Patterns Worth Noticing

When one starts looking at the Old Testament for patterns, one of the patterns that emerges is a very odd one. There is a whole raft of people whose lives started out okay, and at some point may have even appeared to be heading towards glorious accomplishments, but who at some point got completely derailed, to the point that it must have seemed there was no hope for what remained. There was no chance their lives could lead to anything worthwhile; there was no putting out the existential dumpster fire. It was just plain futile to look forward to anything.

And yet, in each of these stories, out of that situation, each of these people did something remarkable enough to make them into one of the heroes of the Hebrew faith. It wasn’t that they pulled themselves out of their holes by their own bootstraps. It’s more that they just kept plodding along, living their lives, until the redemptive moment whacked them upside the head.

First, consider Joseph. Joseph is paradigmatic as a person whose beginnings seem propitious, but for whom things quickly go downhill. As a favorite of his father, he was rather spoiled growing up, but this led to jealousy by his brothers, who wanted to kill him, but instead sold him as a slave. He was also a person who had been “blessed” with visions, though his sharing of those visions with his brothers is part of what led them to be so annoyed as to want to be rid of him. So all the advantages that he seemed to have early on turned into disadvantages.

He ended up being taken to Egypt and sold to a court official. “And his master observed that Yahweh was with him, and everything that was in his hand to do Yahweh made successful. And Joseph found favor in his eyes and he served him. Then he appointed him over his house and all that he owned he put into his hand.” Moreover, “Joseph was well built and handsome.” Things were certainly looking up, and the future was looking bright. But these very qualities were what led his master’s wife to see him as a catch, and when he rebuffed her, she accused him of assaulting her, leading him to be thrown in prison. All his advantages and giftings, and the diligent way in which he had pursued using them even as a slave, had led to this. And it wasn’t a quick derailment of a budding administrative career, either; he was down there for years.

Finally, news of his ability to interpret dreams made its way to Pharoah, who called him up from his incarceration, realized that Joseph indeed had the insight needed to interpret dreams, and decided that he also probably had the discernment to do what needed to be done in the light of the conditions they foretold. (Joseph had already proved himself an able and trustworthy administrator in the prison; presumably the Pharoah consulted with the prison authorities before making this judgment.) Thus Joseph was placed in a position to rescue not only Egypt, but, eventually, his own family as well.

Next, consider Moses, the miracle child spared from a genocide perpetrated by Pharoah by Pharoah’s own daughter, raised as a son of the Pharoah’s daughter in Pharoah’s household, and nursed by his own biological mother. The text seems to indicate that this “nursing” was essentially raising him full-time until he was a certain age, which means that his socio-cultural earliest influences were Hebrew, but that his education would have been Egyptian.

Years ago, I was reading about ancient Egypt, and learned that during a period that seems to have likely coincided with the life of Moses, Egypt was considered to have the best educational system in the ancient world. As a result, the children of the elite from all over the ancient near east sent their children to be educated at the Egyptian court. If this is the environment in which Moses was raised, then he would have grown up with Hebrew culture as his foundation, but would have been continually adding to it not only the perspectives of Egyptian culture, but also an awareness of the beliefs and ways of life of a great many other cultures.

This is all speculative, however; all the text tells us is that he is nursed by his Hebrew mother and then taken to the Pharoah’s daughter and raised by her. The next thing we see is him as an adult, seeing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and deciding to kill the Egyptian. Pharoah gets wind of Moses’ crime and decides to kill him, so Moses flees to Midian, ingratiating himself to the priest of Midian and making his living by becoming a shepherd of the priest’s flock. In other words, so far all the text has told us is that Moses had an amazing fortuitous beginning, but it ended in him becoming a shepherd of other people’s animals in the middle of the desert, a member (though still an outsider) of a nomadic tribe.

