Some thoughts on the Bible today
Standing at the “frontier of evangelism” here in Africa, and looking at the forms that “christianity” takes not only here, but everywhere else in the world as well, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the entire church has drifted so far from its biblical and apostolic foundations that whatever it is we’re doing, it doesn’t have a lot to do with what Jesus was doing.
My background is Bible and Liturgy. Actually I started from the Liturgy, but then got a degree in Scripture, and now I find myself coming to the Liturgy from the Bible.
The Reformers were perhaps the first to notice that what the Bible talks about and what was going on in the Church were rather vastly different. They demanded that the Church return to God’s original and authentic revelation, which they considered to be the Bible.
Still, no one had the tools to appreciate how the picture painted by the Bible really did differ from contemporary Church practice. It wasn’t really clear that the stories in the Bible had given rise to the Church’s dogma, but were not the same as that dogma. They still thought the Bible was talking about what they were talking about when they were talking about the Bible!
And yet. The Reformers had glimpsed something, and had begun to realize that we needed to get back to it. In many ways, this was the impulse that brought about modern, scientific biblical studies.
Although St Jerome had translated his Vulgate from the “hebrew truth” of Scripture in the mid-300s, Catholic scholars became earnest about scientific biblical scholarship really only in the 20th century. But by the 1950s, and certainly by Vatican 2, they could handle it as competently as anybody else, including the Jews. By then, everyone agreed that the Text was an objective fact that had to be understood and explained in its own terms, and that later dogmas, even if correct, couldn’t be used directly to support any interpretation. So sectarianism could be left aside as all scholars agreed that the Text controlled the interpretation and not the other way around.
The development of biblical studies was slow and painful, and the complaint that it was spiritually fruitless and even contrary to faith was not always baseless. Yet we seem to have arrived at a kind of watershed by the late 70s when scholars on all sides began to realize that breaking the Text down to smaller and smaller pieces wasn’t getting them anywhere, and started looking with renewed interest the story in the Bible and the stories from which the whole was constructed— their patterns, themes, structures, social assumptions and political context, and so forth— and even its numbers— and how all of these helped to build its larger meaning.
In this new approach, it’s become even more clear that the uses we’ve made of the Bible— our “traditional” allegories and dogmatizing and moralizing use— was never actually very biblical. That doesn’t mean that they were wrong, but only that they were often based more on the fathers’ creativity than on a strict insight into the Text itself. Allegory, for instance, can bring out profound theological truths, but the process tended to take the Bible as raw material and use it to express a theological insight that the actual biblical story was not interested at all.
So, what we’ve taken to be biblical and apostolic, is often such only in the sense that it doesn’t contradict the biblical and apostolic message— but authors themselves were usually interested in something quite different from what the fathers were illustrating with their bibles in hand.
The Scriptures tell a story of their own. And when we no longer know or even recognize that story, but have only the “extensions” of those stories that the fathers provided, we end up replacing the Church with something that looks exactly like the Church, but may not really even be the Church.
But at best, it’s like cut flowers. They’re beautiful, and they’re really flowers, but they’re missing their roots, and eventually we will have no choice but to discard them. I think that’s the situation of much of Christianity today.
I do want to emphasize that neither the Church nor the fathers were wrong about theology. Out of their deep experience of Christ they resolved the questions that had arisen in their own cultures, working from a Bible written in the Hebrew culture. And through much struggle, they came up, for the most part, with the only possible right answers.
Yet a shift has taken place. We sing “Christ is our new Passover” every year at Easter, but we can hardly find a prayer elsewhere in our prayerbooks— even when it comes to the Eucharist— that mentions Passover at all. You can read the Liturgies of Chrysostom and Basil, and never guess that the Eucharist is Passover or the Covenant with Abraham, or how Jesus the Messiah took this to the next level, and what that means. Except for “this is my blood of the new Covenant”, we hardly find mention of the Covenant at all.
