Bread Shared with All the Eaters (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Vaibhav Jadhav on Unsplash
This is the seventh in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the previous posts here.
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. It is my intention in this and following weekly blogs to take up each of these eight claims and to consider how we may in good faith respond to them. I have no doubt that such a careful pointed response to each of these distortions is an effort worth making. I will take up each claim in turn.
The seventh claim is: Inequality is not so bad. This bold claim is not an expression of economic insight, but only a shameless disclosure of the position of those who lead this political party. After all, I have never known anyone on the side of the disadvantaged who believes that inequality is a good thing. That sentiment can only be the advocacy of those who enjoy such shameless advantage. Of course, those who uphold this claim have been shrewd enough to recruit the support of many who will never arrive at their plus side of inequality. There is no reason to think that racism is not operative in this formulation. The great dread is that Black persons should share advantage and be members of the plus side of inequality. The wide support of this position among those who are greatly disadvantaged, moreover, is likely because it is thinkable that at least Black persons suffer greater inequality, a fact that may make some inequality bearable. The entire claim is based on a sense of entitlement for those who benefit from excessive wealth, power, and control.
It requires no imagination at all to recognize that biblical faith, in gospel articulation, has no positive appreciation for inequality, but consistently insists that the wealthy and powerful are entitled to no special advantage. They are called to greater responsibility for the common good (Luke 12:48). Put in the most extreme form, the gospel anticipates a radical socioeconomic reversal, of last/first and first/last, and exalted/humbled and humbled/exalted.
As a consideration of the way in which the Bible refuses any positive appreciation for inequality, I propose that we linger over the manna narrative of Exodus 16. Back in Egypt, prior to the emancipatory wonder of the Exodus, we may believe that there was great inequality among Pharaoh and his entourage, the foremen, the taskmasters, and the slaves. Such a society was well-ordered by rank and hierarchy. And as in every such ranked system, the rankings determined the goods and benefits apportioned unequally. The slaves could remember the “fleshpots” of Egypt wherein “we ate our fill of bread” (Exodus 16:3). But undoubtedly the food offered slaves was very different from the food at the royal table. (We can see the same reality in later Israel as the table of King Solomon was generously laden with ample meat, I Kings 4:22-23), while the subsistence peasant farmers in Israel no doubt lived with sparse meat, if any. Thus Pharaoh’s regime was a model embodiment of inequality, unequal work, and no doubt unequal food, unequal drink, unequal rest, and unequal futures. One can imagine, in an anticipation of right-wing notions of inequality, one in Pharaoh’s entourage exclaiming in the company of other members of the entourage, “Life is good.” One could imagine a later Israelite engaged in the same self-congratulations, as scored by the prophet Amos:
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
and lounge on their couches,
and eat lamb from the flock,
and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,
and like David improvise on instruments of music;
who drink wine from bowls,
and anoint themselves with the finest oils… (Amos 6:4-6).
And all the while the slave camps of Pharaoh enjoyed no such wellbeing. Instead,
The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out (Exodus 2:23).
Their groan set in motion a socioeconomic upheaval that upended Pharaoh’s unequal practice of life and of bread.
Given this moment of emancipatory upheaval, our attention shifts (with the narrative) away from the ease of Pharaoh with his entourage to the void and anxiety of the wilderness where the escaped slaves found themselves. Here in the wilderness there is no advantage, as the wilderness is a great leveler. Here there are no great storage units, no inequality. Everyone faced the same risks and felt the same dangers. The wilderness, it turned out, was a place of anxious equality.
In that venue of threat, there was shared anxiety with no social differentiations: “The whole congregation of Israelites complained” (Exodus 16:2). All of them! All were hungry! All were in need! All of them were nostalgic for the good old days of inequality and slavery. Surely they over-remembered:
If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt,
when we sat by the fleshpots of Egypt and ate our fill of bread (16:3).
The wonder of the narrative is that as soon as their desperate complaint is voiced in the wilderness, the response from the emancipatory God is prompt and promissory:
I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day (Exodus 16:4).
