Episode 187: Hospitality or not? Rahab, Yael, Abigail, and Lydia in Context

Now that we’ve covered the ancient rules for hospitality, I want to talk about the commonly misunderstood accounts of Rahab, Yael and Abigail. And we’ll also talk about how the world had changed by the time of the apostles with a quick look at Lydia.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here. If you want to watch this on YouTube, click here.

 

Last time, I taught about hospitality in the ancient Near East and how incredibly important it was—sacred even—within communities regardless of religion or nationality. This week, I am going to go deeper and beyond the examples of Abraham and Lot (which were important for laying the foundation for the next two chapters of Genesis that I am teaching for Context for Kids) and I want to talk about famous examples of things that might or might not be or be mistaken for hospitality throughout the Bible. As important as it is to know what hospitality is, it is also important to understand what didn’t count and also how it changed from Abraham’s time to the days of Yeshua/Jesus and the early church. As the world changed, so did hospitality—although it really stayed the same far more than it changed. It was a great system, one we would do well to emulate more today even though I am not crazy about many other aspects of honor/shame culture and wouldn’t want all the rest that went with it. Really, hospitality as practices in the Biblical era can’t exist without honor/shame culture and we are way too individualistic to go along with that now anyways. So, let’s look at Rahab, Yael, Nabal, and whoever else I can think of to figure out whose behavior did and didn’t fall under the rules of ancient hospitality.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed last year when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

I am going to quickly review the guidelines of hospitality during the early biblical period that we see mirrored in Scripture. A male head of a household who was in good standing with the community or head of a camp had the authority to invite a stranger into his home for a short period of time—extending to that person temporary community membership. During this time, the guest was safe and also could not do harm to the host or his community. The potential host would approach the stranger, offer him bare basic hospitality and perhaps lodging depending on the time of day, and the stranger would usually refuse the first offer in order to preserve their own honor. At this point, the host would repeat the offer with a stronger sense of urgency and the stranger would accept and return with the host to his dwelling. The basic offer of bread and water could then be upgraded according to the means of the host, magnifying the honor of both the host and the guest. The guest was not permitted to ask for anything, and the host wasn’t permitted to ask the guest any questions about their mission, travel, or intentions. No prying allowed. The offer of hospitality was not open ended but came with strict time limits. Upon leaving, the guest was required to place a blessing of life upon the host and his household. It was like a dance that everyone knew the steps to and was really something that everyone in the ancient world could depend upon—which made the deviations from hospitality in Genesis and Judges 19 so shocking to the original audience.

As I mentioned last time, during the early Biblical period, a woman couldn’t offer hospitality—only a man of good standing within the community could and we talked about why that was. By the first century, that had changed and women could and did offer hospitality provided they could do so in a way that didn’t compromise their reputation. Obviously, a woman who ran a large household with male and female servants and children would have no reason not to serve as host to travelers, which is exactly what we see happening with Paul on his journeys as a large number of the people named as benefactors and leaders of local congregations were women.

I want to start with two rather scandalous stories—the first being Rahab in Joshua who was, yes, a prostitute but not specifically a cult prostitute as that terminology isn‘t used. In the ancient world, prostitutes would often have their dwellings within the casement walls of the city—which were two serious stone walls filled with rubble in between. Prostitutes often had their homes/offices there, as it was a very useful place to advertise their business to passersby and would even have windows in the outer wall where they would appear in order to attract clients. As Rahab has such a dwelling—we know this because she lowered the two unnamed spies to safety outside the city after nightfall, there is little doubt as to her profession. People get antsy about the two spies visiting a prostitute but let’s not forget that in the ancient Near East, there were still some serious double standards between what adultery meant with men versus women. From last week, if you recall, Judah had no qualms about visiting a temple prostitute—literally binding himself to another god—but wanted to burn Tamar for her perceived infidelity. Yeshua and Paul both had things to say about this sort of double standard, but we all know the wilderness generation of Israelites weren’t exactly known for their moral excellence. We do see Rahab protecting them and giving them shelter, but as she was not a man within the community, she had no ability or authority to offer the two spies formal hospitality and temporary community status. Not only that, but she refuses to let them go until they swear to protect her and her family. So, although we see things that look like hospitality, it is most likely that Rahab sees an opportunity to ally herself with the God who decimated the Egyptians, as well as the two Amorite kingdoms on the other side of the Jordan. She is staking her claim to the superior God and bargaining for her own safety. She clearly knew who they were and what they were up to. The Bible makes no attempt to hide the sexual nature of the entire episode.

Our next misunderstood example of “not” hospitality concerns the episode in Judges 4 where, at first glance in English, this appears to be an example of a woman offering hospitality to the defeated general Sisera, with whom her husband had been an ally. When we are unfamiliar with hospitality rules, this seems like a clear case of betrayal of hospitality but what we see here is as important as what we do not see. Her husband isn’t there, Sisera’s entire army has been destroyed. He has been completely shamed and has nothing left except his mommy waiting at home for him (according to Deborah’s song). Sisera comes purposefully to Yael’s tent—a clear violation of his alliance with her husband. Yael’s greeting, which is often translated as “come inside” can also mean “turn away”—as in, “Get out of here, you have no business here.” Soldiers who came into a camp of women while their men were away generally had one thing in mind and it is more than likely that Yael assumed that rape was in her future. Such was the way of the world and Sisera, by raping Heber’s wife, could take control of his household. It’s complicated but this is exactly why Solomon had his brother killed for wanting to take Abishag, their father’s newest wife before dying, for his own. To possess the women of the King was to be the king—Absalom also did this when he raped David’s concubines on the roof of the palace.

One thing is certain, Yael was not offering hospitality because she had none to give. At best, she was scrambling to make the best of a bad situation while she figured out how to save both her virtue and her husband’s honor. Sisera certainly didn’t see this as a hospitality situation because he begins ordering her around in her own tent in the absence of her husband. Although some translations say “please give” because of the use of the emphatic “na”, it can just as easily be translated as “give me” and making it a command. “Give me water to drink!” She very wisely gives him fermented milk instead, no doubt hoping that after the exhaustion of battle that he will fall asleep and buy her some time. He then commands her to lie if anyone asks if a man is in the tent—which is actually played to comic effect because she can honestly say that no man is in her tent since he has shamed himself so deeply that the term no longer applies. He falls asleep and she takes the only weapon in the tent, the mallet and tent peg she uses when she pitches her own tent, and drives it through his skull. Instead of him penetrating her, she penetrates his skull. So, like Rahab, not a hospitality situation and unlike the residents of Sodom, who are lambasted and decried by the prophets as violators of hospitality despite having great resources, she is called a hero.

What about the situation with Nabal, Abigail, and David in I Sam 25? David is still a fugitive on the run from King Saul, who has been trying unsuccessfully for years to kill him. He’s been camping out with his six hundred men (probably an exaggeration) on Nabal’s land while raiding Philistine encampments and cities. While there, their presence alone is enough to ensure the safety of Nabal’s shepherds along with his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. Yeah, the dude is loaded for sure. And we are uncertain as to whether or not Nabal knew they were there but if he did, he never turned David in. Likely it was a win/win situation for them both as David was protecting what was Nabal’s while refraining from stealing any of those critters for dinner. Certainly this is no hospitality situation. As we come to find out, Nabal wasn’t really a hospitable guy. In fact, according to his wife, he’s the worst sort of fool and idiot.

Along comes a festival day and David and his men are feeling peckish and probably tired of living off Philistine rations. Nabal is nearby shearing his huge flocks and David sends ten of his soldiers (armed? We really don’t know) to Nabal and “ask” him for whatever he has to eat so that they can celebrate, reminding Nabal that they’ve been protecting his people and that they haven’t stolen anything. Remember, in a hospitality situation, the guests can’t demand anything or even ask for it. Nabal has never extended hospitality to them and they are not under his protection. Whether they should be is another matter entirely and not a hospitality one because hospitality has time limits and they have obviously been there a lot longer than a few days. Nabal responds to what might have been an affront to his honor like the fool he is and provokes David by insulting him in front of both their men. This is just a mess. Fortunately, Nabal’s wise wife Abigail saves the day by going behind her husband’s back and providing a feast for David and his men complete with wine, meat and even dessert. But this still isn’t hospitality as she has no authority to provide it—this is tribute, a bribe, whatever you want to call it. This is a ransom to buy the lives of all the men in her household. She even offers David a rebuke for wanting to commit mass murder over an insult from one fool.

So, we can see how stories can have elements that appear to fall under the ancient rite of hospitality without actually being that. But during the first century, we can see that hospitality has really changed a lot. We see that travel is no longer quite the oddity and deviant activity that it once was—even if it did make you a bit suspicious to the locals. As the early apostles and evangelists and teachers spread the Gospel, they were only able to succeed as well as they did because of hospitality. We can see from the book of Acts especially that Paul tended to go to areas of the city where he could meet up with fellow artisans who would extend hospitality toward Him, and would offer him space in their courtyards to teach and preach. In those days, formal synagogues were a rarity within the Roman Empire and so meeting in homes wasn’t so much a “business model” as much as a necessity. Rome didn’t care much for people gathering in groups without permission, and so gathering in private/public settings (because there was really no privacy in the public areas of homes) depended upon the gracious hospitality of local households. Many of these households were run by women, who would then be the leaders of the local congregation—one could hardly be a leader in someone else’s home. That wasn’t how things worked in those days.