We pray endlessly about un/worthiness and purification, and affirm with all our heart that Christ is “truly present”, but we haven’t the faintest sense that this rite has anything to do with God’s promise to Abraham to bless all nations and to fix the problem of Adam through his choice of Israel to be the site of his redemption. Our prayers for worthiness and purification are not wrong, but how much do we consciously desire to take part in what God is up to in history? It was never just the salvation of individual believers.
In the Bible, everything from Genesis to Revelation takes place because God is determined to honor his promise to Abraham. As St Paul put it, “The Messiah [himself] became a servant of the circumcised [the Jews] for the sake of God’s truthfulness. He wanted to confirm the promises that God had given to the patriarchs [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob], and to get the nations to glorify God for his mercy” (Rm 15.8-9). That’s what Christ was doing— making good on God’s promise to Abraham that he would fix the problem of Adam through him. Who among us has ever known about this?
This is the sort of thing that the Reformers began to sense was lacking from contemporary Church life. And it’s largely still lacking.
Fr Alexander Schmemann noted that what the Liturgy actually says it’s doing, and what it actually is doing, is often obscured by what we say it’s doing and the way we do it. The forms we use and the formulas we recite are not concerned with whether the bread and wine are “really” the body and blood of Christ, yet this is a major concern of theology in the modern era. In focusing on this, we are thinking about something other than what our Messiah was doing at that Supper. Looking at the Liturgy and many of its later developments, Fr Schmemann named the shift between them a “pseudomorphosis”.
Christianity as a whole has suffered basically this same pseudomorphosis. Among other things, we hardly see the Bible as the story of Israel and her walk with God through the desert of Empire. We do not see how our Church— much less our churches— are connected to this story of Israel. More typically, we try to view the Bible as a “love-letter (or really, as a rule-book) from God, addressed personally to me”. Which may inspire a certain sentimental kind of spirituality, but it’s to use the Bible as something other than what it is.
I’m convinced that this pseudomorphosis is one major reason for the massive crisis of legitimacy that all churches are facing today. Whenever I teach the Bible, people are inevitably fascinated by the glimpse they get of what the writers are actually saying— and I don’t engage in any esoteric or idiosyncratic interpretation, but mostly just read whole passages with an eye to the writer’s main idea. It’s just that they’ve never actually heard anyone talk about what Isaiah is interested in. We spend our whole lives hearing only that “by his stripes we are healed” (Isa 53.5), and so forth. So we think Isaiah “predicted” Jesus and leave it at that. But so what if he did? Why should we care? And hence the crisis of legitimacy.
People want something that speaks to them. A whole industry of trying to get people to think the Bible is really all about them has therefore arisen. You can find scores of study bibles— Recovery, Women, Teens, Men, Orthodox, “Breathe Life”, Life Application, Africa, Prophecy, etc etc— and just about all of them purport to be, in one way or another, about your “everyday life”. The flaw in this approach is that the Bible was never actually about “you” or your “everyday life”. But we have no idea how to let the Bible speak with its own voice about what it talks about; and anyway, LIFE is all about us, dammit!— so shut up and give me answers about how to live a “Christian life®”!
In what follows, want to offer a small study of the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25— whose point we absolutely miss every time we read it. After that, I’d also like to discuss the story of the Giants— or as they’re sometimes called, the Nephilim— in Genesis 6, who introduce the Flood Narrative.
As I contrast what the Bible actually says in these two passages with what we always say about them will give us a glimpse of how a couple of longstanding— even patristic— misinterpretations have sent us careening into a deadly Neverneverland of meaningless nonsense for centuries, and how the Bible is really quite relevant and interesting if we let it be what it is!
The Parable of the Talents
Whenever we want to read a passage in the Bible, it’s good to first step back and get the big picture. The Parable of the Talents is no exception, for Matthew 25 actually begins in Matthew 23, where Jesus concludes his battles with the Temple hierarchy by delivering a final, excoriating judgment on them. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! … Snakes! Brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to gehenna? … how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you didn’t want it. Look, your house is left to you desolate” (Mt 23.13-39). “House”, here, among other things, means Temple: The Temple in which you place your hope will be utterly destroyed.
