedient. Now, we come to the root of the matter which is the condition of "heart" -- the inward seat of the individual will.

Deuteronomy 29:19 All who hear the words of this oath and bless themselves, thinking in their hearts, "We are safe even though we go our own stubborn ways" (thus bringing disaster on moist and dry alike)--20 the LORD will be unwilling to pardon them, for the LORD's anger and passion will smoke against them.

Here is the issue of hypocrisy, or even more difficult to eradicate, the problem of self-deceit. This is the grand theme of the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 7:23; 13:10 and significantly 23: 16, Jeremiah links the stubborn heart with calamity, which at its worst means the breaking of the covenant with God:

Jeremiah 23:16 Thus says the LORD of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they are deluding you. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. 17 They keep saying to those who despise the word of the LORD, "It shall be well with you"; and to all who stubbornly follow their own stubborn hearts, they say, "No calamity shall come upon you."

For Jeremiah (and the prophet Ezekiel) the only answer was the gift of a new heart from God. And that conclusion led Jeremiah to promise the new covenant in which God writes his law inwardly upon the heart.

This is central to the Quaker understanding of the Gospel. If we are to be saved, we need to be obedient to the teachings of God. Yet because of our lusts and self-will we constantly go our own way and end up in a state of disobedience. What is the answer? It is provided by God in the form of an inward principle from God: the Light of Christ within. It is by attending to the Light of Christ within that we can receive the power from God to be liberated from "going our own stubborn ways." For Quakers, to attend to the Light of Christ within is to come to the reality of the law written upon the heart. This reaches beyond the mind with all its deceitful rationalizations; it transforms the stubborn heart. By the inward operation of the grace of God, we can be set free from our self-will to find the love which is at the heart of God.

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