The early church really changed things up as far as hospitality went because the church as a whole was considered to be family, and the church itself a community within the community. That doesn’t mean that the early leaders didn’t have to crack down on those who abused the generosity of others—there were terrible problems with people travelling from place to place, not working, and imposing upon the local body. Paul had to tell some to work instead of abusing their family status. Others used their status as teachers to prey upon the good graces of their hosts to overstay their welcome. But when we think of classic first century Christian hospitality, we can go to the story of Lydia in Acts 16. She was a dealer in purple cloth and so she had money, and she is described as the head of her household, where she extended an invitation to Paul, Silas, and Timothy to stay with her after her entire household heard the Gospel and was baptized. She continued in loyalty to them through thick and thin until they were forced to leave the city by the local magistrates.

Really, the book of Acts is just teeming with examples of hospitality offered by both men and women, Jews and Gentiles alike. Oftentimes, in Paul’s letters, his reprimands have to do with breaches in the sort of hospitality that family members should have been able to anticipate from one another but were being withheld due to status differences. I am going to cut this short because I believe between this time and last that I have given enough examples to outline how to approach the text in terms of looking for hospitality and what does and doesn’t qualify. Our modern use of hospitality just means being generally welcoming but in the ancient world it was a sacred social contract that wasn’t optional for honorable or even dishonorable people.

The next time you hear from me, I will probably be talking about the very awful reality of shaming men in the ancient world through rape. It was something that heterosexual men would do as a power play, and I will be citing some ancient near eastern literature in context. Nasty bit of context, but if you want to understand what was going on in both Sodom and Gibeah and how it differs from homosexuality (which is mentioned elsewhere as in Lev 18:22 so doesn’t need to be read into these accounts), it’s needful.

 



Episode 184: The Gospel of Matthew #3—The ‘Greater Than’ Motif/Second Moses

A huge early theme of the Gospel of Matthew that carries throughout is the portrayal of Yeshua as the latter and greater Moses. In addition to this, He also declares Himself to be greater than the Temple and a whole lot of other sacred cows of the first century. This week, we will investigate these claims and find out why they are so important to Matthew’s particular audience.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here. If you prefer YouTube, click here.

Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, we see Yeshua/Jesus telling His audience that “something greater than this or that” is here. He outright claims to be greater than the Temple, Jonah, and Solomon. Through parables and teachings, He also makes it clear that He is greater than Moses, any interpretation of the Torah apart from His own, the Sabbath, sacrifices, paying Temple taxes, and King David. But, by far, the most obvious of these is the ongoing comparison to Moses—from his birth story to His role as a teacher far greater than Moses, who only prophesied about Yeshua but failed to enter into the Land because of his sin and rebellion. I will just be glossing over most of these as I will cover them in depth when I get to them in the series, but I want you to get a feel for what Matthew is saying here because it will be important from the very beginning.

Remember from last time, Matthew is a polemical text making the case to post-Temple Jews of why they should follow Yeshua instead of the Pharisees, who were growing in power after the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent ruin of the Sadducean high priestly family. Pharisaic Judaism was morphing into the Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle Ages but it wasn’t there yet, not by a long shot. Matthew is making the case that it is Yeshua who represents true Judaism, as opposed to the more mainstream Pharisees who (by and large) didn’t accept Yeshua as the long-awaited Messiah and therefore the only true teacher and arbiter of the will of God. In fact, during the second century, led by Rabbi Akiva (a former Gentile), they would side with Shimon bar Kochba in his temporarily successful rebellion against Rome, which disastrously led to the permanent expulsion of the Jews until the 7th century.  But when Matthew was written, this was all in the future and the battle was on for which sect within Judaism would come out on top. Matthew obviously wanted the victor to be Yeshua so he had to make sure to make a strong case for it. To accomplish this for his Jewish audience of Jews evangelizing other Jews and proselytes, he had to make a clear case that Yeshua is greater than anyone in the Torah and also greater than the Torah, as Paul had also written decades earlier. In Galatians 2:21 and Romans 8, Paul explains that Torah was weakened by the sin of the hearers and unable to save or render a person truly righteous within. Although Yeshua was likely considered to be the living law, as were all ancient kings, that is a reflection of His unique position as the arbiter of justice and instruction in righteousness and not a way to make Him simply co-equal with the Torah, the five books of Moses or even the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids. I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

Let’s look at the collection of “greater than” verses as well as where Yeshua implicitly claims authority over and on all things held sacred by the Jewish world:

 

I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. (Matt 12:6)

The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching; and look—something greater than Jonah is here. (Matt 12:41)

The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and look—something greater than Solomon is here. (Matt 12:42)

For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. (Matt 12:8)

While the Pharisees were together, Jesus questioned them, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They replied, “David’s.” He asked them, “How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’: The Lord declared to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet’?  “If David calls him ‘Lord,’ how, then, can he be his son?” (Matt 22:41-45)

“You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you… 27 “You have heard that it was said, Do not commit adultery. But I tell you… “It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you… “Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you… “You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you… “(Matt 5:21-38, edited)

As Kevin said in Home Alone, I have to say to those who claim that Yeshua never claimed to be anything other than a normal human being, “You guys give up, or are you hungry for more?” Greater than Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived but who tore the Kingdom apart with forced labor to build palaces for his bevy of booty call beauties. Greater than Moses, who gave the law but made allowances for human hard-heartedness (Mark 10). Greater than the Temple, which was supposed to be inhabited by the presence of God but had been abandoned since the days of Ezekiel before the Babylonian conquest—even though God commanded Haggai and Zerubbabel to rebuild it and continue with the offerings. Greater than Jonah who preached to the Gentiles but out of a wrathful and bitter heart, wanting them to perish and afraid that God would have mercy if he obeyed. Greater than the Sabbath because He understands that Sabbath is a gift so that men and women could rest and not something burdensome that people need to be paranoid about breaking. Greater than David because, well, you know but also because David himself recognized that Messiah was his Lord. Greater than the Torah, because He can do what the Torah never could—allow for perfection through the circumcision of the heart. Torah still allowed the evils of the world while lessening them, according to Yeshua, but Yeshua made allowances for perfection and provided the only way to the New Creation life. Torah prophesied about Yeshua, and so it serves Him and not the other way around. We obey it as a starting place but Yeshua beckons us to strive for perfection and not be satisfied with treating the commandments like an inclusive “to do” list or to search them to see what we can get away with while still claiming to be “Torah Observant.”

Let me just say this—many people would rather be Torah observant (or at least pretend to be because so much of it is land, cultural, and Temple based that it is impossible) than to follow the Messiah because it is a heck of a lot easier. You can still do some nasty, selfish, and evil things to other people and claim to be obedient, but Yeshua strips away all our pretensions with the Sermon on the Mount and we are so aghast that we come up with reasons why He wasn’t really serious about putting us in danger. Folks, until the time of Constantine, the church took it seriously. But with a standing army comes less trust, more fear, and the desire to conquer, dominate and convert by force. The teachings of Yeshua were often pushed aside in favor of using examples from the OT out of context to justify war for pretty much any reason to the point that, today, we pick and choose our wars based on financial motives and other worldly concerns and call it good while referring to ourselves as a Christian nation. Last month, I saw people calling for the deaths of innocent Palestinians and even children to avenge what their terrorist political leadership has done. But if we are going to follow Yeshua, we need to pray for and bless our enemies and if we are to do that for actual enemies, we should do even more for those who are suffering right now because they were born into an impoverished terrorist state. They could be us, under different circumstances. Condemn evil. Condemn violence. But be careful not to become the types of people who would want a people group slaughtered wholesale just because their leadership wants to do that to Israel. As in the Bible, it was the leadership responsible for the death of the Messiah and not the regular folks. We are all products of environments that we never chose for ourselves.

But the good news is that Yeshua came, promoting Himself as greater than everything and everyone on earth. Greater than the wisdom and wealth of Solomon. Yeshua is greater than the prophet Jonah, who ran away from God’s will instead of diligently carrying His own Cross toward a terrible death. Yeshua is greater than the Temple, which had become a source of false security and national pride. Yeshua was the presence of God, without priestly mediation and go-betweens, with no buffer between Himself and humanity. Blessings flowed from Him as they were supposed to flow from the Temple, but no longer were due to corrupt leadership. Yeshua was greater than David, who became the sort of ancient Near Eastern king whom Samuel had warned the Israelites about. Yeshua was greater than Moses, putting Himself over and above Moses with the “but I say to you” statements after speaking the words of Moses. Sometimes He kept the traditions of His day and at other times, he utterly ignored them.

But before that, we have His origin story which is purposefully tied to Moses. A miraculous birth, unlike Moses, but followed by persecution from a modern-day Pharaoh in Herod who also killed Jewish baby boys. Journeys to and from Egypt to escape danger. Following the Spirit for forty days of temptation in the wilderness echoing the forty years of Moses following the Spirit in the wilderness where Israel was tempted and failed. A mountaintop sermon delivering the law of the Kingdom of Heaven. The division of Matthew into five sections echoing the five books of Moses. Yeshua is going to not only be compared to Moses but also to Israel. Yeshua will succeed in everything Israel failed. Yeshua will be the perfect Son of God—not the stiff-necked generation in the wilderness. This is the story Matthew is telling, post 70 CE when the nation is having to face another Temple destroyed due to what the Talmud later described as “gratuitous hatred” among the factionalized Jews (Yoma 9b). Follow Yeshua, who got it right, endured to death like the prophets of old, resisted temptation, and who was vindicated by God as the first raised permanently from the dead and who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Live in this radical way He showed us to live because doing things the Pharisaic way didn’t stop our Temple from being destroyed, our people slaughtered, and our nation scattered.

