Week 8: Curse v Blessing

One of the enduring “problems” I have with the Old Testament is the version of God that is presented as simultaneously jealous and open, spiteful and forgiving, and mean and loving. Consider Deuteronomy. At the outset of the passage (Deuteronomy 28:1-68), it really feels like God is with the people, promising blessings of abundance in both resources and progeny if the people will simply obey God’s laws. The people are told they will be “the head, not the tail” in verse 13, which is in reference to the people’s establishment as God’s holy people. In other words, obedience to God guarantees military supremacy and regional geo-political stability.

But immediately afterward, God makes clear the punishment for disobedience, and it’s the exact opposite of the assured blessings. In addition to the threat of being conquered by foreign powers, the threat of a loss of progeny seems to be even more pronounced. First, the women betrothed to Israelite men will be raped (v30), thus rendering them unsuitable for marriage and motherhood. Second, the people’s children will be sold off to other nations (v32), thus eliminating the current “next” generation of leaders. God is capable of exacting blessing and curse; what you get is conditioned on how you behave. This is part of the Deuteronomic Theme that Bandstra explains as "four arcs of sin, punishment, repentance, and deliverance" that make sense of Israel's history of ups and downs and "provide a measure of control over the future" (Bandstra, 192).

Morally, this conception is profoundly troubling because explicit acts of God’s love are predicated on correct action first by the people. Deviation from this doesn’t just remove one from the prosperity; it actively guarantees that God will work against you. This is morally very dangerous ground to be walking in. Obedience and love borne out of fear are not the same as obedience and love freely given. Can you imagine your parents setting a curfew and then saying that if you fail to get home by midnight, you’ll be sold into slavery!?! Such a punishment is completely devoid of love – it’s retributory instead of restoring. It seeks to break down instead of make whole.

Seemingly in response, the “former prophets” try to explain why God would conditionalize God’s favor in this way. In Joshua 23:1-16, the author grounds his message in a sense of nationalistic fear (not unlike Donald Trump today!). By intermingling with other nations, there is a real threat that they will eventually fall prey to worshipping their gods and losing their identity in Yhwh. The author goes so far in verse 13 to suggest that, if the people do intermarry, God won’t protect them anymore. The laws against intermarriage reflect the need among leaders and authors of these texts to ensure that the Israelite line remains strong – that it isn’t watered down, so to speak, by marrying outside their own ethnic group.

To address this fear in other ways, the Israelites demanded a king, which in 1 Samuel becomes another sticking point for the people to (re)prove their faithfulness to Yhwh. In 1 Samuel 12:1-25, the prophet Samuel impugns the people’s faithfulness because they asked for a king “even though the Lord [their] God was [their] king” (1 Sam 12:12). The problem that Samuel was pointing out to the people was that they continually forget who God is to them – remembering God only in their times of trouble, but quickly forgetting Yhwh once their pressing needs have been addressed. Similarly, but in an even more pronounced failing in 2 Kings 17:5-18 and 2 Chronicles 36:11-21, the people have actually ignored the words of the prophets who were sent to remind the people about God’s love and invite the people back into relationship with God. The result was these kingdoms eradication from society through being conquered and enslaved.

The message is clear: when Yhwh’s chosen people refused to honor their covenant with God thus failing to be obedient to God’s laws, they received extreme punishments: rape, pillage, enslavement, poverty, sickness, and murder. Sound like a God you’d want to worship, or one you’d worship only out of fear? It’s incredibly disingenuous to read Samuel’s exhortation to “consider what good God’s done, so be faithful” (1 Sam 12:24) in one breath, and then a warning that everyone will perish if they aren’t faithful in the next. Moreover, a close reading of these last three passages makes clear that these proscriptions against idolatrousness are based in “the sake of God’s great name” (1 Sam 12:22). God’s own pride and identity are at stake when people fail to heed God’s word and obey God’s law.

These texts use blessing/curse language in ways that demonstrate the fundamental fears of the people at the time these texts were written: fears of military subjugation, inability to procreate, and the loss of their Israelite ethnic lineage. I don’t personally believe that the former prophets were faithfully representing the full nature and love of the God I know. In light of the latter prophets message of faith in action through justice and mercy and caring for the poor, we see the Israelites’ understanding of God start to shift toward less black/white or blessing/curse dichotomies and toward a more dynamic understanding of the complexity of living in relationship with God.

Ultimately, I think Samuel starts to get these prophets to start thinking more about it in this way. He clarifies that the punishments threatened for non-compliance with the law do not mean that God has rejected God’s people. The writers of Kings and Chronicles also offer some hope that the Davidic line will be restored one day. Samuel reminds them, “the Lord was pleased to make you God’s own” (1 Sam 12:22). God’s people did not opt in to the relationship; they were chosen by God for a reason. This exceptionalism guides the leaders’ use of language and prophecy to enforce behavioral standards that guarantee a strong and prosperous ethnic line. Unfortunately for them, however, the flip side of this language and identity mean that, as far the authors of these pronouncements are concerned, they are not able to opt-out of the relationship either.

While problematic, these texts do give us great insight into the contextual worries and fears that confronted the Israelites millennia ago. They are some of the same fears that our own country wrestles with. God help us that we don’t continue to conflate success with God’s blessing and sickness and struggles with God’s absence, for it is in those times especially that we are called to be our most faithful selves and to trust in God.