Fifty Biblical Portraits [1 ed.] 9780874627909, 9780874627893

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Fifty Biblical Portraits

paul beauchamp Fifty Biblical Portraits

drawings by

Pierre Grassignoux Translated by Peter Rogers, SJ

Marquette studies in theology No. 74 Andrew tallon, series editor © 2011 Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved. www.marquette.edu/mupress/ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beauchamp, Paul. [Cinquante portraits bibliques. English] Fifty biblical portraits / Paul Beauchamp ; drawings by Pierre Grassignoux ; translated by Peter Rogers. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in theology ; No. 74) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-789-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87462-789-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bible. O.T.—Biography. I. Title. BS571.B4313 2011 221.9'22—dc22 2011002067

By arrangement through Georges Borchardt, Inc., New York, 2008, with Les Édition du Seuil, Paris, ©2000. The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

contents Foreword.......................................................................................... 7 Overview.......................................................................................... 9 Abraham: The Chosen One........................................................ 13 Abraham: In the Beginning Was the Plural............................... 17 Abraham: Life, Death................................................................... 21 Abraham: Binding and Unbinding............................................. 25 The Name of Isaac: “Will Laugh”................................................ 29 Jacob the Deceiver......................................................................... 33 Jacob, continued............................................................................ 37 Jacob the Wrestler......................................................................... 43 Joseph............................................................................................. 46 Moses between Two Peoples....................................................... 51 Moses the Visionary..................................................................... 55 Moses in the Place of God........................................................... 59 Moses and Pharaoh...................................................................... 65 Moses in the Sin of His People................................................... 69 The Raised-up Serpent................................................................ 73 Joshua Conquers the Promised Land......................................... 77 Rahab and the Wall of Jericho..................................................... 81 Samson, or Brimming Over......................................................... 87 Ruth: Bread, Flesh, Word............................................................ 91 Samuel: A Transition................................................................... 95 Samuel Executes the King of the Amalekites............................ 99 Saul: The Elected and Rejected King.......................................103 David: Courage and Ability.......................................................107 David the Beloved.......................................................................111 David Put to the Test.................................................................115

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From David to Jesus...................................................................121 Solomon and Wisdom...............................................................125 Adam............................................................................................129 Adam and Eve.............................................................................135 After Solomon: Rehoboam.......................................................139 Jeroboam: The Secession of the North....................................143 Elija: Like Fire.............................................................................147 Another Elija...............................................................................151 Elija, Yesterday and Tomorrow.................................................155 Elisha the Disciple......................................................................159 The Prophet Hosea....................................................................163 Isaiah............................................................................................167 Isaiah: Births...............................................................................171 Jeremiah and the End of the Kings...........................................175 Jeremiah and Moses....................................................................181 Jeremiah towards the Future.....................................................185 Ezekiel..........................................................................................189 An Unknown Person: The “Servant”........................................193 Nehemiah: The Return..............................................................197 Job: The Cry of the Leper..........................................................201 Jonah and the Man from Everywhere.......................................207 Tobit, His Son Tobit, and Raphael...........................................211 Esther or Disguises.....................................................................215 Judith............................................................................................221 Daniel and the End of Times....................................................225 Appendix: Portraits and Genealogies in the Bible..................233 Notes............................................................................................239 Abbreviations..............................................................................242 Acknowledgements.....................................................................243 Index.............................................................................................245

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Foreword

ow do we remember the history of biblical Israel, the history that preceded the coming of Christ? It seemed to me that the liveliest way to do so and still be brief was to propose fifty “portraits,” without leaving large gaps between them. There is necessarily, from one portrait to the other, some discontinuity. Let us listen to what a Jesuit of the eighteenth century had to say: “Divine action […] made some Abels, some Noahs, and some Abrahams according to different ideas. Isaac would be original, Jacob will not be his copy nor Joseph his; Moses has had no counterpart among his ancestors; David and the prophets are not the same figure as the patriarchs; Saint John goes1 beyond them all […] Jesus Christ did not imitate himself, he did not follow to the letter all his sayings.”2 The unexpected is present in every narrative. All the more so when it is a question of God’s actions. It is written that God hides himself. One can also say: “God disguises himself.” The wager of biblical history— Will God keep his promise, and what, finally, is this promise?—, this wager is bet every time in a manner that frustrates one’s expectation. The biblical figures do not simply line up one after the other. They support each other from one century to another. The entire history is recapitulated with each one, wraps itself around the unique “time” allotted to each. The events that occur several times are numerous, quite numerous: we see this more in a relatively short overall view. We should pay attention to these recurrences because the newness finds in them its best hiding place. Our series does not only shorten the history of the people, by keeping only a limited number of proper names. It also reduces, and very much so, the portrait of each character. But respect for the reader has kept us from simplifying too much. There will occasionally be question of several “schools,” of a “tradition” juxtaposed with another on the same page, of “divergences,” of versions that are hardly compatible but which intermingle. The possibility of untangling these strands was never a part of our project, which is but a first reading of the texts. But our hope is to lead one, or to have one return, to the Scriptures themselves. And

8 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits to do so in order that the reader find in them many surprises, endless surprises, more complexities than in these pages, but with the hope that they do not frustrate him as much as they might have previously. Understanding is not everything. One must sense things. In order to allow for this “feeling” and to provide the necessary pause between chapters, images are interspersed between the chapters. One will understand that the drawings of Pierre Grassignoux, which accompany the text, are not there as mere ornamentation. They are intended to provide a moment of quiet after reading. The drawings let one see, hear, taste, feel, and touch. They let one touch, because the works of art which have inspired the artist are mainly sculptures: we sense that the hand of each artist, in an effort to interpret, adapts to the resistance of the stone or of the wood. Images thus evoke different periods which, today, appear to many nearly as distant as biblical times themselves! They are not, for all that, foreign to us. They seek an élan in these periods of Christianity which are like our Old Testament. Capitals of columns, stalls, tapestries and the stained-glass windows of European churches let us understand to what point the Christian people saw themselves grafted, through Jesus, onto the people of the first Testament. This Christian people truly identified with the grand biblical characters, whom it has never ceased to place around itself in the churches where it celebrated its faith. The interpretation of the artists was flavored and even sometimes accompanied by a little mischief. The interest that our forefathers had in the ancient biblical characters came from the heart, and the heart wanted our eyes to see them. These representations seem to tell us, regarding the ancients of Israel: “They were like us, and God loved them.” We easily believe them. The violent scenes of biblical history are sculpted one after the other, as you will see, on the capitals of Vézelay or elsewhere. They are violent images because these periods of our own history were violent. The sword struck on all sides. But the artists worked just as the biblical writers wrote. That is, without pleading or condemning: “This is the way it is, this is the way it was.” It is in this manner that the images as well as the texts already turn violence towards its contrary, by the very fact of saying what is true.* *

About thirty chapters of this book appeared in the journal Croire aujourd’hui in an earlier version.

My warmest thanks go to Mlle Marie-Béatrice Mesnet, who reread the proofs.

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OVERVIEW

he individuals for whom the reader will find a portrait in these pages follow, rather closely, the order of the books of the Bible. The period that extends from Abraham to David occupies half of our list. The history of the Israel of biblical times can be categorized as follows.

The Patriarchs The time of the patriarchs, which begins with Abraham (19th century before Jesus Christ), stretches from Abraham to Jacob (also called Israel) and to Joseph, his son. Joseph marks a break by settling in Egypt where he is close to Pharaoh. His descendants as well as his nephews and nieces will join him in this land, before being soon enslaved by the Pharaoh who succeeds Joseph’s protector. Here they lose their taste for freedom.

From the exodus from Egypt (about 1250) to Canaan, the Promised Land (end of the 13th century) The “Hebrews” will be liberated, often despite themselves, by Moses. His name, even if a Levitical ancestry is found for him, is apparently unconnected with the line of patriarchs. The march of freedom (“Exodus”) begins under his leadership. It starts with the paschal night, celebrated in Egypt in every house of the sons of Israel. The marvel of the crossing of the Red Sea authenticates the mission of Moses. God, on Mount Sinai, makes an alliance with the people by giving it, through Moses, his Law. Crossing the desert leads the people to the Jordan, the frontier that Moses does not traverse. He dies outside the Promised Land, the land of Canaan. Joshua replaces him as the leader of the people, whom he takes through Canaan towards Shechem. The tribes will settle the land from Judea to the sources of the Jordan.

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The Settlement of the Tribes, Period of the “Judges” (1200-1030) The schematization of the biblical narrative suggests two things. First of all, from the moment of leaving Egypt, the cortege which follows Moses is not only composed of the sons of Abraham. Secondly, the formation of twelve tribes, all issued from Jacob, is only a convenient schematization. The people constructs its identity slowly, from populations won over at different times, including some from the land of Canaan. The period called “The Judges” (such as Samson, or, the last one, Samuel) sees the power circulate from one tribe to another, without ever uniting them all. The principal enemy at this time is another invader of Canaan, the Philistine. Had there been no need to unite against him, we do not know when Israel would have had a monarchy.

The Kings, the Temple, the Prophets (1030-578) Until the Exile Despite the negative points of having a king that Samuel signaled, the time of David reveals itself to be the decisive passage from instability to rootedness. The throne, the land finally conquered, and the temple (with Solomon) symbolize the promise and concretely offer the image of a God present among men. Israel experiences the ordinary conditions of exchange among peoples in a “wisdom” of which Solomon is the emblem. Through the figure of Adam Israel reflects on the universal human. Qoheleth will emphasize (much later) the negative aspects of Solomon’s glory. As soon as his reign ends, Israel is quickly divided into two monarchies. To the north, separated from the throne of Jerusalem by Jeroboam, the dynasties have a short life. Elijah, who lives in the North during the ninth century, sees the fidelity of his country towards the God of Moses waver. The grand works that mark the action of Elijah are the signs of a nearness of something that man cannot approach. Elijah turned hearts towards the invisible and as far as the limits of the future. The list of prophets continues until the sixth century and ends with two prophets who experienced in their flesh the misfortune of Israel: Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This misfortune is exile, another Exodus, which goes from one image of glory to glory that has no representation, from rootedness to uprooting. The time of the kingdom is a time of prophets: they are the leaders of this new Exodus by risking their life just as Moses had. In this crucible of

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 11 misfortune, they are the witnesses who carry on the hope formerly given to Abraham for his people and all peoples.

Return from Exile, Second Temple, Construction of the Book The exile ends thanks to the Persian Cyrus (“Edict of Cyrus,” in 538). Nehemiah and Ezra again present hope. This is the time of the Book, which is constructed or reconstructed at the same time that the memory of the people is reconstituted. The books of the prophets continue to increase, for most of them, after their death. The Temple will be at the center of the earthly space for those who are unable to return from exile, but the Book will bring them all together during a process which will make all the books, very old and new, one book, the Bible of Israel. Thanks to the monarchy and thanks also to the exile, the Bible, far from being confused with the history of Israel, tells rather, almost from page to page, the history of the relationship which is constructed between Israel and the peoples, between the sons of Abraham and the sons of Adam. This endeavor is internal and has its risks. We first encounter Job, but also Jonah, Tobit, Esther, and Judith—figures along the frontiers. In cryptic language, Daniel (written around 164 BC) witnesses to the experience of martyrdom and to hope in the resurrection.

Luke 16, 22 [RSV]: “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.” The artist of Moissac represented Abraham holding only Lazarus; other artists have him hold a group.

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Abraham: The Chosen One

ccording to Genesis, the people of Israel begin with the call of one person, of an individual. The term “individual” signals a stopping point: even if there were a billion men, we would still be talking about an individual just as many times, a unit. The entire earth can be moved by a great athlete, an actress, and, often also, by someone condemned to death. To observe this, to be touched by it, does not signal a preference given to the individual dimension. This very fact shows the importance of number. The individual is nothing without community, but the community cannot sacrifice him for its own advantage. Everything happens on the line of difference which extends between the individual and the community. This line allows for the continuous articulation of one with the other. Abraham is not alone. In a few verses, everything immediately gathers about him, and is even organized around him. Abraham had a father, named Terah. Before him, this father had already left Urs of Chaldea. There is, therefore, a prelude to the story of Abraham. Why do we forget it so often when we relate biblical history? It is useful to see that the religious migration of Abraham is grafted on a preceding migration, one that prolongs it. This migration is undertaken without any call from God, in any case without the Bible mentioning one. Terah served “other gods. I took Abraham,” says the Lord ( Jos 24, 2-3 [RSV]). So Terah is the “grandfather of believers” without having believed. This is the prehistory of Abraham. What happens later in the story? What about the descendants of the chosen one? Any help to the migrant, the family, the sons, is a matter of anxiety for Abraham: his wife is sterile (Gen 11, 30 [RSV]). Abraham the individual is Abraham the son… Abraham the husband… Abraham the uncle… but he is not yet Abraham the father. Well, Abraham will be, for always and par excellence, the father. When a voice calls him, we would expect the promise of posterity, but the voice tells him: “I will make a great nation of you.” We shall have to

14 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits wait until chapter fifteen for God to promise him a son. In reality, the promise extends beyond family and nation: “…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” “Families of the earth” because the person of Adam highlights symbolically, with utmost force, the certainty that humanity is one “as one sole man.” We can say that to have conceived the figure of Adam in one place and one time where the differences of race and religion were daily noticeable constitutes a grand victory for the human spirit. God confronts the figure of Adam, symbol of universality, with Abraham, the figure of difference. The chosen one is the unique one par excellence, the blessed one, but blessed for all. Around this individual, this separated one, the destiny of all the families of the earth, thus of humanity, is to be played out. “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12, 3 [RSV]). Question: Will men have to recognize the authority of Abraham, honor him, and in any case adopt his belief? — Answer: They will only have to bless him. The only alternative being “to bless or to curse,” we can conclude from this that “to curse” is a real possibility. Men will be tempted to curse him, and God through him. In effect, why bless only one person, “why not me” or – a more indirect reproach (more “correct”) – why not all? That is the scandal of the choice of Israel, the scandal of every divine election. Answer: All are blessed – all, if they bless only one of them. That is a condition. Question: To the promise made to him, to him, Abraham, no condition is attached! Is that fair? — Answer: Here clings the jealousy which keeps one from blessing. One then becomes jealous of God and of his life. The life which begins in God and which is given has no cause, except itself. Divine love has no cause. It loves the families of the earth and wants them to know it through Abraham. Let us stop at this process, at this method of God, whose reasons are perhaps not quite inaccessible. “In him, there is no darkness” (1 John 1, 15 [RSV]). The election (since that is what it is about) is neither absurd nor obscure. Let us invent for a moment another text: “God said to all men: ‘I love all men.’” We would be in an imaginary world and in insignificance: no one hears, or no one moves. Then let us state this: “God said to someone: ‘I love all men, tell it to them.’” That is not enough. We would still be victims of an abstraction: it would be sufficient for men to learn that they are loved, and on what would

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 15 the messenger rely in order to give this information? In reality, with Abraham, God said to an individual: “I love you in such a way that I am going to take care of you and I want all men to know it and that, knowing it, they bless you!” Let us admit this: God is asking for the impossible; the story of Cain killing Abel because God preferred his offerings has already shown this. But it is implacably through the segment which goes from one birth to one death, and through the same narrow support of a body and its story, that every message and truth pass. The conditions of credibility for every experience cannot escape this maximum verification: “in you” (Gen 12, 3 [RSV]). “…in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In such a laconic manner, and with so few words, the Bible lets us conclude that a man so loved by God will be able to witness to this and have himself loved by men… This is a test for Abraham to whom it falls to know that God loves him, but to know it only in traversing a long history which will set in motion the jealousy of the nations! The divine love is played out in what happens between men, at the point of their difference. A test that Abraham must foresee, but also a test for the tempted Nations, who are wrested from their solitude and from their pride in order to receive a message which only comes from another while crossing a frontier! The rest of the story promises to be eventful. Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country […] I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” • Genesis 12, 1-3 [RSV] •

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Genesis 15, 5 [RSV]: Abraham will be the father of myriads and myriads: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. […] So shall your descendants be.”

Abraham: In the Beginning Was the Plural

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he radiant call of Abraham opens onto dangers. God asked the Nations to bless him (see Gen 12, 1-3 [RSV]). Must we already be worried about Abraham and see a dark cloud over the future of the Nations, whom God puts to such a rude test in asking them to bless his chosen one? It is not hard to be blessed, and it should not be difficult to bless… But there are so many traps along the way! Probably inertia and old ways of collective thinking keep us from paying attention to this complexity of the Bible, from honoring these turns of the text, its windings and crevices, even its dark holes. That is why it seems to us all right to be amazed, as so many sermons have regularly accustomed us, to watch Abraham leaving his country at the call of God. And the dark hole does not hesitate to obscure this image but also deepens it. The darkness is even a fearful ambiguity. God had said, “I will make of you a great nation.” An unforgettable glorification of the individual at this decisive moment of human history. Then the same text almost sets up an obstacle by reminding us that a people never comes from one individual. In the episode that immediately follows the call (Gen 12, 10-20 [RSV]), Sarah (still called Sarai), who is the wife, is the principal character. This people comes not from one, but from two individuals. From one couple. And if the nation begins from one couple, it is because, before this couple, this nation did not exist, and so the first spouses come from two different nations. If they come from two different nations, then ethnic mixing is at the beginning, at the origin, and is inscribed forever in the genetic texture of this nation, as it is of any other. There is a way to avoid this conclusion. It is to believe that the first couple, the first spouses, was at the same time brother and sister. But that would mean placing incest at the origin of the nation.

18 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits It is remarkable that Genesis draws attention to this dilemma, with three episodes3 where the relation husband-wife and the relation brother-sister come dangerously close to each other. One of the dark areas that we were alluding to thus confronts us. Was Abraham the husband of Sarah or was he her brother? If he was her brother, Terah (Gen 11, 31 [RSV]) would be the true father of Israel. However, this is not the option chosen by the promise of God. He chose neither Terah, whose wife we do not know, nor Abraham separated from his wife, but their couple (Gen 17, 15 [RSV]). What we were calling a mark of darkness is really a luminous beam on the origins of a people. The people of the Bible declares itself the ambiguity of every nation. This does not keep the nation from being necessary, of a necessity to which, we can say, that the plan of God is submissive. From the beginning, by positing a man, a nation, the biblical narrative posits, in the coarsest manner, the ineluctable necessity of difference and, from this difference, the necessity of relation. A man, a woman. One nation, other nations. The work of God, the seed of life will never be inscribed elsewhere but in the furrow which passes between one another. We read that this will not easily happen: the truth does not suddenly come about. Abraham will not come quickly to the truth: he begins by lying to Pharaoh… If, indeed, Sarah is a sister of Abraham, Pharaoh can take her as one of his wives. If Sarah is a wife of Abraham, will not the Egyptian kill Abraham in order to take her from him? “…and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say that you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account” (Gen 12, 12-13 [RSV]). A truly impossible situation. Abraham could only get out of it by risking his life. Instead of that, he leaves his wife with Pharaoh by having her tell him that she is his sister, and he ends up being expelled when the lie is discovered. But we find in Genesis 20, 12 the middle path that is adopted: Sarah is the half-sister of her husband! So Abraham did not completely lie. But this is still not the time when Abraham is going to be blessed among the Nations. And neither will he be cursed. God has compassion on Abraham. This is apparently the point of view of the narrator, and he lets us understand that God would not have compassion on us, readers, if we did not share the same feeling. God has compassion on

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 19 Abraham, who is going to continue his journey, for other adventures, across other nations: “And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had” (Gen 12, 20 [RSV]). Blessed, he will be, by an inhabitant of Canaan, by a king named Melchizedek (Gen 14, 17 [RSV]). The narrative lets us know this “priest of God Most High” who is also king of Salem, coming out of the dark and the depth of ages in order to say: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth […]” (Gen 14, 19 [RSV]). We cannot underline any more than this that the knowledge of God is not the privilege of the elect. Melchizedek knew God before he knew Abraham. But God also wants him to know his chosen one. Historians generally identify “Salem” with Jerusalem. This would imply that a tradition of Israel honors in the holy city a holiness more ancient than Israel. And it is a great honor for Israel to have been capable of this recognition: does not Abraham pay “one-tenth” of his belongings to Melchizedek (Gen 14, 20 [RSV])? This benediction given by one, this tithe paid by another, as a counterpoint to the episode with Pharaoh, anticipates salvation for all humanity. Humanity will remain traversed by difference: crossing it does not erase it. Abraham said, “I did it because I thought, There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife. Besides, she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.” • Genesis 20, 11 [RSV] •

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Genesis 18, 1-2 [RSV]: Hospitality of Abraham, who welcomes the three divine messengers (the three “angels”). At the bottom, to the left, an “oak of Mamre.” On the right, Genesis 18, 6 [RSV], Abraham asks Sarah to prepare quickly the meal (Verona, door of the Church of San Zeno Maggiore).

Abraham: Life, Death

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braham in the light: he hears the promise. Abraham in darkness: Pharaoh takes Sarah from him. Then comes a new stage at the “oaks of Mamre”: “He was seated at the entrance to the tent in the full heat of day.” He is more than a hundred years old, and his wife is sterile. But it is high noon and the promise of a son is going to be fulfilled. Surprise: the tradition of the Eastern Churches designates the scene with the Greek term “philoxeny” (inspired by He 13, 2 [RSV]), which means “love of the foreigner.” We quickly understand that “philoxeny” is the opposite of “xenophobia.” “He looked up and saw three men before him.” He did not see them coming, he does not know them. Strangers. We need to take into account the details of Abraham’s hospitality (how he refers to “bread” and has a calf slain, etc.). Indisputably, however, this philoxeny is the first Annunciation of the entire Bible. And the proclaimed son is the promise of a “great nation.” The nation will be blessed by foreigners. Well, it is revealed by strangers. With reason, one talks about the “proverbial hospitality of the nomads.” That should not distract us from this dazzling connection between “opening his door to foreigners” and “receiving a son.” The son, the daughter: strangers for the father, the mother. Stranger, that is to say, other, new. This newness puts every father and every mother on the defensive. Abraham is not alone. His life will be played out in his relation to the Nations (Gen 12, 2-3 [RSV]). His visitors have no nationality. Their status is hidden: when they speak, we hear their voice (Gen 18, 9 [RSV]) or the voice of the Lord (Gen 18, 10 and 13 [RSV]). Three dimensions present themselves: 1. to welcome strangers; 2. to receive a son; 3. to welcome this stranger: God. A stranger who shares our meals: “…and he stood by them under the tree while they ate. They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” (Gen 18, 8-9 [RSV]). The promise of a son makes Sarah laugh, laugh as she faces the impossible. But, she is told, not impossible for the Lord. Saint Luke, intentionally, will have us remember this scene. Gabriel will address the same

22 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits words to Mary: “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1, 37 [RSV]). There are, however, degrees of impossibility. Mamre and Sodom: the first Annunciation of the Bible is inseparable from the scene which follows it (Gen 18, 16 to 19, 29 [RSV]), and which begins with the word: “Sodom” (Gen 18, 16 [RSV]; see further: Sodom and Gomorrah). This shocks us! The contrasting effect is written in the careful composition of chapters 18 and 19, under the sign of the “visit,” the visit received by Abraham, the visit rejected by the people of Sodom who pounce upon the newcomers as on their prey. This reading is corroborated by the New Testament. On two occasions Jesus compares the cities who refuse the “visit” of God to Sodom and Gomorrah because they have refused him or those he has sent (Matt 10, 15; 11, 23-24 [RSV]). “Angel,” in Hebrew, means “messenger,” “envoy.” The prophets went so far as to apply this same comparison to Jerusalem (Isa 1, 10; Ezek 16 [RSV]). Today, however, the names Sodom and Gomorrah immediately evoke for us the sexual practices and behavior associated with them. Well, the tradition of the Bible is consistent: these two cities symbolize first of all something else. They evoke the closing in on one’s self, which is connected to an overabundance of goods and which engenders violence. The land of Sodom is characterized by opulence (Gen 13, 10 [RSV]). For Jeremiah, Moab (connected to Sodom: see Gen 19, 30-37 [RSV]) “settled like wine on its dregs; he has not been emptied from vessel to vessel” ( Jer 48, 11 [RSV]). Ezekiel 16, 49-50 [RSV] traces the complete image of “your sister Sodom: she and her daughter had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.” The Letter to the Romans will clarify what the apostle Paul designates as “degrading” in the sexual order (Rm 1, 26-27 [RSV]), but it will be to see in it the ultimate phase of a series of closures, the bodily symptom of a more profound and hidden resistance. One has often noticed the sorrowful contradiction of this movement that is at once corporal and contrary to the humility of the body, since it is the “angel” (the ideal image of the other) that it wants to reach: such is the true dimension of the problem. This symptom reveals the emergence of a system. The quoted texts do not impute it to individuals but to the choices made by a civilization. In that, Saint Paul is faithful to the attitude of the

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 23 prophets and of Jesus who compares cities among themselves and not persons. That said, the episode of the oaks of Mamre tells where life is; the episode of the destroyed cities tells where death is. The diptych is one of the Judgment. Even for Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham remains the chosen one for all, the blessed one for all who bless. He was never so close to the Nations as at this moment when, accompanying the foreign visitors to this elevated point where they could see the two cities, the dialogue begins during which Abraham intercedes with the Lord so cleverly for Sodom and Gomorrah. How many just people must there be for the cities to be saved: fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten? Some have wondered why Abraham did not go as far as the number “one.” Perhaps because an alliance between several just people is needed to save the city: “It is not good for man to be alone,” said the Creator (Gen 2, 18 [RSV]). “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be." • Genesis 15, 5 [RSV]•

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Genesis 11, 13 [RSV]. The angel of God stops the arm of Abraham and provides the ram that is going to replace Isaac for the sacrifice. The child already leans quite confidently on Abraham (Souillac).

Abraham: Binding and Unbinding

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od “tested” Abraham (Bible de Jérusalem) or, more clearly, “put him to the test” (Bible oecuménique). After this test, God said: “…for now I know…” (Gen 22, 12 [RSV]). The images unfold in our mind. God asks Abraham to immolate his son (“to offer him as a burnt offering” Gen 23, 2 [RSV]). But he stops his hand at the last moment. A ram replaces Isaac. Commentators have told us a bit more. The practice of sacrificing the first born was current in Israel. It was done, because it was forbidden. It was a question of making offerings to the god Molech (“the Moloch”). The law states that anyone who “closed their eyes” to such an act would be cut off from the people (Lev 20, 4 [RSV]). A clear condemnation of complacency and perhaps also of the admiration that resulted from it. In the book of Judges, which is the best exposition of the customs and morals of Israel in its earliest times (before the year “less a thousand”), we read that the warrior Jephthah had vowed to the Lord: “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering” ( Judg 11, 30-32 [RSV]). He had taken a terrible risk! His only daughter came out first and he sacrificed her. With the Greeks, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, in order to be heard by the gods. In the story of Judges 11, a tradition of this type was probably watered down (and rendered improbable) with the intention of attributing to blind fate the choice of the victim. In this version of the same scenario, the father had not foreseen who the victim would be, which makes the scene more acceptable to a less insensitive civilization. Is Jephthah, the judge of Israel, offered for our admiration? The narrative is like the water of a calm lake. Unruffled, it relates an event; we will not know what it thinks about it. Are we able to accept, to take into account, this silence of the texts? A kind of probe delves into the deep layers of human history, through the centuries. Yet it is in us that it searches. All the strata of human

26 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits history are still present in each man. Jephthah is not our model. But light shed on the past of men tells me something about myself. Let us return to Abraham, he who is “the father of all of us” (Rom 4, 16 [RSV]), and let us look at one of the ways in which Genesis 22 is read. Formerly, in ancient times, one offered the first born child to God. Now they offer an animal, like this ram of Genesis 22, 13 [RSV], “instead” of the son. We could conclude that the custom is less harsh. History advances. However, the story can return to the past: “Today you sacrifice animals, but did you not use to offer more?” We would conclude that there is something hidden in this sacrifice of an animal. The first gesture does not disappear all together. On the contrary, it is recalled each time that the blood of an animal is shed for God, in the Temple or for Passover. This ram stuck in a bush keeps us from getting rid of the text by some platitude, one like this: “We have made progress since human sacrifice.” Since this beginning is not truly hidden, but rather sealed by this story of the ram, what should we say about it? It was then said that every first-born, “of human beings and of animals,” belonged to God (Exod 13, 2; 13, 11-16 [RSV]: the narrative of Passover). The individual counts for little: there will still be more births in the family as in the flock. Yet the question stands: why this payment of blood? The payment of a tax in order to have the right to give life, in order to feel oneself authorized a second time? This son does not continue me. I am not the one who gives life. One signifies by blood that begetting is not a continuity and to signify it in a kind of terror that results from one’s ignorance about what life is, sensing only that it comes much further than from man. This is the blood that the ritual of circumcision will still require. As a remembrance? The narrator who has left us Genesis 22 is quite distant from this buried epoch. In his narrative, it is above all a question of an only son. At the farthest reaches of the family-flock. We read: “[…] your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” (Gen 22, 2 [RSV]). Then, Abraham not only gives up his son. He gives up the promise! Twenty-five years have passed since he received this promise to become a “great nation.” Then came the day of “hospitality” (philoxeny), the first Annunciation. Abraham had reached the age of a hundred without having his wife give him a son. He is now asked to give up what a miracle had once given him! An author of the New Testament offers his interpretation.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 27 No, he teaches, Abraham did not renounce the promise. He told himself: the promised gift, which comes from well beyond man, also extends beyond him and cannot be taken back. “He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back” (Heb 11, 19 [RSV]). Let us not imagine that, according to this interpreter, Abraham had seen in advance the dénouement of his drama: “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac” (Heb 11, 17 [RSV]). Well, faith is the night. The mountain named by the story is called “God will see” (Gen 22, 14; see also verse 8 [RSV]). God sees, Abraham does not see. The father “found his son again.” But he became another father. As for the son, the title given to the story by Jewish tradition puts the accent on his own drama: the episode is not called “sacrifice” but rather the “tying up” of Isaac. If Abraham did not believe that God wants death, Isaac did not believe that his father wanted to kill him… With that all is not said. The dénouement of this tying up releases in the reader the sense of a debt of blood, a daily and former slavery. The audacity of the story is to attribute to God himself the old imposition. It is as though God said: you made this cruel image for me, but I came to inhabit it because that was the only way I could free you from it. After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him: “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am” […]. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” • Genesis 22, 1 & 7 [RSV]•

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A childbirth scene in the life of the patriarchs of Israel (Paris, wooden panels of the Church of Sainte-Élisabeth de Hongrie).