It is time for new leadership—true leadership. That’s the story Matthew is telling. Yeshua is the greater Israel, the greater Son, who did everything right and was killed for it by the leadership—and some of those leaders were Pharisees. Even if they didn’t cause the problem, they did nothing to stop it when the Sanhedrin met to consider the recommendation of the High Priest’s informal hearing the night before. Matthew didn’t even include Yeshua’s request that they be forgiven because they didn’t know what they were doing because to do so would weaken his argument. Yes, there is forgiveness for all who repent but Matthew was portraying the Pharisaic influence as to be avoided and not as forgiven.
Those are the things I want us to notice as we are going through this Gospel. Everything in it is designed to show Matthew’s fellow Jews, living either in or in close proximity to the Land, the way forward for true Judaism, the way of the Kingdom of Heaven, at their cultural crossroads after the destruction of the Temple.



Episode 178: Psalm 4: What on Earth Is Going on Here??

There is so much debate about this Psalm. Not only does it contain two words that we don’t know what the heck they mean, but the context is quite the mystery. Is the Psalmist (David?) being lied about? Are the Kingdom elites resorting to Ba’al worship in order to bring an end to a famine? Is this Psalm 3 part 2 where David’s advisors are defecting to Absalom? Lots of questions and lots of debate.

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

If you prefer a longer video version, click here. If your email doesn’t show the podcast player, you can click here.

Psalm 4 seems simple and straightforward enough, right? Nope. Oh, my goodness, there are so many different puzzles here, and so there are also a few plausible interpretations of what was going on here and why. Remember back when I told you that one of the best things about the Psalms is how purposefully vague they are? People can read themselves and their own situations into the Psalms and pray them as though they wrote them themselves. When we are facing crises and hardship, are being attacked, betrayed, lied about, or if we are just doubting God’s faithfulness, we can go to the Psalms and find one that fits our prayer needs. And that’s awesome but it is also problematic when we are trying to study and mine them for context to get the most out of our theological studies. Psalm 4, unlike Psalm 3, gives us no clear leading as to what the problem is, who the specific enemies are, and we definitely don’t know the final outcome of the crisis. Was this written during a famine, when there was no rain and David’s own councilors are turning on him? Some scholars can give a really good argument for it. Is it Psalm 3 part two and David is dealing with the split in loyalties among the wealthy? Maybe, we’ll talk about that too. Is David dealing with false accusations? That’s possible too! How much does it really matter when we apply it to our own lives and pray it for ourselves?

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link). I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

As we did last week, the Psalm itself will be read initially from Robert Alter’s excellent The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (affiliate link). After that, I will pull all Scripture from the Christian Standard Bible (CSB). Remember that Alter loves to capture more of the sound and the brevity of the Psalms in Hebrew, which is always like a third of the words we use in English to try to say the same thing.

For the lead player, with stringed instruments, a David psalm. When I call out, answer me, my righteous God. In the straits, You set me free. Have mercy upon me and hear my prayer. Sons of man, how long will My glory be shamed? You love vain things and seek out lies. selah But know that the LORD set apart His faithful. The LORD will hear when I call to Him. Quake, and do not offend. Speak in your hearts on your beds, and be still. selah Offer righteous sacrifices and trust in the LORD. Many say, “Who will show us good things?” Lift up the light of Your face to us, LORD. You put joy in my heart, from the time their grain and their drink did abound. In peace, all whole, let me lie down and sleep. For You, LORD, alone, do set me down safely.

First of all, we have to take care of the basic housework. There are two words in this Psalm that we don’t know the meaning of. The Psalms have more of those words than any other book of the Bible, by far. The first Hebrew word is menatseach, which Alter translates as the lead player and other translators call the choir director. In the Septuagint, the authorized Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in the second/third centuries BCE, this first line reads “for the end” most likely because the last line makes it clear that this was an evening prayer. Honestly, it makes no difference to us because we don’t know the tune anymore and we can pray it whenever we want, right? Don’t tell me when I can and can’t pray Psalm 4. The second unknown word is selah, which is why it isn’t translated into any English word. We just don’t know what it means at all. Probably a musical term. In the Septuagint, they translated it diapsalma which is a combination of the word psalma (meaning psalm, it’s where we get our English word) and the prefix dia, which can mean quite a few things. A mystery word translated into another mystery word and then just transliterated into English back to selah so it would at least sound the same. Hebrew isn’t a dead language anymore because people speak a modern version of it but for all intents and purposes, a lot of the words are deader than a doornail because we have no clue what they mean. By the time the Temple was rebuilt after the exile, all of the singers of the House of the Lord had been dead for a long time. Musical notations would have been one of the first things to be lost.

Let’s look at this Psalm verse by verse in the CSB:

Answer me when I call, God, who vindicates me. You freed me from affliction; be gracious to me and hear my prayer. 

We can tell right away that this is a lament Psalm. The writer is using phrases like, “Answer me when I call” and reminding God of past acts of deliverance. The author, whether it is David or someone writing for David or in the style of David or about David, is communicating the existence of a covenant relationship where God can be called upon and be expected to listen, and who has a history with the writer. We see three supplications here; supplications are cries for aid and action from either God or someone else who has the capacity to help. They are cries to answer, to give relief from suffering, and to hear. The author desires vindication of either their faith in Yahweh or because they have somehow been wronged. It isn’t entirely clear, as we will see. Despite their covenant relationship where Yahweh has sworn to be faithful and to protect His people and specifically His anointed king from enemies, they still recognize that it is their duty to take their petitions specifically to Yahweh and not to other gods or foreign armies—of course, this is a problem throughout the history of the divided Kingdoms of Judah and Israel. But this was penned during the reign of David, before the split. Despite David’s sins, we don’t ever see him crying out to anyone except Yahweh for help. Yahweh is the true vindicator and Savior. This is a common thread throughout the Davidic Psalms. The author talks about a prayer to be heard but what prayer is this? We aren’t specifically told.

How long, exalted ones, will my honor be insulted? How long will you love what is worthless and pursue a lie? Selah

Another common phrase in laments is “how long?” It is a cry of frustration. Despite seeming to be directed at the b’nei ish, literally the sons/daughters of man, it is actually a crying out to God to do something about the undefined actions of those who are wealthy and powerful. When the various Psalmists want to talk about the poor and lowly, they will use the idiom b’nei adam, sons/daughters of adam/humankind. Despite sounding like they should mean the same thing, they don’t. They are polar opposites. There are some different ideas about how this verse should be translated—is the psalmist’s reputation being slandered or is God Himself being somehow dishonored? The Hebrew word translated as honor is kavod, which can mean glory. Is the object of scorn the author’s personal honor or the author’s God? Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, or to even understand completely in the original language—even when the author is alive to explain it! In this case, powerful people are loving what is “worthless” and pursuing a “lie.” Are they worshiping false gods and going after them? That’s certainly a common theme throughout Scripture. Are they slandering the author with a lie? Have his councilors and “men of rank” defected to Absalom’s army? All these are plausible.

Know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself; the Lord will hear when I call to him.

Whoever the enemy is and whatever it is they are doing, the author has finished their complaint and is now directly addressing and instructing them, seven times. At this point, the Psalm shifts to an expression of confidence and instruction in wisdom. The author will be vindicated and the Lord will make things right for those who follow and obey Him. So these children of men are advised to know, yada, Yahweh and to understand that Yahweh is faithful to those who love Him. The wording on this is a bit confusing and could mean that Yahweh works miracles for the faithful or that He sets them apart in His safekeeping but the uptake on it, either way, is that the author is warning them that they have the ear and attention of Yahweh and so these adversaries had better be careful in what they are doing—they shouldn’t believe they can get away with whatever it is forever. If they desire to remain “men of rank” then they need to be wise.

 Be angry and do not sin; reflect in your heart while on your bed and be silent. Selah

Again, this is hard to translate because rigzu means to tremble or to quake with fear or awe. But when it was translated into the Greek in the Septuagint, they used a word meaning anger and that’s what Paul quoted from in Ephesians 4:26.  But the context for Paul is different—that being said, it is the most Jewish thing in the world to take a verse that means one thing and tweak it a little or a lot to make a different point. We will see this quite a bit when we get to the Gospel of Matthew. If you have read any of the Talmud, you already know this is true. They didn’t play by our rules, and God was speaking to and through them and not us! So He wouldn’t follow our rules of what makes for legitimate Bible interpretation or history or science or any of that. I believe that the original meaning really was something along the lines of “shake in your boots and stop sinning.” You know, like a “fear God and repent” sort of thing. The phrase “reflect in your heart” is our translation of a Hebrew idiom meaning “to think” because remember they believed that the brain was kinda useless and that thinking, reasoning and feeling happed in the heart, kidneys, and bowels because of how those felt when they experienced strong emotion. I like to translate this whole verse as, “Fear God and stop sinning. Think about what you are doing and shut up.” And of course, that’s always good advice for us all when we get uppity or even every day.  Four more instructions—fear Him, do not sin, think, and shut up. Although that last word might also be translated as weep, which is what we should do when we start thinking about the nonsense we have been up to.