In Ezekiel 11.23, God’s Presence abandoned the Temple: “Yhwh’s Glory went up from the midst of the city and stood on the mountain that is on the east side of the city [the Mount of Olives]”, and from there announced the Doom of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. In the next verse, Matthew 24.1-3, Jesus also leaves the Temple, never to return; goes to the Mount of Olives and sits there, and pronounces the Temple’s Doom at the hands of the Romans.
He conveys the doom by means of his famous “wars and rumors of wars” speech, which most people incorrectly understand as “predicting the end of the world”. I won’t comment on that here, but only say that he’s talking about the Temple’s destruction— “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (24.2); “let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” (24.16)— as an eschatological sign. He follows up this speech with five parables on watching and being ready, culminating with that of the Wise and Foolish Virgins— ““Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming” (25.13). Then he tells the parable of the Talents, which we’ll examine, and finally, he tells the Parable of the Last Judgment. After that, Matthew begins his Passion Narrative.
All these parables are linked. They aren’t just a loose collection of sayings on the idea of watchfulness. He contrasts a trustworthy slave (25.45-47) with a wicked one who is cast out (24.48-51), and says next, “Then” heaven’s reign will be compared to what happened to the wise and foolish virgins, so be vigilant (25.1-13), “because” it’s like a slave master entrusts three slaves with his obscene wealth— and two of the slaves please their master, and one makes him very angry (25.14-30)— “but” the judgment of the Son of Man explicitly contrasts with the master’s point of view.
It’s a long thought, but we can lay out its logic like this, to get it in focus:
Watch therefore (25.13), . . . because it’s like this now (25.14) . . . but when the son of man comes, he will do like this (25.31) . . . .
Everywhere on the internet, and in fact throughout the entire history of christian commentary, the “lord” in the Parable of the Talents represents God or Jesus and his judgments are taken to be just and true. The first two slaves are “good and faithful” because they double the master’s money, and the third is “wicked and lazy” because he “failed to invest his talent”.
This of course aligns God with the values of wealth and increase, however much we may “spiritualize” the talents and the investing. The third slave was culpable because he let his fears get in the way of his success.
Yet the third slave’s “fear” is what actually motivates the story. It’s what the story is about. Even if the story itself does not explain what he fears. It actually leaves us wondering what happened to him.
We need to get this clearly in view. A “talent” is an impossible sum— something like “a billion dollars”— and the master has given his slaves 10, 5, and 1 billion dollars respectively.
One simply does not “entrust” even 1 billion dollars to someone who has no idea what to do with it. So the third slave is obviously an experienced investor; perhaps not the top investor, but one of the top three. He knows full well what the master expects and what he has to do with the money. So if he feared the master, then why didn’t he just perform as the others did?
Moreover he denounces his master in harsh words— “Lord, I knew you were a hard man, reaping where you didn’t sow, and gathering where you didn’t scatter” (25.24). The master then specifically and proudly accepts the accusation— “You knew that I reap where I haven’t sown, and gather where I haven’t scattered” (25.26).
To reap where one hasn’t sown or to gather where one hasn’t scattered is to steal another man’s harvest. That would destroy his livelihood and send him into starvation. He would have no choice but to sell his land and become homeless. An astute lender can easily take advantage of a desperate peasant in that way. And that’s the only way anyone could make the kind of fortune described in the parable. The master does exactly this, and even boasts that that’s what he does, and by implication, the successful slaves are very good at it too.
But the third slave, who said he was “afraid”— is none the less quite unafraid to denounce his master’s greed and rapaciousness to his face, and so not only lose his job, but be cast out into misery and darkness! And he would have known well enough what to expect, even if we tend to read it as a surprise.
No, it all comes down as expected. And the parable ends with the master’s final word, which apparently sums up his whole philosophy— “To everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (25.29). In modern english— “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and that’s just how it is. I want GROWTH, and it doesn’t matter who you screw.”
So we’re left with the third slave in misery and darkness.
So now— should we go and do likewise?
Is that the message?