Along with the prospect of bread—and subsequently of meat (quail; 16:12-13), and eventually water (17:1-7)—they also were promised that they would see “the glory of the Lord” (16:7). What a surprise that fit none of their expectations: God’s glory in the wilderness! They had assumed that God’s glory, along with pomp and circumstance, was all back in the land of Pharaoh. They had seen God’s glory in connection with unequal splendor and wealth. But now they learned a radical new dimension of the God of the Exodus. It turns out that the natural habitat of God is not in Pharaoh’s court, but in the wilderness. It turns out that the wilderness is “occupied territory,” not a waste and a void as it appeared to be. The “occupation” of the wilderness by the Lord of the Exodus means that the wilderness is a life-giving place. It is, however, a life-giving place barren of the social hierarchy of the kind they knew in Pharaoh’s regime. Here there are no ranks, and so no ground for inequality. All could address the glory of God with urgent complaint. And all could receive the astonishing assurance by the Lord of the covenant: “I am going to rain bread from heaven on you” (16:4). Who knew? Who knew that the wilderness—void of Pharaoh’s grain storage—could be a place for bread? The bread is promised; and the bread is given!
When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground (16:14).
The narrator is at some pains to detail the bread. The careful phrase, “fine flaky substance” tells us nothing. It is strange bread. It is bread unlike the bread of Pharaoh that is marked with sweat, and likely with blood, and certainly with inequality. But this new, different bread had none of those marks. And so they did not know. They did not know how to regard the bread that bore none of the marks of inequality. The explanation by Moses really tells them nothing about the bread, except that it is given by YHWH:
Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat” (16:15).
The bread comes with the command of the bread-giver who has presided over their emancipation:
Gather as much of it as each of you needs, an omer to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents (16:16).
The bread is assigned and received according to “need.” (The Hebrew has, “In proportion to the eating of his mouth,” that is, what each one needs to eat.) The focus is on hunger and the satiation of hunger.
The hungry Israelites in the wilderness promptly obeyed. They came to the bread with various hungers, and various appetites. But then, we get a most remarkable report on their consumption, one of the most remarkable verses in scripture:
The Israelites did so, some gathered more, some less (16:17).
They did not all gather the same quantity of bread. Some had greater hunger; they gathered and ate more. Some were not as needy, and some gathered less and ate less. But there was no shortage, no lack. There was enough bread for everyone. We might not call that “equality.” Or perhaps it is equality of appetite and satiation. But the point is otherwise. The report attests that YHWH, giver of strange bread peculiar to the wilderness, distributes differently and in measures commensurate to their need. No shortage; no need unmet!
It was “daily bread.” It was bread wondrously given for the day. (Special provision is made for Sabbath day as an exception.) None of it is to be stored. None of it is to be carried over to the next day. None of it is to be made into a surplus. But then this:
But they did not listen (16:20).
They did not listen to the qualification that the bread was only for the day. They imagined that it could be stored. Some set out to imitate the propensity of Pharaoh to accumulate. If bread could be accumulated, not only would there be more security, but one might have social leverage in the community. If some could have more bread, they might be able to have their say in the community, an exercise in leadership. They might practice inequality. Thus even the bread of the wilderness brings with it a compulsion to reiterate the ways of Pharaoh. If one could store bread for an extra day, or two extra days, and then three, one might begin to see in the wilderness the erection of granaries for surplus. And then one would require a cheap labor force to build the granaries, and so on clear to the return of Pharaoh!
But the Lord of the wilderness will not have it so. The Lord of emancipation intends that the covenant people should need and receive the bread every day…for the day. In order to enforce that lordly intent about the bread, we get worms in the bread, a foul smell of spoiled bread, and the melting away of the bread of fine flaky substance. This bread from heaven has a very short shelf life, because the bread giver intends daily reliance on bread for the day. Wilderness life with YHWH is precarious, a day-to-day thing. Everything depends on the reliance of Israel on the bread given. Everything depends on the readiness to trust the bread giver and so to refuse the allure of a hoarded surplus that is the route to inequality.
Israel’s lyrical prayer life exults in the generous, reliable food supply given through the provisions of the creator:
These all look to you to give them their food in due season;
when you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are filled with good things (Psalm 104:27-28).
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them bread for their food in due season.
You open your hand,
satisfying the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16).
That is why when we voice our table prayers, with hearts and heads lifted in wonder about food, we articulate our best creation theology. Every time we eat in gratitude, we remember how generous God is, and how deeply we depend on that daily gift. In celebration of the reliable presence of the creator, Isaiah can affirm:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater… (Isaiah 55:10).
It is not bread for the predator. It is not bread for the powerful or the privileged. It is not bread for the lucky or the entitled. Rather, it is bread for the eater. It is bread given because all of God’s creatures need to eat. The giver of bread is daily attentive.
We are left to imagine that Israel in the wilderness, from that awesome moment of “fine flaky substance,” relied on the bread daily given from heaven. We may believe that such an arrangement, so characteristic of wilderness, pertained…until it did not. Eventually we are told of the end of that wilderness provision when Israel crossed over into the land of Promise:
The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year (Joshua 5:12).