 Offer sacrifices in righteousness and trust in the Lord.

Now, here is where the theory that this is just David being upset at his advisors for siding with Absalom really begins to break down. Something is wrong with their sacrifices or how they are offering them or maybe what gods they are offering them to. Certainly Yeshua/Jesus told people that if you had done something to hurt another person, God wouldn’t accept an offering until you made things right with the person you hurt. There is no such thing as a private sin when it involves other people. So they are commanded to offer sacrifices, but they have to be righteous offerings (which means with right heart motivations, after performing just acts to make up for what they have done wrong if possible) and those offerings must be offered to and only to Yahweh. If these sacrifices represent petitions in a time of crisis, then Yahweh is the only one they should be going to, but we will discuss that later. The last two instructions to the elites are to offer appropriate sacrifices and to trust Yahweh.

Many are asking, “Who can show us anything good?” Let the light of your face shine on us, Lord.

The author turns their attention to Yahweh again in complaint and petition. The “many” or rabbim (a common theme in laments, the prophets, and the Gospels) are crying out in complaint but not to God. They are crying out to anyone who will listen—perhaps hoping to catch the ear of another god in the area. Something must be desperately wrong. Either the author is being blamed for bad circumstances or the “men of rank” have lost faith in Yahweh and are turning to other gods. Presumably, one way or another, David is being cast aside as being unable to lead them through this crisis—perhaps they believe that David is to blame for the crisis. Is God angry at David? Is rain being withheld? If so, then the elites would certainly be wondering if another king or another god is needed to bring back prosperity. The people, for one reason or another, are not flourishing and prospering. We see in 2 Sam 21 that the land experienced famine for three years because of a sin Saul committed against the Gibeonites, their covenant partners from the time of Joshua and Caleb.  But then we have the question of, “if this is about a recorded historical event, then why no title on this one when the last one has a title?” Whatever the case is, whether the elites are trying to get rid of David for one reason or another or trying to get rid of Yahweh worship in favor of other gods—the challenge is clear, “Show me the money!” That’s the sense of “who can show us anything good?” Good hearkens back to the days of Creation where God provided every need for the people whom He created.

The Psalmist responds with a key quotation from the Aaronic blessing which we find in Num 6:24-26: “May the Lord bless you and protect you; may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.”’ The author is appealing to the blessing in whole by using a part of it, something very common in the Bible and other Jewish writings. The formal term for that is synecdoche (sinekdeckey). We do this too in our culture in various ways. It’s why we say Coke or Kleenex when what we mean is soda and tissues in general. In this case, a phrase from the Aaronic blessing is supposed to remind us of the entire thing. In the Bible, we could use “Come out of her my people!” as a great example of why we need to know the whole Bible. That phrase is telling us to go to Jeremiah 51 so we can see what the Roman Empire has in common with ancient Babylon—wealth, oppression, military violence, and idolatry—and why the believers in Yeshua need to separate themselves from serving the wrong Empire. When we read it out of context, people start picking on Catholics.

You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and new wine abound.

Now the author expresses confidence in the Lord despite outward appearances and circumstances. After asking for the promises implied in the Aaronic blessing to those who put their trust in Yahweh, the psalmist tells Yahweh that no matter what the elites take pleasure in, he or she takes joy in Yahweh. Interesting little note here—the Hebrew word for grain here is dagan and of course, the Philistine god Dagon is the grain god of the Philistines. There might be a play on words here if there is indeed a famine going on. They are focused on grain and perhaps appealing to the god who is regionally thought to be able to bless that harvest. They seem to be crying out in the wrong way to the wrong god for what only Yahweh can give them. But Yahweh always knows that the people need Him more than they need grain and wine. People with grain and wine, according to Moses, get fat, happy and contemptuous of the idea that they owe it all to Yahweh and must worship Him and follow His ways. Are the elites crying out to Dagon? Are they crying out against David because they want a different king who can provide the results they desire? Is it David’s faith in God that requires vindication? Some scholars think so. It’s certainly an interesting idea and definitely not out of character for the ancient Israelites and their fickle loyalties. But then, we are much the same, right? Heck, we complain about persecution over getting unfriended on social media when people get tired of our abusive behavior—oops—I mean, they can’t handle the truthful truthiness of our truth. It helps if truth is in all caps. It’s more true that way.

I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, Lord, make me live in safety.

I had mentioned before that in the Septuagint, the title is translated “for the end” instead of “by the choir director.” This verse is why they made that decision. The psalmist, after crying out to God, complaining way too vaguely for us to know for sure what the heck is going on, rebuking and instructing the Kingdom elites who have somehow gone astray, and petitioning God for favor and prosperity before finally telling God that He is enough even if everything is going wrong otherwise—well, we see that the psalmist is now so at peace that they will not only lie down in their bed but will also sleep in peace. Only the Lord can bring security and safety. There is no need to appeal to other gods. Being able to sleep in the midst of conflict and uncertainty is like the ultimate expression of faith and confidence. We also saw this same vote of confidence in Yahweh to deliver in Psalm 3 where David specifically said that despite the rebellion of his son Absalom against him, he is able to sleep and to wake back up again because Yahweh keeps him alive. Just as David didn’t kill the sleeping Saul who was trying to hunt him down and kill him, so David knows that the Lord will protect him from his enemies as well. We see this idea elsewhere in the Psalms and Proverbs that the wicked never sleep, but it’s okay because neither does Yahweh.

Okay, so we’re going to take a four week break from the Psalms–next week I will be giving another one of my scathing Yom Kippur presentations–and then we will start talking about the themes and common expressions in the Gospel of Matthew. If you remember, before starting Mark, we had to talk about the Greater Exodus, what the Gospel is, and why Yeshua used the expression Son of God to identify His ministry instead of the more common term Messiah. We need to talk about the “greater than” statements that Yeshua made about Himself, and in particular Yeshua as the Greater Moses and as Israel’s definitive wisdom teacher and God’s final word on His will. The Kingdom of Heaven as a concept and a reality is supremely important in everything Yeshua preaches and does. The core focus in Mark wasn’t on His teachings but on His works as the Yahweh-Warrior/Arm of the Lord prophesied by Isaiah where He was dismantling the kingdom of the Beast. With Matthew, the miracles take a real backseat to His teachings. Each of the four Gospels has a different purpose in teaching about Yeshua. Mark was written for a more mixed audience but Matthew was written for the predominantly Jewish believers in Christ and probably late first century, whereas Mark was likely the first written. Oh, and we also need to talk about ancient biographies because they don’t follow our modern rules at all.

So, I am excited and I hope you are too!

 

 

 

 



Episode 177: Psalm 3—“Mimzor l’David?”

What is a Psalm of David? Or is it a Psalm by David? A Psalm in the style of David or about him? This week, we will talk about irritating Hebrew conjunctions and why context is incredibly important—and sometimes unknowable. And what about the fourteen titled Psalms? How do we read this one in light of David and Absalom? The Bible is a messy book about messy people and messy situations–so this Psalm is going to be really messy too.

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

If you would like to see a slightly longer video version, click here.  If you can’t see the podcast player in your email, click here.

Alright, we have finished up the introductory Psalms, one and two, and now we are entering into those formally ascribed to David in some way—but Hebrew conjunctions can be super tricky, and we aren’t always sure what these titles actually meant to say. In addition, it seems very clear that these titles were added later (or were they?)  by whoever it was that collected these songs, laments, hymns, etc., into the five books that make up what we now call the Psalms but in Hebrew are called Tehillim. I am going to tell you right now that I love the laments, and evidently, so did the compilers because they make up 40% of the Psalms—way more than the praise hymns. The laments do more to teach us about how we should and even can relate to God than anything else in the Bible—except for the words of Yeshua/Jesus. The laments are brutally honest, accusatory, and filled with curses against enemies—but how should we even deal with the violent sentiments of these works? And what the heck does selah mean? Lots and lots to talk about this week!

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link). I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

As we did last week, the Psalm itself will be read initially from Robert Alter’s excellent The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (affiliate link). After that, I will pull all Scripture from the Christian Standard Bible (CSB). Remember that Alter loves to capture more of the sound and the brevity of the Psalms in Hebrew, which is always like a third of the words we use in English to try to say the same thing.

A David psalm, when he fled from Absalom his son. LORD, how many are my foes, many, who rise up against me. Many, who say of my life: “No rescue for him through God.” selah And You, LORD, a shield are for me, my glory, Who lifts up my head. With my voice I cry out to the LORD, and He answers me from His holy mountain. selah I lie down and I sleep. I awake, for the LORD has sustained me. I fear not from myriads of troops that round about set against me. Rise, LORD! Rescue me, my God, for You strike all my foes on the cheek, the teeth of the wicked You smash. Rescue is the LORD’s! On Your people Your blessing. Selah

What can we call this psalm? As far as categories go, it is first and foremost a lament, which is the type of psalm where the author is crying out to God in complaint and often begging to be rescued. Sometimes laments accuse God of covenant unfaithfulness and wrongdoing, like in Psalm 89. Then there are the painful ones where the author is calling down some pretty nasty curses on their enemies, like the notorious Psalm 137. Others are full of confidence that Yahweh will come through with rescue and vindication, while some end on a very bitter and sour note. And then, there are laments that end with praise. The only real rule is that there is a crisis involved in a lament. Although there are some fairly reproducible patterns in how a lament is written, there are few hard and fast rules. As in real life, when we are upset, we generally just go with the flow.