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The Name of Isaac: “Will Laugh”

t is good that a character of the Bible be named “Will Laugh.” Isaac, son of Abraham, is the one who is called “Will Laugh”! The story leaves us in the dark as to the reason that there is “laughter” in his regard. In effect, it gives several reasons which are connected to the ambiguity of the word and to that of laughter itself. The word is repeated throughout the story. An old man, Abraham, learns that he will be a father when he is a hundred years old: he “laughed” (Gen 17, 17 [RSV]). His wife Sarah, who was listening to the news in the shelter of her tent (the tent of philoxeny), “laughed” up her sleeve (Gen 18, 12 [RSV]). Found out, she pretends that she “did not laugh” (Gen 18, 15 [RSV]). At the birth of the baby boy, she imagines that “everyone who hears will laugh with me” (Gen 21, 6 [RSV]). The word “to laugh” in Hebrew also means “to play.” There are the childhood games of Isaac with his half-brother Ishmael (Gen 21, 9 [RSV]) and there are the games of love of Isaac with his wife Rebekah (Gen 26, 8 [RSV]). Language is proper to man. Laughter is even more so, whereas the seriousness of animals (birds, fish, and even evolved mammals) is one of their distinctive traits. Laughter and language cannot in reality be dissociated. Laughter is born at the heart of the very first experience of the baby. It is born from the anguish and pleasure which accompany the function of meaning. Anguish and pleasure that primarily consist in overcoming the danger of making a mistake or of being deceived. There is this danger because every sign has several meanings and because, consequently, to understand is, at the very least, to choose between two meanings. There is thus a wager: one moves from the contraction of risk to the expansion of success. Making a mistake is the most reparable form of failure and, in fact, daily repaired: it is even necessary. On the contrary, the failure of a child to overcome fear of being mistaken radically places him in danger. This failure is all the more radical and mysterious since it is not automatically related to the experience of having been mistaken. To understand is to risk believing

30 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits that one is not deceived, that the sender of the sign is not lead by a lie but rather by a truth which cannot be separated from good will. The sender then receives a response, which is the smile of the new-born. “Then I began to smile,” writes Saint Augustine in the Confessions (I, 8), not because he remembers, he notes well, his first smile, but because of what he was able to observe in others. Isaac always remains, in some fashion, the one who is born. By this I mean that one especially sees in him traits which attach him to his father and mother. The critical historian of today finds a cause for this paucity of memories regarding Isaac. He then concludes that the traditions concerning him are neither solid nor abundant: a figure so barely inscribed in the memory of the people would be justified by his usefulness, which would be to assure a transition between Abraham and Jacob, both of whom are better provided with nuance and color. Only the preparations for Isaac’s marriage are described, completely arranged in the absence of the main party by the steward of Abraham, his father. To tell the truth, the scene is enchanting (Gen 24 [RSV]). But the special aim of this masterpiece of writing is to evoke, by literary means, and without any basis of documentation, a long radiant moment which, some chapters later, will emphasize all the bitterness of the thwarted marriage of Jacob (Gen 29 & 30 [RSV]). Nothing opposes the happiness of Isaac: there is no more pleasing young girl, nor more consenting to this marriage, than Rebekah. Her family is quite happy about it. And God confirms it with a sign. What singles Isaac out occurs in only two scenes. We know the first: Isaac is led by his father to the mountain of sacrifice. We shall return to the second in which the son of Isaac, Jacob, lies in order to steal the blessing that Esau was to have. First scene: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering […]” (Gen 22, 2 [RSV]). Let us accept that one always considers Abraham to be the hero of this episode. But if ever a son has overcome the fear of being deceived by a father’s word, Isaac is the one to have done so. Their first exchange of words is striking: “Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son’ (Gen 22, 7 [RSV]). What is most meaningful for these two characters is said with these words: “father” for one, “son” for the other. The father, Abraham, cannot believe that God wanted to cancel his promise by asking for the

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 31 life of Isaac. He cannot believe that the God who promises life has become a God whom death pleases. He rather believes that his God defies death by the intervention of his chosen one. As for the son, Isaac, he cannot believe that his father wants any harm to come to him and, in this frame of mind, he lets himself be bound and even placed on the altar over some wood without ever having his confidence shaken. One and the other overcome the fear of being wronged, the first by his God and the second by his father. They thus fully hand themselves over to the function of meaning: it is not the word “sacrifice” or “holocaust” that is to be refused. Every sign has several meanings, and to understand is to choose, at the very least, between two meanings. The “sacrifice” that Abraham offers is his obedience. And his son Isaac offers the same sacrifice at the same time. Because of this conjunction of the two they will no longer be father and son in the sense that they were before. The obedience of the son elevates him to the level of his father. The image that we project in words, from that moment, is erased. A tradition represents Isaac on the altar with his eyes blindfolded, in the night that faith traverses. So grand is their union that the images of “father” and of “son” disappear. In the second decisive scene of his life, Isaac is an old man who has become blind. A subterranean correspondence is established between the two scenes. Not for an instant was Isaac able to think that his father had deceived him, but here he is deceived by his son, Jacob! Laughter does not greet this episode but rather a shiver: “Then Isaac trembled violently […]” (Gen 27, 33 [RSV]). This shaking is not without some relation to laughter; it reveals its hidden side. One laughs for having brushed up against the abyss. We need to become accustomed to perceiving this convulsion, this spasmodic alternation of terror and joy in numerous biblical stories, so true is it that God surprises man from the other side, either because his thoughts are apparently more elevated than ours or because, on the contrary, they seem to us to be lower, coming to associate with what is less elevated in our life of men. The story of the chosen one, Jacob, is going to begin in violence and treachery. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said: “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” • Genesis 21, 6 [RSV]•

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Genesis 27, 1-45 [RSV]. Isaac sees nothing and is going to grant his blessing to Isaac the usurper, who does in fear what he has been told to do, whereas his mother, Rebekah, seems to tell herself, “Provided that Isaac notices nothing!” (Vézelay, capital).

Jacob the Deceiver

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ebekah, the wife of Isaac, becomes pregnant with twin boys. They already clash with one another in the womb of their mother. Esau is the first to come out, but Jacob holds tightly onto his brother’s s heel. Although twins, they do not resemble each other: Esau is hairy and Jacob smooth-skinned. Isaac prefers Esau, Rebekah likes Jacob better. After he cooks some lentils and takes advantage of the fact that Esau is wild about this platter and that, being very hungry, he wants it right away, Jacob serves him some on the condition that he give up his “birthright.” It happens that very young people see no injustice in this kind of dealing. Esau is to be blamed for having acted like a dazed glutton, whereas Jacob shows himself to be calculating, even at the expense of someone else. Much later, the day comes when Isaac, having lost his sight and sensing that death is near, thinks that it is time to give Esau his blessing.4 So Isaac, who has two sons, decides, when the time comes, to bless only one. Some words of explanation are in order here. “Genesis” means “genealogies.” But the filiations of which it is a question in this book have two dimensions: one proceeds according to the flesh and the other according to the word. This word is the benediction of the Father. According to Genesis 1, 27-28, God, as Father, blesses the first human couple as soon as he created it. This benediction will be transmitted from father to son, such that one could also call the book of Genesis the “book of blessings.” While the human seed transmits corporal life, the word that blesses is like a seed of divine life, the assurance of benevolence, the promise of fertility and expansion. From age to age, from father to son, the blessings that follow transmit the first paternal blessing of God. But why does Isaac want to bless only one of his sons? The question already came up with Abraham, the chosen one, the only one among the Nations: if the gift does not go to “all” and “everywhere,” is this not unjust? And yet, where there is no difference, is there not indifference? The experience of love is always founded on the encounter with someone in particular. If Isaac does not foresee (as it would seem natural

34 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits to us) blessing both sons, it is also because God wants to enlighten us regarding what he is himself. He is one: “…you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod 20, 3 [RSV]). One, that is to say, unpredictable, free. God is one and, at the same time, we know, the love for one is the path that he takes in order that the love for all might appear. Isaac will bless Jacob as God had blessed Abraham. “…and blessed be everyone who blesses you!” (Gen 27, 29 [RSV]). In this there is certainly a mystery, but also some light. And areas of darkness. It is precisely this incomplete and lacunary, intermittent, aspect that makes the Bible a book that breathes, a book that keeps us spellbound. Isaac, we were saying, wants to bless Esau. But Jacob has disguised himself as Esau and, having taken his place, is blessed. Jacob is clever, but the idea came from his mother, Rebekah. Following her maternal instructions, Jacob covers his hands with the skin of a kid in order to appear as hairy as his brother. He pretends to be returning from a hunt, where his brother had gone. He takes Isaac a platter of game: “I am Esau your firstborn,” he will say (Gen 27, 18 [RSV]). Isaac smells the odor and then feels the hair of the kid—but a blind person does not mistake a voice. Suspicious, he wants to hear him again: “Are you really my son Esau?” (Gen 27, 24 [RSV]). We hold our breath as do Jacob and Rebekah. The hesitation, then Isaac’s insistence, obliges Jacob to lie more brazenly, repeating that yes, he is Esau. Drawing out the action almost allows Esau to arrive on time in order to have everything fail: discovered, Jacob would be cursed and not blessed. The hunter arrives, but he is too late: Jacob has just been blessed. To Jacob, therefore, goes the assurance of benevolence, the promise of fertility and supremacy. Cries and tears of Esau: “Bless me, me also, father!” (Gen 27, 34 [RSV]). Moving. But the hidden center of this strange story is elsewhere, and the violent trembling of Isaac indicates it for us (Gen 27, 33 [RSV]). The shattering of an identity has produced this effect. Can one be oneself and another, can one be two at the same time as this appearance of a composite being, of this Jacob-Esau, would like us to believe, in the darkness of a blind man? Ancient terror caused by twins. As is the case in many carnival scenes, the burlesque and the tragic mix. With the blessing, the sacred is at stake. But the story has its point of departure in a farce: this hair of a kid that can pass for the hair of Esau, the risk of being discovered, the defeat of an obtuse

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 35 and strong man, his stumbling. Several versions of this narrative must have circulated before our own would let us sense that it was about the story of God with men. The blessing of the father brings God’s blessing, it is the blessing of God. But, without the mother, who decided everything and plotted everything, nothing would have happened. The father represents a sovereign court of authority. By declaring that there will not be two blessings, he states the law and states it against himself. For, although he prefers Esau, he does not feel authorized to cancel the blessing of Jacob on account of his fraudulent behavior. But, on another level, the good choice is that of the mother: Esau was not truly made to take over the reins from Abraham. Every narrative concludes with an appraisal of some sort: here, a complex formula is put into place. The good choice succeeds, but Jacob has contracted a debt. Everything ends well for him, except that his dispossessed twin prepares to kill him. Their mother sends Jacob away, with these words: “Why should I lose both of you in one day?” (Gen 27, 45 [RSV]). The narrative concludes with this remarkable reflection. Remarkable, indeed. Rebekah not only thwarts the father’s choice. She is not completely satisfied with the rule that only one be blessed. Let these two sons conceived the same day and carried together by her not also be separated from her forever on the same day, if one happens to kill the other. The paternal judge thinks in terms of oneness. Maternity, which wants to favor one without being separated from the other, thinks above all in terms of totality. God, in this sense, is father and mother. The choice, as definitive as it might be, hides another project, hides it especially from someone who would never have heard speak of it. But to whoever is familiar with the New Testament, a sentence of the Apostle Paul comes to mind in reading Genesis 27: “For he [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us […] that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace…” (Eph 2, 14-15 [RSV]). The “two” who will be “created in one” represent, on the one hand, the oneness of Israel and, on the other hand, the totality of the Nations. It is not that the author of the narrative wanted to announce this, but something of it wanted to announce itself and did so under the effect of what doctrine calls “inspiration.” It was a question of this mystery:

36 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the reconciliation of the chosen and his brothers. It was there and he did not know it, but his desire took him to it. So Jacob went up to his father Isaac, who felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” He did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s hands; so he blessed him. • Genesis 27, 22-23 [RSV]•

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Jacob, continued

acob takes to the road and exile in order to flee from his brother. At his first stop, he falls asleep on a stone and in a dream sees a ladder which connects his pillow to heaven. Angels climb up and down the ladder. “…the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring […] and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land…” (Gen 28, 13-15 [RSV]). Abraham had already heard these last words. What is the meaning of the dream’s ladder? The words are like the rungs, and the ladder which connects heaven and earth is like the Word. The rungs do not change, the ladder does not move. These are not other words; it is not in another language that the angels take the word of God to man and the word of man to God. Just as the rungs of the ladder hold good, so does language, the house of man and the house of God, the house that God dwells in with man. Its foundation is even more firm than the earth created to be solid, and more than the stone where a confident Jacob rests his head. The reliability of language is the sacred principle of every alliance. Anyone who falsely commits himself knows that, by his abuse, the very base of his value as a man is shaken. Through the path of the ascending angels, Jacob answers that on his return the stone of his pillow will be the first stone of a sanctuary, and he names the place Bethel, which means “house of God.” He remarks: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” (Gen 28, 16 [RSV]). After Bethel, Jacob will only know a few happy moments. When he is very old, this is how he will talk about his own history: “…few and hard have been the days of my life” (Gen 47, 9 [RSV]). His marriage is related as though only to contrast it with that of his father Isaac. In order to save the life of her son Jacob, Rebekah tells him: “…flee at once to my brother Laban in Haran […]” (Gen 27, 43 [RSV]). That is where Jacob will get married. We have to go back to compare Isaac’s marriage with that of Jacob. The brother of Rebekah, this Laban whom Jacob seeks, dwells in the land that Abraham had left in order to obey God. But the patriarch

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Genesis 29, 1-10 [RSV]. Jacob rolls a heavy stone away, the first sign of his disadvantageous position, in order to have the animals whom his cousin has led drink (Gerona).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 39 had insisted that his son Isaac not return there. For him to find his fiancée, he should not make the journey of his father in the opposite direction, against the call of God! That is why he had instructed faithful Elizer to invite the young girl he had chosen, Rebekah, also “to leave” her country and travel towards the young man. At the end of his journey, Elizer met Rebekah near the well: she graciously gave him5 water to drink and did not forget his ten camels. In this he recognized a sign of God. In the following generation, we see Jacob come to the same well but without any escort. Only the well has not changed, the rest does. Jacob performs the gestures of a servant. Learning that Rachel, the daughter of Laban, is the one who is approaching, he does not wait for her but all alone lifts the huge stone that covers the well, and now he is going to have his cousin’s sheep drink (Rebekah had given water to the camels of her host!). He then breaks into tears. He will remain in this role of the servant for twenty years. Rachel was “graceful and beautiful”(Gen 29, 17 [RSV]). Leah, her older sister, was not. Jacob loves Rachel so much that he himself proposes this onerous bargain: to work seven years for his uncle and future father-in-law before Rachel is given to him in marriage. The wedding day finally arrives and it happens that on the following morning he finds near him not Rachel but Leah. So Jacob the deceiver is, this time, the one to be deceived. He had deceived his father, his father-inlaw deceives him. He had taken advantage of the darkness of a blind man, and Laban takes advantage of the wedding. Jacob had passed for Esau, he took Leah for Rachel. The necessity to keep to a schema prevails over verisimilitude. In this defeat of Jacob, the narrator feels no need to emphasize a punishment of his deception. This turn of events is rather a rebalancing of destinies. Or even a return of an imbalance between the one who is loved and the one who is not, as the rivalry between the two sisters will show. The father-in-law adopts a tone of concession: “Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years” (Gen 29, 27 [RSV]). Here is Jacob now provided with two wives, but Rachel, whom he prefers, the younger one, is sterile, and God has Leah, whom Jacob loves less, be fertile. Let us note here that, for man or woman, to be loved less is naturally lived as not loved at all.

40 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Jacob will become the father of twelve sons and a daughter. Leah gives him Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Dinah and—with her servant—Gad and Asher. Rachel—in the same way— gives him Dan and Naphtali. Finally fertile, she gives birth to Joseph. Much later, she will die in giving birth to the last of all, Benjamin. The twelve brothers will be the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Each birth is a moment of competition between the two sisters: Leah has the advantage for the number of her children. Certain commentators have thought that, if the narrator does not condemn polygamy, it is not certain that he encourages it. Between Jacob and his father-in-law, the good and the bad tricks mount up to such an extent that Jacob, finally become rich, decides to flee with his two wives, but not without them feeling authorized to steal at the expense of their father. The fault is attenuated by the bad memory they have of him: “…he has sold us” (Gen 21, 15 [RSV]). But their fault is made more serious because they have stolen the little idols of the paternal family by hiding them under the saddle of their camels and sitting on it. This humorous note lets us understand that what one adores would merit a more honorable place and that the idols are insensitive to it because they are not alive. More or less visible, these idols are going to journey with Israel a long time. If we seek honesty in these pages of the Bible, we only find it pure and complete on two sides. On God’s side, in his promise. On man’s, in the narrator, who cannot conceal the sly tricks of his ancestors, and this touches us all the more since he does not treat them condescendingly. He does not think that the men of yesteryear were better, or that we ourselves are better than they: he especially sees how their battles were rough and their success precarious.

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Genesis 28, 11-12 [RSV]. Stretched out, Jacob sleeps. On the left, what he sees in a dream: the angels who go up and down the ladder. Genesis 33, 25-33 [RSV]. Bent against a winged character,

Jacob wrestles all night long (Gerona).

Jacob the Wrestler

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he ladder of Jacob’s dream stretched across the entire distance that separates heaven and earth, at the same time that it made them communicate. Then the ladder was removed, and henceforth everything took place on the ground. An emigrant, Jacob,6 in order to flee his brother who wants to kill him, returns to the house of an uncle who never left his country. There he marries the two daughters of this uncle. He is exploited by him for twenty years, but finally he is the one who has become richer and he leaves without any warning, with all that he has, for the land that he had been forced to quit, the land that God had promised him. Does his brother Esau still want revenge after twenty years; is he lying in ambush in order to kill him? There is no way for Jacob to avoid meeting him. He heads towards his destination with a considerable caravan composed of women, children, men and women servants, and flocks. Esau, not far away, leads a troop of four hundred men. The two groups approach each other. Throughout the book of Genesis, each event is related under several angles from different traditions, which do not only originate in several schools but from successive periods. The oldest versions were judged too valuable by the late comers to be simply disregarded. The last editors therefore completed, interpreted, and even corrected the ancient traditions, intent on losing nothing rather than trying to reconcile everything. Narrative units that were originally unconnected have thus been brought together without much effort at harmonization. It is rather in the depths that they communicate, as though a magnetic force had attracted them towards one another. In this there is much more than just the ability of a scribe. This dangerous moment in the life of Jacob is related to us in the form of two crises—each one must have been related at some time without the other—before an editor made one narrative out of the two.7 In one, Jacob encounters God; in the other, Jacob meets Esau. So Jacob meets God. There is no story without desire and no desire without some obstacle in the way. Between Jacob and the promised land there is a stream that flows called the Jabbok. Though only

44 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits a natural obstacle, it symbolizes all the forces which are beyond man’s grasp, those below him and those above. The ford of the Jabboq: a passage that is at once open and risky. At this ford Jacob stays by himself. In order to stop him, a man “wrestled with him until daybreak” (Gen 32, 24 [RSV]). With this stream Jacob crosses another one of his nights, which covers another unknown: the identity of this adversary… Had his force been boundless, he would not have asked Jacob: “Let me go, because dawn is breaking” (Gen 32, 26 [RSV]). And Jacob does not want to. Then the man gives in and blesses him. Unsatisfied, Jacob (as if he had not been blessed enough on this day) also wants to know the man’s name. He refuses to reveal it. Yet he gives Jacob the name “Israel,” the chosen one par excellence, because, he tells him, “you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” (Gen 32, 29 [RSV]). Who was the adversary, man or God? We can infer from his answer that everything that was played out until now with men, audacity or trick, was played out with God. Dawn disappeared. Jacob could then see clearly and says when the man left: “…I have seen God face to face […]” (Gen 32, 30 [RSV]). But, this time, he also did not realize it. A very archaic myth is at the bottom of this story. There is no frontier that the destiny of man must cross without there being some superior power, a genie of the waters or of the night intent on claiming his due, the life of the traveler. But the (universal) motif is stretched out, because of the context, along a series of forced benedictions which punctuate the story of Jacob-Israel. If Jacob-Israel is chosen, it is because, more than anyone, he decided, in every fiber of his being, to be elected. He wanted it ever since he was in his mother’s womb. He desperately wanted it. If Esau had had a stronger desire, he would have returned from the hunt earlier! The separation of heaven and earth disappear in the dust where both, by wrestling, roll about and become one in the stretch of a night. To be chosen is wanting to be chosen. This conception does not replace the mystery with a flat equivalence. It has one go more profoundly into it: the more we penetrate the desire of man, the more the priority of God is made, as is proper, invisible to us. While the height of heaven gave us an image of him, the depth of the stream hides the place where God himself gives man this desire that he wants to fulfill. Where did Jacob get this desire?

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 45 Jacob meets Esau. A second episode that is moral and humanist. Only Esau, the enemy brother who approaches, mobile with his four hundred men, is a warrior. With his large following of wives, children and flocks, Jacob cannot be a warrior. He can do nothing, unless it be to let the armed man approach his family that, before crossing the ford, he has taken care to divide in several parts, so that they will not perish together, for they will come into Esau’s presence before Jacob does. To dare risk this is to believe Esau capable of becoming milder at the sight of an unarmed and harmless cortège. The surprise comes from the emotion of the warrior, of the enemy. He is the first to run and hug his brother, to forgive, without having been pushed to do so. So the two narratives, the two meetings come together around some words of Jacob: “…for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God—since you have received me with such favor” (Gen 33, 10 [RSV]). The writer was inspired by the preceding episode, in such a way that reconciliation with the brother would be read as superimposed on the encounter with God. These two meetings make for one, without which the Promised Land would not be entered. But it will be necessary that, after this brief embrace, Jacob and Esau once again return, not to their hostility towards one another, but to keeping their distance. You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed. • Genesis 32, 29 [RSV]•

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Genesis 37, 31 [RSV]. Below, the shepherds, sons of Jacob, slay a sheep in order to soak in its blood the tunic of their brother Joseph whom they had thrown into a well. Above, Genesis 37, 32, they have the tunic shown to their father, who believes him to be dead. Little Benjamin looks on (ivory of Ravenna).

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Joseph

wo dreams of little Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, announced to him in images that his father and his brothers would one day bow before him. For the dream to become a reality, it would first be necessary that Pharaoh grant Joseph all power over Egypt (Gen 4, 41 [RSV]). He will use it in order to save his brothers from famine, even though they had once sold him. He will settle them in Egypt, where they will begin to multiply (Exod 1, 7). The story of Joseph ends the book of Genesis and leads us to the book of Exodus. Here are the most important moments of that story. Late in life, Jacob had had with Rachel a son, Joseph, as handsome as his mother was beautiful (Gen 39, 6 [RSV]). Jacob prefers him to the ten sons born to Leah or those he had with his servants. The figure of the “chosen one” takes on an altogether new shape with Joseph. God never intervenes directly in the course of his life: characters in the story state that they recognize the hand of God in it and see in the interpretation of the dreams a gift that this God grants Joseph. Chosen, Joseph certainly is, but he is only chosen by his father (who has a beautiful tunic made for him) and he is chosen for his misfortune. In effect, his brothers take a great dislike for him, because he is frank enough to relate his two dreams to them, in which he is superior to them. From this moment on, the fate of Joseph is a tragedy for himself, but especially for his father. After they throw him into a well, his brothers, not being of one mind to kill him, sell him to caravanners. To explain his death to their father, they show him Joseph’s beautiful tunic that they had dipped in the blood of a ram and tell him that a wild animal had devoured their brother. Jacob will keep this image in his heart during the long years that Joseph will spend in Egypt where the caravanners have ended up selling him to Potiphar, the majordomo of Pharaoh. After some time, on a false accusation made by the wife of his master, Joseph is put in prison. It is from there that his reputation as an interpreter of dreams will reach the ear of Pharaoh, who will then present him his own dreams. The method of Joseph, interpreter of dreams, merits our attention because of the two principles by which he explains himself to

48 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Pharaoh: “Pharaoh’s dreams are one and the same” he tells him and, seconds later, “And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about” (Gen 41, 25 & 32 [RSV]). There are reasons for applying these two rules to the stories of Genesis. Not that they are dreams but, like dreams, they transpose a bygone past and hide a desire that cannot itself be known but which alone cannot deceive: they are written under the premonition of a future. As an application of the first principle, the names and the clothing that the characters borrow change from one to the other, but the functions do not change, as a jack is always a jack, be it a heart or a spade, and remains in the same relation with the other cards. As for the second principle: repetition is at once stable and insistent. The insistence, when it does not obtain the accomplishment (that is to say, what is desired), has one at least sense that it is near. That is the way it goes for the insistence of the schema “loss of the son.” Abraham and Jacob lose their sons and then find them again. The first image, which comes from a more distant past, makes a deeper impression. The second is nearer to what we have been able to see and which seems to us to be without mystery. The two stories belong to two successive moments of the same culture and translate different experiences. But the superimposition of the two stories, their placement in a series, creates the relief. If we still do not understand their hidden truth, we at least have the feeling of entering into it and taking some steps forward. While Abraham is quite distant and rather unique, we have been able to know some Jacobs. This optical effect of proximity through two levels is a signal that the accomplishment provides. The same thing can be verified by the motif of reconciliation: that of Jacob with Esau is reflected and transformed in the pardon that Joseph grants his brothers. The two panels are, however, irreplaceable. The cruelty of the first story (the stolen blessing) has the effect of clearing away any ideals of the reader. The sensitivity of the second offers a less selective view of reality. Cruelty is not altogether absent from it: it keeps its appearance and only loses its reality. The story of the moment when the two dreams of Joseph are accomplished will tell us how. The only thing that was mentioned about Joseph’s little brother was his birth (Gen 35, 16-20 [RSV]) and, on the same day, the death of his mother. Benjamin (that is his name) was never jealous of his oldest

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 49 brother.8 His role as an innocent child is kept for the last act, when the first dreams of Joseph are accomplished. Joseph became the prime minister of Pharaoh. In his great wisdom, he was able to store grain for the seven years of famine, the announcement of which he had deciphered in Pharaoh’s dreams. When the famine began to rage “throughout the world” (Gen 41, 57 [RSV]), it pushed the brothers of Joseph into Egypt, and to his feet. Prostrate, but without recognizing him, they beg him for the means to survive. It is then that Joseph hides under the mask of the cruelty of a powerful person of the world: he takes one of the brothers, Simeon, as a hostage. He will not be freed until they have returned with Benjamin, whom his father did not let leave for fear of losing him also. Even worse, Joseph arranges that Benjamin, once taken into his presence, be found guilty of a theft for which he is innocent: it is Joseph himself who had his own silver cup placed in the bag of the young boy. So, he is going to be held as a slave, taken forever from his brothers and his father. But the reader of this story learns, as it unfolds, what the brothers of Joseph do not see. In between the diverse events of his machinations, Joseph hides in order to cry, until he can no longer control himself. The mask falls, Joseph bursts into tears.9 The reader then discovers the key to the drama: it is again a question of forgiveness but, after the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau, acted out in another manner. Jacob deceives, and then is deceived. The brothers of Joseph are led by him to review their crime in order to be healed by it. That is the way it is in several tales: the devil who has entered a home can only leave it by the same door. Nor is there any exit for the brothers of Joseph without a return to the past. The ones who had snatched his most beloved son from Jacob are led to beg him for the one who is in his heart a new Joseph: their past, for the first time, is changed into truth. It is not that pain brings about pardon, but what good is there in a forgiver who would only crush the offended under his image of being just? Joseph does not accuse. When his brothers appear before Jacob to ask him for Benjamin, they finally see themselves as they were when they announced the death of Joseph. The doctor Joseph, who has the courage to inflict this suffering, cries in secret about the wrong he is doing. At the end, the judge takes off his mask in order to let them see that he loves. He himself gives the key to everything: “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God

50 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Gen 50, 19-20 [RSV]). One cannot keep from thinking that Joseph is, whatever he says about it or more than he knows it, in the place of God. Joseph the judge and Benjamin the condemned innocent child are for Jacob only one son. God takes off his merciless mask when Joseph removes his own in order to break into tears. A man has led the events in question; a man has hidden their meaning and, at the end, reveals it. Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good […]. • Genesis 50, 20 [RSV]•

Moses between Two Peoples

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oses is born during a gap in the history of Israel. The reigning Pharaoh “did not know Joseph” (Exod 1, 8 [RSV]), who was the great grandson of Abraham and Sarah. A long time ago, Egypt had saved these nomads from famine (Gen 12, 10 [RSV]) and then these nomads had given it Joseph, a brilliant inspired economist (Gen 41, 33-36 [RSV]). Thanks to him, the years of “thin cows” had not been a catastrophe for this grand country or for its neighbors (Gen 41, 57 to 42, 2 [RSV]). Rescue for rescue. But the new Pharaoh no longer knows much about the history of the foreigners who dwell in his land. And does Israel still know where it comes from? The Bible registers many gaps of this type. Moses, we are told (Exod 2, 1 [RSV]), is a descendant of Levi, who is said to be a descendant of Abraham. But Moses is not the man of genealogies. The name “Moses,” according to biblical etymology— popular etymology—means “I drew him out of the water” (Exod, 2, 10 [RSV]), which confers a new meaning on his birth. In Exodus, the images often speak louder than everything else: Moses is born from the river. Otherwise said: with him, the book of genealogies starts again at zero. Genesis is over, Exodus opens up. A “trace” takes shape with this baby, in the sense that his first days already inscribe in his flesh the grand moment that the entire people will experience when he will grow up: Israel will also be “taken from the waters.” It will go down into them, it will leave them: this will be a baptism. Exodus begins again where Genesis began: on the primordial waters. Moses, born from the waters. But the person who says “I drew him out of the water” is the daughter of Pharaoh (Exod 1, 10 [RSV]). She found him in a basket that was floating in the middle of the reeds on the bank of the river. At that time, perhaps the mockers smiled when they heard this story. In any case, the daughter of Pharaoh senses that she must care for the baby and finds a nurse for him (Exod 2, 8-9 [RSV]), and she will be called his mother. But are there any simple births? Let us now leave the mockers since they have received attention. It is quite clear that Moses has two mothers. The first one is, like her husband, from the tribe of Levi. She is the one who placed