Certainly every capitalist commentator on the internet seems to think so.
But Jesus has one more arrow in his quiver, and it has a poison tip. It’s the parable of the Last Judgment— the sheep and the goats, “when I was hungry, you gave me to eat”, “as often as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me” (25.31-46). You know the story.
But what you likely don’t know is that every English translation curiously omits the word that connects the Last Judgment parable with the one about the talents and the third slave.
Treating the two parables as merely juxtaposed makes the Last Judgment into a kind of confirmation of the rich slave owner’s judgment on the investor-slave who was “afraid”. It’s as if Jesus is saying, You actually will be judged for not increasing your talents AND you’ll be judged for not feeding the poor. Well, the master was very happy when the first two slaves brought home the bacon, so feeding the poor might end up on the back burner.
As we said, the third slave was already the kind of guy that a Jeff-Bezos type of master hadn’t hesitated to entrust with a billion dollars. So something had happenened to him. Why was he now afraid to reap where he hadn’t sown, and gather where he hadn’t scattered? What was he so newly afraid of?
Well, the missing connector word tells everything. “Jeff Bezos” justifies extortion and exploitation by saying, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That’s just how it is!”
But Jesus has been saying, up to that point, “You have to be vigilant” (25.13) . . . because it’s like a rich man entrusting his wealth to three slaves. One slave is afraid and does nothing with it, and the rich master is merciless to him (25.14-30). BUT when the son of man comes in his glory (25.31) . . . .
That one little word “BUT” turns the whole story of the slaves upside down.
The “Son of Man” is not, in Matthew, the second Person of the Trinity, incarnate of the Virgin. At least that’s not what Matthew is thinking about. For all four evangelists, the “Son of Man” is the figure in Daniel 7.13 who in Aramaic is enthroned “with”, but in Greek is enthroned “as” the Ancient of Days— and in Matthew, enthroned on a cross— as Jesus in fact begins to explain immediately after this Last Judgment speech (26.2). Here in the parable, as in Daniel, the Son of Man has come to judge the nations— and it turns out that the very Lord of History has a point of view diametrically opposed to that of the slave master. So watch, lest YOU be cast out!
At least from the days of Origen (2nd c BC) we have misidentified the harsh slave owner as God. But Matthew means his point.
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that’s just how the world works”— those are the words of the slaver, the exploiter, the banker, the neocolonialist, the IMF, the American.
“BUT”, says Jesus, himself the Son of Man (26.2), whose kingdom will have no end. “BUT”, he says, my criterion is different: “Did you feed the poor?”
Apparently the third slave got the memo, and was afraid.
However, to be afraid is not yet to be righteous. But it can be a start— and this is not the end of Matthew’s Gospel.
The nephilim
Introducing the story of Noah, Genesis 6.1-4 tells us, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose.”
“Sons of God” can also be translated “sons of the gods”; the Hebrew is ambiguous, but because it does differ from “sons of God” as used elsewhere, i will take the phrase as meaning “sons of the gods”. This need not imply a belief in other gods, but can function only as a literary reference to the “sons of gods” found in all the surrounding cultures— men like Achilles or Orion.
Also, those “sons of the gods” saw that the daughters of men were “attractive” and took them as “wives” only in English; in Hebrew, the “sons of the gods” saw that those women were “good” and they “took women for themselves” from all that they chose.
“Saw that they were good and took them”—
That’s exactly what Eve did with the fruit (Gn 3.6-7), what Abraham and Sarah do with Hagar (16.1-6), what Aaron did with the gold when he made the calf (Ex 32.1-22), what David did with Bathsheba (2Sm 11.1-5), and it’s what the nephilim did with the women (Gn 6.1-4).
Genesis 6.1-4 is not a silly, romantic, and meaningless “fragment of mythology” about tall and mighty, semi-divine beings marrying beautiful women, which for some unexplained reason depresses God enough that he first limits human life to about a sixth of what it had been, and then decides to destroy human and animal life altogether. Specifically, as i will try to explain, it is not about divine beings (later said to be “fallen angels”) mating with human women. In fact it’s the complete opposite of any of that.