In the first line of Alter’s translation, we come up against two of the great scholarly debates of our time: (1) what does the phrase mizmor l’David mean? and (2) Are these titles before the Psalms legit, or were they added later by the scribes who put the different Psalms together into the five books we have now? You need to know that there is nothing cut and dried about this. Really intelligent, well-studied, God-loving men and women have some very different ideas about this. I know because I have been reading a lot of what they had to say about it. In truth, when we don’t have people to ask (because they are dead), there are going to be things we just don’t always know for sure. Let’s take up the first question and try to figure out what mizmor l’David means when it shows up at the beginning of a Psalm. Alter translates it as “A David Psalm” but others point out that the lamed before David is a conjunction that can mean a whole lot of different things like of, by, concerning, for, in the style of, to, about, etc. I like what Alter says here because, unlike Psalm 2 being credited to David in the book of Acts, we don’t have any assurances of what exactly it means. Did David write Psalm 3 or was it written about him or to him after the victory, or in the same style as David about a situation in his life? That expression can mean a whole lot of different things, and all are legitimate options. Hebrew is really lean on their conjunctions whereas we have a ton, and they have much narrower meanings. Usually, but English is a danged mess too. The takeaway is that we have this phrase that might mean different things in different Psalms. Is it a problem if David didn’t write all of the mimzor l’David? Not really.

The second question concerns the titles like this one that claims that this was about David when he was fleeing from his son Absalom. I really fell squarely on the side of saying that I thought the title was added later by the scribes as a mode of interpretation and understanding—a sort of “when you read this, think of this historical event because this is how we are interpreting it now.” Not too different from the added in chapters, verses and subject headings we find in the Bible now. I think it is the Tree of Life Bible that has the heading “Joab the Terminator” which is way cooler and more accurate than some of the headings we find in the Gospels like “The Parable of the Prodigal Son” which limits how most people will think about and interpret said parable. And so, there are some who believe that the “titles” were added later when all the Psalms were assembled in book form to help the reader/singer out (but on the other hand, there are only fourteen of them in the whole Psalter, which argues against later naming because why only fourteen out of 150?). Certainly, nothing nefarious going on; however, if they were added later then they can really stunt how we evaluate them, but they would provide a valuable window into how they were being read at the time they were all arranged into the Psalter. Can we prove anything either way? Nope. It’s just brain candy, I suppose, but interesting brain candy. No one’s salvation hinges on this. There won’t be a test.

One thing I really love about Alter’s translation is that he makes sure to use the word “many” over and over again instead of using euphemisms because the Hebrew text wants us to see the repetition. Let’s look at the CSB and compare the two:

A psalm of David when he fled from his son Absalom.

1 Lord, how my foes increase**! There are many** who attack me.

2 Many** say about me, “There is no help for him in God.” Selah

3 But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.

4 I cry aloud to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy mountain. Selah

5 I lie down and sleep; I wake again because the Lord sustains me.

6 I will not be afraid of thousands** of people who have taken their stand against me on every side.

7 Rise up, Lord! Save me, my God! You strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.

8 Salvation belongs to the Lord; may your blessing be on your people. Selah

So, four of the words in this psalm, in the Hebrew, are related words. If you remember when we studied Isaiah 40-56 and the Gospel of Mark, that the words rabbim and polys were very important. The reason why is because the Servant in Isaiah comes to deliver the many, and in Mark, Yeshua is followed by many. Mark purposefully wrote his Gospel to paint Yeshua/Jesus as the Yahweh-Warrior/Arm of the Lord prophesied by Isaiah. Rabbim and polys, translated as many, are meant to communicate the enormity of the crowds, the delivered from exile, and here in Psalm 3, the enemies of the psalmist—who we are going to presume is David. When he says “my foes increase,” “many attack me,” “many say of me,” and “I will not be afraid of thousands,” all of those words are either rabbim or related to rabbim. Hearing them over and over again in such a short psalm, being only eight verses long, makes for a feeling of being overwhelmed and surrounded–and that’s on purpose.

Like a lot of laments, the first word is “Yahweh!” followed by a complaint. When I say complaint, I don’t want you to think of the whining the children of Israel were doing out in the wilderness—that was just totally annoying and insulting. David is in covenant with Yahweh; when his kingship is threatened, Yahweh has to act to protect David. Only Yahweh can displace His chosen king, even though David’s trouble with Absalom is 120% David’s own fault. David raped Bathsheba and had her husband murdered by proxy, and then his son Amnon followed in David’s footsteps and raped his virgin half-sister Tamar. David did nothing about it, and so Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, murdered Amnon and then lived in exile for a while until called back by David, who refused to see Absalom. Absalom’s bitterness grew until he began furtively making a play for the throne behind David’s back. He incited a rebellion that sent David running with almost all of his household except for some of his wives—whom Absalom then raped on the roof of the palace in front of the entire city of Jerusalem.

And Yahweh told David that there would be dire consequences for his crimes against Bathsheba and Uriah–that the sword would never leave his house. In fact, there was still fallout during the early reign of Solomon—although Bathsheba was finally honored as Queen mother, with a throne by her son. As we will see later in the Psalms, kings were held to higher standards than anyone else because they were appointed by God to rule and represent Him before the people and do justice and righteousness in His Name. Of course, most of the kings were chosen by their fathers, with the exception of Saul, David, and Solomon.

But back to the psalm—what David is suffering here is entirely his own fault. He abused his authority. He failed to administer justice to his own daughter. He created bitterness in the son who did what the law demanded in killing the rapist of a virgin. But Absalom was still wrong, and he wasn’t honoring Yahweh by appealing to Him for justice. Absalom had grown accustomed to taking matters into his own hands because David refused. I imagine it made him feel invulnerable, especially since he is one of the few people in the Bible described as being gorgeous. I dunno, think Chris Hemsworth playing Thor kind of gorgeous. Absalom was also aided by the wisest advisor in the kingdom, who just happened to be the grandfather of Bathsheba, whom David raped. There is nothing about this situation that isn’t helaciously messy. And yet, what Absalom is doing is subverting Yahweh and not just his father. Absalom isn’t abiding by the Covenant of Yahweh with His people. Of course, neither was David and he was certainly paying the price for the rest of his life—along with everyone around him.

So, David has many enemies, which means many attackers, but this isn’t like Psalm 2 where they are all talk and Yahweh is laughing at them like they are a bunch of old toothless chihuahuas. These are enemies who are encroaching upon the divine prerogative of Yahweh to appoint His own kings, discipline his own kings, and decide for Himself what their fate will be. They are wrong even though they are enacting the continuing judgment of God on David. And by the way, this isn’t applicable to pastors, okay? I know some use any verse they can find to avoid human accountability, but if they have to do that, then they shouldn’t be pastoring, ’nuff said. Not only are these people rising up against God’s anointed king, but they are attacking him as well as daring to speak for Yahweh—or against Him. They say, “There is no help for him in God.” That can either mean that Yahweh is powerless to help David or they are presuming that Yahweh has cast him aside and will not help him. I see this on social media a lot, where people dare to speak for God and say whom He will and will not save. We don’t know the answer to those questions, and so we cannot make the mistake of saying such things. Only Yahweh decides whom Yahweh delivers. Period. They are claiming that there will be no yeshua for David, no salvation. No, this isn’t a hint at Jesus even though that is His real name.

But David counters the claims of his enemies and attackers because he understands their covenant relationship and remembers his long history with Yahweh protecting him first from Goliath and then Saul. David hasn’t led an easy life, but he has led what we could call a charmed life because Yahweh has made him promises that He will eventually keep in Yeshua the Messiah. David acting like an idiot doesn’t change Yahweh’s oaths sworn to David and his descendants—even though his sons are dropping left and right. David began acting like a typical ancient Near Eastern king in how he treated women and firstborn sons, yet Yahweh could still rein him in when confronted about it. Yahweh was going to perform restitution for Bathsheba through her son—this story is a lot more complex than it looks like at first. David understands the evil he has done and undoubtedly regrets not only his own sins but those of Amnon and his own failure to act. However, he knows that Yahweh isn’t just a shield, which only guards a person on one side, but a shield all around. Some translations remove the word shield and replace it with Suzerain—which is fitting because that is the Covenant arrangement that is protecting David at the moment. Yahweh is the greater Suzerain King, and David is his lesser Vassal King. They have covenant obligations toward one another—Yahweh must protect David when he is attacked, and David must display covenant loyalty to Yahweh. Not only is Yahweh his 360 degree shield, but Yahweh is the source of David’s honor/glory and the one who lifts up David’s head. As David is now hiding out at the lowest point on earth right now, the metaphor is appropriate. David can literally go no lower while still being above ground. He’s as close to the grave as a person can be without being dead.