By the time God speaks to Moses in the burning bush, all the years of elite upbringing and education must have seemed like a distant dream, perhaps even a mockery of his current situation. All that promise, squandered. If God had wanted to use him, it would have been back in Egypt, when he was still an elite within that culture, not now that he had spent decades following animals around the desert and participating in a primitive culture. Yet when he had attempted to enact justice for his people, starting with punishing a single Egyptian, everything had gone immediately to pot, landing him in his current situation. So when God tells Moses to go to Pharoah to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, Moses is less than enthusiastic, and can only think of all the reasons why he is not the right person for the job.

Chief amongst his objections is the complaint that he is “slow of speech and slow of tongue.” When he had attempted justice before, it was through action. Instead of dragging the violent Egyptian to court, he had killed him himself. After fleeing to Midian, when he saw some shepherdesses being treated unfairly by some shepherds, he “came to their defense and watered their flock.” He was a man of action, not words. Perhaps all his elite training had led him to see more flaws than strengths in his rhetorical abilities; he admits to God, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now.” No wonder that now, having left his training behind so long ago, he could only characterize the current state of his linguistic abilities as, at best, slow. (It could also be that he had a stutter or some other speech impediment; I’ve certainly heard that theory floated before.)

When Moses does leave his tribe to go back to Egypt, he doesn’t declare, “Well, I’m off to deliver the enslaved Israelites from their mighty Egyptian oppressors.” Instead, he requests of the priest, his father-in-law and employer, “Please let me go back to my kindred in Egypt and see whether they are still living.” He begins his journey back to Egypt, it seems, not even fully convinced about what he is going to attempt once he gets there.

And yet, in the end, not only does he free an entire people from slavery, he also leads them for forty years, during which time they are transformed from an enslaved culture (whose slavery had lasted twice as long as slavery in the United States, and was hence presumably even more entrenched in their self-conception) into a people ready to take over and inhabit a new land as a free people with an entirely new self-conception. These were a people who had known only oppression, and whose imaginations needed to be re-seeded in order to avoid replicating the only way of life they knew, a way of life built on injustice and domination.

The Mosaic Law wasn’t some sort of completely anomalous form of legislation delivered to a people incapable of making heads or tails of it. Rather, it was crafted by Moses, with divine guidance, as a result of a deep knowledge of human institutions of all sorts and many, many years of desert solitude during which he presumably had plenty of time to consider what went wrong, both with Egypt as a culture and with his own life, and how he would do things differently. During those years, his main authority was over a bunch of dumb sheep. He had to learn not only how to survive in the wilderness, but how to guide a mass of creatures unused to exercising agency.

He was then given the opportunity to do the same thing all over again after the Exodus — but with people this time, whose appearances of agency were not much more than the fear-based stampedes of easily startled sheep. The purpose of the Law was to turn them into a people of principle and character, capable of running a well-structured, just society guided by knowledge of God and motivated by love of God and humankind. That system is now many thousands of years old, and yet, unlike any other system of law and culture from that period, it still provides guidance and wisdom. It is safe to say that Moses’ life was not a failure after all.

The leadership of Moses and the permanent guidance of the Mosaic Law launched the Hebrew people on their journey, but the journey didn’t end with Moses; some might say it hasn’t ended yet. Once the people were living in the land of promise, they were led and guided by judges. Eventually they were led by a prophetess named Deborah. Now, in the history of the planet there has historically been nothing propitious about being born female if one is interested in a visible, public role in society, especially if one is not born into a royal family. At this time, there was no Israelite royalty. She was just a woman who happened to have gifts that made her useful to the people.

Then one day she summoned a particular man and commissioned him to engage in military actions, and he agreed, on the condition that she go with him. This meant, she pointed out, that the enemy would essentially be handed over to her, not to him, and that she would get the credit. He was okay with this, and so off they went. She ended up not only a prophetess and a judge, but a military conqueror, despite being not just a woman but a wife. I imagine that if she had also been a mother, the text would have mentioned that. Presumably the notable silence on that matter points to the fact that she had failed in that aspect of life — a fact which would have made her seem without value in any ancient near eastern culture. And yet she ended up exercising tremendous authority, and under her watch the enemies of Israel were “destroyed.” “And the land had rest forty years.”