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Exodus 2, 4-6 [RSV]. On the left, Moses’s sister watches over the basket where baby Moses cries; on the right Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and takes him (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Amiens, stalls).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 53 the infant, who was three months old (Exod 2, 2 [RSV])—before being given a name—in the middle of the reeds in a box made of papyrus and waterproofed with bitumen and pitch (Exod 2, 3 [RSV]). We should note that the same coating had protected the ark of Noah (Gen 6, 14). Pharaoh’s daughter opens the box (Exod 2, 6 [RSV]). The two women are going to share the baby. The first as a nurse whom the Egyptian pays (Exod 2, 9 [RSV]), probably for a few years. As for the daughter of Pharaoh, the text indicates her relation to the child by a preposition that approximately means “with the title of son,” more, in any case, than “as her son” (Gen 2, 10 [RSV]).10 And she, the Egyptian, is the one who names him. The Bible takes the adoption seriously. Moses does have two mothers. Sign and wonders accompany many narratives concerning birth. As soon as he was born, the Mesopotamian King Sargon I was placed in a basket coated with tar and then put by his mother in the river, five hundred years before Moses. But each legendary motif is taken up again in a unique story, a series which transforms it. The motif of the two mothers is especially original. In the order of language and culture where his name places him, Moses is an Egyptian. In the eyes of an historian, if there is a fact that has not been proven, it is this birth of Moses in one of the tribes of Israel. But we let ourselves be guided by the double affiliation. The connection to Egypt carries weight. The episode that follows the end of his childhood suggests it, in two days time: it is the time when Moses “goes out to his people” (Gen 2, 11). These are the Hebrews. Moses kills an Egyptian who was beating up a Hebrew and then buries him thinking that no one has seen him. The reader may feel torn apart: Moses saved by Egypt kills an Egyptian, whom he thinks he can secretly bury. Everyone is supposed to know that it is difficult to hide a corpse. Where and when will the violence that human history never ceases to bury emerge? Discovered, Moses flees abroad. There he is called an “Egyptian” (Exod 2, 19 [RSV]). He will marry a woman who is not Jewish named Zipporah (Exod 2, 21 [RSV]). There is something more important to note. This Moses with a foreigner’s name will receive the mission to have Israel serve and adore God under a name which until then was totally unknown to the sons of Israel. He will have to convince them that it is the same God. The shrewdness of historians detects that this name was known before Moses and was not pronounced for

54 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the first time before him or by him. One senses that the word which is going to reveal the divine name does not fall directly from heaven. It is as though it has roots in the ground from whence it emerges: “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exod 3, 5 [RSV]). The Word rises above an enclosure, in order to show a demarcation that had apparently been made by the local population. The sheep of Moses’s fatherin-law (“a priest of Midian” Exod 2, 16; 3, 1 [RSV]) led him near a sanctuary which a people that was not Israel had constructed. This people knew God under the name of YHWH, unknown to Moses and his brothers. It will be necessary to sew up the genealogy again: this God is the same as the one whom they formerly adored, under other names (Exod 3, 15 [RSV]), up to the time of this Joseph whom the new Pharaoh had not known. There is great discretion in marking this rupture, at once a break and a coming together in religious history. There is also great firmness. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. • Exodus 2, 5-6 [RSV]•

Moses the Visionary

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oses is the lawgiver par excellence. “The law indeed was given through Moses […]” ( John 1, 17 [RSV]). According to the Gospel, even the Decalogue is given through his words: “For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ […]” (Mark 7, 10 [RSV]). Yet there is not only the law, there is the one who promulgates it. His presence is so important that, no sooner do the people think Moses dead, they quickly begin to adore an idol (Exod 32, 1 [RSV]). A living person needs to proclaim the law. But men die. In reality, Moses was not dead: he “delayed to come down from the mountain” (Gen 32,1 [RSV]). The people needed to see Moses, but Moses needed to see God, the One who does not die. To see God… The biblical story of the life of Moses turns about these words. Moses and seventy-three men who accompany him “saw the God of Israel” (Exod 24, 10 [RSV]). Yet, when Moses tells God: “Show me your glory, I pray,” the Lord answers: “you cannot see my face […] you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen” (Exod 33, vs. 18, 20, 23 [RSV]). Yes or no, did Moses see God? Well, it is remarkable that, when it is a question of knowing what the people saw at Sinai, one finds a similar hesitation. On the mountain, according to Deuteronomy 5, 4, God spoke to the people “face to face.” Deuteronomy 5, 24 even states: “Look, the Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness […],” but one reads earlier, “you hear the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut 4, 12 [RSV]). With this one hears the echo of lively debates between the wise men of Israel, editors of the narrative. The inspired writer of Exodus 34, 29-35 traces an impressive parallel, an insightful one, between “to have seen or not the face of God” and “to have seen or not the face of Moses”! Just as the people had received the Decalogue from God, with or without a vision, but “face to face,” and had begged for the intervention of Moses (Deut 5, 23-27; Exod 20, 19 [RSV]), so do the people “see Moses” after he has descended the mountain, and they are afraid of his radiant face. To see, and then to request to no longer see…

56 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Moses will then cover his face. So the people are afraid of the face that has seen the face of God. A double veil, on the face of God, on the face of God’s messenger. No sooner than one enters into the secret of God does one enter into the secret of God’s envoy. But this double obstacle has the effect of making us feel how similar the two secrets are: secret of the one sent, secret of God. When Jesus comes, his face will appear in its radiance only on the mountain and only to Peter, James and John. Deuteronomy assures us that no prophet has (yet) come like him because the Lord “knew him face to face” (Deut 34, 10 [RSV]). According to Numbers 12, 6-8, God speaks to the prophets through visions and dreams. But, the text asserts, “Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak face to face—clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the Lord.” Moses lives his secret. On the one hand, he is the one who reveals himself through the law. On the other hand, he is also the one who is hidden by it. He is the lawgiver. The law is his veil. The principle of the law is behind the veil. Moses returns to the principle of the law. This principle had been revealed to him from the beginning of his mission (Exod 3 [RSV]). First of all, by the vision of the bush that burns without destroying itself. A symbol of life, but of life at its source. Our own life, and this holds for every lawgiver and for Moses, burns while destroying itself. Not the life that comes from God! Moses sees the true life. Then, from the midst of the bush, God is going to say how he calls himself. The name of God is then revealed under two forms: “He is” is the third person of a verb; one writes it YHWH. But this is not the way that God first reveals it to Moses (Exod 3, 14 [RSV]). He first says: “I am who I am” (or “will be”). God thus anticipates the first words of the Decalogue: “I am YHWH who had you leave the land of Egypt.” God “declines” his name, while declining the verb to be. For the revelation does not only consist in the verb “to be,” but first of all in the subject. God is subject: God says “I.” When “I” is lacking, “to be” disappears. To say “I” is to speak. God reveals himself as the one in whom “to be” and “to speak” are one. The unity of being and of speaking lives in the living God. That is why John will one day say that “the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And the Word was Truth. And the Word is Life, which burns without consuming itself. At the same source, Moses saw Life in the burning bush and heard the Word.

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Exodus 3, 5-6. Moses dropped his shepherd’s stick and removed his shoes before the burning bush (Paris, wooden panels in the Church of Sainte-Élisabeth de Hongrie).

58 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits The prologue of John is thus prepared from afar, and for us. Moreover, no gospel names Moses as many times as does John. The Name of God opens the law, it is its principle. Before every law, someone (the Lord) speaks to someone (Moses), in a contemplative dialogue which is also a vision, just as seeing oneself and speaking to oneself go together. To say “I” is to speak. It is also to call out to someone, to enter into dialogue. This dialogue which comes before the law takes one further than the law, towards the fulfillment which goes beyond it. That is why Jesus declares, always according to the Gospel of John: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” ( John 5, 46). It is given to Moses not only to see God but also to see the future. Through the law he sees sin, through sin he sees forgiveness (Deut 4; 30; 32). Sin is to look at the law and believe that one observes it while forgetting the presence, the source which speaks.

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” • Exodus 3, 13 [RSV] •

Moses in the Place Of God

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o discover all that God can expect from a human being, one should read the biblical story of Moses. To discover how God hides behind a human being, one should turn to the very same pages of the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. We often see the name of Moses where we would expect to read the title of the books, for example, when one speaks of “Moses” and then of the “Prophets” (Luke 16, 29 and 31; 24, 27 and 44; John 1, 45; Acts 28, 23). It is quite certain that the Christian world of images prefers to linger over Abraham. A more crafted figure, illuminated by the dawn of beginnings and imbued with their warmth, Abraham is rather well placed by the words of Moses himself, when he tells God: “Why have you treated your servant so badly? […] Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child, to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors’?” (Num 11, 11-12). It is as much as saying, “What you were able to ask Abraham, do not ask it of me!” Or, rather, an even better clarification of the image presents us with Sarah, the mother of Israel. “I am not a mother,” Moses tells God. That is not enough. If our attention takes us a bit further, we would discover here one of the biblical passages which best speaks to us about a God who is mother, a position that Moses strongly declines, because he can no longer fulfill it. Let God himself take it on! What other function does God ask Moses to take on? He is for all purposes the word of God. Throughout the numerous legislative passages of the Torah, we could underline this formula: “The Lord spoke to Moses: ‘Speak to the entire community of the sons of Israel; you will tell them’ […]” – or others like it. The words of Moses are the words of God and conversely. The book of Deuteronomy has for its Hebrew title the first two words of the first page: “These are the words.” It is a question of those “that Moses spoke […] just as the Lord had commanded him to speak to them” (Deut 1, 1, 3). The scenario at Sinai traces in our imagination distance as well as proximity: we see Moses climb the mountain in order to seek the words of God and then

60 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits come down in order to communicate them before going back up again. A rather simple idea occurs to us: the Torah, the word of God, is the word of Moses, the word of a man. So we are the ones to come down the mountain. Or also: the word of Moses is the word of God. We go back up this time. It is the same for actions. It so happens that the words, almost sacramental, which God pronounces: “I am YHWH, who had you come out of Egypt,” can also be said of Moses. God hands over his responsibility, relinquishes it to him: “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Exod 3, 10). The people does not blaspheme when it refers to “this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt […]” (Exod 32, 1). After Moses crossed the sea through a miracle, it was quite normal for the narrative to conclude this way: “So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses” (Exod 14, 31; see Exod 19, 9). Here it is that a human being is treated like a sanctuary in which the name of God and his own come together. This sanctuary, a man, is made in order to receive what one would think was only intended for God, faith. The honor that God renders man through Moses seems unsurpassable: “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet” (Exod 7, 1). Moses is more than a priest because he is more than Aaron. He is more than a prophet: God speaks to prophets “in a vision,” or “in a dream,” but it is not “in riddles” that he speaks to Moses (Num 12, 8). This position is a cause for jealousy, especially on the part of the sister and brother of the chosen one: “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Num 12, 2). Today’s reader would thus be a bit naive were he or she to become proud for having discovered, by knowing how to read a religious book with a critical eye, that it is in reality man who is making the story. The biblical narrative allows us to say: God has Israel leave Egypt, or Moses does. God speaks, or Moses speaks. God acts and speaks, man acts and speaks. It will be said of Jesus: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4, 41). The suggested answer is not only that through him God is getting our attention: one first wondered, in seeing Jesus act, whether Moses had not returned, he

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Exodus 3, 4: “God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses’” (Alonso Berruguete).

62 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits who, with outstretched hand, had the wind blow and who had divided the sea. Behind Jesus, the New Testament sees Moses everywhere: no proper name of the Old Testament figures in it more than his. Through the face of Moses, one could see the glory of God whose face Moses sees, if he did not cover his face. Thus does Jesus uncover his face only once, on the mountain, before, again, one sees “only” him (Mark 9, 8). Exhausted by the crowd that is hungry, Moses tells God: “Are there enough fish in the sea to catch for them?” (Num 11, 22). In quite a similar situation the apostles will make a request of Jesus, a request that is also similar ( John 6, 7-9). The fourth gospel will take up the question: Who has given the manna, Moses or God? ( John 6, 31). When a man, Jesus, multiplies the bread, the people will complain that the sign does not come from heaven, because he had found on earth the bread that he multiplied (see Mark 8, 11). To this Jesus will answer that it is from heaven that he himself came. But they would like to have seen him come down from it, whereas he comes from Nazareth ( John 6, 41-42) where his family is known. His works, he says, are those that the Father gives him ( John 5, 36) and his words are those that the Father tells him ( John 12, 49-50). We have read what Jesus told the Jews: “If you believed in Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” ( John 5, 46). We shall probably be helped to believe in Jesus, if Moses has shown us how God is able to believe in man.

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… but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. • John 12, 49 [RSV] •

The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own […]. • John 14, 10 [RSV] •

O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? • Exodus 32, 11 [RSV] •

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Exodus 12, 29. During the night when the Hebrews celebrate Passover, the Exterminator strikes the first-born of Pharaoh (Vézelay, capital).

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Moses and Pharaoh

assover is the passover night (Exod 12 and 13). And the passover night is at the heart of the Bible. During the passover night, the first-born of Egypt are put to death. The scourge spares Israel, whom God calls “my firstborn son” (Exod 4, 22). Thus struck for having refused to liberate Israel, Pharaoh gives in and lets the people leave. The Passover is therefore also the tenth plague of Egypt. The time of the tenth plague of Egypt is the time of Israel’s salvation. The “plague” is death. Not death for Israel, but death for the Egyptians. Not the death of Pharaoh, but the death of his oldest son and of all the firstborn of his people. The plague thus falls on a very precise place, on life insofar as it is given, on the transmission of life. At the beginning of the narrative (Exod 1), Pharaoh found ways to deprive Israel of this power, to strike out at the Israelites as fathers and as mothers. His project now comes to him and to his people. The narrative recognizes the hand of God in this misfortune. Among the readers of this dénouement, we find two attitudes. The first are against it, the second ones let everything pass with their eyes closed. Let us tell the first that they should give the narrative time to unfold, that they should give it more credit. They will see that the narrative does not quite hide its embarrassment. This is because the memory of Israel has never felt itself free of this event and merits our admiration for having never let what was most problematic in it disappear. I am not talking about the problem that is placed before the knowledge of the historian but, what is more important, about the one that is placed before the human conscience. So Pharaoh sees his crime fall on him or, rather, on his son and on the sons of his people. The number “ten” (tenth scourge) reveals that this dénouement is the last possible one, the one that should have been avoided at all cost, but that a long confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh could only put off. Moses has two weapons at his disposal. One is a stick which he uses to work wonders (the “scourges”) in order to warn Egypt. The other arm is the word. For us to see that it is not really a weapon, Moses must speak with difficulty and be afraid to

66 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits talk: he is not a good speaker (Aaron takes on several times the role of a more loquacious substitute). It is only after the first interview (which took place without any threat and which ended with no result!) that the series of ten scourges begins. The schema is repeated with a few variations throughout the ten episodes: 1. Moses says: “Let us leave or you will be struck.” 2. Pharaoh refuses. 3. Moses acts through his stick (or his hand, or the stick of Aaron). 4. Pharaoh promises liberation. 5. Moses speaks to God in favor of Pharaoh. 6. The scourge stops. 7. Pharaoh goes back on his promise. 8. God then strikes. Moses is thus effective on two counts: on the one hand, he announces and begins each of the scourges; on the other, he puts an end to them by his prayer as an intercessor. Though they are impressive, the first blows (unhealthy water, invasion of frogs, vermin) are mild. The narrative unfolds by showing inexorably but patiently where the evil of Pharaoh is, where his sin is hidden. Every time that the hand that struck him is held back, he interprets the sign of patience as a sign of weakness. Ten episodes will be necessary for the failure of the word to become evident and rendered definitive. Blind and deaf to any leniency, Pharaoh cannot be influenced by any clemency whatsoever. To understand only force is to hand oneself over to it. Thus does justice speak. And yet the text hesitates. There are several indications of this. The narrative does not firmly hold that God himself exterminated the first-born of Egypt. Is it he, or the obscure being called “destroyer” (Exod 12, 23)? God does not let him enter the houses of the Israelites, only the homes of the Egyptians. And the narrative does not make Israel and Egypt enemy peoples. The status of Moses—a son of Egypt!—is not completely done away with (Exod 11, 3). The women of Egypt—the mothers!—are well disposed towards those of Israel (Exod 3, 21-22). And we see that, regarding the execution of the tenth scourge, Moses no longer has a role, either to begin it or to interrupt it.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 67 But there is a more eloquent sign, which alerts us as to the absence of a justice truly worthy of God in this first Passover night. The true sign of the Passover is the blood of the lamb. Blood: clear and visible sign that there has not been any justice. Israel remains forever the truthful witness of this. The lamb has nothing to do with the stubbornness of Pharaoh. Its innocence represents the first-born of Egypt. Though it does not make justice, the lamb is no stranger to it since it signals and recalls injustice from generation to generation. It is the hidden truth of the narrative, or, better, it witnesses that truth makes itself irrepressibly visible. The lamb is the debt of Israel. After the Passover, a liberated Israel remains indebted to Egypt. In a clearly more anecdotal manner, the women of Israel left wearing the jewels that their sisters, the women—the mothers!—had lent them (Exod 12, 35-36): when will they be reclaimed? We also remember that, after the crossing of the Red sea, corpses of the Egyptians lay along the banks. Moses had already tried to hide his first dead Egyptian in the sand (Exod 2, 12). With Egypt struck and Israel spared, a debt remains. The Moses who was saved from the waters by the Egyptian will return when, according to the Apocalypse (15, 3), “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” will be sung. He will be recognized in the one who, taking the place of Moses and the place of the Lamb, will make, by his blood, one holy people of Egypt and of Israel. The Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, Moses himself was a man of great importance in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s officials and in the sight of the people. • Exodus 11, 3 [RSV] • For the Lord will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you down. • Exodus 12, 23 [RSV] •

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Numbers 14, 1-10. The glory of the Lord protects Moses, Joshua, and Caleb from the stones that the people throw at them (Rome, Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, mosaic).

Moses in the Sin of His People

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oses did not receive the promise. His people received it when they were able to live in the “happy land,” after they had crossed the Jordan and taken the land of Canaan, which is the Promised Land. But the history of Moses and the history of the people in what one calls the Promised Land remain two parts separated by a clearly delineated line. Moses will only have known the desert and the hostile territory around Canaan, a land where he will taste neither peace nor “milk and honey.” All that is given him is to gaze at the Promised Land from afar, from Mount Pisgah. In three words: climb, look, die (Deut 32, 48-52). He dies when he is a hundred and twenty years old but, we read, he is still vigorous and has good sight (Deut 34, 7). His death is not that of a man “old and full of days” such as Job ( Job 42, 17) or David (1 Chr 23, 1). Though still a strong man, he will die before reaching the promise. His lot has him cry out: “I entreated the Lord […]. Let me cross over to see the good land beyond the Jordan […].” To which God answers: “Enough from you! Never speak to me of this matter again!” (Deut 3, 23-26). Well, it is a question not only of privation and misfortune, but of punishment (“Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” […] “because you rebelled against my command at the waters of Meribah” (Num 20, 12 and 24; “you” designates Moses and his brother). This accusation, which seems clear, loses its clarity after we read other passages. First of all Deuteronomy 4, 21, where Moses says to Israel: “The Lord was angry with me because of you […].” Then the narrative regarding the deeds which provoked this anger (Num 20, 1-13) does not clearly show the motive. Here is the story: once more, the people suffering from thirst doubted and wanted to verify the power of YHWH, who invites Moses to strike the rock in order to have water flow from it. Moses strikes and the water flows. But he strikes two

70 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits times. Let the reader understand, if he can: did Moses think that a supplementary striking would make the poor means chosen by God somehow more effective? This is all that we have, and nothing else indicates any other faux pas on the part of Moses. This is probably the best reading of the event: Moses was infected by the insistent incredulity of the people. This works as a first approximation. But what attracts our attention and makes us even more inquiring is the obscure and hidden manner by which the moment is related. Once again we see a bit of darkness placed on a critical happening. Deuteronomy 4 is silent regarding any motivations for the anger of God. A late text, Psalm 106, indicates embarrassment: “They angered the Lord at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account; for they made his spirit bitter, and he spoke words that were rash” (verses 32-33)! As for the episode of Numbers 20, it is, at the least, incomplete. Since the oldest rabbinical tradition, the custom of commentators is to be attentive to several ways of understanding a passage. Here is one of them. Is not the law itself a place surrounded by storm and torment? Does not the retreat imposed on Moses signify a certain distance between the law itself and the promise? “Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently” (Exodus 19, 18). The man who communicates this fearful message from Sinai is not in all things like God. And this man cannot be different in everything from those to whom he delivers the message nor completely uninvolved in their sin. However little he may be a sinner, is it not on him, the least sinful, that will best appear the distance between all of us and the law, the distance between the law and the promise? “The Lord was angry with me because of you…” ( Deut 4, 25): in order for you to realize that you do not merit what is promised to you. Let us note that, if the text is so reticent, so secretive, it is in order for us to measure the impossibility of expressing in adequate terms, of formulating in a theory, the connection which unites the just man who has been punished, whom God does not let enter, and the guilty, who have been spared, for whom the door remains open. But how precious it is to recognize, in a measured

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 71 but certain light, that this connection truly exists! The just and sinners are called to exchange their places. This is a bond of love. The road is long. Moses the liberator is attacked by the people at nearly every stage, that is to say after each wondrous deed that he obtained for them. “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” (Exod 14, 11; 17, 3; Num 16, 13; 20, 4… [RSV]). His brother and his sister fight him (Num 12, 1-2). The people want another leader and want to stone him (Num 14, 4 and 10). He cries out to God: “If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery” (Num 11, 15 [RSV]). He predicts the worst times for Israel: “…they will forsake me, breaking my covenant that I have made with them. […] For I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly […]” (Deut 31, 16 and 29 [RSV]). There comes a moment when, between God and Moses, Moses is the one to persevere the most in hoping. “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation,” says God (Exod 32, 10; see Num 14, 12 [RSV]). And Moses: “But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written” (Exod 32, 32 [RSV]). The Bible leaves us several images of Moses. Traces handed over by several traditions, at different times. He is the one to have the sons of Levi massacred: they adored the “golden calf ” (see Exod 32, 25-29 [RSV]). He is the one who offers to lose himself in order that the people might be forgiven. Saint Paul will do the same later: “For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh” (Rom 9, 3 [RSV]). The story of Moses has us sense how humanly impossible it is for something of the aggressor not to mark the one attacked, for the harshness of the law not to be changed into the harshness of the judge. The thick smoke of Sinai hides the secret of love, but it is by revealing to us that in it there is a secret.

Numbers 21, 4-9. Those whom a serpent bit are healed by the bronze serpent that God had Moses make (Verona, door of the church of San Zeno Maggiore).

The raised-up Serpent

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he “bronze serpent” appears briefly in the narrative of the crossing of the desert at the time of the Exodus, even more briefly in the story of King Hezekiah (five centuries later), then in a reflection from the “Wisdom of Solomon” (right before the Christian era), and finally in the gospel of John. There it is a question of a “type”11 in the etymological sense of a mark, made so deeply that its imprint crosses successive epochs. A type repeats itself, it stresses. Without showing all that it “wants” to say, it shows what “wants to be said” by it and constrains us to seek it. Here is the story, according to Numbers 21, 4-9. After arriving to the south of the Promised Land, the people, who find the journey too long and who become disgusted with manna at every meal, turn against Moses. God, to punish it, sends some fiery or “poisonous serpents.” Many of the people die from their bites. When some survivors ask for pardon and confess their fault, God tells Moses: “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live” (Num 21, 8 [RSV]). From this episode the archeologist notes that there are indeed copper mines to the south of the Promised Land, near the gulf of Aqaba, and even further up, sites already exploited in the time of Moses. There are also some snakes. The existence of “bronze serpents”12 would not come as a surprise. In fact, some bronze objects in the form of snakes have been found in the region, and some can be dated from the time of the Exodus. The need of having the ancient texts supported by real objects is thus satisfied. What we lack is the mast, or the pole, which is not superfluous if it is indeed a matter, in order to be healed, of “looking at” the serpent. In his effort to reform religious practices, the zealous King Hezekiah (a contemporary of Isaiah, in the eighth century) “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it […]” (2 Kgs 18, 4 [RSV]). Whether there was or not a connection between this pole and the serpent, it is clear that a cult rendered to a bronze serpent supposes that one did not leave it flat on the ground.

74 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits The surprise, for the historian and for us, is the fact that the king is praised for having destroyed what Moses had made. Concerning this, the context is clear. Does the writer let us understand that Moses had only made this object so that one could burn incense to it? His reticence probably had a deeper motive. To melt and mold copper in order to make a shape resembling an animal evoked just a bit too much cattle, the golden calf that came from the workshop of Aaron. In both cases, the act falls under the censure of an interdiction of the Decalogue. The abuse (burning incense) is invoked as a pretext for suppressing the object itself, but the respect due Moses is maintained. What we see here is a radical tendency belonging to a particular author, the one who has related the story of the Kings, while keeping to the principles of Deuteronomy in order to evaluate the different reigns. This author (the “deuteronomist”), inspired by the prophets, is a determined partisan for the simplification of worship, even for its reduction. He is more interested in the establishment of the law than in its details. Were it only up to him, we may believe that the part given to the wondrous deeds in the story of Israel—a part that, taking everything into account, is already reduced—would have even been more so. As it often happens, the Bible brings us a tradition and accompanies it, on another page, with a complement that puts it back in its place. The bronze serpent that is most accessible to the historian is not the one from the desert but rather the object which was for a long time venerated in Jerusalem: its presence was explained and legitimatized for the ears of attentive pilgrims by a narrative similar to the one of Numbers 21. It is this narrative which attracted to the Temple, at the place of the mast or pole, those whom a snake had bitten or those who, perhaps, suffered from other ills: they were assured that the remedy that they would find in this place went all the way back to Moses himself. The place became suspect during a period of purification that was somewhat rationalizing. But the fact is that such a complex of symbols with such deep roots does not let itself be done away with. Two themes intersect here. The first theme: the serpent, cause of sickness, heals the sickness. This is because the serpent carries a poison, pharmakon, whose name also means remedy: even today, the image of a serpent coiled around a stick signals a doctor. Second theme: to heal through seeing. If seeing has

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 75 the power to heal, it is because not to see has the power of death. The serpent hides and the order is given that it be shown. Vision, the faculty of light and therefore of life, is stronger than darkness and death. Would there be a relation between sickness and lying? The third appearance of the serpent in the Bible takes on the same reforming tone as the text of Deuteronomy. The Wisdom of Solomon takes advantage of the story about the bronze serpent in order to teach that nothing has the power to heal unless it be the word of God. Relating the episode, the book does not seem to be interested in the content of the divine order (the serpent) but only concerned with the word and the fact that one obeys it. The Gospel of John takes up the theme in its beginning. Let us say that it gives full satisfaction to Moses. Can one say that this is the fate of all archetypes: covered over for a long time, they reappear in extremis. To have oneself cared for and healed near an image of death by relying on a part of the memory of the Exodus had a strong meaning that the Gospel of John underlines. He has us hear these words from the mouth of Jesus: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” ( John 3, 14-15 [RSV]). He means that Jesus “raised” on the cross takes the place of the serpent that gives death and that, by this way, he gives life. This is not only a theme of Saint John. The Apostle Paul, who does not often express himself with images, tells us the same thing in his own manner: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5, 21 [RSV]). He also says that Christ “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’ […]” (Gal 3, 13 [RSV]). The one who is without sin takes upon himself our sin in order that this sin might finally leave us. For this to be, it would have been necessary that our lie, by which we would hide our sin from ourselves, leave us, each time that we had it carried by another sinner. Jesus, in his perfect justice, is the only one who can render this mechanism perfectly ineffective, defuse it. We make a sinner of the just man and he gives his justice to us sinners. He leaves us the place of the judge in order to take the place of the criminal. He absorbs, in order to destroy it, the unyielding force of our accusations. Yet our gaze upon him will still be necessary: “They will look on the one whom they have

76 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits pierced” ( John 19, 37 [RSV]). But by what miracle will our gaze be able to delve past the appearance of a condemned person in order to see the innocence of the lamb who does not accuse us? We can do so because the glory of the innocence which radiates from God has chosen this spectacle of a condemned man shown for all to see in order to manifest its force—an innocence that heals the guilty.