But from the lowest point on earth, David cries out to the Lord, who answers David from Mt Zion—where the Ark sits in the Tabernacle of David. This wouldn’t be the Temple because it didn’t exist in David’s time, but he did erect a tent for the Ark of the Covenant prior to this. Whatever the Lord’s answer is, David responds in perfect trust and goes to sleep. He wakes up again because Yahweh is sustaining his life. There was nothing to fear. Wish we knew what Yahweh said to him; it must have been really good. Many of the lament psalms have a word of confidence following the complaint—”such and such is just terrible, but I remember that you have always saved me.” David and Yahweh have quite the history together, and Yahweh has miraculously saved David on many occasions. David speaks again and claims that he will not be afraid, even with the many people who have decided to stand against him and who are gathering all around him. But remember that Yahweh is David’s shield “all around” and not just to the front or the back.

David calls out to Yahweh, saying, “Rise up, Lord! Save me, my God!” And the phrase “Rise up, Lord” should sound familiar from Numbers 10:35: “Whenever the Ark set out, Moses would say:   Arise, Lord! Let your enemies be scattered, and those who hate you flee from your presence.” One of the promises of Yahweh to His people in the wilderness was to travel with them and protect them, and later to protect His kings in particular because Yahweh had determined that through David would come all of Israel’s kings and specifically the Messiah. Although Joseph came from the Solomonic line, genetically, Mary came from the line of Nathan—a branch of the Davidic line but not the line that came directly from Solomon, which was cursed by Yahweh through Jeremiah in Jer 22:28-30 when Jeconiah’s descendants were banned from the kingship—meaning the Messiah could not be a physical male descendant of the entire Davidic line. Yeshua was not only a genetic branch of Jesse through his youngest son David but also a branch of David through Nathan. I have talked to the kids about this, but it was the funny belief of ancient times that a child was only the descendant of the male—that a man gave an actual “seed” (which was a very tiny human) which would be planted into the fertile or barren womb of a woman. So Messiah being the seed of the woman wasn’t a scientific declaration of ovaries and eggs but a mystery to be revealed in Yeshua—I mean, we have only known about the ova contribution to humans since the 19th century. Henry VIII had no clue that he was the one producing girls…I imagine his biology course in hell will be humbling (I know, I know, wishful thinking on my part). But back to the psalm. David says:

You strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.

This was always the line that puzzled me because I read it more violently than I should have. David didn’t want any harm to come to Absalom and indeed mourned so deeply that he was rebuked by the military leadership for shaming the men who fought. They felt good about the victory that they had risked their lives (and some gave their lives) for, but David was making them feel bad for it. By this point in his life, David had very much figured out that all of this bloodshed in his family, and especially among his sons, was entirely his fault. If there had been any doubt, it should have been erased when Abiathar the priest went over to Absalom as an advisor, being that he was the grandfather of Bathsheba, whom David had removed from her house and brought to him—and she lacked the power to say no. Abiathar had been nursing this grudge for even longer than Absalom had been brooding over the rape of his sister. Had this simply been adultery, I think that Abiathar would hold his peace and just want everyone to forget about it or might have killed Bathsheba to restore the honor of his family. Adultery just doesn’t add up with the text or the history.

But striking enemies on the cheek is far from a killing blow—instead, it was a culturally specific form of humiliation and putting someone “in their place.” Again, breaking the teeth of the wicked is something that, for lack of a better term, leaves an attacker toothless or harmless. Think about that elderly, toothless chihuahua from last week’s Psalm 2 lesson where all the foreign kings can do is yap, but they are powerless against Yahweh. Someone whose teeth are broken probably also has a broken jaw and won’t be able to even speak against David anymore. Which leads us to the last verse, claiming that salvation belongs to Yahweh. Why even say this? Isn’t it obvious? Well, back in verse two, these enemies and attackers were claiming that Yahweh wasn’t going to save David—either because He couldn’t or just wouldn’t because He was as done with David as those staging the coup. This answers the claim of verse two with a counterclaim—”Yahweh saves whom He saves and no one can decide who or why or what or when except for Him alone.” Truly, it is folly when we try to decide whom He will and will not save based upon our own wishful thinking. Who would have thought He would save Paul, right? Did the religious experts believe that Yahweh would save Yeshua?? Nope. We are fools to speculate so casually. I once had someone tell me that the Lord wasn’t with me because I called Game of Thrones soft porn, so there’s that. Wasn’t aware He was a fan…

The psalm ends with a birkat, Hebrew for a benediction or closing blessing—“may your blessing be on your people.” And it is kind of odd since this has been in the first person all this time, but perhaps David realizes that as long as this rebellion continues, it is the Lord’s people who suffer the most.

Finally, the word “selah” appears three times in this psalm, and no one knows what it means. Is it a musical term? Probably. What we do know for sure is that by the time the Psalms were translated into Greek sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, the meaning of the word was already lost because the word was just transliterated into Greek. They had no Greek word they could use to translate it because they had no idea what it meant. But I will share a funny quote about this from Goldingay that I got out of Psalms for Normal People (affiliate link) by Joshua James, “Despite the popular teaching that selah is an instruction to be silent/to meditate/to enter into a holy pause, no one actually knows what the term means. Goldingay offers this tongue-in-cheek conclusion, “The best theory is that [selah] was what [the psalmist] said when he broke a string. This is the best theory because there is no logic about when you break a string, and there is no logic about the occurrence of ‘selah’” (An Introduction to the Old Testament, 297)” (affiliate link).

See you next week for Psalm 4!

 

 

 



Episode 118: Is Polygamy/Polygyny Really a Biblical Thing?

This is a real controversial topic within some fringe Torah groups and I was asked to address it from a Biblical/historical perspective. Last week, I talked about male and female-identified religion and the dangers—and this is a big draw for some men. So, we’re going to look at what the Bible does and does not say about it. Is it ever spoken of in a positive way? What is the fruit? What restrictions did Yeshua/Jesus put on marriage and what did Paul have to say about polygynists in leadership?

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

Polygamy, multiple spouses, or more accurately polygyny, multiple wives, can be a hot topic among people new to reading the Hebrew Scriptures. And there is this unfortunate tendency with people who do not read deeply into the text—or into what the first century writings and particularly Yeshua/Jesus has to say about it—to somehow prop up multiple wives as some sort of Biblical ideal. So, today we are going to delve deeply into what Scripture does and does not say about multiple wives (because nothing is said about multiple husbands as it was illegal in the ancient world in almost all cultures). Is this portrayed positively, as some claim, or negatively? What were the historical-cultural reasons for polygyny in the ancient Near East and elsewhere? What do demographics and Genesis 2 and 3 teach us about original intent? What does Yeshua teach us about original intent? What do we see typified in polygynous families in the Bible? How does Leviticus talk about this phenomenon? Lots to cover today.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Oddly enough, I am going to begin at the end—with the words of Yeshua and Paul. And then we will go back to the beginning. I am of the belief that our Messiah is the absolute and ultimate interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures and that everyone else is just giving interesting opinions. So there. In Mark 10, which we covered not so long ago, Yeshua is talking about divorce and the “allowances” of Moses. And it’s truly difficult to understand Torah without also understanding the concept of allowances—it’s how a lot of people in the Hebrew Roots Movement get themselves into trouble when they focus so much on the Torah and not on some of Yeshua’s clarifications about it. When Yeshua is asked if a man should be able to divorce his wife, Yeshua doesn’t give them permission. They are asking what they are allowed to do and Yeshua takes them back to the beginning to show them what they are supposed to do. He tells them point blank that Moses, far from commanding divorce, made an allowance because of their hardness of heart. And there is a huge difference between the two. This is why a legalistic reading of the law will often lead us into unrighteousness, if we are only looking at it in order to see what we can get away with doing to other people. Which is exactly what men were doing during the first century. The House of Hillel Pharisees had a ruling that they enjoyed living by called “any-cause divorce” and instead of only being allowed to divorce their wives for gross indecency, as dictated in Torah, they had expanded that to include the burning of meals and just plain old getting older. In fact, they would even punish wives they could not afford to divorce (hence having to return their dowry because they hadn’t committed adultery, which forfeited it) by taking a second, younger wife. The Essenes had fits over them doing both this and marrying their nieces because that wasn’t specifically mentioned as being forbidden in Leviticus 18. You see what people do when they search the Scriptures for what they are allowed to do to other people?

But in Yeshua’s answer to their question, he smacks them down hard for polygyny—when we know the first century context and who His audience was and what they were doing: 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,  8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (ESV)

One wife. They are no longer two but one—not three, but one. The word for man is the generic Greek word meaning human. If it was just referring to men, as the Pharisees were when they asked the question, He could have responded with andri, which is where we get the name Andrew. But, Yeshua didn’t go there, He used the generic Greek for human. No human, neither male nor female, is to come between a married couple. To do so is adultery. And so, right here, Yeshua is very slyly calling the Pharisees onto the carpet for polygyny being a form of adultery. It simply was not that way in the beginning and that is always where Yeshua sends us in order to find out what God wants from us and especially in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. So often, He says something like, “You have heard it was said to those of old…” referring to the Torah commandments, but then He will jump in with, “but I say to you…” and sometimes He is flat out saying that the commandments are nice but they were made to contain or limit sin—not to define a righteous life. We all know that slavery is evil now, post-Cross, even though it took us a long time to get there—and even though most of that slavery might have been debt slaves, it wasn’t all that way and you could beat a slave to death and go unpunished just as long as they didn’t die within two days “because they are your property” (Ex 21:20-21) We know that forcibly taking war-brides is evil (Deut 21:10-14), because we live in a post-Cross world. Moses made allowances. Yeshua outright says so. And Yeshua calls us to a much higher standard of justice and righteousness than Moses ever could have.