What an awesome moment when Israel, so to say, “came of age” in the land of promise. Now, according to the tradition, Israel is plunged into Canaanite culture, Canaanite agriculture, and Canaanite religion, a plunge that constituted a defining crisis for Israel. With the new option of agriculture, it immediately became possible to store grain, to accumulate surplus, to gather social leverage, and so the practice of inequality. Without reliance on the daily gift of bread Israel entered the world of production, distribution, and consumption, of leverage and surplus. (James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States [2017], has detailed the way in which capacity for “grain storage” became a fierce tool of leverage and social control in the ancient world.)
Moses had anticipated this course of development in Israel:
When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my own hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:12-17).
Moses recognized that the land and its productive potential were seductive, and could lure Israel away from daily dependence and solidarity. Moses saw ahead of time that if Israel practiced amnesia about its past daily bread, it would imagine:
My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth (v. 17).
Thus everything depends upon Israel’s capacity and willingness to remember its rootage in the daily bread of the wilderness. In Judaism the remembrance of such bread is in the Passover meal. No doubt that is why the narrative in Joshua can speak of “the day after Passover” as Israel moved into the new economy:
On the day after Passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain (Joshua 5:11).
The day after Passover it is possible to be seduced, to forget the demanding equality of the wilderness, and to embrace the easy practice of inequality. In Christian tradition, it is the Eucharist that dramatizes our dependence on the bread that is given as the body of Christ. But, unfortunately, the Eucharist has been overlaid with much misleading theology that one might not even suspect the link to manna generosity and manna dependence.
Thus Israel stands before two modes of bread and must decide. It always stands before this bread and must always decide again. There is the bread of heaven given daily that makes for community. And there is the bread of production that can be stored as surplus and distributed according to the whims of the powerful. The matter of these two kinds of bread, one that practices equality of hunger and one that permits inequality is, in my awareness, best exposited by Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection (2007). They write of these options:
The terrain of the Homo oeconomicus is the market exchange in which goods are exchanged for money. That exchange produces abstract relations between producers and consumers, relations not based on fulfillment of the basic needs of the individual or the community, but on the multiplication and accumulation of money…The desire for more gives birth to a craving for objects that move the Homo oeconomicus away from the satisfaction of the basic bodily needs of all people. His inner clock ticks according to the news of the stock market. He does not start with bodies or bread. He does not take seriously the physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of bodies as a prerequisite that is valid beyond the logic of economic calculation. Men, women, and children are considered human capital…The compulsion to accumulate destroys rationality (84, 89).
This matter is an urgent issue for the church, because the choice of bread conditions a choice about equality and inequality, about the shape of our future in hope or fear, and about the power of generosity or greed. It is clear that “Inequality’s not so bad” make sense only when bread can be reduced to a sterile, tradable commodity. The biblical tradition, in both Jewish and Christian usage, insists otherwise. It insists that bread is a sign and practice of creaturely commonality among us that refuses the social differentiations that legitimate and enhance inequality.
The force and significance of this alternative bread lingers in the awareness of the apostle Paul. In his vigorous concern that the congregation in Corinth be generous in sharing with other congregations, Paul appeals to the old manna narrative. He bids the congregation to reflect on its abundance in order to be generous. In his appeal for such generosity he writes:
As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little” (II Corinthians 8:15).
In a quote from the manna story, Paul bids the congregation to be generous according to the generosity of the creator God. With a bit of imagination, we may see that this narrative-based generosity concerns not only church offerings, but also concerns public policy and taxation and the recognition that we all—the powerful and the vulnerable, the haves and the have-nots—depend upon the daily gift of bread, our granaries notwithstanding. It turns out that our excessive surpluses cause us to forget, and so to conclude that inequality is an acceptable social posture. It is not! The bread attests otherwise.
Finally, there is this little note about the obduracy to the disciples of Jesus. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus had just provided bread for 5000 “men” (Mark 6:30-44). Soon after the disciples are said to be “afraid” (6:50), and then “utterly astonished.” And then Mark adds laconically about their fear and their astonishment:
They did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened (Mark 6:52).
They misunderstood the bread! The reason they misunderstood is that they had “hard hearts,” hearts not open to the generous assurances of God. When the bread is misunderstood, bad things happen. Bad things like inequality that soon begins to seem normal. Thus we in the church must spend a great deal of energy in order to understand rightly about the bread, about the bread of heaven, the bread of Passover, the bread that is blessed and broken for us and for the world. To regard inequality as legitimate is a sure sign that the bread has been misunderstood.
Walter Brueggemann
August 13, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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