Joshua Conquers the Promised Land

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he Book of Joshua does not give the reader any picture of the hero whose name it bears. Who is Joshua? The narrative of Exodus 17, 8-16 speaks eloquently: Moses prays with outstretched arms, while Joshua wields the sword against the Amalekites. Joshua the war chief is but the instrument by which God keeps his promise to Moses: the promise to give a land to his people. In Hebrew the name of Joshua is the same as that of Jesus. Ancient Christian tradition was a cause for astonishment: the name of both is connected to the accomplished promise. In a manner quite different than Jesus, Joshua, by the marvelous event of Gibeon, has made his mark on the story. We read that he spoke to the sun (“…stand still…”) and it obeyed “for about a whole day” ( Josh 10, 12-13 [RSV]). This was “the longest day.” For our contemporaries this feat recalls the trial of Galileo condemned to retract himself (1633) after claiming that it is not the sun that circles the earth, but the opposite. He thus obliged us to deny that this narrative was materially true. From this came many doubts and suffering inflicted in the name of God, until Church authorities no longer took this text literally. In truth, this feat is also the last of a series, a kind of good-by. The grand acts of the first books of the Bible then become rare. The hand of God becomes less visible. We can notice a few transitions. Whereas the Red Sea had opened up for the exodus from Egypt, it is the quite small Jordan River that stops flowing so that the people can enter Canaan. The real difference can be seen in the fact that the carriers of the Ark must first place their feet in the river for it to become still. This little sign makes us attentive to the place that man has in the work of God. Men had to commit themselves first. There is another change: “On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land” ( Josh 5, 11-12 [RSV]). The lesson has the same meaning. Here we should

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Numbers 13, 23: The two spies of Moses in Canaan “cut a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them” (Zagreb).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 79 underline the continuity of meaning in the disappearance of the sign. God made himself visible through the manna that fell from heaven in the desert. He is invisible in this bread that, from then on, comes from the earth. However, it is the continuity which is important: the bread of earth and the bread of heaven have the same origin. Man has nothing to do with the bread from heaven. Man is present in the bread from the earth. He is present to it in two ways. First, by his work: he has it grow. Then, by his word: he names it the gift of God, because this bread comes from the land that God had given him as he had promised to do (Deut 26). It is for man to make the history of this bread which, although invisibly so, is no less marvelous than the manna. Manna nurtured him yesterday as one nurtures an infant. He nurtures himself today with bread as an adult who takes care of his own subsistence but who would lose his identity were he not to recognize his father and mother. Manna is not something he could offer to God, because he was absent from it: nothing, in it, came from man, it was only from God, not from man. Bread, on the other hand, is something he can offer to God because it is his bread. This transition from one resource, manna, to another, bread, is made without a break: the welded joint, as one says, has been assured! It so happens that the day when the customary food of Israel is transformed is the day of the first Passover in the Promised Land ( Josh 5, 10). Jesus, in a Passover perspective, will say one day, according to John 6, that he is himself this bread which comes from heaven, although he comes from it invisibly. “We know his father and his mother,” it was said. And, in order to have the people understand what Jesus himself is, the bread that he distributed to the crowd did not only come from heaven, because first of all the apostles had to find five loaves. At another level, what is from God and what is from man come together in the story of the conquest, but in a more troubling manner. This same book, which so troubled the men of the Renascence, because of the miracle of Joshua, is also the one that offers us today another stumbling block. With Joshua, Israel has already crossed the Jordan and celebrated Passover. But God has not found, in order to give it to his people, a land where no one else is already living. So Israel takes it over by war, exactly as other conquests on the planet have been made since the beginning of time. Throughout history, the fortune of the vanquished has varied according to economic and cultural

80 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits conditions: large empires might decide to displace the people or to subjugate them. If a conqueror is poor and without any base, he will be more cruel: men, women, and children also (otherwise, who would have fed them?) will be killed. The behavior of Israel led by Joshua greatly approaches the conduct of other peoples on the face of the earth as well as what we see repeated even up to our time. Why is it that not only the conquest but also the extermination, called “anathema,” be done by the order of God? The first Passover night had raised the same question, and provided the narrator with an ambiguous response: “God? or this other one called the Destroyer?” This time, when the conquest begins, Joshua does not see God himself appear to him, but rather a mysterious man who presents himself as “commander of the army of the Lord [….]” ( Josh 5, 14 [RSV]). Before we explain ourselves shortly regarding the violence of the conquest, let us say that we may see, in this intermediary being who is neither God nor man, and for a temporary time which will be long, the place where the views of man and those of God are confused. To speak in order to stop the sun, to win the promise by killing on the order of God: a long journey thus challenges generations, a journey through the obstacles that are some words which will not be erased. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land […]. • Joshua 5, 12 [RSV] •

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Rahab and the Wall of Jericho

ahab was a prostitute who dwelled in the ramparts of the city of Jericho ( Josh 2, 15). This relatively tucked away place suited her work. We may conjecture that it allowed her to receive, besides her fellow citizens, any foreigners who were passing through. Thus did she welcome some scouts sent by Joshua from the camp of the Israelites before the conquest of Canaan. They could probably hope not to attract any attention in the middle of a varied clientele. But it seems that, regarding the identity of the visitors of a prostitute whose business went on in such a sensitive quarter, little went unnoticed by the police of the king. The presence of these Israelite scouts, we read ( Josh 2, 2), is immediately made known to him and, thus informed, he has Rahab know that she has given asylum to some spies. To tell the truth, it is difficult to see why this Rahab is warned, unless it be that the narrator wants to give her the credit and the time to shield them from the police ( Josh 2, 4-7). They are quick to come and Rahab saves the spies through a ruse. She has the police run outside the walls in pursuit of the spies, whom she has hidden on the terrace, under stalks of flax which are drying. Let us return to Jericho. A vast oasis, one of the doors of Canaan, this city existed for more than five hundred years when Joshua came to its wall with the army of Israel. Several walls of the enclosure still exist, although they all predate Joshua. The mission of the scouts (or of the spies) is not clear. One expects to see them ask about the defenses of the city. In the time of Moses, a commando sent to reconnoiter returned only to spread panic: “…all the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” (Num 13, 32-33 [RSV]). Israel is paralyzed by this report. Well, with Rahab, the situation is just the opposite. She does not inform her guests about the walls or the army but about the morale of the inhabitants. They have no heart, panic is everywhere in Jericho! “For we have heard…” the catastrophe which struck Egypt

82 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits and others after it ( Josh 2, 10 [RSV]). The walls of Jericho have ears and it is in this way that defeat has already entered the city. Paralyzed, Jericho will not defend itself. The message for the reader: the force of the word, of the announcement which proclaims: “God acts for his people.” The word will win this war. Israel will not have grounds to boast much about the conquest. The savory story of Rahab is followed by an episode of a different color, of later writing: for six days, the Ark of the Lord, accompanied by the sound of trumpets, circles the walls of Jericho until, on the seventh day, with only the sound of music and war cries, the walls come tumbling down ( Josh 6, 1-16). Once more, the walls have ears, and their tympanum is crushed. After the story of Rahab, this liturgical version illustrates the weak feature of walls: the word goes through them. The rest of the story: Rahab, who dwells in the wall, goes over a wall, the one that separates peoples. She asks to enter into an alliance with Israel and she obtains it. She will put down roots in the midst of the people of God ( Josh 6, 25 [RSV]). There is a new message for the reader: a people constructs itself through alliances. If it had been necessary, in order to assure the complete purity of the blood of Israel, for Abraham and Sarah to be completely brother and sister, one would have had to pay for this integrity with incest instead of an alliance. Here, the case of Rahab is what one calls a “type,” that is to say, a schema called to be repeated and amplified. The episode with Rahab is considerable, at least for the narrator, who writes about it in the second chapter of the book. It is also important to the historian, who sees in it more than a new item that breaks monotony. Rahab is the symbol of a mass of people whose marginalization brought it to become a part of Israel without a fight, and whose trick was able to keep it from extermination. Of course, the books of Joshua and Judges record many anathemas, instructions for extermination of the Canaanite ( Josh 6, 17 and 21; 8, 2 and 25-29; 10, 26). They contrast with the remarkable cases of alliance. Thus a group of native people comes forth with hard bread and patched sandals in order to make one think that they are not Canaanites because they have arrived after a long journey, in reality, only a few miles. But Israel notices the trick too late: an alliance was granted, it cannot be revoked ( Josh 9). When one thinks that

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Joshua 2, 18. While the walls of Jericho fall, Rahab shows the attackers the sign that was agreed upon with them in order that she be spared (Rome, Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore).

84 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Jerusalem still remained an unconquered city until the time of David, an enclave among others in a vast marquetry ( Josh 15, 63; 16, 10; 17, 12-13 and 18; 23, 4…), one can sense the degree to which the promise had not yet been fulfilled. Israel should not think that it had truly arrived and was free of any other obstacles. The conclusion of the book ( Josh 24) takes place at Shechem, far from Jericho. Joshua recalls the people’s entire history to them. Yet two anomalies get our attention. The story goes as far as the father of Abraham, Terah. In this way the proximity of first cousins is indicated, nations that are different from Israel. What is especially noticeable is that the listeners are treated as if they had never concluded an alliance with the Lord before this day: Sinai is not mentioned and all are thought to render a cult to other gods, some of whom were adored in places since Mesopotamia. As regards the religious absolutism that imposes a war of extermination and that certain texts document, the image is inverted. It is more faithful to reality. Joshua 24 implies a religiously and ethnically composite audience. This mix is the true price for settling in Canaan. Let us return to the story of Rahab: she should mark her window with a red cord ( Josh 2, 18) in order to signal her presence to the invader. The scouts will come back. Biblical history, in effect, will come back. Matthew will inscribe Rahab in the genealogy of Jesus, and the Fathers of the Church will see in her a figure of the pagans introduced into the elect.

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For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt […] As soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. • Joshua 2, 10-11 [RSV] • And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham […].” • Joshua 24, 2-3 [RSV] • …put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt […] but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. • Joshua 24, 14-15 [RSV] •

Judges 16, 19. The strength of Samson resides in his hair. Delilah takes advantage of his sleeping in order to shave him (Abbey of Montbenoît, stalls).

Samson, or Brimming Over

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n amoral giant riddled with fury and desire,” this appreciation of Samson, who figures in a dictionary of the Bible, is not without some foundation. However, let us remember that a person does not appear in the best light in such a targeted image, which makes one think of a picture taken in a police station. The author of the biblical story of Samson saw his hero differently. He related his heroic deeds at a quick pace. When the Philistines dominated Israel, an angel tells a sterile woman and her husband, Israelites from the tribe of Dan, that they will have a child. He will be a “Nazirite of God,” that is to say a consecrated man, who will wear his hair long. His mother will keep the diet of the Nazirite (no alcohol or impure food) from the beginning of her pregnancy, because he is chosen in order to save his people from the Philistines. His first action will be to displease his parents by taking as his wife a young girl from this impure and enemy people. He tears the jaw of a threatening lion, and then marries the one he loves. A week is spent celebrating the wedding with the Philistines. Some bees have made their honey in the carcass of the lion that he had killed. Samson says nothing about it, but does come up with a riddle: “Out of the eater came something to eat. / Out of the strong came something sweet” ( Judg 14, 14 [RSV]). If the Philistines find the solution, they will have thirty pieces of cloth and thirty garments; they will pay the same thing to Samson if they do not find the answer. The Philistines tell his wife: “Coax your husband to explain the riddle to us, or we will burn you and your father’s house with fire” ( Judg 14, 15 [RSV]). She cries for seven days and gets it. Samson has lost. In order to pay his debt of thirty garments, he kills thirty Philistines in another town and returns to his own people. The parents of his wife then give her to his best man. Samson wants her back. Refusal. So he attaches some foxes to a lighted torch, two by two, and throws them into the fields ripe for harvesting. Samson’s wife is killed in retaliation. Samson fights the Philistines and runs into a cave. They find him there and demand that he be handed over.

88 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Samson lets himself be taken and bound. When the enemy comes within his reach, the force of God breaks his chains and his hand falls upon the jawbone of an ass with which he massacres a thousand men. Then becoming terribly thirsty after expending such effort, he cries out to God: “You have granted this great victory by the hand of your servant. Am I now to die of thirst, and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” ( Judg 15, 18 [RSV]). Water bursts forth. Samson leaves for Gaza; the Philistine population waits for him at the door of the prostitute whom he goes to see. Not only does he escape but he puts the door of the city (located near the sea) on his back and carries it as far as Hebron (situated on the mountain, at an altitude of more than a thousand meters). It is then that he falls in love with Delilah, a name that means “the slight one.” The Philistines promise Delilah money if she can get the secret of Samson’s force from him. Three times he tells her a lie (you have to have seven ropes; they must be new; you must weave his hair with the cloth of the tent). Three times she warns him as though she were protecting him. She then reproaches him so much for his false answers that, no longer able to resist, he tells her the truth: I am a Nazirite of God, all you have to do is to cut my hair. His enemies do it. He is made a prisoner and taken to Gaza after the Philistines gouge out his eyes. On a day when many people are around, the blind man, now their plaything, leans on the two main columns of the principal edifice of Gaza, causing it to fall, with the result that “those that he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life” ( Judg 16, 30 [RSV]). His death makes him a conqueror. He is buried in the tomb of his father. The frame of the story (the promise of Naziritism) gives it, certainly once it is told, a religious dimension. Let us add that the hero’s sudden show of physical force is introduced each time by the words: “The spirit of the Lord rushed on him…”(see Judg 14, 6 and 15, 14 [RSV]). But everything else is of a different nature. Different peoples have giants in the back of their memory, like Gargantua for us, the cyclops Polyphemus for the Greeks or, for the Assyrians, Gilgamesh, whom one can see in the Louvre pinning a lion under his elbow. The name of Samson (Shimshôn) evokes the sun (shèmèsh), but this sun has become blind. Force accompanies wisdom: Samson makes up riddles and plays with words. Let us note that the riddle is a serious thing: when the Sphinx proposes one, it dies if you solve it, or you die if you do not.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 89 It is pure invention that Samson is placed among the “Judges,” that is to say the leaders: he only fought alone and never truly freed his people. Besides wisdom and force, there is in this story—there is especially—madness and weakness. Blind sun, saving transgressor, vulnerable giant, tricked wise man, colossus led by this “slight woman” to his ruin. Laughter also, to see him remove the city door with its bronze hinges and carry it away. He must defeat the Philistines, but their irresistible women put him in his place. This crazy and wise giant, strong and weak, is at once any people and also humanity which, good and bad at the same time, ceaselessly overflows its banks. This narrative tells us that the burden of life is useless. Blind, bound, mocked, having lost everything, it is precisely then that the character gets going again, after catching his breath. A conqueror when all is lost. The Gospel writers did not find it incongruous that as a prelude to the announcement made to Mary, the announcement made to the parents of John the Baptist (Luke 1, 15) resembles in some fashion the announcement made to the mother of Samson. These are annunciations which replace one another on the path of men. On the strange path of men. There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Although you are barren, having borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son.” • Judges 13, 2-5 [RSV]•

Ruth 4, 13-17. If Obed, son of Boaz and Ruth, father of Jesse and grandfather of David, ancestor of Jesus, holds a book, he does so because it contains his genealogy (Saint Bertrand de Comminges, stalls).

Ruth: Bread, Flesh, Word

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he story of Ruth the Moabite and of Boaz leaves one with the memory of an idyll. Let us not forget, however, that it is the story of people who are hungry. The book of Ruth begins with a famine, which has the widow Naomi leave Bethlehem and become a foreigner in the land of Moab. Her sons, one whose name is “Languor” (Mahlôn) and the other “Consumption” (Kilyôn), die during this exile. When the famine has ended, Naomi leaves Moab with the widows of her sons, foreigners, women from “over there.” Along the way she encourages them to return to the land of their relatives in order to marry again. One refuses. This is Ruth. In Bethlehem, she is going to provide food for Naomi by gleaning behind the harvesters. Two poor women. The narrative is punctuated by the rhythm of harvests: the harvest of barley, the harvest of wheat. It is also marked by the deduction of the portions gathered by the gleaners. Through this concern, a model comes to the fore from the Book of Genesis: Abraham, barely settled in Canaan, had to find food in Egypt; Isaac relied on the Philistines for the same reason (Gen 26); and hunger takes the brothers of Joseph to Pharaoh. What we call “history” is, at ground level, the history of bread. Sacred history is also, from beginning to end, the story of bread. By its first words (“In the days when the judges ruled…”) Ruth is contiguous to Judges (Ruth 1, 1 [RSV]). But its atmosphere is altogether different. Ruth is the only book of the Bible where everything takes place with no one sinning. We have seen that Genesis, less harsh than Judges, still gives a rather crude image of origins. Memories of Genesis can be read in the lines of Ruth. After the crisis of bread comes the challenge of genealogy: how does one continue an Israelite line in exile with two widows? Well, the book of Ruth succeeds in keeping a trace of the most shocking episodes from the old traditions which it even transforms into an ideal purity. Its principal reference is the name Tamar, which is connected to those of Rachel and Leah, in order to remember the great ancestresses. Who is Tamar? The narrator of Genesis 38 relates with little show of emotion the incest that she commits with her father-in-law, Judah,

92 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits son of Jacob. She was a widow, and Judah shilly-shallied about giving her in marriage to the brother of her deceased husband: the law, however, (called the “levirate”) required him to do just that. What Tamar did not obtain by law, however, she procured through trickery. She attracted her father-in-law by disguising herself as a prostitute. But it is only in Ruth that we read, when the book alludes to this episode, that Tamar obtained the son “to” her father-in-law (Ruth 4, 12 [RSV]) and not “from” him. The difference is especially in the discretion and delicacy on the part of the narrator of Ruth. Bejeweled and perfumed, the gleaner stretches out near Boaz whom the harvest has made a bit lighthearted (Ruth 3, 7) and who has fallen asleep: she will thus succeed in being asked to marry after a long night, about which it is suggested that she was chaste. Another reference is to the daughter of Lot, nephew of Abraham. She had formerly given birth to the Moabite people (the people of Ruth!) by sleeping, for lack of a husband, next to her drunken father. There is a grand superimposition of these repetitions. On the one hand, there is a sublimation of themes but, on the other, there is the presence of what is most primitive in memory. Filled with a spiritualized matter, the frames have not changed. All this happens in the same flesh, because Sacred History is also the history of the flesh. The genealogy of Matthew lists four women for the feminine ancestry of Jesus, among whom are Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth—on the side of Joseph. Before that, Ruth’s daring made her the great-grandmother of King David (Ruth 4, 17). Thus, by her origins, the great-grandmother of David was not a daughter of Israel. No historian will be amazed by this, when one knows that such is the case for all peoples. What counts is that a book has been written to say it. Let us emphasize the literary resources taken to underline the free choice of an alliance with Israel that Ruth makes. Naomi told her two daughters-in-law to return home and get married. One does, Orpah (Ruth 1, 14), which stresses the opposite choice that her sister Ruth makes. She expresses her desire of an eternal alliance with Naomi with such emphasis (Ruth 1, 16-17) that the complete story of love that is the book of Ruth is transformed by it. The book does not accentuate the love of Ruth and of Boaz, but rather the love of a pagan for Israel, and this love exists through the love of a widow for her mother-in-law. By contrast, Boaz is a pale figure. We know that

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 93 he is no longer a young man (Ruth 3, 10), but no trouble is taken to tell us why this master of the land is a bachelor or even that he is one. There is a surprise ending: “A son has been born to Naomi” (Ruth 4, 17 [RSV]). Thus will the maternity…of Ruth be proclaimed. Obed, the new born child, is proclaimed the son of his grandmother. Through this juridical detour, the one who will become the grandfather of King David is completely reintegrated into a strictly Israelite genealogy. The book establishes a parallel with the son of Tamar, Perez, son of his grandfather, although through less orthodox ways. This Perez is said to be the ancestor of Boaz (Ruth 4, 18-22). The Gospel of Matthew, inspired by the book of Ruth, names Perez and Obed as ancestors of Jesus. Let us also note that a decisive moment of Sacred History is led exclusively by women and, what is more, by the alliance solemnly inaugurated between Naomi and Ruth, that is to say, between a Jew and a pagan. It is thus confirmed that Sacred History is the story of a word, the story of an alliance.

“May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. […] may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.” • Ruth 4, 11-12 [RSV]• “The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, ‘A son has been born to Naomi.’ They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David.” • Ruth 4, 17 [RSV]•

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Samuel, hostile to the idea of a monarchy, will nevertheless anoint two kings, Saul (1 Sam 10, 1) and David (1 Sam 16, 13) (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

Samuel: A Transition

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hy has the name of Samuel, in the Hebrew Bible, been given to two books in which his role disappears rather early? The anomaly can be explained: these two books have us observe the two reigns of Saul and David, both of whom were anointed king by Samuel. So Samuel is a key actor. His position marks a crossroads in the story, when the first millennium before our own was approaching. The period which is ending is that of the Judges. It is characterized by the sign of discontinuity. Israel is in the Promised Land but does not find the peace it expected there. If the people remembers God, it is only when the crisis is no longer bearable: Philistine, Canaanite, and Moabite pressure, and invasion by Moab. God then hears its cry and sends a Savior, a judge. From one to the other, Israel returns to its idols, and the tribes break up once again. The idea of a central hereditary power until now only becomes incarnate in the repulsive form of Abimelech, who kills seventy of his own brothers in order to succeed his father Gideon, who was the great judge of Israel ( Judg 9, 5 and 9, 56). But how long will Israel be able to support this apostasy with its sporadic moments of fidelity. And will the bond that unites the tribes, which the outside threat makes indispensable, be able to survive such a precarious state of affairs? The intermittent divine help has one think of the manna which falls from the sky, food for the children. Israel occupies the land, but has not truly settled it. Hardly do the fruits of the earth grow freely: one has to hide in order to winnow the wheat for fear of attracting the enemy ( Judg 6, 11). Samuel belongs to the series of liberators, but very little so (1 Sam 7, 2-13). He exercises the functions of government (see 1 Sam 12, 3-5) within a limited territory. This judge, unwillingly, will legitimize the royalty. We should note that he was called a “seer” at a time when the word “prophet” was not current (1 Sam 9, 9 and 11 [RSV]). He spends his childhood in the sanctuary of Shiloh (1 Sam, 1 to 3) and it is to him that God will announce its downfall: the old priest who reared him will be the last of its dynasty. Samuel’s own sons are not fit to succeed him (1 Sam 8, 3 and 5). He will be sent to remove (1 Sam

96 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 15, 23-26) the first king, Saul, whom he has himself anointed (1 Sam 16, 13) and will be able to recognize David, whom he will then anoint. His last appearance is gloomy: a threatened Saul cannot keep from calling forth the ghost of Samuel in order to hear him announce his defeat, his death, and the death of his son (1 Sam 28). Samuel is, as we say, a man of transition. His presence signals malaise; he keeps one from forgetting failures and from letting them become signs of death. “Even after he had fallen asleep, he prophesied […]” (Sir 46, 20 [RSV]). He has especially left us the memory of an intercessor (1 Sam 12, 23; Jer 15, 1) to the point of being named as a priest, with Moses and Aaron, in Psalm 99 (v. 6). It is not only between God and the people that he intervenes, but between the movements of the story which clash against each other and contradict themselves. The shock is harsh. Not only does Samuel rant against the principle of monarchy and then legitimize the first king, and then the second, but by his mouth God says that he is offended by the kingdom (“…for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” 1 Sam 8, 7) and this same God gives a king to his people. A crack is perceptible. There is something typically biblical in these irregularities of the terrain, which always lead us to search beyond surfaces, images, and even beyond words. The diatribe of 1 Samuel 8 against the monarchy is extremely logical. Your sons, your daughters, your lands, your workers, your flocks will all be taken for the use of the king (army, administration, finances) and you yourselves will become his slaves (1 Sam 8, 10 -17). But insecurity has weighed too heavily on the people for it to be convinced otherwise. Only to be defended from the enemy by God, on the condition that one return to him, is something that cannot continue. Here, a reader who thinks about it will agree that God himself cannot quite think otherwise. It is not surprising that, appearing to contradict himself, he gives in to the desire of the people. Like a shoot that sprouts out of the earth, the autonomy of man never ceases to come out of the biblical soil in order to become more visible. The formidable dignity of the free man is going to become manifest in the person of the king, capable of doing good or evil, no holds barred. In the narrative about the divine choice of Saul which follows this menacing diatribe, the dark cloud seems to be forgotten: the anointing occurs in a pleasant

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 97 rural setting (in 1 Sam 9, 1 to 10, 16; in 1 Sam 10, 17-26, the same contrast is briefly presented). Henceforth, Israel does more than inhabit the land. It will put down roots: the tree of Jesse (son of Obed and father of David) will be one of the best symbols of the kingdom. And the kingdom itself will be the exemplary form of the adventure lived by man who has left his childhood, finding in this relation with his creator a distance whereby he runs risks that are inseparable from his dignity. Samuel is the involuntary godfather of this new birth to an adult age. …you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them. […] The Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice and set a king over them.” • 1 Samuel 8, 9 & 22 [RSV]• He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. • 1 Samuel 8, 13-15 [RSV]•

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1 Samuel 15. The seated character imputes to Heaven the order to execute a conquered warrior (Vézelay, capital).

Samuel Executes the King of the Amalekites

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n impressive episode causes the deposition of King Saul. The order is given to put the infants of the Amalekites to death, the enemies of Israel, and this order comes from God himself: “…now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘[…]. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey’” (1 Sam 15, 1 and 3 [RSV]). Unlike the passages which tell of marvelous deeds, it is not the impossibility of the event which, here, bothers us. In the episode which unfolds in 1 Samuel 15, all is clear and all is plausible. We understand everything, except that such an order comes from God. Despite this, for long periods of time, prodigious feats have caused much more perplexity than this scandal. Not only is the narrative clear but, as to what is essential, it is lucid. The Amalekites are a people which had pursued Israel in a cowardly manner when, weakened by its long march of forty years in the desert, it was just about to enter the Promised Land: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt, how he attacked you on the way, when you were faint and weary, and struck down all who lagged behind you; he did not fear God. […] you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget” (Deut 25, 17-19 [RSV]). Moses is speaking here. For a long time after the crime of Amalek, when several generations have already passed, Saul receives in the name of God, this time through the mouth of Samuel, the order that we quoted above: the time has come to “attack Amalek.” Once this has been done, Saul tells the prophet: “I have carried out the command of the Lord” (I Sam 15, 13 [RSV]). Well, Saul is lying when he pretends to have obeyed. Even the spoils that he has kept betray him: “But Samuel said, ‘What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears, and the lowing of cattle that I hear?’” (I Sam 15, 14 [RSV]). As a response, Saul gives two motives: the will of the people and a pious

100 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits intention. He says that the people preferred to spare the cattle in order to sacrifice them to God. After this brief comic interlude, Samuel speaks in words that have been repeated through the centuries: “Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice […]” (1 Sam 15, 22 [RSV]). Then the prophet, who has pointed out Saul’s lie, tells him that he has lost his kingship. Another parallel episode: the reader has meanwhile learned that, if the people spared the cattle, Saul has also spared his counterpart Agag, king of the conquered Amalekites.13 Once informed of this, Samuel has Agag, still astounded to be safe and sound, brought before him and he tells the king: “Since your sword has deprived women of their children, so among women may your mother be deprived of her child!” (1 Sam 15, 33, RSV). Having said this, Samuel does what Saul did not want to do: he executes Agag with his own hand. Henceforth Saul, who disdained to carry out the order of God, is no longer king, and Samuel himself cries about the deposition of the man he had once anointed king… If, scandalized, we accuse the text, we must also grant it a lawyer. He might be able to bring out the humanitarian measures taken during the same campaign in favor of another foreign people. Saul first separated from the Amalekites another ethnic group, the Kenites, so that they would not become victims of the same treatment, something they did not merit. In fact, far from being exemplary, the case of the Amalekites is unique. No other people, Babylonians, Egyptians, is thus vowed to be hated from century to century, and forever. However, even here, this king is not killed because he is Amalekite: his death occurs to sanction a fault, no reason of religious or ethnic incompatibility is alleged. The lawyer will add that the murder of infants did not then imply the cruelty that we associate with it today: one cannot imagine that they would have been received by orphanages. And it is the Ottomans, not the kings of Israel, who kept the babies of the enemy after their conquests to make soldiers of them once they grew up. Besides, cruelty is absent from the wars of Israel. One does not see in them what one sees today: torturing the guilty or enemies, mutilating children on purpose, women raped out of revenge. If we put aside our own epoch, the Israel of Saul, judged by the yardstick of his own century, was most probably—whatever might have been said about it—the least cruel of all the peoples. Finally, it is especially important

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 101 to observe that respect for the text does not oblige us to understand that God, literally, spoke. Moses and Samuel say that God spoke to them. They do not lie in saying it, but the word of God is refracted through the words of men. Distorted by sinful humanity. Yet the same divine word, dwelling in the words of those whom it has chosen, ends up imposing its own hue because, of the two, it is the more powerful. A lawyer would only put us at ease and have us consider things at some remove. The question pursues us as we read from text to text. As we are faithful to God who speaks in man, we cannot come to grips with it with any knowledge that is devoid of warmth. We must first reflect about ourselves. About ourselves, that is to say, about the condition that we adopt as judges who belong to neither of the two parties in conflict with each other. But by what right? We react as if the violence which is shown here was foreign to us, absent to us. Well, it is a question of this violence which has never left the world of men since the murder of Abel by his brother, or even since the creative word gave an order to chaos. When God said, “Let there be light” (Gen 1, 3), he did not command darkness not to be, but he made the night out of it. God did not absent himself from darkness. Nor did he remove himself from human violence. It is precisely this situation of absence that we attribute to God. We see ourselves as neutral whereas it is a question of the abyss which is in man. Abyss, that is to say, the unfathomable volume that only fratricidal hatred or love may occupy. Any neutrality can only anesthetize this contrast. May we define God as the one who empties our abyss of fraternal hatred that it contains in order to fill it with love? We can do this on the condition of adding that, here, God does not perform a miracle and suddenly replace hatred with love. In the miracles of nature, which are sudden in their appearance as in their disappearance, he shows himself under a positive form, but it is not quite himself that he shows. In the scandals such as the order heard and given by Samuel, it is his truth that he conceals under this negative or even revolting mask, under the mask of a homicidal order. And the disappearance of this mask, the unveiling of his truth will not be sudden. This truth will not appear by resorting to some miracle. God therefore borrows a face which is contrary to his own. – Why this ruse? – Let us also answer with a question: Man being what he is,

102 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits is it possible for him to see another face of God? But each time that God consents to this disguise, he also commits himself to transforming the face of man, in the prodigious intimacy between two partners, who roll about in the dust as in the narrative of Genesis 32, 23-30. It is therefore man who, little by little, will change his face. It is in Israel that the one will be chosen who, instead of showing God under the appearance of a judge who condemns and punishes, will show it to the Amalekites and to all under the appearance of the condemned and the punished, and this will be the face of God which will let itself be seen, seen in truth with the eyes of the Spirit.

1 Samuel 16, 14-23. Saul, with scepter in hand, welcomes the young shepherd David who must play him the cithara to calm his fears (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Amiens, stalls).