What about the epistles? In I Timothy 3, overseers and deacons are both commanded to be the husband of only one wife and in Titus 1, elders are held to the exact same standard. So, obviously when Paul was setting up new congregations, he was banning polygynists from leadership. A huge reason is because they were commanded to have orderly households and, as we will see throughout Scripture, that is not the case when there is more than one wife in the home, and especially children of more than one wife. Polygynists aren’t really celebrated in Scripture—at least not for that. Their home lives are a mess and oftentimes they themselves are objectionable and portrayed badly for other reasons. Let’s just go through them:

Lamech, the great-great grandson of Cain, a murderer and the first person in Scripture to be described as having more than one wife. He was quite the piece of work, claiming that anyone who tried to kill him for killing the young man who had only wounded him, was going to get it bad—seventy-seven fold. Lamech depended on God’s protection of Cain in order to justify this. Lamech is the first person in Scripture who is really described as being just an all around bad dude. Very entitled in every aspect of his life that we know about and feeling as though the rules obviously didn’t apply to him and that he could kill people over slights without penalty.

Our second polygynist is debatable—it’s Abraham. And a lot of this material you can find more fleshed out in my book Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. Hagar, being a concubine, wasn’t a full on wife. This is terrible but in the ancient world, women were seen as incubators. The man deposits his seed in the fertile soil of the wife and nine months later, voila! Mini-me for daddy. But the idea of a woman having an egg? And that the baby was genetically hers as well? That really wouldn’t have made sense to them. No, the baby was the father’s property as it grew from his seed and no matter how fond Abraham was of Sarah, and he must have loved her very much for sticking with her in a world where a woman needed to produce within two years or be discarded as damaged goods, he would have seen his kids as just mini versions of himself. Sarah and Hagar were just incubators in the birthing process. The Bible doesn’t teach science, so it speaks in those terms when we know what to look for. Which was why the whole “seed of the woman” thing in Genesis 3 didn’t make an ounce of sense to them. Women, they thought, didn’t have seed. Only men. Of course, we know differently. But Sarah was within her rights in the ancient Near Eastern world to present her husband with a surrogate “incubator” for his baby, and that’s why the child would be “hers” because it was only her husband’s child anyway, as far as they believed. Didn’t matter where it came out of. So, she had the legal right to force Hagar into this situation (which would have been a step up socially for her anyway) and Abraham wanted a son so it wasn’t like he was going to refuse her. Sarah needed a son just as badly as did Abraham, someone to care for her once Abraham died. So, was Abraham a polygynist? No, not really. He only ever had, in his eyes, one wife at a time plus an incubator on the side. And I know this sounds offensive and it is offensive but this is contextually how they would have looked at the situation. But, even though there weren’t two wives, Hagar was behaving as though she was a wife and we all know how horribly this worked out when she began acting as Sarah’s rival instead of as her slave. There is nothing even suggesting that Abraham was treating her as a second wife, however, carrying the heir to the clan was a big huge deal and it made Hagar somewhat of a celebrity in the group. Of course, we all know what happened, the family ended up splintered apart and Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and almost died. I mean, really Abraham? A water skin and some bread? So not cool there, dude. And the two families were at odds throughout the Scriptures. Not a good starting point.

Fortunately, all this drama skipped a generation and we were instead treated to the problem of having favorite children, which is also a recurring problem theme. But Jacob—he didn’t go into life wanting more than one wife but was tricked into it and it was a disaster. His brother, Esau, on the other hand, married multiple women on purpose—women who made his mother’s life a living hell. Jacob, of course, only wanted Rachel but her father played a game with ancient Near Eastern inheritance rights and probably tricked Jacob into marrying Leah so that he could be disinherited. You see, Laban doesn’t seem to have any sons when Jacob shows up, only the girls. Because of this, Laban might have been in the market for an endogamous adoption—the adoption of another clan member as a son/son-in-law. Marrying him to Rachel gave Laban a male heir—but later in the story we see Laban suddenly having sons. So, something had changed over the course of the 21 years Jacob remained with Laban where we see no sons and then all of a sudden he has sons old enough to be working with the flocks. There is a law on the books, and I talk about this in my book, where a stipulation of son-in-law inheritance rights would be invalidated if the son in law took a second wife. And we actually see Laban make reference to this during their very last meeting when he forbids Jacob to take any wives other than his daughters. So, if Laban had sons during that initial seven years of Jacob working for him, then if he could force Jacob into a polygynist situation, Jacob would not inherit—only Laban’s biological sons would inherit. So, Laban makes the switch, Jacob consummates the marriage, and then is forced by his love for Rachel to become a polygamist when all he initially wanted was Rachel. He loses the inheritance and Laban gets what he wants.

Of course, Bilhah and Zilpah were added not as wives but as concubines due to barenness (in the case of Rachel) and secondary infertility (in the case of Leah) and both wives were within their rights to demand more children. And, of course, Jacob doesn’t seem to complain about it. In Rabbinic legends, he liked Bilhah so much that after Rachel’s death, she became his preferred sleeping partner—which is why they claim Reuben slept with her, so Jacob couldn’t anymore. But the wording is very precise and Bilhah and Zilpah are not ever referred to as the wives of Jacob, when the wives are singled out and addressed, but just as women. And when Bilhah and Zilpah have children, they belong to Rachel and Leah. If they were wives, then the children would be credited to them. And yes, it is a step up from just being a slave but it is a far cry from the respect a wife would be due within the clan.

What is the immediate fruit of these unions, I mean, besides a whole mess of kids? Strife between the sisters as love turns to a bitter rivalry—Leah even accusing Rachel of stealing her husband. When Joseph goes making trouble for his brothers, he singles out the children of Bilhah and Zilpah, so evidently there is a hierarchy that even the kids are painfully aware of and you know how kids are. In addition, the children of Rachel are given a super-priority and favoritism over the others—even the firstborn. As a result, hatred grows amongst all of the brothers and Joseph is betrayed and sold into slavery in Egypt. Just as in the problems with Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, this is all directly attributable to multiple women being forced into a rivalry situation. Perhaps this is why Joseph only had one wife!

During the time of the Judges, we have Gideon, who had seventy sons and “many wives”—well, with that many kids, one would certainly hope for more than one wife. He also had a concubine who bore him a son, and that son, Abimelech, killed all of his brothers so that he could rule over the residents of Shechem himself. And we’re going to see this theme repeated again, with the sons of David. Sons of different mothers in the Bible tend not to be terribly loyal to one another. In the ancient Near Eastern world, the closest bond is not between husband and wife or father and son but between mother and son, followed by brother and sister. Which makes a lot of this make a whole lot more sense. Oftentimes, these guys were actually striving with one another for their mother’s honor. Rivalry is all about undermining your opponent and trying to come out on top. Like with Leah and Rachel and the dialogues whenever a new baby would or wouldn’t be born.

Let’s look at what the Bible says about that rivalry issue—Lev 18:18 “And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.” And I Sam 1:6 “There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephrathite. 2 He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. 3 Now this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. 4 On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters. 5 But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. 6 And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. 7 So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore, Hannah wept and would not eat. 8 And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

Can I just go and say, “Most clueless man of all time?” No, honey, you aren’t better than ten sons. Geez, what kind of an idiot are you? I have this other woman of yours tormenting me but hey, I am married to you which makes it all so thrilling and happy. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon!” But, look at Leviticus 18:18—Moses is flat out saying that multiple wives are rivals. Hey, just like multiple husbands would be. There’s a reason that’s always illegal in patriarchal cultures—because men are jealous just like women are, and it isn’t any less of a problem. Here’s the thing, if Moses is acknowledging that multiple wives are rivals, what should that communicate to us? The word rival is not a positive one—no one should have a rival in their own home. It is cruel and dehumanizing. A woman with a rival is a woman who can have no peace—just like a man would feel the same way. And the saddest example of this is between Rachel and Leah, sisters whose relationship should never have been broken by rivalry. Let’s look at this heartbreaking story in Gen 29 and 30:

31 When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. 32 And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” 33 She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. 34 Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. 35 And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing.

Let’s stop right here. Geez, four sons and with every son she is like begging and hoping for her husband’s regard, but instead he prefers her sister. It says here that she is hated—which must have been what it felt like, to know how she had been used as part of a ruse and can you even begin to imagine her agony—and her rival, the other woman, was her own sister. Legendary materials say that they were twins, but at the very least Rachel was her younger sister. This situation is a nightmare for Leah who obviously gives up on Jacob loving her before the birth of Judah, and it isn’t a picnic for Rachel either, because although Rachel is a rival for Jacob’s actual affection, Leah has given birth to four sons—making Rachel nothing in the eyes of other women and insecure in her marriage.

30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” 2 Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel, and he said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” 3 Then she said, “Here is my servant Bilhah; go in to her, so that she may give birth on my behalf, that even I may have children through her.” 4 So she gave him her servant Bilhah as a wife, and Jacob went in to her. 5 And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. 6 Then Rachel said, “God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son.” Therefore she called his name Dan. 7 Rachel’s servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. 8 Then Rachel said, “With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed.” So she called his name Naphtali.