The period of the judges continued for some time, but it came to an end under Samuel. Samuel was the miracle child of a faithful and godly woman, the answer to prayer, but she gave him up when he was just a wee squirt to serve under the priest Eli. Even before Samuel is handed over to Eli, the text hints that he may not have the greatest judgment; when he sees Samuel’s mother pouring her heart out to God in the temple, his first assumption is that she is drunk, and his first words to her scold her for being a “drunken spectacle.”

The next bit of information we are given about Eli is given after learning that Samuel’s mother has given her son over to this man. This is what we learn: Eli was not a good parental figure. His sons, the text blurts out, “were scoundrels.” We are then told all about their scoundrel-ry, and that “the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord,” without learning anything else about Eli. Apparently, to the author, this information about his complete failure as a parental figure is all one needs to know about Eli. This information comes immediately after the hymn of Samuel’s mother praising God for his provision. The juxtaposition is striking.

Now, Eli was not a fan of the behavior of his sons, and he tries to warn them about the grievousness of their sins, “But they would not listen to the voice of their father.” And no wonder. A “man of God” comes to Eli and condemns him by saying that Eli honors his sons more than God by allowing himself to benefit from their evil. The man of God concludes that by this greedy behavior, Eli “despises” God, and will bear the consequences. Eli may technically know what is right, but he has no will to pursue it. This seems to cloud his ability his ability to discern where God is at work in other people — a problem indeed, if one is a priest! This is confirmed in the story of the calling of Samuel, in 1 Samuel chapter three, in which Samuel unknowingly hears the voice of God and reports the experiences to Eli several times before it occurs to Eli that that is what is going on.

None of this is indicative of a propitious beginning of ministry for Samuel. It seems crazy that his mother thought that turning her child over to the care of of Eli was a responsible thing to do. One might wonder, what good could possibly come out of any product of that environment? And yet, the text tells us, “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him, and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord. The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord. And the word of Samuel came to all Israel.”

Ultimately, Samuel anoints and guides the first two kings of Israel. His first experience of anointing a king led him into a relationship with an authority figure whose attitudes bore more than a passing resemblance to Eli’s. Saul was a man governed by his own appetites and insecurities and full of excuses for his own self-serving behaviors. Samuel was presumably non-plussed to see these attributes come out in Saul; he’d seen it all before. And when he saw these attributes start to arise in David, he knew what to do. Ultimately, by helping David become the king he needed to be, Saul helped the Hebrew people transition into a nation-state with a king whose progeny included the Messiah, Jesus. Samuel anointed the king whose kingdom is become everlasting. No small role, from such inauspicious beginnings!

Many a moon later, after the end of the period of kings, northern Israel and the southern kingdom, called Judah, were invaded and all the royals and nobility, and many others, were taken captive and exiled. Amongst them was a young man called Daniel, who ended up being dragged into the palace of the Babylonian king, to be trained in service of the Babylonians. Being born into a noble family may have appeared fortuitous at first, but when it meant being exiled and forced to serve the brutal and idolatrous Babylonian kingdom, it must have appeared quite the opposite.

What is more, he was expected to live like a Babylonian while being educated by them, even though it was impossible to follow his own culture’s dietary laws if he ate like a Babylonian. He appeared to be between a rock and a hard place. Here was Daniel, a prisoner being forced to undergo a process of “re-education” intended to make him forsake his Hebrew-ness and to assimilate into Babylonian culture, a culture renowned for its cruelty, begging a court servant, his keeper, to be allowed to eat a restricted diet. Thankfully, his keeper agreed to it on a trial basis, and because Daniel ended up even healthier at the end of the trial, he was allowed to continue.