Saul: The Elected and Rejected King

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he first millennium before our era is going to begin, at the same time that the iron age follows the age of copper, then of bronze. It is also the coming of the monarchy. Saul (Hebrew Shaoul: “Desired”) is the first king of Israel. The order of the biblical books gives preponderance to the prophets over the kings. One of them, against his will, has inaugurated the monarchy, others announce its end. We may be surprised that the birth neither of Saul nor of David is related as a marvelous event. That place is taken by the birth of judge and prophet Samuel (1 Sam 2, 1-21; see 9, 11), granted by God to a sterile woman, Hannah, who is so overwhelmed by distress that the priest who sees her moaning in the temple thinks that she is drunk! Answered, she lets out a cry of victory, which is quite proper for the birth of a war chief (1 Sam 2, 1-10). Hannah is the mother of Samuel, and Samuel will never be a war chief. We may wonder whether this bellicose canticle did not first belong to the narrative of the birth of Saul. The origin of Saul’s kingdom would have been considered by the last authors as such a mix of good and evil that they could not directly attribute it to a miracle of God. Hence this displacement of an ancient poem with its ring of fighting and victory, which will one day inspire the Magnificat (Luke 1, 46-55). The origin of the kingship of Saul is related three times. In 1 Samuel 9, 1 to 10, 16, Saul experiences a prophetic trance after being anointed king. In 10, 17-26, the setting is warlike; the narrative underlines the giant size of Saul. Is that why he had to hide behind the baggage? He becomes king not by anointing but by acclamation. In 10, 27 and 11, 15, the fear and respect that result from Saul’s butchering of two cattle gather the tribes together for a victory which will acquire a new investiture for him. A speech that Samuel makes counterbalances the circumstances favorable for the monarchy: the outcome is something bad which God tolerates (1 Sam 12, 1-25). This last speech recalls the first diatribe of the same prophet against the kingdom (1 Sam 8, 10-22). It announced, as a prelude to the entire

104 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits history of the system, the establishment of state control which would make every subject a slave of the riches and wars of the king. However, this prediction will only be truly verified with Solomon’s reign and especially with his son. Saul is quite incapable of such a program or even of conceiving it. Neither the times nor his personal make-up would favor it. His image will remain as an emblem of an Israel that is poorly differentiated from Canaan. A signal that the epoch is changing is given by the progress of the Philistines, a non-native people which crossed the sea. The writer presents them with “thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen” (1 Sam 13, 5 [RSV]), but especially with a monopoly on iron (1 Sam 13, 19-22). Their presence will be felt in the furthest reaches of Galilee. Saul will die there fighting them. Until then, the main feature of his reign is the indetermination of his function, due to which he will become a victim. This unclear status coincides with the anguish that inhabits his spirit. Early on, we find him prey to an ambiguous and very primitive form of prophecy, delirium. Witnesses are astonished by this (1 Sam 10, 11). The narrative of his activity is framed by two transgressions, which cause him to be rejected. He has celebrated a sacrificial rite while taking the place of Samuel (1 Sam 13, 7-15). As for the booty that he should have destroyed in the name of “anathema,” he claimed that it was kept for a sacrifice (1 Sam 15, 15 and 21-23). Guilty or not, he has always adventured beyond the limits. The pattern is all the more striking since Israel, until the exile, will prefer to delineate more strongly the functions of king, priest, and prophet, whereas they remain muddled with the first king, thus providing an archaic figure. Such an action that, in the time of the Judges, was presented as violence allowed in the customs now takes on, in the person of Saul, the air of an unacceptable exaggeration. Thus Saul is ready to kill his son in order to keep a vow (1 Sam 14, 44): such a characteristic, related by Jephthah without raising an eyebrow ( Jg 11, 35-37), is disapproved for Saul. He will even go further than that: he wants his guards to massacre the “eighty-five priests who wore the linen loin ephod” (1 Sam 22, 18 [RSV]) but, since they are reluctant to do so, he charged a descendant of Esau with the task. Exaggeration, sacrilege, and anguish mark Saul, whom only the cithara of a handsome young man from Bethlehem named David could calm.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 105 David appears when Saul is on the decline. The child David kills the Philistine giant without taking the armor that the king offered him. The women cheer for him, and Saul becomes jealous. Towards David he will feel as much hate as love. He is like the double, like the double of this sun which, from the very fact that he is sun, pushes him into the night. Perhaps the most precious fruit of the story of Saul is to know that this man was loved and to remember the tears that Samuel shed because of the deposal that he had himself announced (1 Sam 15, 26 35). We cannot keep from imagining that God reproached Samuel for crying over the fall of Saul (1 Sam 16, 1) so that He would not show him that He cried at the same time. Now there was no smith to be found throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines said, “The Hebrews must not make swords or spears for themselves.” • 1 Samuel 13, 19 [RSV]•

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1 Samuel 17, 48-51. The first exploit of David: after killing Goliath with a stone from his slingshot, he cuts the giant’s neck off with his own sword (Vézelay).

David: Courage and Ability

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avid is like a résumé of humanity: he attracts. The narrative emphasizes his beauty (1 Sam 16, 18; 17, 42), the color of his hair (1 Sam 17, 42), his talent as a zitherist. What is even more remarkable is the fact that his biographer takes us to the heights as regards the pleasure of reading. The time of the narrator is that of a civilization at its best moments, when lucidity and the ability to admire take nothing from each other. It is as though David is seen through the eyes of his creator, as each man would like to be seen. There is in effect a correspondence between the aesthetic of this narrative and the affirmation that man is “image of God”—the theme of the image connecting with that of beauty, visible or invisible. This does not mean that we are dealing with an ideal portrait. It is impossible to forget how David had his faithful soldier treacherously killed in order to hide the fact that he had seduced Bathsheba and wanted to keep her. But throughout this biography there is a trace of a more subtle division between the ideal and the real. It is worthwhile to examine how the interpretations of a grand gesture on David’s part are superimposed on each other. We can admire that, pursued by Saul as one might hunt the partridge in the mountains (1 Sam 23; 24, 1-3), David finds his enemy completely defenseless and spares him. The scene unfolds in a cave of the desert of En-gedi, where Saul found shelter for a moment in order “to relieve himself ” (1 Sam 24, 4 [RSV]). David, in a party of three thousand men, finds him in this rather unfavorable position and contains the enthusiasm of his warriors who are ready to pounce. He succeeds in cutting a piece of the royal mantle before getting away. A little later we follow him with our eyes as he jumps from one rocky wall to another and shows the piece of cloth to the king and pleads his cause. The beauty of David is not only in his appearance, it is also in his speed: “He made my feet like the feet of a deer, and set me secure on the heights. […] You gave me a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip” (Ps 18, 33 & 36 [RSV]). Agility, the art of dodging: twice before, when David was an adolescent, Saul had thrown his lance to pin him down,

108 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits and both times David had successfully gotten out of the way. – The art of speaking also: “Whom do you pursue? A dead dog? A single flea?” (1 Sam 24, 15 [RSV]). As prompt at being moved as at being brutal, Saul “lifted up his voice and wept” (1 Sam 24, 17 [RSV]). “For who has ever found an enemy,” he said shaken up, “and sent the enemy safely away?” (1 Sam 24, 19). But neither the narrator nor the characters lose sight of the political feature of this event. David says, “I will not raise my hand against my lord; for he is the Lord’s anointed” (I Sam 24, 10 [RSV]). Is it not preferable, in order to succeed a king, not to have killed him and even to have willingly ignored the opportunity to do so? Even Saul understands things this way: “Now I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand” (I Sam 24, 20 [RSV]). He also knows that in coming to the throne without shedding blood that David will not be obliged to see in the son of Saul, Jonathan, or in his brothers, rivals to be removed. But Saul believes it to be reasonable to have David commit to this with an oath, and this is done before each man goes his way (1 Sam 24, 22). This is not reconciliation. On another occasion David will have to steal the king’s lance and gourd while he sleeps, and have them shown to Abner, Saul’s general and guardian. We thus see that David’s gesture is one of a thoughtful person. But it is also the decision of a courageous man, who puts his own life in danger rather than hasten the time when he will receive what he desires. (“Afterward David was stricken to the heart…” 1 Sam 24, 5 [RSV]) This force, in the eyes of the narrator, comes from knowing that he is chosen: Samuel has let him know this after Saul was rejected. It is by God’s hand, and not his own, that he will become king. Yet he must wait. In the final analysis, he finds support in what he quotes as the “ancient proverb”: “Out of the wicked comes forth wickedness” (1 Sam 24, 13 [RSV]). We should understand: “the evil which also devours them,” what will happen without the just man having to do anything whatsoever. The episode of the enemy who is spared comes up twice, a sign that it may serve as a key to the destiny of David. We may affirm that there is not one good action of David which is not advantageous to him. The doctrine of the books of Wisdom (especially of Proverbs) and that of the narrative are in accord with each other. This harmony is what encourages one to speak of beauty, but at the most profound

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 109 level, beyond what is only literary. Such harmony will be severely and even radically contested later in the history of Israel. At no moment of biblical history, however, will the idea that virtue and usefulness coincide be cancelled. On the other hand, there will be some ease in going after what seems a ruse to some: they claim all the merit for having known how to discover it as though someone had wanted to hide it from them. I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is skillful in playing, a man of valor, a warrior, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence; and the Lord is with him. • 1 Samuel 16, 18 [RSV]•

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2 Samuel 2, 1-4. David becomes king (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

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David the Beloved

ove is the thread that runs through the story of David’s life. Another is politics, and these two threads can only be intertwined. Love, but also loves. Every relationship comes from love or its opposite, unless it be from both at the same time. The passion of King Saul for David comes from love and a murderous hate. The passion of Jonathan, son of Saul, for David is pure: “…he loved him as he loved his own life” (1 Sam 20, 17 [RSV]). Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, is famous for her beauty, and it was so great that David had her husband killed because of it. The indictment of the prophet Nathan sees more in this. A very rich man (he tells the king) covets the sheep of a poor man – thus had God already given many wives to David: why is it that he is attracted by the one who had been given to another man? What is denounced behind the disorder of the senses is the outlandish pride of imaginary absolute power, and we understand that the first child conceived in this void would die. After this sanction, the text refers to Bathsheba as the wife of David (2 Sam 12, 24) and she conceives again. Solomon is going to be born. Life finds a place after all. Yes, David had had many wives: six during the first seven years of his reign (in Hebron). They will give birth to the protagonists of the dramas that follow. The number of wives that he then had, in Jerusalem, is not given. Abishag of Shunam is the last wife of the king, when he became an old man who could not be warmed with covers (1 Kgs 1, 1). The narrative as a whole comes together by these two subcurrent streams where the burning lava of human desire flows. The first originates in David’s relation to Saul. David took the throne away from him. Their contemporaries knew that in such cases the usurper appropriates the wives of the king and that he eliminates his sons. This is, from century to century, the law of the flesh and of the world. As for David, he is the chosen one of God. He obtains the love of the king’s daughter but especially the unconditional love of the son and designated successor of this same king. Saul and Jonathan will die fighting. David made a pact with Jonathan: he will spare the entire

112 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits family of Saul. But he will not be able to keep his promise to the end: common law obliges him to hand over five nephews of his friend to a Canaanite clan as payment for a debt. And Jonathan’s descendants, though pampered, will not be faithful (and will be treated with clemency). Thus do the lines seem to be only one flesh, now luminous, now dark. Flesh that the Word makes his own, throughout time until its fullness. All is light in Jonathan. He loves openly this David whom his father loves rather confusedly, and his love is returned. After his friend’s death, David sings, “…your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Sam 1, 26 [RSV]). What is compared here, against the background of the social condition of woman, is the love of one person rather than the love of a large number. There is clearly no chosen woman in the story of David. The other series is that of the hardships that strike several of David’s sons. The prophet attributes them to the great sin of the king who took Uriah’s wife: “Now therefore the sword will never depart from your house […] and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor […]” (2 Sam 12, 10-11 [RSV]). We should also say that the love of David for his sons was a passion that was deaf to the sayings of biblical wisdom. One of the sons, Amnon, is very handsome, and fifty guards march in front of his harnessed chariot. Similarly, his half-brother, Absalom, is faultless “from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head,” and fifty men also run before his chariot and horses, whereas young David walked behind sheep (2 Sam 14, 25). Amnon, in love with Absalom’s sister Tamar, his half-sister, would have been able to marry her according to the law which then allowed such marriages, but he rapes her. Absalom kills Amnon. David forgives him five years later but Absalom, four years later, rouses the people against his father and “went in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel” (2 Sam 16, 22 [RSV]). He is killed despite the orders of David who, one more time, but more than ever, weeps over the defeat of an enemy, this time his favorite son. His humility is unique, as is his gentleness, each time that misfortune strikes him. Thus is revealed the depths of David’s heart, in such a way that the magnificence of the king only appears to the extent that we know his weakness, and in such a way that God is glorified for having thus created man!

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 113 During these forty years of reign where crimes are piled up, the law of God makes itself known without violence through the acts of violence that transgress it and without the author ever mentioning it: it is as though the law were revealed by its opposite. As regards the period of the kings, the action of God is absolutely discrete. David has only to ask God that his enemy not choose a good advisor in order for him to listen to the other one, the bad one, and the story, without any miracle, then favors the dynasty that God had chosen to bear the hope of Israel. It continues through Solomon, the son of Bathsheba. But all Israel and Judah loved David […]. • 1 Samuel 18, 16 [RSV]• The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” • 2 Samuel 18, 33 [RSV]•

David Put to the Test

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he biblical historian, rather close to the events of the reign of David, had a difficult task: he had to legitimize David’s accession to the throne without hiding the crimes that had made it possible and to draw from it a lesson about what pleases God and about what David was able to understand from it all. The Latin and Greek versions of the Psalter speak about the “gentleness” of David (Ps 132, 1).14 This is not a quality that we usually find in kings and is not acquired without some testing. Inevitably placed between the violent jaws of the State, David gives, when he can escape from them, an extraordinary lesson for his time. Compared to what Gregory of Tours teaches us in his History of the Franks regarding the savagery of the royalty, whom neither baptism nor crowning heals, David is able to leave the memory of a moderate ruler. Few kings in history have been able to avoid the company of the violent, and many have never separated themselves from it. The fact that he was not the first king of Israel but placed on the throne of Saul will always weigh heavily on David. His alliance with the son of Saul, Jonathan, obliges him not to be unfaithful to the latter’s descendants, although they become pretenders to the throne. Two causes will come to blows through the intermediary of a nephew of Saul and the nephews of David. David will be caught between two violences, one from Abner, nephew of Saul and head of his army and the other, more lasting, from his own nephews, the three “sons of Zeruiah,” who are Joab, head of David’s army, Abishai and Asahel. Young Asahel provokes Abner so persistently that Abner, with regret and unable to do otherwise, kills him! The narrator insists that he not be blamed. Since divisiveness is being created by the family of David, Abner places a brother of Saul on the throne, but he soon distances himself by revealing that he desired the throne. Unmasked, Abner changes camps and then proposes an alliance with David that he accepts. Joab will have nothing of it. He treacherously kills Abner, thus revenging Asahel, his brother. On that day, David curses Joab, mourns for Abner, sings a lamentation over him, and fasts (2 Sam 3, 33-37). He thus condemns the violence in his own camp and shows

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2 Samuel 18, 9-18. The horse continues by itself, leaving Absalom stuck hanging from a tree by two strands of hair and without any protection against the sword of Joab (Vézelay).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 117 himself faithful to the pact of friendship! To his own he reveals the depths of his heart: “Today I am powerless, even though anointed king; these men, the sons of Zeruiah, are too violent for me” (2 Sam 3, 39 [RSV]). There is still the “king” chosen by Abner. Those who take his head in homage to David are then put to death by David’s order. Then there was Mephibosheth, son of Jonathan, a wretched pretender maimed since childhood. David keeps him with his own: he will dine at David’s table “like one of the king’s sons” (2 S 9, 11 [RSV]). The blood shed in order for David to keep his throne was not shed by his hands. David cursed Joab, his general. But all is for the worst when David uses this same Joab to have Uriah murdered in the middle of a military campaign because of Bathsheba. David had charged Joab with this murder during the siege of Rabbah-Ammon, where Joab, after carrying out the criminal order, sends word to David: “…Now, then, gather the rest of the people together, and encamp against the city, and take it; or I myself will take the city, and it will be called by my name” (2 Sam 12, 28 [RSV]). Under the appearance of deference, a hushed threat, the insolence of a violent person now sure of himself. Joab has something over David. The testing begins after the crime. Absalom, the favored pampered son of David, killed his brother. After this, he turns against his father the king, who had, however, forgiven him. At first he is insidious, spreading criticism and promises among the people in order to attract it to himself. Then it is a declared fight as he begins the irreversible: he takes the concubines of his father after he has himself proclaimed king. “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (2 Sam 18, 5 [RSV]) is, however, the order that David gives his officers. It is now that David shows his “indulgence” or “humility.” Overwhelmed by revolt, the king does not leave like a war chief but flees on foot from Jerusalem with his family, with their heads covered and weeping. He refuses to have the Ark of the Covenant accompany him. It would not only protect him by its surnatural influence: whoever attacks him would be attacking it. Despite that, David wants nothing that might resemble his control of the divine alliance. “…If I find favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and the place where it stays. But if he says, ‘I take no pleasure in you,’ here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him” (2 Sam 15, 25-26 [RSV]). The

118 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits narrative strings together some contrasts: Mephisbosheth, the cripple, grandson of Saul and son of Jonathan, has gone over to Absalom’s side. Ziba, although a servant of Mephisbosheth, offers David supplies and his asses (weak mounts for a war). Another man, Shimei, pursues the humiliated king with insults and throws stones at him as he goes up the Mount of Olives (2 S 16, 5). At this critical moment, the son of Zeruiah wants to shed blood, but David: “What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah? If he is cursing because the Lord has said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who then shall say, ‘Why have you done so?’” (2 Sam 16, 10 [RSV]). The king continues to climb despite the stones and insults. Then, with the army reconstituted, the fight is open. Finding Absalom defenseless, Joab goes beyond the orders of David and kills him. At the risk of making his army angry and of alienating it to the benefit of Joab, David weeps endlessly for his lost son, the enemy son. At the return of David the conqueror, the deserters press about him in order to beg for forgiveness. He grants it, despite the sons of Zeruiah who would like to settle scores. In the end, he resists them: “What have I to do with you? […] For do I not know that I am this day king over Israel?” (2 S 19, 22-23 [RSV]). This is a decisive statement inspired by Wisdom at once divine and human, revealing the lesson that the writer wanted to have heard all along. David is confirmed king at the moment when, put to the test, he chose a path that was not the way of the violent. Still, on his deathbed, David will assign to his son Solomon the task of having Shimei put to death, the offender whom he had forgiven, as well as Joab, the principal character of the narrative after himself (1 Kgs 2). The narrator does not see in this any flip-flop or detachment. He says nothing about it.

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But David went up the ascent of the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went, with his head covered and walking barefoot […]. • 2 Samuel 15, 30 [RSV]• When King David came to Bahurim, a man of the family of the house of Saul came out whose name was Shimei son of Gera; he came out cursing. He threw stones at David […] “Out! Out! Murderer! Scoundrel! […]” David said to Abishai, “[…] Let him alone, and let him curse; for the Lord has bidden him. […]” • 2 Samuel 16, 5-6, 11 [RSV]•

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King David with his zither. Chronicles (1 Chr 16, 7 and 2 Chr 7, 6) extol him as the initiator of “praise,” the Hebrew title of the Psalter (stained-glass, Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

From David to Jesus

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he biographer of David consulted several sources from the archives which began to be collected. One of them was to place the Temple in the foreground: this source came from the priests, who were interested in David from this angle. The Ark of the Covenant, this symbol of the victories of the God of Israel, which, ever since Sinai, accompanied the people, had been previously kept in the sanctuary of Shiloh when Samuel was still a child. After the destruction of Shiloh, David took the initiative and transferred it to Jerusalem. He had just conquered this city where, until then, Israel was not able to have a footing, in order to make it the “City of David.” One day Jesus would enter it with great solemnity and be proclaimed the “Son of David.” This temple and the praise celebrated in it are common to David and to the “Son of David,” Jesus. The episode of the installation of the ark shows us David who, wearing only a linen loin cloth, whirls and jumps about, dances before the ark which makes its way up to the city, towards the tent that has been pitched for it. On this day David becomes the very symbol of praise (2 S 6, 12-19). Opposite him there is Michal, his wife. She is the very image of jealousy when she reproaches him for having left the trappings and majesty of a king since he had taken off his clothes in front of the women servants. – He answers her, “…I have danced before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor” (2 S 6, 21-22 [RSV]). At this time we find David “living in a house of cedar” when the Ark of the Covenant only has a tent for its dwelling (2 S 7, 2 [RSV]). God, however, stops the king intent on building a temple for him. – It is for me to build you a house, to build a “house” while maintaining your dynasty forever. As for my house to be built by man, your son will be the only one to do it! In this pun on the meaning of “house,” an entire future is traced. One day it will be said that the true Temple is the body of Jesus ( John 2, 21), that the true house is the body that he forms with his own: “Now you are the body of Christ […]” (1 Cor 12, 27 [RSV]).

122 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits There is another Temple: these are the words of praise that God “inhabits,” according to Psalm 22, 4. The book of Chronicles, the second version of the history of the kings written a long time after the exile, goes very far in this sense. It exalts David while emphasizing his role as the one who initiates “praise” (this term is the Hebrew title of the collection of Psalms). Not credited with building the Temple, David will nevertheless dictate the plans to Solomon and give instructions in advance regarding worship according to the vision that Moses had prophetically received on Mount Sinai (see 2 Chr 28, 3). Thus, at the same time that the dark side of David is inscribed, the tendency to prefer the song of praise to bloody sacrifice is expressed indirectly. This corresponds to numerous psalms, but also to what a biographer of David has emphasized in underlining the time when he separates his path from that of the violent. The real troop of the “God of armies” is the assembly which celebrates him and calls upon him against the enemy. Today’s historian cannot attribute the entire composition of the Psalms to David. Such an attribution has its origins in 1 Chronicles 16, 7 [RSV]: “Then on that day David first appointed the singing of praises to the Lord by Asaph and his kindred” (see Pss 73-83). 2 Chronicles 7, 6 is even clearer: the king himself had made the instruments that the Levites played and had composed the hymns that they sang. The grace of music will have accompanied David from the time of his adolescence in the presence of melancholic Saul. We no longer hear his melodies, but, as Jesus and his disciples did, we are still able to dwell in the same temple of words. These words proclaim the freedom that is enjoyed by the one with whom God has made a pact. At the top of the psalms attributed to David, we can notice several epigraphs, of an unknown date, which refer to his decisive encounters with violent men: Saul (Pss 18; 52; 54; 57; 59; 142) and Absalom (Ps 3). The difficult moments of the psalmist, praising when he begs and begging when he praises and confiding in God alone, have thus been connected by the last editors of the Psalter to the times when David was not a “man of blood” (2 Sam 16, 8 [RSV]). Even the entire collection was attributed to David, before the authors of the New Testament would find in its songs a new resonance, brought about by the trials and the glory of Jesus: Christians

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 123 like to celebrate what was never heard of before Jesus with the old words of David. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet. […] Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. • 2 Samuel 6, 15-16 [RSV]•

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1 Kings 3, 9. Solomon, symbol of the wise king, asked God “for an understanding mind to govern […], able to discern between good and evil…” Here his seriousness recalls Qoheleth, author of Ecclesiastes (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

Solomon and Wisdom

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hen King David dared to ask that a census be taken of his people, God, annoyed, sent the plague (2 Sam 24). However, the reforms of his son Solomon would have been impossible if the census had not been allowed. In one generation, civilization itself changed in Israel. “Wisdom” is the word traditionally used to describe the reign of Solomon, and it is his principal quality. But this word does not quite have, for the Bible, the rather contemplative meaning that we assign it. It means the art of using the gifts of God, but at every level: language, economy, daily life, religion. Of course, during the forty years of his reign, the “wisdom” of Solomon witnesses to a decline in prophecy. We must see how Solomon comes to the throne (1 Kgs 1). The narrative is almost comical: how do you go about persuading David, now an old man, who keeps to his room, to reject the heir who is most in view and to choose Solomon, the son of Bathsheba? We see, with some surprise, the prophet Nathan arrange a scenario and foresee with Bathsheba who will enter first, he or she, and when and what will be said. This hushed style is meaningful: prophecy, for once, is going to give way to “wisdom,” exercised here on the sly. The idea is to show that Bathsheba has in no way plotted any of this: she only followed the “advice” (1 Kgs 1, 12 [RSV]) of a prophet. But we should not be mistaken: the “advice” of a wise man is not an oracle. Court intrigue for the succession of the Anointed of God is still court intrigue. Wisdom consists in knowing the law of God and the composition of the world and, given this, to act accordingly. The wisdom of Solomon consists in knowing how to govern, in knowing the secrets of the universe, and in exchanging goods with other nations while there are no wars. The famous “judgment of Solomon” is his first and most beautiful act of governing. He decides between two women who pretend to be the mother of the same infant. One woman prefers to give up the infant rather than to see it die. The other is fine with each one receiving half of the baby. So she is not the mother. Today, when we speak of the

126 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits “judgment of Solomon,” we mean “satisfy the two parties.” This is far from the true meaning. This said, the other acts of the great king are especially reported through lists: his divisions of government, his chariots and horses, his cities and their garrisons, his navy. For the Temple, there are the works of the quarrymen replaced by the cutters of stone that was “sawed with saws, back and front […]” (1 Kgs 7, 9 [RSV]). For the royal administration, the land registry of the prefectures could not be what it was for the ancient tribe: the rigidity of centralization settles in, with the redistribution of lands and the omnipresence of power. We cannot imagine seeing David on a throne, and that is where we first see Solomon represented. The wisdom of Solomon puts no claim on revelation. He and his entourage of scribes composed and gathered not only proverbs but songs as well. 1 Kings 5, 12-14 keeps only botany and zoology as themes of this production. But the Proverbs of Solomon talk especially about how one is to live well. In them we often see the name of God revealed to Moses, YHWH. Except for that, the proverbs do not pretend to be different from the Wisdom of the Nations. On the contrary, the glory of Solomon, after being placed on the same level as that of the Nations, is to have astounded them on their own terrain, managing the affairs of this world. This is what merited him the visit of the queen of Sheba. And the king of Israel is the one who requests help from the king of Tyre, for the construction and equipping of his navy as well as for the conception and materials of the Temple. The religion of Solomon is shown at two grand moments. First, by the prayer which initiates his reign. God tells him: “Ask what I should give you” (1 Kgs 3, 5 [RSV]). But the wisdom of Solomon consists precisely in knowing already that he should ask for Wisdom and nothing else. Are we able to separate the initiative of God from that of the king? A long time later, with Hellenistic finesse, the Jewish author of a “Wisdom of Solomon” will give his answer to this theological enigma in Greek (Wis 6 to 9). The other moment is the inauguration of the Temple, the prayer that he then addresses to God for all the generations of his people. The version that has been handed on to us is related to the laws of Deuteronomy and was composed a long time after the reign of the great king.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 127 Regarding Solomon, the biblical narrative is, this time again, a marvel of balance: admiration takes nothing away from blaming, nor blaming from admiration. The foreign policy of the king (whose dimensions have been amplified by tradition) has him fill his harem with seven hundred wives (foreign princesses) and with three hundred concubines. Does the narrator see any excess in this? According to him, it was only as an old man that Solomon gave in to the temptation to honor, at the same time that he honored his God, the gods of his wives, each one according to her nation and in the sanctuary that he had constructed for each one of them near Jerusalem. This was his great sin. “How wise you were when you were young!” is the comment that Ben Sirach will make (Sir 47, 14 [RSV]). Ask what I should give you. […] — Give your servant therefore an understanding mind […]. — Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies […] I now do according to your word. […] I give you also what you have not asked […]. • 1 Kings 3, 5-13 [RSV] •

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Genesis 2, 21. God takes a rib from a sleeping Adam in order to form Eve (Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in cielo, Orvieto, door).

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e may well ask why it is that Adam comes after Solomon in a series of biblical characters. Starting with the first man would be more logical. But when we read these words: “…and there was no one to till the ground […] then the Lord God formed man […]. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Gen 2, 5-8 [RSV]), etc., we are taken with the narration and we forget the narrator. He, moreover, remains completely anonymous. “God formed man.” “Who says that?”: the modern epoch signals itself by its interest in this question. While the narrative is like an objective reality, projected onto a smooth screen, the man of today wants to see the projection room, he also wants to see the making of the film and to know who made it. “Who is speaking?” We thus pass from the “object” of the narrative to the “subject” who speaks, to the “I” hidden behind the text. This is a decisive step. It triggers the entire history of biblical criticism. This curiosity, fortunately always rekindled, will never be completely satisfied. But we have realized, since the first steps taken in the inquiry, that all that concerns Adam is transmitted to us exclusively by the descendants of Abraham. Israel is the one to talk about Adam. So the history of Israel has received our attention. From what the historian of Israel has taught us, the royal period seems to have been the most favorable for the composition of a narrative about the creation of Adam. In this ideal moment, the king talks about all categories of living things, even about “the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish” (1 Kgs 4, 33 [RSV]). The celebrity of the great king received the attention of a distant stranger, the queen of Sheba (1 Kgs 10, 1-13). At that time, court scribes inquired about neighboring civilizations, and they compared their genealogies (Gen 4, 17 to 5, 32; 10, 1-32; 11, 10-32…). This milieu, which was also interested in riddles (see 1 Kgs 10, 1), could not ignore the subject of the beginning of man. Several answers were already circulating. Others were forthcoming.

130 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Let the second chapter of Genesis lead us. We attend the most colorful and the most animated parade that one has ever seen. The Lord, wanting to find for Adam “a helper as his partner,” creates animals with this intention and shows them to him one after the other: furs, feathers, scales, heavy masses and light bodies, bellowings and squealings proper to each species, the Creator shows them to man “in order to see what he would call them” (Gen 2, 19 [RSV]). During the composition of this huge lexicon, the Creator is watching attentively. Will Adam be intrigued by one of the creatures? “To name” is at once to know, to speak and, in that, to have the power to be heard and obeyed. Language established a bond between man and the animals. Word after word, Adam finds that he is different from them and is at pains to see, from one try to the other, this difference become greater. And, at the same time, his desire to have a being in harmony with himself increases. Thus the full completion of creation is put off until later, and it is for us to evaluate carefully the time that the waiting might take until man finds what he wants. There is a drama in this duration: what man seeks is himself, uncertain of his own identity. And God waits, hanging on every word of his creature and living with it a relation that for us has never been so intimate and so anxious. The mythical narrative is thus advanced as an apologue of human becoming through the history of our cultures: man, especially today more than ever, hesitates to trace the elusive limit, perhaps erased by himself, between his biological status in an animal series and his specificity as man. The itinerary followed by the narrative finally reaches its end: “…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner” (Gen 2, 20 [RSV]). This finale is a defeat. Today’s man would prolong the experiment in a laboratory where he would make other creatures that the Creator would not have shown him, because he would not have created them. Adam, however, benefits from the remedy granted to many of our worries: sleep. In fact, the word that is used (tardémah) indicates rather a kind of coma that the Creator himself has “fall upon the man” (Gen 2, 21 [RSV]).15 It is necessary because the threshold that has to be crossed is radical. Adam cannot cross it by his own means. He has lived the experience of the multiple, which was offered to him only so that he might be born with a keen knowledge of his desire, desire of the One who alone can satisfy him. The intervention of God which ends this experiment is itself a creative act.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 131 Let us note parenthetically that our initial question—Who is speaking?—here finds an ironical answer. Whereas Adam did not know everything about his origins, since he was sleeping, will his children know more? Every mythical narrative is born under the cover of sleep, without one’s knowing it. This is the price to pay in order not to say more than the naked truth. God puts Adam to sleep before He takes out one of his ribs not so much because He does not want him to suffer but because He does not want him to know. With the rib God makes a woman, whom He takes to Adam once He has closed the opening. After the long parade of species ended, Adam certainly knew much about living beings. Before he would enter another world, he had to lose consciousness. And from there, in order for him to come to “acknowledgment,” he had to pass over the hiatus of his night. This jump over a vacuum is the true birth of Adam. He also has no knowledge of it, no more than the narrator of any myth “knows” about what he speaks. Truth knows for him and speaks its own language by its intermediary. Truth slips through the words. The outcome of the quest and of the night which precedes the true birth is joyful. Adam has found the One. The One is not she who is suddenly present to him, granted to him. The One is in their harmony, which originates from the One, of whom nothing can give a sign which does not come from this harmony. It is confronted by the One that leaps out of the body of Adam, through the channel of his throat, what is his true specificity: the word. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh […]” (Gen 2, 23 [RSV]). The word. Adam did not find it, it found him. It stands upright on the base of a new characteristic: truth. It is the word of truth because it unites man and woman at the same time that it unites man and his Creator, before whom it is spoken. The truth “takes place” at the crossing of these two lines, vertical and horizontal. “Truth”: this word could not yet characterize the names assigned to the other living things. Simple instruments, man would have been able, will be able to find other names for other living things. On the contrary, by crying out: “This time, this one, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, will be called ‘ishsha for from ‘ish has this one been taken,”16 Adam takes a position. To acknowledge a unique being (“this”) and a unique moment (“at last”) is to engage oneself, to distinguish, to take sides, and therefore to be present in one’s word. Speaking is nothing else, “truth” is nothing else. Adam had not yet spoken because he was alone. Being with the Creator was enough

132 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits as long as he had not made a covenant within creation, with his other. One is what makes the union of two, in the word, which is no longer an instrument, but a dwelling of truth. In order for truth to manifest itself, it would have been necessary that the Two which has just been united not let itself be taken for the One. Let the animal not be man, let man not be woman. Let this one be “this one” and not several at once, where “this one” could be replaced by another. The word establishes a law. But the line of unity is delicate and fine, because it follows the way of the Spirit. It is a line that wavers because it is not immediately found. The One becomes interior at its creation after Adam has spoken. Without waiting, a principle of separation is pronounced: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2, 24 [RSV]). Unity is impossible with what is too foreign. Unity is impossible with what is too close. The son must distance himself from his parents in order to become a husband: on this condition, humanity will move forward. This double constraint is announced from the moment of the first woman’s appearance. The difference which separates man from an animal is too great to be crossed. The difference which separates man and woman is posited: a body is separated from itself by the amputation that Adam undergoes, a spirit is separated from itself by its fall into the night of sleep. But woman is very much the same flesh as man. There thus exists between man and woman the necessary difference and the necessary resemblance. The union of the first man and of the first woman contains the formula of others that are to follow. It also foretells their vicissitudes. The narrator knew a little more about the union of Abraham and Sara than he did about that of Adam and Eve. He taught us how laborious it was for the union to make its way in order to unite in truth no longer the father and the mother of human beings, but the first father and the first mother of Israel. Abraham was not completely able to leave his father and his mother, since he had taken with him his half-sister, and he was not able to establish completely his union in truth since he could not do so without lying, having his wife pass as his sister: a true word could not come from an unclear line of family relations. Israel will no longer have to choose, as did Adam, between human and animal, but will have to find a path, and it will not be easy, between endogamy and exogamy. The wager is immense, because it has been

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 133 bet from the beginning, ever since Abraham, and since Adam. It is not necessarily the narrator’s intention to have underlined this point: truth speaks for him. …that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two […]. • Ephesians 2, 15 [RSV]•

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Genesis 3, 17-19. A memory piece: since the expulsion from the garden of Eden, at the end of the pain of each day finally comes death (Verona).