Now, being a barren woman myself, I know what it is to feel like I am going to die without a child. I even told God that in January of 2000 after I lost our third baby. And I meant it. And Jacob here, is really not the most sympathetic figure in the Bible—on so many levels. Rachel, desperate as Sarah ever was, gives Jacob her young, probably about thirteen or fourteen years old, handmaid and when Bilhah gives birth, Rachel’s words really reveal the oppressive and adversarial nature of having to deal with other wives. “God has judged me”…and the unspoken thing is that the judgment would be with regard to this rivalry with her sister, she feels vindicated now. And with the birth of Napthali, she speaks of wrestling with her sister. This is a horrifying indictment on polygyny, if even the closest of women can have their loving relationship destroyed over it. This is not how either family or marriage should be, for anyone.

9 When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. 10 Then Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. 11 And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. 12 Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. 13 And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher. 14 In the days of wheat harvest Reuben went and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” 15 But she said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes also?” Rachel said, “Then he may lie with you tonight in exchange for your son’s mandrakes.” 16 When Jacob came from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him and said, “You must come in to me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he lay with her that night. 17 And God listened to Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. 18 Leah said, “God has given me my wages because I gave my servant to my husband.” So she called his name Issachar.

Geez. Come on! How humiliating to have to barter with your rival in order to sleep with your own husband. And none of this is Leah’s fault. She was a pawn in a ruthless patriarchal culture and her father used her in order to rob Jacob. This is just wrong. When we look at men and women in the beginning and the harmony and the one on one nature of the relationship, this is just tragic.

19 And Leah conceived again, and she bore Jacob a sixth son. 20 Then Leah said, “God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons.” So she called his name Zebulun. 21 Afterward she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah.

But six sons and a daughter mean little to Jacob, who still does not regard her and seemingly never will.

22 Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. 23 She conceived and bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” 24 And she called his name Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!”

So, even having the births through Bilhah was not enough to cause Rachel not to feel this shame and rivalry. Look, when you have a rival, no amount of victory is enough. Rivals are there to be conquered and defeated, not to be fought with endlessly.

But surely, even though things were a mess for Sarah and Hagar, and Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and his clan, and Hannah and her family—surely things got better with the monarchy. I mean, David is like one of the stars of the Bible. Surely he could handle polygyny like a champ with no infighting. Actually, with him it was even worse. And he wasn’t tricked into it like Jacob was. David took multiple wives for various reasons—political alliances and lust being among them. And really, you have four overt reasons for polygyny in the Bible (other than being tricked, we aren’t going to count a unique situation):

  • the need for heirs because people without heirs were in deep doo doo in the ancient world. Without a younger generation, you were vulnerable in every way. As you grew older, there was no one to protect you from the elements, care for the land and livestock, or defend you if you were attacked by marauders or your slaves rebelled. Even worse than all that was the idea of having your body go unburied and ending up as dust beneath the feet of others. This was seriously terrifying for ancient people and we have no indication from the Bible that they had any concept of eternal life at this early date. Even David didn’t. For ancient people, the only immortality was through being remembered, which is why Absalom built a memorial for himself. Obviously, none of these are any sort of concern in modern times.
  • Political alliances—this was the main reason why kings gathered wives. To shore up political alliances with neighboring countries. These were princesses bred for this duty and the race was always on to produce the first heir, or maybe the favorite heir, so that they could be queen mother. Apart from the wealth, it was a kind of a miserable sort of life spent scheming and competing for affection. Saul, David and Solomon all took political wives. Solomon’s very first wife allied Israel with Egypt because she was the daughter of Pharaoh. Rehoboam, Solomon’s heir—his mother was an Ammonite.
  • Lust—Bathsheba was the one wife of David whom we know was the victim of lust. The text in Hebrew and in historical context is clear that she was innocent and that David was the aggressor and that he even raped her—which is why she was likened to a little defenseless ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable. The problem with power is that it makes even good men drunk with it and likely, when he had her seized and brought over to his palace, she couldn’t conceive of getting out of there alive if she said no to him. He held all the cards. And since he murdered her husband to cover everything up, maybe she would be right to just be happy to get out of there alive. Power changed David, and not for the better. And Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines. There weren’t enough countries to be allied with to justify that many alliances and he sure didn’t need that many heirs.
  • Patriarchal authority/honor—patriarchy breeds self-indulgence. It just does. A man feels more like a man if he has more of what makes a man feel like a man—and women are always at the top of that list. Even if it isn’t about lust, it is about possessions, authority and power over others and no one is easier to wield authority over in the ancient world than women. A man who could gather beautiful and well-positioned women around him would be granted a lot of honor for doing so and honor/reputation was everything in that world.

In the modern world, we see the latter two reasons for plural marriages. Plus one other—but that one other tends to get blended in with lust and patriarchy, and that is religion. Where I live, we have what are called “black Mormons” and they are Mormons who practice polygyny even though the church outlawed it so that Utah could become a state back in 1896. Polygyny is still very much a thing here, but don’t think of Sister Wives or Big Love. That’s fictional. Yes, reality shows like Sister Wives are largely fictional and I actually have a friend who knows that family personally. But let’s get back to the Biblical record—and this time we will talk about David’s family.

David had eight wives and of course we already discussed the tragedy with Bathsheba. The children that came from these eight marriages were treacherous with one another. Amnon, David’s firstborn, raped his half-sister Tamar. Tamar’s brother Absalom, when David refused to do anything about it, killed Amnon and was banished. When Absalom returned, the bitterness was still so terrible that he launched a coup against his father which resulted in his death. When David was close to death, his son Adonijah seized the throne and declared himself king—despite the throne being promised to Solomon. Solomon spared his life only to have him executed later because Adonijah was trying to secure a backdoor to the throne by trying to marry David’s last wife, who was still a virgin. By marrying one of David’s wives, he would have a claim to the throne. And so, all these children of different mothers—there was no affection there but only rivalry and we have seen it too many times for it not to be a serious pattern of the bad fruit that comes from plural marriages.

And I am not saying that people who do this are evil. I am saying that the fruit is bad. So many times, Yeshua would just point His audience back to the beginning. There is a reason why the male/female population is about 50/50 and it isn’t because Yahweh wants some men to have a ton of wives and the rest to have none. Would Yahweh really want some men to have absolutely no heirs? Well, that’s what ends up happening within these plural marriage communities. The only way to make it work is to have a lot of single men or to expel them from the community, which does often happen. Look at the FLDS community run by Warren Jeffs, and that’s not the only community out there.

This is never portrayed in Scripture as a righteous or beneficial way of life. The word rival gets used—and that isn’t a dig at women for being too sensitive. It’s just a fact. Yeshua called the men who do this adulterers. The early congregations barred these men from leadership. And so, why does this happen? When I read the materials put out by these groups or individuals that promote this, they make a big deal about saying this isn’t about sex. But what is it about? It certainly isn’t about there being no male or female in Christ, because there are definite dividing lines. Women are not granted the right to have more than one husband and the reasons given are ludicrous. “Oh,” people say, “You won’t know who the father is.” Why does that matter anymore? Get a DNA test. Easy peasy. But no, there is always a double standard. Now, in the ancient world, no man anywhere would tolerate rivals which is why adultery was considered to be a crime committed against another man, and not against a man’s wife. In other words, if say, my husband and I were alive three thousand years ago and he had relations with the neighbor’s wife, they wouldn’t be sinning against me but against her husband because I had no authority over his body—which brings me to another bit of Scripture often overlooked in all of this. Two, actually—in Mark 10:11, Yeshua shocked his audience by pointing out that, yes Virginia, a man really can commit adultery with his wife as the victim—he is committing adultery not just against another man but against his own wife. This seems obvious to us but it was anything but obvious within that patriarchal culture where women truly were treated as though they were less than fully human. Like I said before, walking incubators. But what’s that other verse I was talking about? Here we go—I Cor 7

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Although this Scripture is misused to make women feel as though they are sex slaves and that if they don’t give in to their husband’s every whim, he’s going to stray, it couldn’t be further from the truth. And by the way, if you guys don’t want us to see you as weak—then don’t pull this stuff. We know that single guys are expected to be celibate, as are divorced and widowed men. They don’t all go out raping women and committing fornication just because their every desire isn’t being met so you husbands, seriously, put on your big girl panties (well, not literally) and understand that your wife isn’t a sex slave and sometimes she doesn’t want to or can’t and that’s okay. Her body doesn’t just belong to you. Your body also belongs to her and thus you have to hold back when she needs a break. You’ll live. And also—if you can let yourself go and get older and go without makeup and jewelry, so can we.

But this Scripture is what I call the “Leah” scripture. Oh if only Jacob’s body had only belonged to her! If only Jacob only had his own one wife! If only Leah could have called Jacob her own husband but she couldn’t because he was also her sister’s husband. If Leah had been properly given authority over Jacob’s body then all twelve tribes would have come from her and Rachel could have married someone else and Rachel and Leah could have loved one another as sisters—and they could have both just hated their snake of a father instead without the rivalry. Polygyny makes this impossible—and so does polyandry, plural husbands. And no thanks, one is enough!

Yahweh is the God of love, dignity, justice and righteousness. Polygyny is something men did in the ancient world, not something that was part of God’s original design. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Betty and Veronica. No one deserves to go through life with a rival. No man and no woman. We were each of us created to be loved and respected and cherished. We were each of us created to be enough for someone else. For one someone else. With no rivalries among children constantly jockeying for position. Moses made allowances for hardness of heart but we aren’t supposed to have hardened hearts.