Rewriting History
Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash
It is usual to regard the Books of Kings as nothing more than a boring recital of kings, North and South. But to the contrary, we might otherwise see the books as a work of complex art with a clever way to trace twin monarchies of Judah and Israel with a sprinkling of prophetic testimony along the way. In any case, these two books provide a baseline for what we know of the history of Judah and Israel. We are able to see that the books of I and II Kings constitute a rewrite from the sources cited with a distinct axe to grind. (On those sources, for example, is I Kings 11:41.) From there we see that the books of I and II Chronicles consist in yet another rewrite with still other objectives. The latter rewrite from Kings to Chronicles not surprisingly consists in some losses and some gains as the historical account is now tilted toward yet another new purpose.
When compared to I and II Kings, we can see that a great deal has been lost in I and II Chronicles:
We no longer have the witness of Elijah and Elisha who disrupted royal claims by their performance of transformative power. On the one hand, we now lack the narrative of Elijah as a mighty force in the public scene of Israel, both in the contest at Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18) and concerning the nefarious royal plot to seize the vineyard of Naboth (I Kings 21). On the other hand, we no longer have any memory of Elisha who deployed his immense power for the good and wellbeing of the lowly and the powerless (e.g., II Kings 4:1-7, 8:1-6). The new account given in Chronicles lacks evidence of prophetic transformation that helped to expose the ineptness and impotence of royal capacity.
We no longer have any access to the great economic success and commercial power of the House of Omri in the North that has no counterpoint in the Jerusalem monarchy. Compared to Omri and Ahab, the Jerusalem dynasty is something of a backwater in the affairs of trade and commerce.
We no longer have any report on the characteristic and recurring disruptions that marked the Northern Kingdom that are said to be often the outcome of prophetic instigation. We miss out on the frequent changes of dynasty, including the violent elimination of Queen Jezebel (II Kings 9:30-37). Because the murder of Queen Athaliah is part of the Jerusalem memory, she has her life and death narrated in II Kings 11:1-3, 13-16, and reiterated in II Chronicles 22:10-12, 23:12-15.
What remains after these losses is a singular uninterrupted narrative of the southern dynasty of David that runs without a break for many generations. Once the northern tribes seceded, the southern claim went without disruption all the way to the failed years of Jehoiachin. We may identify two significant gains for the Jerusalem monarchy by the capacity to edit out any memory of the northern enterprise by the Chronicler:
Such editing gives a monopoly to the southern regime, as though it were the only regime with any claim to governance. When all rivals are eliminated from purview, the one remaining is made to look compelling.
Such editing permits a claim to singular legitimacy for the southern regime. This claim is further enhanced by the genealogy of I Chronicles 1-9 that is able to trace rootage for the dynasty back to the beginning, back to “Adam” (1:1). There is no doubt, moreover, that in royal ideology the king is indeed “Adam,” that is, “the man.” This claim then pertains even to the weakest and most pitiful members of the royal recital since pedigree here counts for everything.
The reductionism of this editorial process serves to eliminate “distractions” from the special claim of the Davidic House, and gives to the dynasty an unchallenged presence in the memory and self-understanding of Israel that eventuated in Judah in “Messianic” hope for the arrival of a new
David:
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness
from this time and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this (Isaiah 9:6-7).
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:5-6, see 33:14-16).
My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes. They shall live in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived; they and their children and their children’s children shall live there forever; and my servant David shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them forevermore. My dwelling shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Then the nations shall know that I the Lord sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is among them forevermore (Ezekiel 37:24-28).
This rewrite of history by the Chronicler has shocking parallels to the current rewrite by some of US history. In the same way, the current “rewrite” comes to generate a monopoly of white authority, legitimacy, and domination to the exclusion of any other claim.
In this rewrite, there is no Indigenous memory or lingering presence. In the white triumphalism championed by such as John Wayne in his many roles, first peoples were only a prehistorical presence that threatened and impeded white advances; they were available for exploitative measures in the most violent ways.
In this rewrite, there can be no African Americans or people of color, only labor that is readily expendable and easily dismissed in the ways of abuse, violence, and erasure.
In this rewrite, there are no LGBTQIA+ people, since such persons would be a contradiction to a singular, cis-gendered, heteronormative definition of proper order, and so are to be treated by erasure, denial and purgation.
When Indigenous, African American and people of color, and LGBTQIA+ people can be eliminated, it does not take very long to add people living in poverty to the list of non-persons.” “Poor people” are to be cast only as labor and can be kept at the margins of social recognition. These several exclusions leave heteronormative white people with financial resources as the only ones who can count for anything in the body politic. And indeed, over time there have been many public discussions concerning who is properly of the dominant class with the hint that “less acceptable” populations (like Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century) were not fully or credibly acceptable. Like the ancient claims of chosenness, the claims of dominant monopoly also appeal to religious legitimacy, so that since the “magisterial” writing of Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, white history of the US has been taken as a reiteration of the old memory of a chosen people. The US Constitution, with its bold clarifying amendments 14-16, moreover, talks powerfully against such exclusionary claims already in the context of the Civil War that refused and resisted racist exclusion that much too easily claimed religious legitimacy. The rewrite that is currently underway is yet another manifestation of the effort to claim chosen status for heteronormative, financially resourced whites. Such a claim and such ideological posturing can find their legitimacy from Scripture.