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Adam and Eve

nowledge of our beginning can not leave us indifferent, but such knowledge always escapes us. Even the Bible relates this beginning in several manners, which are not all compatible. So we choose to say “our beginnings,” because the beginnings are multiple, and origin is one. “One” as God is One. The difference is not only that of the singular and of the plural, for “our origins” signifies the same thing as “our beginnings.” If the word “origin” cannot be replaced, this is because it means “source” and consequently implies a relationship. Between “source” and what proceeds from it. Whereas the “beginning” only starts a series. What proceeds from the source is not the master of the source. God is our source. A child asks questions about his beginning, and so does humanity. The author of Genesis 2 and 3 responds to them. He does not shy away as though this were forbidden territory. But he knows what the true interdict is: the interdict to say everything. Apparently, no one will ever say everything, but to say the most possible is already to go beyond truth. So the reader who asks questions regarding what the author of Genesis wanted to say must take into account what he did not want to say. To ascribe to him what he did not want to say is wrong. But we must be sensitive to the limits that he respected when he wanted “not to say.” We must receive, without cutting it up, the message that his manner presents us, a contained manner, one we may describe as taciturn. It would be wrong to say that work was imposed on the first man (and on his descendants) as a punishment of his sin. This reading is unacceptable. After having produced “every tree that is pleasant to sight and good for food” (Gen 2, 9 [RSV]), God took man and placed him in the garden of Eden in order for him to cultivate it and to keep it (Gen 2, 15). Since “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground” (Gen 2, 6 [RSV]), we could understand that Adam was thus free from the heaviest burden of his task: water came up by itself. But this would be for us to fill in uselessly an empty space of the text. The important thing was not that he had little or much to do, nor that it was or was not difficult. It was simply to be said

136 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits that man had to work. As for his second mission, “to keep” the garden, we only learn that he did not fulfill it, since he is the one who let the “crafty” serpent approach his wife (Gen 3, 1 [RSV]). When the results of the first fault are enumerated (Gen 3, 8-24), emphasis is placed on the stinginess of the soil. “Cursed,” it will ever produce “thorns and thistles” (Gen 3, 17-18 [RSV]), and man will end up in this dust from which he was taken. The laborious condition is described as a struggle with the earth that provides the wherewithal for making bread only if man applies himself with painstaking effort, day after day, with the sweat of his brow. Thorns and thistles appear again when work is interrupted. This difficult struggle assures man nothing more than his life from day to day, not without an end, but with no other end than that of returning to dust. At the end of his daily hardships there is death. The image that is thus represented is more complex than the single picture of work. The word “death” does not figure in this sentence that God pronounces, but the reality of death characterizes from beginning to end all his labors: “until you return to the ground” (Gen 3, 19 [RSV]). This return is a return to the beginning: the circle goes from dust to dust. One could object that there are other kinds of work. But here the author has simply described work as it presented itself to him in the existence of nearly all human beings. More in the lives of others, probably, than in his own! During a more recent epoch, another author of the Bible, Qoheleth (or the Preacher), goes beyond the particular situation of the poor who work the land. He extends to all sectors of human activity the schema that cancels all projects and work by the perpetual return to the beginning, which is the law of death. He even groans at having to write, even though he is a grand poet: “Of making many books, there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl 12, 12 [RSV]). He has Solomon say that his own wisdom serves no purpose, since it especially teaches him that the projects of man only come to that. It almost keeps him from exaggerating his ambitions and teaches him not to despise what is ephemeral. Nothing is truly handed down. According to the Solomon of Qoheleth, the efforts of the great of this world no more succeed than does the work of the most miserable. Qoheleth takes man back to his starting point. According to Gen 3, 16, the lot of woman is different, and Qoheleth says nothing about it! Before we look at this passage, we should

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 137 remember that Gen 3 is not the complete Bible. Thus does Proverbs 31 speak highly about the works, more than about the labor, of the “woman of character” (“femme de caractère,”Traduction oecuménique biblique). Her husband leaves it to her to buy a field and a vineyard, and one sees her at the head of a business, providing for the future, while her husband sits with the elders of the region. This could not be the case for the first woman, and the author especially describes the common lot as he saw it. While the ordinary form of blessing begins with the promise “to be multiplied,” God tells woman: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing […]” (Gen 3, 16 [RSV]). What is evoked here once again is the lot of the poorest: giving birth not only in pain, but repeatedly, with all the obstacles and dangers that it entails, even its failures. The man of today will think of the ways by which he can take care of difficult situations but also of the limits of these means and of the ordeals that accompany them. However, woman is the one who carries the future; it is regarding her own descendants that a future has been mentioned. God, it is true, had created her for man, as a “helper who might be in harmony with him” (“aide qui lui soit accordée,” Gen 2, 18 Traduction oecuménique de la Bible) or “matched” (“assortie” Bible de Jérusalem). Sin has deteriorated her condition: her attraction to man and her desire for children make her dependent on a husband who will “rule over her” (Gen 3, 16 [RSV]). At the exit of the first garden, the new order is certainly not without disorder. Nevertheless, it is the descendants of woman who will turn the first situation around, and woman also receives a name: Eve, “the living one.” Bitten by the snake at her heel, the “offspring” of woman (Gen 3, 15 [RSV]) will crush its head. This victory certainly does not concern every generation but rather what will one day happen. The story has no role to play in Qoheleth. But Qoheleth does not say everything. The author of Genesis 3, 16 says more about it, but without also saying everything. In his perspective, what men can produce by the effort of their hands or by their thought is little; it is only through the expectation of a child that the hope of all humanity is stirred up.

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1 Kings 12, 6-11. Rehoboam, son of Solomon, lacks judgment: in his council sit together young beardless men (to whom he is going to listen) and hoary old men (Vézelay).

After Solomon: Rehoboam

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any long pages glorify the accomplishments of Solomon and compare him to the greatest wise men of the Nations, to the point of saying that he “excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom” (1 Kgs 10, 23 [RSV]). Then, only two pages are necessary to tell of his misfortune. Outside of Israel, Pharaoh, warned about the development of Israel, grants asylum to one of its enemies (1 Kgs 11, 19). Agitators find refuge in Damascus. Within the country itself, the situation is worse: Solomon’s head of public works, Jeroboam, revolts against his king (1 Kgs 11, 26). This crisis comes after a long interval of success. All nations have known great reigns, periods which console them forever and even have them forget the price—and also the injustices—they exacted. To tell the truth, the figure of Solomon that dominates this show of successes lacks a certain substance. Except for the two colorful episodes—his prayer for wisdom and then its use in the judgment concerning the two prostitutes, we could well wonder, in reading the rest, whether Solomon truly existed! After David, after the variations of his soul and his life of dangerous and unexpected events, we are faced with the fact that the historian had nothing to say about Solomon as a person. As compensation, we can love him through one of the collections of Proverbs, as we can through Qoheleth (called “the Preacher”) and the Canticle of Canticles, works that were attributed to him, before a Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek just before our era. Just as Dante has kings and popes speak from their place in hell, so has the author of Qoheleth intended that the emptiness of a great reign, no matter which, be revealed by the posthumous voice of the king himself. “I, the Teacher, when king over Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven […] I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind” (Eccl 1, 12-14 and 17 [RSV]). He suggests that, from father to son, it is rare for any happiness and truth to be passed on. As it happened, the wisdom of Solomon was completely lacking in his son Rehoboam. It was also not without some defect in the great

140 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits king. To take the narrative as it is, two causes prepare the catastrophe. Concerning Solomon, it is the idolatry to which, as an old man, he succumbed. As for the new king, Rehoboam, it was his insensitivity to the suffering of his people. Today’s reader immediately notices that the head of public works, Jeroboam, took seriously the discontentment of the population, that of the middle class which was too heavily taxed and that of the workers who were little appreciated. Their leader only got away from Solomon through exile. Such a figure, a political dissident returning from exile in order to try his chance when there is a change of government, is familiar to us. Thus does Jeroboam find himself in the presence of Rehoboam (1 Kgs 12, 2), the new king, at the general assembly in Shechem. The people, under the “heavy yoke of the king” [,] protests his “hard service” (1 Kgs 12, 4 [RSV]). Whereas the elders counsel Rehoboam to become the “servant” of the people, the beardless councilors of the king believe that, were he to makes any concessions, he will never be able to stop: so he should instill fear in them right away. This bad advice shatters all unity. Ten tribes (1 Kgs 11, 31) separate in order to have Jeroboam as their king, in the North. Only one tribe remains to the dynasty of David reigning in Jerusalem (the tribe of Levi not being counted). The crisis was sudden: the long list of Solomon’s successes left nothing to be seen of their other side. This is because the writer gives equal attention to both sides. However, the prophetic voice, the one which remained silent during the reign of Solomon, had foreseen the first cause of the catastrophe. Samuel had told the people who wanted a king before there ever was one in Israel: the king will take your sons for his army, in order to take in the harvest and make his weapons; he will collect your taxes “and you shall be his slaves” (1 Sam 8, 17 [RSV]). This is the side of reality that shows up again after the death of Solomon. It is not a prophet who has it reappear: it is Jeroboam, leader of public works who has become a political agitator. A little later, a prophet will speak and he will unveil the second cause for the disintegration of Israel. We see Ahija of Shiloh, wearing a new cloak, meet up with the agitator Jeroboam who has fled to Egypt, towards exile, by an isolated route. The prophet tears up his cloak into twelve pieces as a sign of the unity that Jeroboam is going to destroy. This misfortune is, he

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 141 declares, the fruit of sin, which God is sanctioning through Jeroboam. But Ahija does not take over from Samuel, because he says not a word about the servitude placed upon the people by the father of the new king. He only denounces the idolatry practiced during Solomon’s reign. Thus does the Bible know how to tangle voices and levels of history: one cause of disintegration is in heaven and the other on earth. As its spokesman, social justice has now a prophet (Samuel), now a politician. The offense against God that is idolatry and the offense against man that is oppression are committed by the same king, however great he might have been and, yet, still meriting his rightful share of praise. The young men who had grown up with him said to him, “Thus you should say to this people who spoke to you, ‘[…] My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.”’ • 1 Kings 12, 10-11 [RSV]•

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1 Kings 12, 28. Jeroboam has two golden calves made. Here, the “golden calf ” from the book of Exodus, chapter 32, with Satan on his back, leads away a disciple carrying an animal for sacrifice. Moses, indignant, is going to break the tablets of the Law (Vézelay).

Jeroboam: The Secession of the North

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hile Rehoboam, son of Solomon, reigns in Jerusalem, Jeroboam, his officer of public works, revolts against him and wins the favor of the people. With the support of the prophet Ahija who promises him a dynasty as though to David, but on the condition that he be faithful, Jeroboam starts a schism by founding a kingdom which, in the North, will become the rival of Jerusalem. Jeroboam knows that, wherever the dynastic principle has no guarantee, the most frequent way of succeeding a king is to kill him (1 Kgs 12, 27). In order to consolidate his position, he chooses to strike a blow to the state in the religious domain by taking advantage of the immense prestige of a place, Bethel. It was here that Jacob made a vow to build one day “God’s house” (Gen 28, 22 [RSV]) after he had seen angels go up and down the ladder. Choosing Bethel as a “royal sanctuary” was a grand idea. The idea of adding to it the sanctuary of Dan, on the frontier of Lebanon, was not so great. What was even worse was that, in both temples, a “golden calf ” was adored (see 1 Kgs, 12, 28 [RSV]). To represent God not only by a golden calf but by two was just too much. We know very little about the figure of Jeroboam, but more about the prophets who appeared during his reign. The story begins rather well. The prophet Shemaiah persuades Rehoboam not to make war against “his kindred” of the North in order to re-establish unity (1 Kgs 12, 24). He tells him that the schism comes from God. Each of the two narratives that follows concerns, in the final analysis, the fate of the respective dynasties of David (king of Jerusalem) and of Jeroboam (illegitimate king). We might give several titles to the first narrative, which is a popular legend: “Why a lion and a donkey, both alive, were found next to a dead prophet” or even: “How a prophet proves, by deceiving him, that the message of his colleague was authentic.” The men of today will decide about this story differently (1 Kgs 12, 26 to 13, 32). Perhaps it should

144 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits not be recommended reading for some; others might savor it. Here are the characters: a “man of God” (old way of saying “prophet”), King Jeroboam, an “old prophet,” his sons, a donkey, a lion, and passers-by. A man of God is solemnly sent to prophesy against the altar of Bethel, an altar that is going to compete with the one in Jerusalem. He proclaims that a son of David, a son of the only legitimate king, will destroy this altar. As a confirmation of the oracle and of the prophet’s mission, God has the hand of Jeroboam shrivel up, and then he immediately heals it at the request of his envoy. The king, convinced by this sign, invites the envoy to dine with him. The envoy must decline: God, he answers, ordered him not to eat anything before returning home. Then a certain old prophet learns about this from his sons, especially attentive to the last detail: the prophet must return home fasting! He meets up with the man of God while he was returning home and, after inviting him to have something to eat, receives the same answer as the king: no. Know, the old prophet then says, that an angel has ordered me to invite you. “But he was deceiving him” (1 Kgs 13, 18 [RSV]). The other believes him; together they “ate food and drank water in his house” (1 Kgs 13, 19 [RSV]). The test of the accepted meal is decisive; the old prophet says, “Because you have disobeyed the word of the Lord […] your body shall not come to your ancestral tomb” (1 Kgs 13, 21-22 [RSV]). After saying this, he saddles up the donkey for the unfortunate man, who takes to the road again. Here the donkey plays an indispensable role, not so much as vehicle as sign. A lion happens along the way and, after he kills the disobedient man of God, he does not eat them, neither him nor his donkey, but hangs around just the right amount of time in order for passers-by to tell the old prophet about this unheard of thing. From this record it follows, first of all, that it was the Lord who punished the man of God; secondly, if he punished him, it is because he had truly sent him and, thirdly, the oracle of Bethel was therefore authentic. Consequently, one can certainly expect that a son of David will come one day to destroy the idolatry of Bethel! All that remains to be done is place the cadaver on the donkey that is miraculously available, bury the unfortunate man while crying for him, and grandly remember him by the most moving sign of veneration which could be granted: “When I die […] lay my bones beside his bones” (1 Kgs 13, 31 [RSV]), the old prophet orders his sons.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 145 Faced with several lessons, which do we choose? – Better to obey God rather than an angel… – One false step of a prophet can cause his ruin but not make him less dear to memory… – The story does not want to judge, even less edify. The main line is probably the one that will reappear in the Gospels: when you receive a mission from God “greet no one on the road” (Luke 10, 4 [RSV]). Let us interpret this instruction: when a mission comes from God, everything will unite to make it worldly. Here is the second narrative. It illustrates the extreme precariousness of Jeroboam’s descendants. His son is going to die. In vain, his mother disguises herself in order to beg a prophet to heal the child. Well, this prophet is none other that Ahija of Shiloh, the one who had encouraged the schism of the very same Jeroboam and, besides that, had promised descendants to the king of the North, but on the condition that he remain faithful to God. The story of Jeroboam is going to conclude on this remembrance of the beginning. Ahija is blind, but he is a prophet. He recognizes the queen under her disguise and right away takes all hope that he had previously given her: salvation remains with the Davidic line. King Jeroboam is an idolater, his son will die. And yet this son was the only one among the descendants in whom “there is found something pleasing to the Lord […]” (1 Kgs 14, 13 [RSV]). …and he went and found the body thrown in the road, with the donkey and the lion standing beside the body. […] After he had buried him he said to his sons […] “the saying that he proclaimed by the word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel, and against all the houses of the high places that are in the cities of Samaria, shall surely come to pass.” • 1 Kings 13, 28 & 32 [RSV]•

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1 Kings 18, 36-39. Elija starts to pray and fire falls upon the altar that he had set up (La Chaise-Dieu, tapestry).

B

Elija: Like Fire

etween the long trace left by Elija in Christian and Jewish traditions and the few pages that history books have consecrated to him, there is a striking contrast. The reason for this is that, once we take away the marvelous deeds that he accomplished, little remains about his life. The narrative divides us: either refuse his astounding actions and stay with that, or be taken by the accent. There were men to tell the words of this story, there were men to hear it, and some men to live by it. The energy which is in their words comes from God, it has come into this world and it has made history. This force has had far reaching effects: some took John the Baptist for Elija come back, and Jesus was compared to Elija. The time was forty or fifty years after Rehoboam, under the reign of Ahab (874-853), son of the founder of Samaria, famous and opulent capital of the kingdom of the North. Ahab had married Jezebel, originally from Sidon, in Phoenicia (present day Lebanon), a country of the Canaanite religion. She sought to kill any prophet who refused her god Baal. Well, at that time, prophesying was a way of living that gathered entire communities outside the towns. The victims who fell under the terror of Jezebel counted in the hundreds among their ranks. Elija appears and comes onto the scene all alone. He is hardly named and his place of birth is hardly known (Tishbe, situated beyond the Jordan), but here he is, with threatening words, announcing a period of drought to the king, and thus a time of famine. God orders him to hide far away: a raven will bring him bread and meat morning and night (a diet that the old Greek translation, called the Septuagint, will give as only one meal). The Hebrew name of the prophet (“YHWH is God”) says everything about him. His orders are the orders of God: the murderous drought will only end with Elija’s word. He will ask the widow of Zarephath who is dying with her son when the stream has dried up, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink” (1 Kgs 17, 10 [RSV]). (The Gospel that talks about the Samaritan woman will remember this). When she does return with water, he is still not satisfied. Let her make him some bread with what she kept for her last

148 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits meal! Elija tells her not to be afraid; she must first make him a cake and then two for her son and herself. Here it is not just a question of a miracle: the faith of the woman responds to the faith of the prophet. God had told Elija that after the providential raven would be sent, the prophet would order a woman to nourish him, and this would take place near Sidon, the country of Jezebel. We could say that, each time, this is the naked voice of God. The prophet is only His vehicle. This voice invites faith to confront death. It then happens that the son of the widow becomes ill and is dying: his breath leaves him. The prophet stretches out three times on the lifeless child and calls upon God: “…the life of the child came into him again, and he revived” (1 Kgs 17, 22 [RSV]). Elija came in order to proclaim life. He had told Ahab that “the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand […]” (1 Kgs 17, 1 [RSV]). Certain moments of the cycle of Elija have something comical about them. The king, frightened, was taking measures which accounted for his first worry! “Ahab said to Obadiah, ‘Go through the land to all the springs of water and to all the wadis; perhaps we may find grass to keep the horses and mules alive, and not lose some of the animals’” (1 Kgs 18, 5 [RSV]). They look for Elija everywhere. Elija suddenly presents himself to the envoy of the king, Obadiah: “Go tell your lord that Elija is here.” – “…the spirit of the Lord will carry you I know not where; so, when I come and tell Ahab and he cannot find you, he will kill me […]” (1 Kgs 18, 11-12 [RSV]). Indeed, Elija appears and disappears, unforeseeable and elusive. This mysterious side of him is also connected to his condition as a fugitive. When the king sees Elija, he tells him, “Is it you, you trouble of Israel?” (1 Kgs 18, 17 [RSV]). Elija answers that the plague of Israel is the king and the house of his father. It was necessary to confront Baal, the god of Jezebel and of Canaan, in this fertile North where one accredited the deity with the gift of rain. Elija becomes a competitor, in the name of his God, among four hundred prophets of Baal, who invoke their own. Let Israel finally choose! Fire from heaven falls on his offering. With his own hand Elija puts the prophets of Baal to death. It is then that a servant, who had waited seven times at the top of Carmel while his master prayed, announces the appearance of a “little cloud no bigger than a person’s hand” (1 Kgs 18, 44 [RSV]). The rainfall comes and brings life.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 149 Elija brought life, and death. He is the hero of other fierce scenes (2 Kgs 1). Tradition has not spoken much, certainly not enough, about them. From this carnage it has only wanted to emphasize, often with the help of allegory, the impossibility of entering into the Kingdom of God without a dramatic choice. Whether this affair of the Kingdom of God be in any way a matter of life or death, the humanity of the twentieth century has traversed enough horrors for it to know. But the time had not yet come to receive what comes from the cross of Jesus. “You do not know of what Spirit you are,” this same Jesus will say to James and John who, precisely on a village of Samaria (ancient kingdom of Jeroboam), were going to call down the fire of heaven in order for it to “consume” its inhabitants (Luke 9, 54 [RSV]). They no longer remembered the face of “the other Elija,” which we have yet to discover. Then Elijah arose, a prophet like fire […]. • Sirach 48, 1 [RSV]•

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On the way to Mount Horeb, Elija is discouraged and wants to die. He falls asleep. An angel awakens him and tells him, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you” (Gallery Tretiakov, Moscow). 1 Kings 19, 7 [RSV].

A

Another Elija

re there two Elijas? The one who won an overwhelming victory over the prophets of Baal and the one who, shortly after, wishes to die? We knew that he was alone, now we see him being desperate. Under an isolated tree, in the desert, he pronounces words that have us think a long time: “…I am no better than my ancestors” (1 Kgs 19, 4 [RSV]). He is thinking about the generation that disappeared in the desert, at the time of the Exodus, because of its infidelity. He asks for death: “…now, O Lord, take away my life […]” (1 Kgs 19, 4 [RSV]). This is because Jezebel, the queen whose prophets he put to death, had sworn to get her revenge and had let him know as much. So, to save his life, he left from the North with his servant until they reached the desert. From there he started out again, but this time alone, the length of a day’s journey which ends “under a solitary broom tree” (1 Kgs 19, 4 [RSV]). At first sight, his lamentation is the distress of a fugitive in danger of death. A more critical look sends us a bit further. Elija is not complaining about Jezebel the Phoenician; he is accusing her people: “…the Israelites have forsaken your covenant […] and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left…” (1 Kgs 19, 10 [RSV]). This complaint will be repeated twice in the same terms. When God does answer, it will be to promise that he will leave “seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him” (1 Kgs 19, 18 [RSV]). It is not so much a question of the danger run by Elija as of the failure of his mission. This surprises the reader, for the marvel worked at Carmel had those who were following Baal return. It had led them back to YHWH. With a certain amount of ability, distinct or divergent traditions have been sewn together. But the important thing is this crisis where Elija appears quite different than in the moments when he shows great power. The life of Moses knew similar crises, but we did not see him desiring to die. Three centuries later, Jeremiah will go so far as to regret having been born.

152 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Elijah is not all powerful. He would be dead without the raven (1 Kgs 17, 4-6), perhaps also without the widow of Zarephath. This time, after touching him to wake him up, an angel serves him a meal: “Get up and eat…” (1 Kgs 19, 5 [RSV]). Elija eats but does not get up, not because he lacks the strength to do so but rather because desire to live has not come back to him. Let us remember that, several times in the Bible, the man who no longer wants to live no longer wants to eat (1 Kgs 21, 4 and 7). However, anyone, in the middle of the desert, would heartily eat a “cake baked on hot stones…” (1 Kgs 19, 6 [RSV]). On seeing him go back to sleep, the angel touches him again: let him wake up for good this time and finish his breakfast. “Get up and eat,” the angel tells him again and, to persuade him, says, “…otherwise the journey will be too much for you” (1 Kgs 19, 7 [RSV]). The road… which road? – We shall soon find out. While waiting, what a pleasure it is for us to see this film of a difficult rising in the morning, where it is a question of a man who, only yesterday, had us think about lightning! “Get up”: these are words that each of us has had the occasion to hear repeated two times or more! Because the narrative takes Elija to our level, let us take the time to think about ourselves also: the road is too long for you if an angel does not happen by to nourish you. Christian commentators have not failed to notice this bread of the angels. In any case, it is a question of the need for help that we all share, and it is shown in one of the greatest of all the biblical heroes. Elija finishes his breakfast cakes and leaves. If we do not yet know where the road of Elija is heading, we do know that it is going towards God. Yes, but towards which God? The answer comes in another morning scene. Elija had slept in “the” cave: “What are you doing here, Elija?” God asks him (1 Kgs 19, 9 [RSV]). The great prophet then speaks of his zeal for “the Lord, the God of hosts” (that is to say of the powerful, obedient, celestial myriads) (1 Kgs 19, 10 [RSV]). This zeal has not born any fruit. “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord,” God tells him (1 Kgs 19, 11 [RSV]). And the prophet, out of the cave, is deafened by the wind and the noise of the rocks. He thinks he has an answer, “but the Lord was not in the wind.” Then the earth quakes, but the Lord remained absent. Then there was a fire. How can we not remember the fire which, yesterday, at Carmel, devoured the holocaust, the stones and even the

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 153 water, in the service of the God of the armies? Well, “the Lord was not in the fire” (1 Kgs 19, 12 [RSV]). Then there was “a sound of fine silence” (1 Kgs 19, 12 [RSV]).17 Just as the angel gently touched the shoulder of the prophet, now the soft voice of gentleness teaches him who God is… and first of all who he is not. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” • 1 Kings 19, 4-5 [RSV]• …but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. • I Kings 19, 12 [RSV]•

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2 Kings 2, 1-13. Elija was taken from on high, and Elisha received his cloak (Basilica of Santa Sabina, Rome, door).

I

Elija, Yesterday and Tomorrow

n retracing for us the religious itinerary of Israel, the Bible indicates some new things. Sometimes it is difficult to notice them because, often, a recent discovery is introduced in a more ancient narrative. Elija met his God in the desert, after forty days and forty nights of walking and a night in “the” cave. The experience that he then has is emphasized as something new. That day, God is not in the violent wind, not in an earthquake, not in the fire. Otherwise said, He is no longer in what answered, yesterday, to the prayer of Elija confronted by the prophets of Baal. These arms are no longer appropriate. The attentive reader learns more about it with several indications. Why was a walk of forty days necessary? – Forty is as many days as it was of years necessary for the “fathers” to cross the desert. Why “the” cave? – Because the path of Elija led him to Horeb: it is a question of “the” cave of Horeb. Why Horeb? – It is the other name of Sinai, where Moses met God. At an earlier time, God “passes” and it was there, protecting with His hand the face of Moses whom He had enter “in a cleft of the rock” (Ex 33, 22 [RSV]). Today, Elija, the pilgrim of Horeb, will protect his face with his cloak after he has left “the” cave, for God is going to “pass by.” There is a parallel between Moses and Elija. The interior discovery of Elija, this gentle voice, this voice which is silence (1 Kgs 19, 12) does not only indicate taking some distance regarding the sensational marvels of Elija himself. It is also a rereading at some remove of the traditions concerning Moses and the terrifying stage that was Sinai. Elija is always Elija, but he has changed. Likewise, YHWH is always YHWH, but He manifests himself differently than He had to the man who is no longer the man of yesteryear. The beautiful popular narratives regarding Elija were less nuanced. A period came when a new reflection arose in the thought of the time and was expressed by a school of writers. The most recent texts of Deuteronomy let one sense a change which goes a little in the same direction. According to this school, in the fire

156 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits and in the quaking of Mount Sinai, God did not show himself. “You hear the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut 4, 12 [RSV]). The history of Israel stresses the times of linkage. It was necessary that Moses and Elija be seen together and appreciated according to the same parameters. It was also necessary for the editors to place colorful narratives with reference to often quoted “archives” such as the “Annals of the kings” (2 Kgs 1, 18, etc. [RSV]). It was especially necessary to situate Elija confronting the rule of the kings of the North, and not only in matters having to do with religion. The story of Naboth clarifies both the prophesying of this period and changes in society. We first learn that, without saying a word, King Ahab lets Queen Jezebel arrange the murder of Naboth, because he absolutely wants his vineyard, which adjoins the palace. To kill in order to steal. But the affair is more complex than that. The king had envisaged some form of expropriation which consisted in offering a choice: either exchange a piece of land for its just price in money, or exchange it for a better piece of land. In addition, the exchange supposes that nothing can be done without the consent of the landowner because, if it is not procured, he will have to be killed. With this background of a murder, the narrative denounces an entire system and does not waver in any way from the diatribe in which Samuel had denounced in advance monarchical power (1 Sam 8). It is a question of good and evil, but it is also a question of two cultures, that is to say of two systems of law which confront each other. Naboth finds support in the ancient law: the inheritance of the lands that the fathers received from God is inalienable. Elija is on this side, Elija as well as the communities of prophets. The religious question—“the god Baal or YHWH”—is not only at stake (see 1 Kgs 18). Elija did not experience death, but was carried away to heaven in a chariot of fire led by horses of fire. Everywhere in the world, the oldest traditions take in hand the invisible and make it visible for the spirit. Discretely underlined in the case of Moses, whose tomb, it is said, cannot be found, a marvelous setting unfolds for Elija. We might consider the narrator to be a genius unaware of his art. The most appealing device is the manner by which the prophet wants to keep his disciple from seeing precisely what, on his part, the narrator intends to show us in some detail: the flight of the chariot of fire! Elija would like to

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 157 leave without any witnesses. How can he get rid of Elisha who insists on staying with him to the end? The amusing subterfuges of Elija do not work. To have been exempt from death probably entails some duty towards men. Thus have successive centuries hoped that Elija would come back. Taken in its entirety, the Bible has us read this contrast between Elija who escapes death and the Son of God who undergoes it, as though in order to pay the debt contracted by Elija. It is precisely at Calvary that mockers feign to wait for the return of Elija, who would save Jesus. On that day Elija gave his last message: in showing nothing and in keeping silent, Elija and Jesus were reunited. Now when the Lord was about to take Elija up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. […] When the company of prophets who were at Jericho saw him at a distance, they declared, “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.” […] they said to him, “See now, we have fifty strong men among your servants; please let them go and seek your master; it may be that the spirit of the Lord has caught him up and thrown him down on some mountain or into some valley.” […] So they sent fifty men who searched for three days but did not find him. • 2 Kings 1, 15-17 [RSV]•

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2 Kings 2, 12. Above, the chariot of fire carries his master Elija away (La Chaise-Dieu, tapestry).