The sons of the gods saw that the human women were good, and they took the ones they wanted. Yhwh responded, “My Spirit shall not abide in [or: strive with] man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years” (Gn 6.3).
The next verse follows up with an explanation or further description of those “sons of the gods”—
Gn 6.4 “There were giants on the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God were coming in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them— the same were the mighty men of old, men of name.”
“Giants” is what the Greek says, but the Hebrew has “nephilim”. We’ll get back to that.
The KJV says that the giants were “in the earth”; modern translations say “on the earth”. “In the earth” sounds like they were underground, but that’s not the story at all, and for modern readers is just confusing. “On the earth” makes you think they fell from heaven, so this might suggest they are fallen angels— but that is not what the expression means and that angels fell specifically not the case in this story, as we’ll see. So we really should translate this, “The nephilim were in the land”. That’s like saying, “There were nephilim in Utah”. In other words, there were nephilim around.
Now, about those nephilim. The Book of Enoch, written not much later than Daniel, tells us that the nephilim were the offspring of “Watchers”— a class of angels mentioned in Daniel 4, who in Enoch were dispatched to Earth to watch over the humans. They soon begin to lust for human women, and their offspring are the Nephilim, savage giants who pillage the earth and endanger humanity— giants because they are described as very large in Numbers 33. They also taught humanity the arts of weaponry, cosmetics, mirrors, sorcery, and so on. Eventually, God allows a Great Flood to rid the earth of them. The watchers are then bound “in the valleys of the Earth” until Judgment Day. In the New Testament, Jude 6 refers to this— “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day”.
This is a very fantastic story. There’s nothing quite like it in the Bible, except for that lone reference to their judgment in Jude. But there is not one single instance of a sexual relationship between a divine or semi-divine or heavenly being and an earthly one in the Bible. That’s part of why Genesis 6.1-4 strikes us as so weird. It’s just out of character with the rest of the Bible!
Besides Genesis 6.1-4, the key texts about the giants/nephilim are in Numbers 13 and in Joshua 11.21-22; 14.12, 15; and 15.13-14. In all cases, they are associated with war.
In Numbers 13.22, the men who had gone up with Joshua and Caleb to spy out the Promised Land scare the people into refusing Yhwh’s command to go up and conquer by telling them how they’d encountered three “sons of Anak” near Hebron. In 13.28, they then relate that they had seen great fortified cities, and besides that, that they’d also seen the “descendants of Anak”. And in 13.33, they summarize their fears by saying, “we saw the nephilim— the sons of Anak come from the nephilim— and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them”. So not only did they see the nephilim, but some further development of them.
We have no evidence, though, of any tribe or people group called the “Anakim”. In fact the word “anak” (actually, “anaq”) is the same as “wanax” in Mycenaean Greek. It means a “warlord” or a gang leader, like Agamemnon or Achilles. In later Greek, the “w” was lost and the word became “anax”, which still appears occasionally in Byzantine hymnography as a title of Christ our “Chief”. But the original meaning was something like a gang leader or a warlord who rules a city.
So, Scripture tells us that warlords come from the “nephilim”. So what are the “nephilim”?
Well, the word itself comes from the verb “naphal”, which means to “fall”. So, “nephilim” is usually taken to mean the “fallen ones”. That is how Enoch seems to read it. The story thus becomes one in which “fallen” watcher-angels mated with human women and produced giant offspring.
The problem is, though, that “fallen” is a passive participle, and “nephilim” is active. They were “falling”, not “fallen”. Nothing suggests they were “fallen” from heaven.
Genesis 6 calls them “sons of the gods” and says they were “falling”; and they were to be found “in the land”, that is, in the land of Israel or wherever Noah was living.
In certain forms, the verb “naphal” can mean not just to “fall” but to “fall upon”, as a gang might “fall upon” a village.
Cognate words in Arabic refer to “raiders” or “marauders”— precisely the sort of people who might “see” that the women of a certain village were “good” and “take” them.