Of course, later on, Daniel’s insistence on continuing to engage in Hebrew practices got him in hot water that he wasn’t able to escape. Daniel, over the years, had so “distinguished himself” above all the civil servants that the king of Babylon was intending to “appoint him over the whole kingdom.” But some jealous colleagues got him in trouble for praying to the Hebrew God, an act which they had managed to make illegal. All Daniel had had to do while the law was in effect was to refrain from praying, and he would have been put in the position to ensure that laws like that were never put into effect. Instead, he was caught and thrown into the den of lions.

We all know how that turned out. But Daniel didn’t know. As he made his calculations about whether to continue to pray or whether to refrain until he was more protected, he didn’t know. As he was shuffled to the mouth of the den and shoved in, he didn’t know. All it says is that Daniel trusted God. How easy it would be for a person who had been taken prisoner, forced into exile, and submitted to the propaganda of a vicious culture, not to trust God. After all, this blow had occurred before Daniel was appointed to the highest position; it would have appeared that God was dangling that possibility before him just to snatch it away.

In the end, not only was Daniel rescued, but his enemies were thrown to the lions instead, and the king issued an edict declaring that all peoples must honor “the God of Daniel.” Thus all Israelites were protected from similar moves by their enemies in what was, I presume, an even more airtight way that Daniel would have been able to bring about even had he refrained from praying until he was given the authority to protect his people. In the end, not only did Daniel’s actions lead to the protection of his people, but he ended up writing a number of the most significant prophesies recorded in the Old Testament.

The disadvantages that Daniel faced pale in comparison to those of Esther, who lived later, under the reign Ahasuersus, aka Xerxes, a Persian king. Esther was born in exile, the descendent of a captive taken from Jerusalem by the Babylonians. She was an orphan, raised by a cousin. While she was still too young to be married, and was hence still a virgin, she was forced into the harem of the king, to be groomed for “service” to the king — by which I mean sanctioned rape. Not only that, but the period of preparation for this “service” was a year — a year of “cosmetic treatment.” A full twelve months of being turned into an ideal sex slave. This is how the prime of her life was being squandered.

Once her turn came and she was raped by the king, the expectation was that, now despoiled, he would never ask for her again. However, in Esther’s case, “of all the virgins she won his favor and devotion, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti,” his wife. This seems propitious, but the fact — as the text makes clear — is that she was still just a glorified sex slave. If she attempted to enter his presence without being summoned, it was likely that she would be killed for the impertinence. Because what right does a glorified sex slave have to bother the king when he’s not in the mood for her “services,” after all?

As it turns out, both Esther and her cousin were wise, discerning, disciplined, and courageous, and because of these qualities, they were able to not only stop a genocide that was planned against all the exiled Israelites, but to see to it that the Israelites were well protected in the future. But one can only imagine that six months into Esther’s training in bimbo-hood, her head full of recipes for facial masks and instructions for sexual positions, she felt that her life was effectively spoiled and nothing could come of it but degradation and futility. She was clearly an intelligent person, and this realization must have been deeply depressing. And yet her bravery is still celebrated during the festival of Purim, one of the most important holidays observed by Jews today.

I could keep going with these stories; more keep occurring to me. But hopefully the above are sufficient to demonstrate the pattern. Perhaps, like an Aesop fable, they can be summed up with a few verses. The first that occurs to me is Isaiah 40:31, which says, “But those who wait for Yahweh shall renew their strength. They shall go up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not grow weary; they shall walk and not be faint.” The second is from the New Testament, in Ephesians 6: 13, which concludes the bit about how “our struggle is not against blood and flesh” with this pithy advice: “Because of this, take up the full armor of God, in order that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand.”

We start out on wings like eagles, but even if we end up just walking forward step by step, that’s okay. Sometimes life forces us to take quite a beating, and all we can do is try to resist. And in the end, when we are at the end of our ability to resist its blows, merely standing is enough of an accomplishment. God meets us there. And good things can come of it.