Elisha the Disciple

“T

ell me all the great things that Elisha has done” (2 Kgs 8, 4 [RSV]). This is what the king requests from Gehazi, servant of the prophet. It is a grand scene, because it tells us about the pleasure one has in listening to stories. It places Gehazi, this rather simple intermediary whom we hardly know, between the page of the Bible that we read and the grand deeds of Elisha. Elisha had first been a laborer and, suddenly, Elija had thrown his cloak over him to make him his disciple. Taken into heaven, Elija will again part with his cloak. Elisha picks it up. He carries it away with a “double share” in the spirit of his master, that is to say two times more than what the other prophets received. They were quite numerous. During the second half of the ninth century, Elisha prolongs the image of Elija with less majesty. There is a little of everything, mixed up, in the pages that concern him. There are views on the history of the nation, and there is also a collection of the memories of disciples, gathered through the recollections of the people, and including numerous miracles. The first series is organized around the project to tell the history of the country through that of the kings. Regarding this matter, from 2 Kings 9 to 2 Kings 11, violence is pushed to the limit. In order to accede to the throne in Samaria, Jehu kills Joram, the son of Ahab (2 Kgs 9, 24), king of Samaria. He also has Ahaziah, king of Judah, killed, and then Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, and then the relatives of Ahaziah. Finally, once he has made them believe that he would sacrifice to their god and has locked himself with them in the temple, he puts to death the prophets and priests of Baal. We are doubly impressed when we read that Elisha chose this bloody Jehu for this mission. To believe the author, this mission was a part of the plan of God, who mentioned something about it to Elija. Many murderers throughout the history of nations have been able to claim for themselves such precedents. Clearly, the writer who would have Elija play this role of instigator has only one idea: to defend at all costs the lineage of Jehu against another party who condemned his memory. As for the massacres themselves

160 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits and their approval by religious men, their reality can leave no doubt. The decision of the writer lets itself be known: Jehu received the support of one clan, the Rechabites (2 Kgs 10, 15-17). These men fought to maintain the old forms of social organization. Their tenacity will later be honored as an example for an unstable people ( Jer 35). But we should see that several characteristics attributed to Elisha are in complete contradiction with the destructive extremism of Jehu. When the king of Israel respectfully asks the prophet whether he should kill his prisoners of war, Elisha tells the king that he should serve them a grand meal before sending them back to their country (2 Kgs 6, 22). Is this tactful propaganda or a different inspiration? In any case, when Naaman the Syrian, whom Elisha cured of leprosy, asks him whether he can accompany his king and with him bow before the altar of the god Rimmon, Elisha allows it (2 Kgs 5, 17-19). But what is most decisive is the blame that, a long time later and with no hesitation, another prophet, Hosea, addresses to Jehu for his behavior (Hos 1, 4; see 6, 3-7). The stories that the king wanted to hear from the mouth of Gehazi, servant of the prophet, were the same as those which the people liked. What is striking about them is their nearness. The water of Jericho (this city is an oasis) became foul; Elisha makes it clean. How does one help the widow of the son of a prophet, whom a moneylender is threatening? What can one do for the Shunammite, who is rather well off since she keeps a room, a table, and a lamp for the use of the man of God? Elisha discusses the matter with his servant. Famine often visits the area, which then has communities of prophets partake of unknown fruit that poisons the stew. The same communities let the ax that was to build huts fall into the water. What should one do? The answer is always a miracle, what may keep us from appreciating the simplicity of the questions and of the service rendered. Certain miracles have a meaning which goes rather far. The Shunammite is sterile. The prayer of Elisha obtains a son for her, but a sun stroke makes the boy sick during harvest time, as though God were cancelling his own miracles. Formerly, God asked Abraham to give back his son Isaac obtained through a miracle, keeping in the distance a victory of life that was still more radical than the victory over sterility, a victory over death. This time, Elisha will resurrect the son of the widow. He has difficulty doing so until the boy, who has

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 161 sneezed several times, returns to life. This realism of the marvelous puts a hesitant reader at ease. The most beautiful miracle is the one that the bones of Elija effect (2 Kgs 13, 20-21). A funeral procession, on a road that is not the most safe, is met by a band of thieves and breaks up while leaving the corpse behind in a grave that turns out to be the tomb of Elija. Since the corpse comes into contact with the bones of the prophet, it comes back to life. A clever way of saying that the Spirit of life will never hesitate to give itself to bodies: Israel will become more confident in this certainty. A stream of truth passes through these marvelous deeds. A century later, truth will follow other paths: the great prophets of the eighth century, with one exception, will no longer perform miracles. When Elisha came into the house, he saw the child lying dead on his bed. So he went in and closed the door on the two of them, and prayed to the Lord. Then he got up on the bed and lay upon the child, putting his mouth upon his mouth, his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands; and while he lay bent over him, the flesh of the child became warm. He got down, walked once to and fro in the room, then got up again and bent over him; the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes. Elisha summoned Gehazi and said, “Call the Shunammite woman.” So he called her. When she came to him, he said, “Take your son.” She came and fell at his feet, bowing to the ground; then she took her son and left. • 2 Kings 4, 32-37 [RSV]•

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2 Kings 17, 7-12. The kingdom of Israel, in the north, remained submerged in Canaanite culture (The Louvre, cover of a Phoenician ivory).

F

The Prophet Hosea

rom the eighth century on, the essential instrument of the prophets is the word: they proclaim messages, and these are written down, either shortly after, or such as one later remembers them. Why write them down? First of all, because every prophet has his originality. It also has to do with the content of the message: something like archives are necessary in order to be able to remember that a given event had already been foretold. Finally, especially because of the expansion of the Assyrians (Nineveh, in the present Kurd country), the map of kingdoms is, at this time, more often changed than it formerly was by wars and conquests. That is why scribes react against this chaos by taking note of the changes in their annals. So the collection of Hosea, like many others, is introduced with a list of kings, under whom he prophesied. Then Hosea was placed in a larger grouping of prophetic writings when one needed a general dossier after the fall of the monarchy. Israel then enters history more closely. The books of Kings relate the actions of their heroes. The book of Hosea has us read them in an altogether different light. We know that Elija, by secretly anointing Jehu king, had given him the mission to avenge the blood shed by the reigning couple, Ahab and Jezebel. Blood of the prophets, blood of the just man Naboth whose vineyard the king coveted. The punishment is decided, it is in the name of the Lord that Elisha gives Jehu the mission to carry it out: Jehu obeys. He drags the dynasty through a series of massacres. After doing this, he hears God say: “…you have done well in carrying out what I consider right, and in accordance with all that was in my heart have dealt with the house of Ahab […]” (2 Kgs 10, 30 [RSV]). But then there is something new: some tens of years later, an oracle of Hosea will give quite a different resonance to the same events. “…I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel […]. I shall break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel,” says God (Hos 1, 4-5 [RSV]). But the blood of “Jezreel” is the blood shed in order to obey Elisha! We understand that the spirit of Hosea is not the spirit of Elisha. On the contrary, it is the one that had made Elija a new man, for whom

164 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits God was no longer in the thunder, but in a light breeze. Hosea expects peace from God: a time of cosmic alliance between man and animals, the disappearance of weapons (Hos 2, 20). The Bible criticizes itself. The life of Hosea takes place under the sign of tenderness, but of a wounded tenderness. What makes this man an unforgettable case is that not only did he pronounce oracles but that his love life is an oracle. In effect, it represents the wounded love of the Lord for his people. God who yesterday gave Elisha orders to exterminate today commands Hosea to marry a prostitute. In the flesh and in the heart of Hosea, the bond of YHWH and of his unfaithful people is going to be lived as a heartbreaking drama. Hosea obeys: he marries Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, “a wife of whoredom […], for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hos 1, 2 [RSV]). It may come as a surprise that such an order comes from God.18 Modern readers save the honor of God and that of Hosea through psychology. They believe that to attribute this initiative to God is a way of saying that Hosea finally understood that the hand of God was in his dark personal history. There is more truth in adhering to the radical and sudden manner by which the Bible expresses itself. God, to hear him, wants a man who is closest to his own flesh to suffer what God himself suffers in His relation with Israel. The prophet will then know how to communicate this lesson on what God is. His life will become the word. The prophet puts his wife to the test, and God also leads His spouse Israel into the desert of exile. He will have it experience hunger and thirst, but it is in order to seduce her, so that she find once again the love of the engagement (Hos 2, 16-25), and then be overwhelmed with new gifts, unknown until that moment. Throughout sacred history, this theme returns: “For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off, says your God” (Isa 54, 6 [RSV]). Marriage is the sacrament of the love of God for His people. This love cannot be lived without the experience of forgiveness. Certainly the sociology of Hosea’s time ignores the case of another figure: one in which the wife would forgive an adulterous husband! It falls to us to give a more universal meaning to the experience of this prophet. The theme of the couple expands, in the oracle of Hosea, to the point of taking on a cosmic dimension. In the time of Elija, when the

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 165 plains and fertile hills were dying because of a drought, it was expected that the Phoenician god Baal would render them fertile with rain, since he was their spouse. With the prayer of Elija, YHWH, God of all the earth, responds to this expectation. It is YHWH, not Baal, who makes the land fertile by giving it rain. That is the sign that Elija had given at Carmel. For Hosea, in turn, it is the God of Israel, and no other, who makes the earth fertile. Hosea announces the day when God will answer to the sky, who will answer to the land, who will answer to the wheat, to the vineyard and to the olive grove, who will answer to men (Hos 2, 23-25). From his own story as a spouse, Hosea teaches Israel that this intimate relation belongs to its God, who is the God of all the earth, and not to some local divinity. The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri, in the days of Kings Uzzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel. • Hosea 1, 1 [RSV]• Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. […] There she shall respond as in the days of her youth […] On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, “My husband,” and no longer will you call me, “My Baal.” • Hosea 2, 14-16 [RSV]•

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Isaiah 6, 6. “Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs” (Alonso Berruguete).

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Isaiah

e read in the book of Exodus that “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33, 11 [RSV]). But the prophet Isaiah wrote: “I saw the Lord […]” (Isa 6, 1 [RSV]). Each of these claims is overwhelming, but we do not know who wrote the first one, regarding Moses, whereas the second one, about Isaiah, comes from Isaiah himself. Someone, whom we do not know, speaks about Moses. Because Isaiah speaks about Isaiah, the nature of the message has changed. It is a witness. This manner of saying “I” is perhaps the principal characteristic of a prophetic text. It gets the attention of the reader. “I saw the Lord”: this witnessing brings us something more. Such a claim suffices by itself (“to see YHWH!”) in order to situate the prophet Isaiah as a giant. But this giant does not tells us straight out very much about himself. He is not like those whose gaze is especially turned towards their own destiny. Rather, what he sees intensely is the world: people, things, elements of the cosmos. His collection forms the most opulent gathering of poems of the entire Bible. The majority of them come from close disciples or from unknown prophets born much later than he, but that does not diminish him in our sight. It tells us about the creative power that originated with him: it touched others besides himself for several centuries. Their writings were mixed with his own. One wanted to place with his oracles those that concerned the return from exile (Isa 40 to 55), as if God had not only shown him the coming of the Persian king Cyrus, but even revealed his name, by doing it two centuries ahead of time. There is something objective and central about Isaiah that corresponds to his social stature. Certain prophets were poor, marginalized or, like Hosea, wounded from the very beginning of their mission. Isaiah comes onto the scene at the very heart of the institution. His life has three centers, which, in his eyes, are only one: the city of Jerusalem, the Temple, the royal dynasty. When he “saw the Lord,” it is right in the middle of the city, in the Temple. And there he sees “the king, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6, 1 and 5 [RSV]). The mission that Isaiah receives is

168 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the one that a monarch gives to his envoy. The noblesse of the latter is emphasized by the fact that he freely proposes himself to fulfill it: “Whom shall I send? […],” says God. “And I said: ‘Here am I; send me!’ And he said, ‘Go […]’” (Isa 6, 8 [RSV]). About the year 740 BC, at the same time that he saw God, the prophet attended a liturgy on high: he heard the song of the “Seraphim,” that is to say of the “burning ones.” Today we still repeat their praise in the liturgy of the Mass: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord” (the Sanctus), taken from the text of Isaiah. The incandescence of the “Seraphim” and that of “sanctity” correspond. No one touches the fire, but fire does invade everything, either to destroy or to purify and to warm up. No one can touch God: nothing can be qualified as holy, if it is not He. Even the angel takes this fire from the altar with tongs. But it is to touch the lips of the prophet. Because he called himself a “man with impure lips, in the middle of a people with impure lips” (Isa 6, 5 [RSV]). He is neither little nor poor but a sinner. Here he is purified. The impurity of the lips, common to prophet and his people, probably designates the opposite of the true word, replaced with evasiveness and emptiness. Isaiah, therefore, is going to tell the truth: he is going to show the people to itself through unforgettable portraits of religious stuffiness (Isa 1, 10-20), inept ornamentation (Isa 3, 16-24), and the insatiability of property owners (Isa 5, 8-25). Here it is not a question of visions but rather of an exercise in frank speech and critical wisdom. Sent by the king of heaven, he will speak later to the king of Jerusalem (Davidic capital of Israel of the South), Ahaz. In those days, the king of Damascus and the king of Samaria (capital of Israel of the North) joined in coalition in order to depose King Ahaz and place a foreign prince on his throne. Then “the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook, trembled just as the trees of the forests shake before the wind” (Isa 7, 2 [RSV]). So here is the prophet in front of the king who trembles like a leaf. The center of Isaiah’s message (Isa 7, 4-25) is the call to “believe” in the midst of imminent wars. “To believe”: the Hebrew word comes from a root that signifies “solidity, to stand fast.” To do this means neither to increase his forces nor to seek help everywhere about him. As a symbol of this calmness, Isaiah chooses the narrow stream of Shiloh which flows softly at the foot of the ramparts. The king should not imagine that he will turn it into a torrent (Isa 8, 6). In the oracle

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 169 that follows, belief in God takes on a body. Isaiah announces life to the king, under its least visible and least warlike form: a baby, the incarnation of every promise. The birth of Emmanuel, “God with us,” is imminent. Nothing on earth speaks to us of God more than the birth of a child. The kingdom will grow with the rhythm of this child and live with its diet. Thus does Isaiah speak to Ahaz: “For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good,” the two kings who threaten you will lose their lands (Isa 7, 6 [RSV]). Israel will also suffer: its vineyards will be uprooted, its land bristling with thorns, but the child and his people will be nourished with curds and honey (see Isa 7, 10-25). Is Ahaz capable of understanding how a baby can help him? Where will this child come from? Can the king foresee through the mystery of these words: “the young woman is with child […]” (Isa 7, 14 [RSV])? The oracle remains mysterious: literary criticism shows that its composition was taken up many times, from new experiences that gave meaning to former words. The birth of a child is associated with it at the end of wars (Isa 9, 3-6), with justice that respects the weak (Isa 11, 3-5). Around the child and under his leadership animals that devour each other will be reconciled, images of nations at war. The theme of life that is at first invisible expresses itself also through the symbol of the seed, of the branch, of the tree, of the forest. The throne of David (Isa 9, 5) will be strengthened through a branch which will come out of the root of Jesse (Isa 11, 1 and 10), the father of David, and it will grow enough to attract the nations. The first call of Isaiah (Isa 6) concludes on a radically negative prediction, to include the totality of his mission. The message—it is said to the prophet—will have no effect, unless it be to make the people more blind and more deaf (Isa 6, 9-13). It is surprising that nearly nothing is told us about what will become of the prophet himself. He lets us guess for ourselves that his fate was not an enviable one. The book of Jeremiah will be more interested in the fate of the prophet to whom it is attributed. The image of a suffering servant will appear in “second Isaiah,” a late extension, in the time of the exile, of the oracles of the eighth century, but more particularly of the words which end the narrative of the prophet’s vocation.

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And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it […]. • Isaiah 6, 5-7 [RSV]•

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Isaiah: Births

racles, in the form of poems, came to figure in the collection of Isaiah over several centuries. It is not easy for today’s reader to find any order in them. However, we do notice the repetition of several grand images. They present themselves little by little to the patient reader and then form signposts for a journey through the entire cosmos, heaven and earth. These images refer all this space to its center, which is the holy mountain of Sion ( Jerusalem), or even the tree which connects heaven and earth. But this is not all: there is no center more precious and more fragile than this living being who, in the womb of his mother, prepares himself for birth. And the poetic game brings together the vegetal seed and the human seed, the growth of the tree and the seed of man. Just as the tree grows in volume towards the heights and towards the depths, so is man made, almost from nothing, to stretch out throughout the universe, towards the most visible and towards the most hidden. Isaiah is at the origin of the formula which unites human growth and that of the tree. It is with him that we find the “tree of Jesse,” (literally the “root” of Jesse [Isa 11, 1 & 10 [RSV]], which Christian iconography has so abundantly represented, especially in stained-glass. Jesse the Bethlehemite, grandson of Boaz and Ruth, is also the father of David. David was chosen from among his seven sons. From the root of Jesse, through David, will comes all the kings of Jerusalem,19 even the Messiah himself, who is the pinnacle of the tree. A journey through the collection of Isaiah has us encounter this central tree of Israel. Now symbolizing the king, now what remains of the people after many catastrophes, it is sometimes miserable, sometimes glorious. The complete text translates the experiences of the attacks of death against life, suffered throughout a century of destructive wars and threats against the royal dynasty. This dramatic characteristic appears straightaway. God instructs Isaiah, from the moment that He first speaks to him, about what will become of Israel at the end of his mission. All of it will be destroyed and, if a tenth survives, what remains of it will be what remains of a tree once it has been cut to the surface of the ground. As though added

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Isaiah 7, 14. “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Cremona, door).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 173 by a scribe in the margin (and which did not pass into the Greek version), we have these words: “The holy seed is its stump” (Isa 6, 13 [RSV]). Tree and lineage, seed and invisible hope. When the weak king of Jerusalem sees powerful enemies unite against him and his heart trembles like a leaf (Isa 7 2), the prophet sees salvation come in the birth of a baby. The contrast is pushed to the limit in all directions. On the one hand, this child, who is not yet born, only offers a moment of weak support, or rather derision, to the hopes of a king horrified by imminent peril. But, on the other hand, the stake is much greater than the outcome of a war in which only some thousands of men will confront each other. The marvelous sign offered by this birth includes, to hear Isaiah, the entire cosmos, “deep as Sheol or high as heaven” (Isa 7, 11 [RSV]). With the oracle thus placed between the extremes of space, it was not arbitrary for interpreters to also remember the beginning and the end of time. A promise had been made to the first woman before she was expelled from Eden. Her “seed” was called to conquer the ever present enemy, the one who, from the beginning, had it in for her and for her descendants (Gen 3, 15). The oracle was even pushed to extremes in the last centuries which preceded the Christian era, as the Greek translation of Isaiah 7, 14 witnesses to: “A virgin has conceived.” After the coming of Christ, the Apocalypse of John will take the theme to the end. In the visions that it relates, “a great portent appeared in heaven” (Ap 12, 1 [RSV]), a sign whose cosmic dimension is the one that Isaiah announced. A dragon will come out of the abyss and will lead a war against the woman’s posterity and will be defeated by angels sent from heaven. This dragon is a figure that the seer immediately decodes: it is “that ancient Serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan […]” (Ap 12, 9 [RSV]). As for the woman who is in the heavens, she suffers the pains of childbirth already inflicted upon the first woman. But it is in order to bring into the world a new humanity, born from on high. Between these perspectives and the prediction of Isaiah, there are probably the same disproportions as between the expected birth of the royal heir in a small capital and the salvation of the world. But the verbal seed has a greater capacity for amplification than does the corporal seed.

174 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits The birth of a child is sung in the remainder of the collection: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us […]”—that is, given “for the throne of David” (Isa 9, 6 & 7 [RSV]). The newborn brings jubilation and light; he has the yoke fall, he destroys what serves war. But the following oracles still describe great hardship for Israel and for its enemies (Isa 7, 7 to 10, 19). Further, it is the coming of a king: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isa 11, 1 [RSV]). On him rests the Spirit of the Lord, who gives himself under the form of seven gifts. This king triumphs, but he does so through word and through breath. Around him the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the calf become friends, and the little child need fear nothing from the serpent. We had already read that the coming of the newborn foretold the destruction of armaments. Here the prophet sees a mast come out of the same Davidic roots. This mast will rise up to be a “signal to the peoples,” intent on gathering them together, when the dispersed people of Israel will return from exile (Isa 11, 10 [RSV]). In this book, these several oracles, all rather ample, are separated by others that are not related to them. Sometimes a brief indication puts us back on track: “The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take new root downward and bear fruit upward” and this in Jerusalem (Isa 37, 31-32 [RSV]) and in a context narrowly related to the monarchy. The totality of these prophecies of misfortune and of happiness reaches the heights in a text that was meditated from century to century and which became richer with meaning with the passing of events. A rejected person, a person condemned to death will gather the “sheep” (Isa 53, 6 [RSV]) and be “raised” whereas “who has believed what we have heard? […] For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; […]” (Isa 53, 1-2 [RSV]). And the prophet will cry out for Israel: “Sing, O barren one who did not bear […]” (Isa 54, 1 [RSV]). Growth of the tree, which here is a felled tree, living forever, giving life.

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Jeremiah and the End of the Kings

eremiah was called to prophesy in 626 BC. About forty years later, around 587 BC, the monarchy came to an end, since Jerusalem was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia. It was also the end of forty years of prophesying for Jeremiah. Such a long commitment had been prepared in the distant past: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you,” the Lord told him ( Jer 1, 5 [RSV]). In the beginning, during the reign of king Josiah, Jeremiah lived in a time of hope. Josiah, it was thought, would have the grand days of David and Solomon return. In 931 BC, Jeroboam had put an end to this wonderful epoch by bringing about the secession of the tribes of the North. The separatist kingdom thus founded, with Samaria as its capital, had fallen apart in 722 BC, absorbed by the Assyrians of Nineveh. In the middle of the following century, during the youth of Jeremiah, the king of Jerusalem, Josiah, had reconquered some of the lost territories. One could hope that the two kingdoms would be reunited under a descendant of David. Jeremiah voiced this expectation ( Jer 3, 6-13; 31, 15-22). Everything falls apart when, in 609 BC, Josiah is killed in battle. His first successes but especially his extraordinary faithfulness to the Mosaic law, which he had restored in full vigor (2 Kgs 22), could have him expect the happiness that this same law promises to those who observe it. Instead, misfortune comes his way. Although he makes no comment about it, we may think that Jeremiah experienced this day as a turning point in the history of Israel. It was taught that fidelity to the law assured a long life. The defeat and violent death of the best of its kings defies the traditional teaching. After this misfortune, which refuted his early hopes, the prophet will only see others come about. And the worst one will be the fall of Jerusalem, in 587, the bloody death of its last king, deportation… In French, the very name of Jeremiah evokes tears “jeremiads,” moaning and lamentation. Yet this is a deformation of the reality: Jeremiah is

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Jeremiah 25, 1-13. Exiled in Babylonia, scourge of YHWH, the king of Israel has his feet in irons (Paris, Church of Sainte-Élisabeth de Hongrie). .

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 177 above all “a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall, against the whole land […]” ( Jer 1, 18 [RSV]). In the fourth year of the reign of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, an oracle of Jeremiah divides his listeners into two groups: “Thus says the Lord […] If you will not listen to me […] I will make this house like Shiloh, and I will make this city a curse for all the nations of the earth” ( Jer 26, 4, 6 [RSV]). Some clamor for his death, others defend him. We are perplexed to see prophets with priests in the first group. And yet “prophets” will always be among the main adversaries of the prophet Jeremiah. This conflict can be seen as one of the principal keys for a reading of his fate. Everything happens as though the death of Josiah had shown Jeremiah that a page had been turned in history. The prophets who opposed Jeremiah strongly held onto the idea of an unconditional promise given by God. But they did not have the people made aware of the demands of this same God, precisely when the people and especially those in high places openly ridiculed the Decalogue, the fundamental Law formerly given to Moses ( Jer 7). Confidence in the promise ended up by being changed. It was felt that confidence was shown in God by confiding in allies of this world who were not too reliable. Confronted by this sad decline of the very idea of the promise, the language of Jeremiah knew no change. With the example of Josiah he had learned that the just man can die unjustly. All the more, the people should stop protecting itself behind the divine promise in order to despise the divine law. In the Temple where the Decalogue is proclaimed, Jeremiah foretells the ruin of the Temple. Jeremiah sees much further than the necessity or the duty to submit oneself to punishment that is deserved. It does remain true for him that God punishes his people. But he does not encourage anyone to present themselves to misfortune. His message is clear: the time is coming, it has come, when Israel can no longer put off the day of reckoning. Jeremiah’s adversaries, deceived by their prophets, harangue the people so that they will resist. For Jeremiah, this resistance is only palliative and evasive. Salvation is neither in bravery nor in diplomacy. The word “lie” is one that most often comes to his lips. The message of Jeremiah can be said in a few words: do not expect salvation from anything unless this anything be God alone. How can one stay on this path without being “a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall”? In the name of certitude and in a spirit of

178 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits strength, Jeremiah pronounces these astonishing words: “…serve the king of Babylonia and live…” ( Jer 27, 17 [RSV]), whereas this king is the enemy and the conqueror. Egypt will not save you, even if it is the enemy of Babylonia. This discourse opposes the prophet to his king as it does to the prophets who support this king. Several times he hardly escapes from death. Others, who speak like him, such as the prophet Uriah, are executed and thrown into a common grave ( Jer 26, 20-23). But Jeremiah directs Israel toward life, an Israel whom he compares to two baskets of figs. One is spoiled, and the other, which is good, symbolizes the exiles who have left for Babylonia. He gives them this instruction: once there, build, plant, multiply, intercede with the Lord in favor of Babylonia ( Jer 29). However, Jeremiah will not be able to follow the exiles to Babylonia. The last king, Zedekiah, comes to a horrible end. The man who takes control of the fallen monarchy is a friend of Jeremiah, Gedaliah. Named a representative of the king of Babylonia, he will be murdered by a commando that a member of the royal family directs ( Jer 40 and 41). Jeremiah himself will suffer a bitter end: the ones whose politics he castigated will carry him along in their flight towards Egypt. That’s about all we know. He will have announced the duration of the exile—seventy years—and the return to Sion. But this return will not be a return backwards: his life as a rejected and suffering prophet, more than his oracles, will have made one sense the change that this hope should experience, a hope that had known a rekindled flame in the time of Josiah.

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[…] the prophet Jeremiah spoke to all the people of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem […] “And I will banish from them the sound of mirth and the sound of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste […].” • Jeremiah 25, 2 & 10-11 [RSV]• …to all the exiles […] “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage […]. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile […].” • Jeremiah 29, 4-7 [RSV]•

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The prophet Jeremiah, witness to the loss of the Promised Land, contemporary of the redaction of “the second law,” Deuteronomy (Moissac).

Jeremiah and Moses

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fter Moses has led the people up to the Promised Land, he announces that it will lose it (Deut 31, 14-29). Later, Jeremiah, after having said the same thing, lived the time of this loss. His sufferings are known to us. Except for hearing God, nothing extraordinary happens to him. There is no miracle. If we look closely at Jeremiah and Moses from afar, it is because of the different manner by which their lives are related to us. Those who wrote the life of Moses were not there when he lived. Barring some exception, the life of Jeremiah is told to us by his contemporaries or by himself. The book called “Deuteronomy” is a particularly interesting case. It relates the death of Moses to us: it is necessarily posterior to him. It relates speeches of Moses, many of which were composed not only after his death, but not long before the “end of the kings.” This is the same as saying: the book was finished at a time closer to Jeremiah than to Moses. They saw Moses and his message through several traits of Jeremiah and his oracles. “Deuteronomy” means “second law.” Why, at the time of Jeremiah, tell of this gift of a second law? There had first been the law of Sinai, after the exodus from Egypt. Then there were forty years of travel and rebellion in the desert. At the other end of the itinerary, right before the people enter the Promised Land, the “second law” takes its own place, the testament of Moses. After forty years, it is conceived for men who remember having broken the first law, they and their fathers, from the moment of leaving Egypt until “today,” and who should lean more on God rather than on their own force. If Deuteronomy relates the infidelities committed in the desert, it is while thinking about those which were repeated for several centuries, until the exile, until Jeremiah. Jeremiah speaks under the weight of these centuries. Jeremiah does not only carry on his shoulders the weight of these men who listen to him. In them he sees the most recent layer of what has been piling up for generations and whose totality, finally, weighs upon him. And he laments, “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me […]” ( Jer 15, 10 [RSV]).