Moreover, a related word in Arabic means “tribute” or “booty” or “protection money”. The writer is specifically not describing the “nephilim” as supernatural. They were just thugs and gang leaders, plunderers and rapists, extortionists and thieves. From them came the warlords.
But why does Genesis call them “sons of the gods”? The last part of 6.4 explains, “These were the mighty men (gibborim) of old, the men of name”.
“Gibbor” can mean a “mighty man”, but most of the time it refers to a “warrior”. So— “these were the famous warriors of old”. These are your old mythic heroes— supposedly half-divine, half-human— they were all just a bunch of thugs and gang leaders, plunderers and rapists, extortionists and thieves.
“The nephilim were in the land in those days”— that is, the days of Noah— “and also afterward”— that is, after the Flood. We can now leave aside all speculations about how the giants survived, although some are quite charming— one story has them survive by riding on top of the Ark.
But Genesis is quite clear that “everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gn 7.22). We don’t need to speculate about how the clever giant offspring of fallen angels and human women managed to thwart God’s intention to destroy all life; Genesis is just saying that there were warlords and organized thugs both before and after the Flood. Joshua 11.21 and other verses suggest that when Israel invaded the Land, these warlords even controlled some of the fortified cities that would have been built to defend against them! The land that Israel invaded was full of violence, rape, and extortion. And now, already before Noah’s story unfolds, Genesis tells us that a Flood will not fix the problem.
There are no “semi-divine beings” in the Bible. Despite at least 22 centuries of misinterpretation, the only passage that people have thought said that such creatures did exist, turns out to be part and parcel of a semi-legendary description of the rise of civilization from the first city (built on murder) to the first Empire. The story of Nimrod in Genesis 10.8— a warlord who became the first emperor and who is identical with Orion, a deified thug.
So this is the background when God calls Abraham and promises that through him, he will redeem his good creation from the trouble brought by Adam.
Scripture is never talking in any way of myths that you can either “believe” or “not believe”, without significance for practical or political life. The Bible is located solidly in the land and on the ground where civilization is based on murder, thugs rape women and rich slave owners exploit peasants as if they had descended from the gods both before and after the Flood.
“These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of name” (6.4). These ones— these thugs and marauders and rapists— these and none other were the ancient warriors, the “men of name” in the myths of the nations. Agamemnon and Achilles were just thugs and rapists. Israel is is specifically commanded not to fear them. “God is our king from before the ages!” (Ps 73.12).
The interesting thing about the Flood story is that God’s plan to purify the world by destroying it, fails. The only way it could have worked is if the flood had in fact drowned every last human being at all. But God was unwilling to kill Noah. So the flood wipes out all breathing life, except for Noah— and Noah offers a right sacrifice but then produces booze and passes out, whereupon his son Ham impregnates his mother and produces Canaan (Gn 9)— and Canaan is the father of all those Canaanites who will be known as anakim. Noah the man “righteous in all his generation” produces both thugs and rapists, and the need to defend against them.
The flood has failed. There’s only one way the world will ever change. We ourselves, made in God’s image, have to become “like” him. And to do this, we will have learn that God is like Jesus, not the other way around. He is actually not like an obscenely wealthy slave owner who “reaps where he didn’t sow”. For otherwise our ideas of not only of God, but of Jesus amount to just power and violence.
So the point of the parable of the Last Judgment (and it is a parable, not a prediction!) is that we must feed the poor ourselves, not seek to double our billions while waiting for God to feed them. That is how God’s reign, God’s government “comes on the land, even as in the sky”.
I believe it was Karl Marx who said somewhere that when we finally stop believing in heaven and take the land seriously, the revolution will come.
“Hear, O Israel: you are to cross over the Jordan today, to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the sons of the warlords whom you know, and of whom you have heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the sons of a warlord?’ Know therefore today that he who goes over before you as a consuming fire is Yhwh your God. He will destroy them and subdue them before you. So you shall drive them out and make them perish quickly, as Yhwh has promised you” (Dt 9.1-3).
Amen! Maranatha!
The Messiah is risen.