Scripture can of course be read as the singular narrative for the chosen people; first Israel, then belatedly Christians and, currently, particular white Americans who also claim to be Christian. Such a reading of scripture inescapably requires a careful selective register of texts. I have no doubt that it is our work to retrieve those texts that clearly counter such a facile reading of the text according to our ideological propensity, and to reread those texts that all too readily support such confiscatory practices.
It is not the primary business of the church to correct our long-running misreading of US history, though that work cannot be neglected. It is, nonetheless, the proper business of the church to read and to reread our own biblical texts more honestly and with more discernment. And that work surely pertains to the texts that have provided the subtext for a white rendering of US history. When we do that, we arrive at the two-fold claim that God gave the land to Israel as a promise and that Israel took the land through the ready violence of Joshua. The interplay of give-take lets us interpret as we are wont, with an accent on divine faithfulness and generosity, or on human faithfulness and courage. In like manner, the “conquest” of the New World by white Europeans has become a combination of divine promise and human resolve, so that human violence against the indigenous populations can be justified as reiteration of the biblical narrative.
Little imagination is required to see that the “take” part of the land equation issued in colonialism, extraction, and as necessary, genocide. The newly established white colonies in the New World were governed by the powers of the old world. The purpose of that governance of the New World was to transfer the wealth of the New World to the old regimes of Europe. And, as necessary, the indigenous populations had to be eradicated to make room for the new white colonialists thus genocide. There can be little doubt that when we learn to reread the Bible, we will inescapably learn to read our own national history with more discerning eyes in a way that invites us to think again about our current national role in the world.
Every generation, as it were, “rewrites the Bible,” that is, every generation inescapably reads scripture afresh in terms of its own context of hope and fear. It is now the work of the church to rewrite, yet again, the scriptures as a faithful disclosure “from elsewhere” that addresses us as both assurance and imperative. The assurance of scripture, often cast as God’s own “fear not,” intends to be a counter to the present tilt of our political economy toward chaos and anarchy. The assurance is attestation that in the midst of such an immediate threat we are invited to look beyond such political realities to the abiding reality of God’s governance that is not in doubt and that is not in jeopardy because of human posturing. But the assurance that aims to outflank current threats is no easy assurance. Rather, it is issued along with an imperative that we have work to do that is good and hard work. That work is to construct and maintain social institutions and practices that refuse the rewrites of nationalism, racism, sexism, or classism. It is the “rewriting” responsibility of the church to refuse and resist such distortions of scripture that all too easily serve ideological ends that are grounded in fear and greed. The anchor for a faithful rereading and rewriting of scripture is the amazing presence in the text and beyond the text of the generous God of forgiveness and hospitality.
It is this God who “does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10).
It is this God who welcomes strangers and throws celebrative parties for the wayward who have “come home” and turned out to be not dead but alive.
It is this God who overrides all of our fears and misgivings by governance that is as reliable as it is generous.
Thus it is the work of the church—both in its utterance and in its missional performance—to attest the God who rewrites the claims of greed, selfishness, and fear into a tale of generosity that subverts every ideological claim made on behalf of the text. Thus it is an awesome moment in the church every time the church assembles and hears again the words of scripture that counter and discredit the distorted words among us. It is no wonder that upon hearing this true speech, the church responds, “Thanks be to God.” We may utter that response without thinking. It is nonetheless the appropriate response to the gospel in scripture. We can only speak our thanks for a word that contradicts the many false words, that refuses the false ideologies that generate greed and fear, and that veto our reliance on false ideological claims. Hearing scripture, if and when we pay attention, we are caught vulnerable and exposed to the truth-telling of the Spirit that repositions us in the world as both free and summoned, as both loved and sent, as both forgiven and entrusted with great work.
So imagine: It is the work of the church and its pastors to “rewrite” scripture in response to a world that is increasingly governed by a greedy, frightened oligarchy. That oligarchy fears not having enough, and knowing it can never and will never have enough to assuage its mortality. Against that oligarchy of anxiety and greed the gospel is an invitation to neighborly generosity that vetoes our fear. It is a good and productive exercise now to read scripture as an extended manifesto of generosity in the face of a world of fear. I commend to you the remarkable book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009). The book reviews a series of emergencies in which communities have responded to disasters with remarkable generosity. Solnit identifies a series of such disasters-cum-responses, and then generalizes concerning the restorative work of human sharing:
When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers…The astonishing gap between common beliefs and actualities about disaster behavior limits the possibilities, and changing beliefs could fundamentally change much more. Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise that at least in which we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper (p. 3).
Solnit sees that it is privatized imagination that produces selfishness, a privatization that can be and is often countered in times of emergency:
Disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own. In a society in which participation, agency, purposefulness, and freedom are all adequately present, a disaster would only be a disaster (p. 9).
Thus human generosity, human compassion, and human sharing have the capacity to rewrite disaster. We do well now to notice in scripture the ways in which faith counters disaster. Nowhere in scripture is this more on exhibit than in the Elisha narratives (II Kings 2-8). This strange man completely without credentials has the ready capacity to transform situations of need into contexts of neighborly abundance.
The work of the church now is to show how responses of generosity can effectively alter the life of society. We have for a long time practiced reading scripture as a witness to starchy, rigid, frightened disclosure. Now is a time for rereading—rewriting—scripture in a way that discloses human generosity that replicates and reiterates the generosity of the creator God who intends a surplus abundance of bread and who intends well-supplied wellbeing for all creatures, great and small.