182 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits To repeat constantly “temple of the Lord, temple of the Lord, temple of the Lord” ( Jer 7, 4 [RSV]), to hold onto the Temple in order to betray God better, is not to expose oneself to some punishment but to deprive oneself of life. This is, in a precise manner, the death of truth. All of Jeremiah can be said in these words: “…truth has perished […]” ( Jer 7, 28 [RSV]). Can men survive truth that has perished? They think they can by killing the one who told them this truth. Jeremiah hardly gets away, and several times. They want to kill him, but his book remains. The book is like a substitute for the prophet: the scribe who is Jeremiah’s secretary comes onto the scene. His name is Baruch and, a composer of the narrative parts of the book (written in prose), secretary Baruch has himself sometimes been exposed to the dangers that he relates. The book of Jeremiah-Baruch often evokes the long series of the prophets, followed by the long series of its own oracles. “For thirtythree years, from the thirteenth year of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah, to this day, the word of the Lord has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you […]. And though the Lord persistently sent you all his servants the prophets, you have neither listened nor inclined your ears to hear […] Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts […] I will bring upon that land […] everything written in this book […]” ( Jer 25, 3-4, 8 and 13 [RSV]). Here, the book relates the history of the book. We are in the fifth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim, in the ninth month, or December 604. Secretary Baruch is sent by Jeremiah to the temple to “read the words of the Lord from the scroll” that he had dictated ( Jer 36, 6 [RSV]). This takes place “in the upper court, at the entry of the New Gate of the Lord’s house” ( Jer 36, 10 [RSV]). And the people hear the series of admonitions from the prophet, his announcements of misfortune, dated. Immediately, a certain Micaiah runs to the royal palace located near the Temple and tells those close to the king what he had heard. Summoned, Baruch gives them a second reading. “How did you write all these words […]? – “He dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them with ink on the scroll” ( Jer 36, 17-18 [RSV]). The king, informed, has the scroll brought to him. It is winter time, there is a fire, the king holds his penknife and, after hearing three or four columns read aloud, he tears the scroll up and throws the pieces into the fire. Then he sends men to have the prophet and his secretary arrested.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 183 They have disappeared. After that, “Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to the secretary Baruch” for him to write all the words of the book that the king has burned ( Jer 36, 32 [RSV]). He adds many others and announced: “He shall have no one to sit upon the throne of David […]” ( Jer 36, 30 [RSV]). There is something in this narrative that is impressive. A longtime before, in the grand days of King Josiah, when Jeremiah was young, the discovery of the “book of the law in the house of the Lord” is made (2 Kgs 22, 8 [RSV]). The law of Moses had become so neglected that it was necessary to have some work done in the Temple for it to be rediscovered. Historians see in this excavation not only the first episode of archeological discoveries concerning the Bible but the point of departure for the final composition of Deuteronomy. Indestructible, the law of Moses. Indestructible, the prophecy of Jeremiah. The more the ministers of the last king of Jerusalem, Zedekiah, see the danger which threatens the city draw near, the more they turn against the prophet who says, “You shall be handed over to the king of Babylon” ( Jer 37, 17 [RSV]). Put in a cistern, Jeremiah sinks into its mud. The last king of Jerusalem, who hesitates between the prophet and his ministers, orders that he be taken out before he dies. Jeremiah is not saved by a miracle: they have to put “rags and clothes” under his armpits so that the ropes do not hurt him ( Jer 38, 12 [RSV]). The king consults him secretly but does not listen. Nebuchadrezzar lays siege to the city for eighteen months. It falls in June 587. What will happen in hearts after the ruin that was announced? It falls to Jeremiah to illuminate this future. The high priest Hilkiah said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord […].” […] Shapan then read it aloud to the king. When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes. […] So the priest Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan, and Asaiah went to the prophetess Hudah […]. She declared to them, “[…] Thus says the Lord, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read.” • 2 Kings 22, 8, 10-11, 14-15 [RSV]•

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Moses the lawgiver and David the psalmist are read through Jeremiah the prophet (The Charterhouse of Champmol, Dijon).

Jeremiah towards the Future

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od will raise up for you a prophet like me,” Moses had said to his people (Deut 18, 15 [RSV]). Jeremiah felt audacious enough to announce a “new covenant” ( Jer 31, 31 [RSV]). As though one had not understood that it would be new, he remarked that it would “not be like” the one of Sinai ( Jer 31, 32 [RSV]). What does a “new alliance” mean? After Sinai, another alliance?… The perspective seems inconceivable. We should take time to follow the prophet, on his little path, a path that starts again at the end, at the end of the era of the kings. When Nebuchadrezzar is at the gates of Jerusalem and all is lost, Jeremiah chooses this moment to buy a “piece of land,” as we say, quite near the city, when a first cousin is quite happy to make a good deal in receiving “seventeen shekels of silver” for land which is going to be devastated ( Jer 32, 9 [RSV])! The sale takes place publicly: Jeremiah wants the entire city to talk about it. At the end, the sealed act of sale is placed in a clay container, assured of being kept for the distant future. The meaning of the gesture is then proclaimed: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” ( Jer 32, 15 [RSV]). Besides this symbolic act, Jeremiah delivers a more concrete message: exile, this exile and servitude given to “the king of Babylon” that recalls the slavery in Egypt will last seventy years ( Jer 25, 11-12; 29, 10 [RSV]). Seventy years: a life time. This means that those who left in their adult years were not assured of returning. The fate of the mature men of Jerusalem would then be like that of the generation which, in the time of Moses, had died in the desert. But was it necessary to foresee the return from exile like a repetition of leaving Egypt, a repetition of the Exodus? The prophetic spirit does not fit well with something new that is only similar to the old! Deuteronomy already foresaw a change, what it called a covenant “in addition to the covenant that he had” with the Israelites at Horeb (Deut 28, 69). It signaled: “But to this day the Lord has not given you a mind to understand,

186 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits or eyes to see, or ears to hear” (Deut 29, 3 [RSV]). This meant that the true meaning of the first Exodus had not yet been understood. Yet Jeremiah understands that the “today” of which he speaks is none other than his own. For a new Exodus, a new Alliance. This alliance will “not be like” the former one. Everything will be new: “Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when it shall no longer be said, ‘As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them’” ( Jer 16, 14-15 [RSV]). The promise of Jeremiah was deeply imprinted. The book of Ezra, which relates the return from exile, notes well that this prediction of Jeremiah was “accomplished” (Ezra 1, 1 [RSV]). After the return, the Levite personnel of the temple in Jerusalem will compose an oracle and add it to those of the prophet ( Jer 33, 14-26). This oracle promises that the same permanence is assured to the tribe of Levi, charged with worship, and to the descendants of David. And besides this, everything begins again on the model of the story of Abraham: “Just as the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will increase the offspring of my servant David, and the Levites who minister to me” ( Jer 33, 22 [RSV]). In the remainder of the book, the prophet is far from giving such importance to ceremonies that were entrusted to the Levites. But this (late) oracle tells of the hope that animates the book of Chronicles. Composed in the Levitic spirit, this book is a revised version of the history of the kings after the exile. Among the Levites, the author shows his preference for those among the Levites who were cantors, authors of most of the psalms. Their ministry, begun by David, was to praise God with hymns and musical instruments. This praise, “fruit of our lips” (see Hos 14, 2 [RSV]), was even sometimes declared to be superior to the sacrifices in which the blood of an animal was shed (Pss 40, 7; 50, 23; 69, 31-32…). This is quite the spirit of the prophets, a spirit that was able to influence profoundly the celebration of the liturgy. The preoccupation—if one may say—of the Levites for the figure of Jeremiah is therefore somewhat logical. A later legend will even push things a bit further. According to 2 Maccabees 2, 1-11, Jeremiah follows the journey of Moses as far as Mount Nebo (Deut 34, 1) where the first leader of Israel first saw the Promised Land from afar. Up there, Jeremiah hides objects of worship in a cave that he then seals off. There he prays

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 187 like Moses and like Solomon, because the one who foretold a new alliance should certainly be seen in the same light as Moses. Praise is not the only thing that connects Jeremiah to the world of the Levites. A number of psalms sing about the sorrow and confidence of an isolated believer confronted by people he knows and who want his ruin. Between these lamentations and the rather numerous ones of Jeremiah, (one speaks of his “confessions”: 11, 18 to 12, 6; 15, 1018…), similarities of style and vocabulary get our attention (Pss 35, 14 and Jer 20, 10; Ps 69 and Jer 15, 15-16). Thus, by this other path, the psalms and Jeremiah encounter each other. Jeremiah has suffered much. He measures the powerlessness of the man who would live to give up sin through his own efforts. On this point, he is radical: “Can Ethiopians change their skin or leopards their spots?” ( Jer 13, 23 [RSV]); “The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts […]” ( Jer 17, 1 [RSV]). If there had not been this experience of radical evil, the promise of a new alliance would never have been thinkable. There where sin had been etched, there also would the law of God be engraved. There, that is to say, in the heart. There is no other way to save man. And Jeremiah will explain why the alliance will “not be like” that of Sinai: it is because the law, at that time, had been chiseled on stone. It was kept there, but without penetrating man. It is a question of a new alliance more than of a change in the law. The law of God itself, once written by God in the place where sin was inscribed, will put into motion the acts of man. Law and grace, one day, will meet. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke […]. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel […] I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts […]. • Jeremiah 31, 31-33 [RSV]•

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Ezekiel the seer: he sees four inseparable wheels rolling towards the four cardinal points, (chapter 1); dried up bones that become alive (chapter 37); a river flowing out of the Temple (chapter 43) (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Amiens).

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Ezekiel

he manner by which Ezekiel prophesizes, from 593, is without precedent. Ezekiel is a seer. Normally, the prophets of Israel hear words, but their visions are rare and simple: an almond tree, a boiling pot ( Jer 1, 11 ands 13), grasshoppers, a basket of fruit (Am 7, 1; 8, 1). Isaiah talks about his incredible witnessing—“I saw the Lord”—with few descriptive words (Isa 6, 1 [RSV]). Moses asked to see the Glory of God (Ex 33, 18). In answer, God placed his hand over his eyes while he passed by. Elisha could only see from a distance, and only for the time of a lightning bolt, the chariot that carried his master into the heights. Ezekiel is different: he sees the Glory of God. To read him, we would say that he sees all of it, as though nothing was hidden. It is not surprising if he has so much trouble describing it. The year was 593. The prophet had already been led into exile near a river of Babylon, where he would learn about the fall of Jerusalem in 587. This change of scenery has something to do with the rather exotic character of his visions. But it does not explain the hypertrophy of his sight. Ezekiel sees more than he can say about it. If he has a hard time describing, with many words, what he saw, we also have some trouble summarizing it! God is beyond every vision, and the visions of Ezekiel discourage description. What he sees (chapters 1 and 10) is a movement that is difficult to imagine: four wheels (“their rims were tall and awesome” Ezek 1, 18 [RSV]), remaining separated, propel themselves towards one of the four cardinal points! Their expansion does not disperse them: “The living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning” (Ezek 1, 14 [RSV]). It is the chariot of Glory. There are some “living creatures” which, despite everything, we can recognize according to the room of Assyrian antiquities at the Louvre: faces of men, the body of a bull with eagle wings. Their wings touch each other… Nothing is missing, neither colors (diverse precious stones), nor sound (“the thunder of the Almighty” Ezek 1, 24 [RSV]). On the chariot is something that appeared to be “of human form” (Ezek 1, 5 [RSV]).

190 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits We thus learn that life which comes out of God is life that is within God. It is the same. The life of God often expressed by fire, by breath (the equivalent term for “the Spirit”). The chariot meets up with the prophet far from Jerusalem. One had thought until then that Jerusalem, and more particularly the Temple, was the dwelling place of Glory, even if one knew that it had traveled since Sinai. But Jerusalem and Sinai were holy places. We find this Glory in an unholy place, faraway, among the pagans and, to top it all, Glory was never seen so closely as it was there! Ezekiel defies convention in order to describe in God an invading, animated and teeming entity. In brief, the description of Glory is the description of God as a living being. The incomprehensibility of God descends into human experience through a profusion of incompatible images. This obliges one to go beyond the visible, but it will be by the path of the visible and not through ideas. Many mystics will proceed in this manner. Later, Ezekiel will appear to be a stumbling block in the eyes of certain wise men of Israel: they thought that the excessive nature of his vision might throw off the weak. The repercussion of such an experience is the reduction of the seer to his own weakness. He himself describes rather well to us his pathology. Lasting states of prostration and periods of aphasia: “I am putting cords on you […]” (Ezek 4, 8 [RSV]), “…and I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth […]” (Ezek 3, 26 [RSV]), the Lord tells him. Another day, the spirit places Ezekiel in the middle of a valley full of bones (Ezek 37). This time, the spectacle is not described exactly like a vision, however marvelous it may be. We are told why: the prophet enters completely into the scene. He walks all around the bones; he calls out to them with the words God has given him and they obey him. What Ezekiel sees is never stable, and he describes its stages in delineated segments. First the bones take on the shape of skeletons. Secondly, they cover themselves with nerves, flesh and skin. Thirdly, and always following the order of the prophet, breath comes from the four cardinal points to animate them and they stand up: “a vast multitude” (Ezek 37, 10 [RSV]). The Lord explains himself: this means that Israel will come out of the tomb of exile. In 573, “at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month,” Ezekiel sees the Glory which was returning to Jerusalem and the noise

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 191 “was like the sound of mighty waters […]” (Ezek 43, 2 [RSV]). The angel leads him to the mountain from which he sees the Temple such as it would one day become. A river flowed from the east side of the sanctuary. Always placed in his visions, Ezekiel crosses it and, from a thousand cubits to another thousand, the water climbs up to his ankle, then (secondly) to his waist, until (thirdly) he cannot touch bottom. The angel brings him back immediately: “Mortal, have you seen this?” (Ezek 47, 6 [RSV]), and he adds that there will be a lot of trees on the banks, that the water will descend as far as the Dead Sea, which will become so perfectly clean and full of fish that one will see fishermen everywhere. The fruits of the trees will heal the sick. For us this vision which is rather enchanting will one day be read in its prophetic profundity. The Body of the Savior, says the Gospel of John, is the true Temple ( John 2, 21); from his wounded side flow blood and water ( John 19, 34). The Apocalypse of John is inspired many times by Ezekiel and takes up his vision: the seer of Patmos believes that the leaves of the trees will heal the Nations (Ap 22, 1-2). Water, blood, nourishment: the Fathers of the Church will understand this for the Christian sacraments. Ezekiel knew Jeremiah. From him he borrows what is essential: God will heal his people. He promises: “I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes […]” (Ezek 11, 19-20 [RSV]). Jeremiah had said just as much. Ezekiel will even say more: God will bless the people with pure water and will give it his own Spirit (Ezek 36, 25-27). He will even say that the Dead Sea will not only be revitalized, but that Sodom and Gomorrah (the cities that it had engulfed) will be healed, and even faster than Jerusalem, in order that it, healed in turn, will become their mother (Ezek 16, 44-62). We feel dizzy with this. God has given his prophet Ezekiel a spirit which pushes everything to its limits. He is the precursor of apocalypses. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” • Ezekiel 37, 9 [RSV]•

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Isaiah 53, 7. [RSV] “…yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent […]” (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

An Unknown Person: The “Servant”

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e see nothing of the greatest prophet of Israel. Only a shadow on the wall, in front of us. We turn around and, behind us, many men have grouped together. We recognize some of them, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel—as for the others, we understand that they belong to the same family. Behind their group, there is the sun, the sun of God, invisible but, without it, there would not be this shadow which goes ahead of us and projects itself into the future. In it converge and amass many known figures, but the unknown one, as we shall see, has something more, something unique. This shadow is the silhouette of a prophet announced in the oracles written under the name of Isaiah, but written during the exile about sixty years after him (Isa 40 to 55). Announced, but never named. He has only a title, which the Lord gives him when he talks about him: he calls him “my Servant.” No particular circumstance is indicated which might help us to identify him. In order to find some trace of him in the post-Isaihan collection, we need to take four poems from it: — First poem (Isa 42, 1-9 [RSV]): God speaks. He speaks to us: “Here is my servant.” He speaks to the Servant: “I am the Lord, I have called you…,” and then again he speaks to us: “I am the Lord…” We discover the mission of the unknown Servant. — Second poem (Isa 49, 1-7 [RSV]): “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention […].” Why so far away? “The Lord called me before I was born,” telling me: “You are my servant […]. But I said, ‘I have labored in vain.’” Then he told me: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations […]” (Isa 49, 6 [RSV]). This is why I speak to the islands. — Third poem (Isa 50, 4-9b or 4-11): the Servant speaks. He describes his own manner: “the tongue of a teacher” Isa 50, 4 [RSV]). Let us understand that instead of holding the position of a master

194 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits he is like the one who listens. Such humility prepares us to understand his meek behavior before the tribunal of his persecutors, but also his absolute certitude (“I have set my face like flint…” Isa 50, 7 [RSV]). The hand of God will save him from danger, and it alone. “It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty?” (Isa 50, 9 [RSV]). — Fourth poem (Isa 52, 13 to 53, 12 [RSV]): everything changes. God speaks again: “my Servant…” (Isa 52, 13 [RSV]). But a new voice makes itself heard, as that of a chorus (“we…” Isa 53, 2 [RSV]). As for the voice of the Servant, one no longer hears it; it has disappeared. In the three preceding poems, we had followed a trace of him from his mother’s womb to the tribunal and we had left him saying that he could count on God. In this last poem, his biography is taken up again by the choir, an unidentified group of narrators. We know enough about them, however, to recognize in them witnesses to his fate, present and implicated. They saw him from the start come out of the ground like a shoot. They know where he has been placed in the ground. He was killed. God did not intervene with his judges, nor with his torturers when his Servant “was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent […]” (Isa 53, 7 [RSV]). This group of spectators speaks in order to bear witness. Up to the end, they say, we believed that he was a sinner. A mechanism that is hidden in the most inaccessible depths of the human heart was set off in them: he is suffering, therefore punished, and punished, therefore guilty. Their witness is also news that they announce: “and by his bruises we are healed” (Isa 53, 5 [RSV]). It is the sinner in us who judged the just man, whereas he did not judge us. Transformed, they do not accuse themselves for having caused the death of the just one, because it could only be imputed to a few. With the huge majority, they were only spectators. Their eyes were closed because of their heart. The sinner has a taste for condemning, this irrepressible taste which is one of the surest symptoms of evil. On the other hand, the just man does not condemn. Many just men and prophets have lambasted evil, but without relishing their role. He, the Servant, is silent (first poem). “He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 195 will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench…” (Isa 42, 2-3 [RSV]). This prophet is not a prophet like the others, although his life borrows many characteristics from theirs. He has pardoned like Hosea, prophesied in vain like Isaiah (Isa 6, 9-10), and has been brought to court like Jeremiah. And like Elija, he has healed the sick, since he, the Servant, heals the witnesses of his death, those who applauded at his condemnation. In this Servant one finds the old and the new: “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare…” (Isa 42, 9 [RSV]). Behind him, in this group that we have discovered by turning back to the past, we also recognize the men who have made the Psalms. Their situation was that of the Servant: persecuted, threatened with death, their confidence is unfailing. The hand of the Lord, they say, will save us from the abyss. Then they come back and witness that God has preserved them. The Servant is in solidarity with their fate, but he does not return to tell himself that he has been saved. What happens is different: others return to tell themselves that they have been healed by him –“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, […] and by his bruises we are healed” (Isa 53, 4-5). Dead, he is a source of life. God did not keep him from death, he took him out of it: he lives. Where did such a conversion come from to change the eyes and the heart of these witnesses? God has spoken. But, as it appears, he has spoken without noise and without a vision. They heard the unbelievable. The kings of the Nations, in turn, hear him: “Who has believed what we have heard?” (Isa 53, 1 [RSV]). They want to say that the extraordinary experience of the Servant is made to be heard by themselves and by all the inhabitants of the world through them. Here we are, in turn, placed in the position of those who have been sent: we are also Servants. However, God has shown nothing to anyone about the final fate of his messenger. He has only spoken these words, only said: “See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa 52, 13 [RSV]). Formerly, Isaiah had seen God “sitting on a throne, high and lofty […]” (Isa 6, 1 [RSV]). The readers of that time knew that these were nearly the same words: at the very place where Isaiah had seen God, his distant successor hears—through his heart—that there is precisely found the disfigured and glorified Lord. Eyes, ears, and heart are healed. This

196 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits healing was impossible before the time of the Servant. It did come, according to the message of the Christian faith (Ac 8, 26-40).

…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. • Isaiah 53, 2-5 [RSV]• Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. • Acts 8, 35 [RSV]•

Nehemiah: The Return

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ollowing the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire largely surpassed its predecessor in territory, extending “from India to Ethiopia” (Est 1, 1 [RSV]). The Persians’ most famous king, Cyrus, had put an end to the exile of Israel, thus fulfilling the oracle of Jeremiah (Ezra 1,1; Jer 25, 11-12). In a distant city of the empire, Nehemiah, an exiled Jew, would take care of the drinks of the successor to Cyrus, Artaxerxes. He had the title of cupbearer, which implied important duties. His functions obliged him to show a smiling face at table. On that day, he could not do it. The king, seated near the queen, was kindly concerned about it. Nehemiah responded: “…Why should my face not be sad, when the city, the place of my ancestors’ graves, lies waste […]?”(Neh 2, 3 [RSV]). Thus begins the book of Nehemiah. This pleasant narrative quickly becomes the report of a highly placed functionary. “I then obtained,” he more or less says, “a mission as the governor of a province, with the documents that grant him authority” (see Neh 2, 5-10 [RSV]). Israel thus comes into a period of many centuries where its leaders are only the delegates of a foreign power. But none was more affable that that of the Persians. The Samaritans, other neighbors and their accomplices in the area do not want this mission to succeed. Confronting them is Nehemiah, a leader who sees things quickly, decides quickly and keenly feels things. Another envoy, named Ezra, will take charge of the Temple: his name has marked the entire history of Israel. Nehemiah essentially takes care of the city. Above all, he takes a look at the area without letting on as to what his projects are. This is a grand moment of biblical history! Without an escort, in the middle of the night, the returned exile guides his mount along the ancient walls, naming one by one the gaping openings at the site of the former doors, counting the holes in the wall, until the rubble forces him to stop. The governor takes count of the 42, 360 repatriates (Neh 7, 66). In order for the reconstruction to be the work of a people, each important family is responsible for restoring a part of the wall. Once the news has spread, the adversaries become troubled and find before them builders who are soldiers, each

198 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits one holding a trowel and a sword. At the same time, trouble comes from within: rich Jews become richer and poor Jews, in payment for their debts, only have their sons and daughters to sell as slaves. This is why, Nehemiah tells them, their ancestors brought ruin upon the city. This time the people listen to him, and they listen better than they had listened to the prophets. Then a day comes when the assembly of Israel, finally reconstituted, celebrates the feast of Tabernacles. A gap is overcome in history. The time of the great events, as also that of the great prophets, has come to an end. The past—and what a past!—is no longer known but by the book. Book of the alliance, book of the Law. Henceforth, all is prose. Formerly, from Sinai, God used to speak, whereas today what rises up is only “a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose…” (Neh 8, 4 [RSV]). There is no thunder, or lightning, not even a slight breeze. It is not the voice of God that makes itself heard, nor that of Moses, but the voice of the scribes. The reading lasts for not less than seven days, for a fourth of a day. This is because, in order to instruct the people—what was perhaps newest of all—it was necessary for the president to read “from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Neh 8, 8 [RSV]). The usual cries of joy at such feasts are not immediately heard. Crying, Israel confesses not only its sins, but (what is a model for our Church!) “the iniquities of their ancestors” (Neh 9, 2 [RSV]). Finally, the people hear the grand narrative of the graces of God and of his repeated forgiveness, a narrative that ends on a cry for help (Ne 9, 5-37). Without waiting for a response, qualified representatives commit themselves on their own initiative in the name of the people to observe henceforth the law which has just been read, the law of Israel sanctioned by the king of the Persians (Esd 7, 26). The text of Nehemiah especially takes from the law, in 10, 1-40, measures regarding social justice and what regulates the manner of adoring God in his Temple. From this day on, Jerusalem with its Temple will shine in the distance like a beacon for Jews who have remained in the Diaspora. Another commitment is concerned with the dissolution of marriages contracted with foreign women. Certainly, this step back regarding the purity of rites and of blood contrasts with the atmosphere of previous centuries. Moreover, Israel, henceforth somewhat removed from the grand events of known history, enters

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Nehemiah 8. Reconstructor of Jerusalem after the exile, Nehemiah officially establishes the law and presides over its reading by Ezra (Cathedral of Sainte Marie, Auch, stalls).

200 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits into the silence of recollection. Thus sheltered, what wise men have remembered is gathered into archives, corrected, and used to compose the Bible. This silence of recollection will favor the development of the new alliance among the people such as Jeremiah announced it. Israel, certainly, runs the risk of being closed in on itself but, in the shelter of a wall of multiple precepts, the invisible inscription which unifies all in the depths of hearts is engraved. Far from being overwhelmed by this return from exile, Israel senses that its expectation has grown. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. • Nehemiah 8, 8 [RSV]•

Job: The Cry of the Leper

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etween a leper crying out and the most beautiful poem regarding it there is the human work to produce such a masterpiece. The Book of Job is a unique cry of passion expressed with a wave of sumptuous images and an elaborated eloquence which grip the reader. As Job is not alone, a struggle unfolds among several characters who launch an attack against one another. These are Job himself, his three friends, a young man, and finally his Creator. Each one argues and becomes indignant. The work makes one think of a play where society has put itself onto the stage. In doing this, it questions itself. Job’s friends, who are wise, repeat what has always been said in their world concerning the reward of virtue with success: the order of things, guaranteed by God, would assure us, that the man faithful to the law of God will, in turn, necessarily be granted happiness: prosperity, posterity, longevity, renown. Such a necessity was felt all the more keenly since the perspective of any happiness after death remained unknown to the men of this time,20 and remained so for several centuries. But misfortune hounds Job, who is a just man. The play begins, before the curtain opens, with the apparition of a character named Satan. His role is to criticize God, who has shown himself proud to have a servant such as Job. Satan objects: “Does Job fear God for nothing? […] But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” ( Job 1, 9-10 [RSV]). God allows this and Satan takes Job’s riches and descendants from him, he takes everything and makes him a leper. God only protects his life. Job, though struck in this manner, continues to bless God: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” ( Job 1, 21 [RSV]). On the other hand, we shall soon see him curse solemnly, and at length, the day when he was born: “Let the day perish in which I was born […]” ( Job 3, 3 [RSV]). We should note that Job is not a man of Israel, not a descendant of Abraham. A wise man from a distant land, he cannot find a model in the wisdom of Moses, nor remember having been liberated from Egypt and overwhelmed with promises. Certainly, he calls upon YHWH,

202 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits but we should not conclude from this that he is Jewish. According to Genesis 4, 26, a grandson of Adam, Enosh, already invoked him. The poet returns to a distant epoch in order to have us admire in Job a just man who is not Jewish: in his own way he hooks up with the universalist inspiration that is at the center of the book of Jonah. Job has no other promises than those implied by the fact of having been created, and it is precisely because of this fact that he sees misfortune in his day. For he has lost everything, except the voice to cry it out. “To live is not a good”: the same thing may be said with more or less suppressed derision, without the grossness of sniggering, but with the feeling of being superior to those who would not yet have understood their misfortune of having been born, and with the satisfaction of taking this illusion from them. But this dry manner of speaking belongs to Satan, the jealous one. It does not belong to Job. On the contrary, Job cries out, he cries out to his friends and even more towards God: he never refuses a dialogue, be this with his friends or with God. He holds on to that most of all. But, faced with the depth of the anxiety and protestation which resonates in the voice of Job, the speech of his friends remains united. And although his friends are shocked by his impatience, they also end up by crying aloud. Through the painting of their attitude and the language that they proffer, traditional wisdom is poorly handled, even mocked, by the author of the book. However, the friends of Job are not completely wrong: who can deny that integrity, fidelity, mastery of self, and other virtues bring more happiness than their opposites? The Psalms and Proverbs repeat it. Everything deteriorates when those who practice these virtues suspect misfortune: to hear them speak, if he has come to that, it is because he had not practiced these virtues as they had. What is this limit, what is this trap that virtue falls into when it turns away from the unfortunate as though they were guilty, as though they were impure? This skidding of virtue is not only the effect of bad reasoning. It is a reasoning which comes from zones of the heart where jealousy hides, a jealousy which the jealous person does not know. This is what the author of the book of Job uncovers. The friends of Job do not immediately assimilate leprosy and sin. But what makes them lose their footing is the intensity of Job’s words. He should moderate his cry, this protest that is more positive than any form of doubt. He should suffer well, and he suffers poorly. Using this as the base of their argument, his friends finally

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Job: Does the man who is faithful to the law of God then always enjoy happiness? (Benedictine Abbey, Blaubeuren).

204 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits become the accusers of the one they had come to console, accusers who are all the more vehement since their consolation is not accepted. Here we are at the heart of the book: what does Job say in his lamentation? His speech is not straightforward, his statements are jerky. He proclaims his innocence ( Job 6, 24; 10, 7; 16; 17). He describes himself as he was in happier days, which gives the author the occasion to sketch a marvelous portrait of the just man in patriarchal times ( Job 29). What he especially does is displace the question: “So are you only a judge?” he tells God. “And even if I had sinned—for who does not sin ( Job 7, 12-21, etc. [RSV])—is that a reason to track me down?” At the same time that he regrets having come into the world, Job does not call on God the judge and then God the creator: “Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews […] Yet these things you hid in your heart […] Bold as a lion you hunt me […]” ( Job 10, 10-16 [RSV]). The more moderate of his friends invite him to lower the tone: “Do you believe that you are God’s equal? Do you think you can summon him to answer you?” This reproach, this brake, instead of stopping Job, only drives him on more forcefully, which turns the problematic around: “Were I guilty” he tells them, “I would not have this audacity.” My frankness before God is my virtue, and believing replaces any possible merit. To believe that God will answer me, even if this should happen after my death ( Job 19, 25-27). After Satan, who believed his virtue doubtful, Job’s friends were scandalized by his trouble. He found “the last word” to his answer: “O that I had the indictment written by my adversary! Surely I would carry it on my shoulder; I would bind it on me like a crown; I would give him an account of all my steps; like a prince I would approach him” ( Job 31, 35-37 [RSV]). The last word of the book belongs to God. He sides with Job and proves his friends wrong: “…you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” ( Job 42, 7 [RSV]).

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Job said to God: “Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? why have you made me your target? […] Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.” • Job 7, 19-21 [RSV]• …but I will defend my ways to his face. This will be my salvation […]. • Job 13, 15-16 [RSV]•

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Prayer of Jonah, vomited by the large fish that had swallowed him (Chapel of the Castle of the Hohenzollern).

Jonah and the Man from Everywhere

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he book of Jonah is a very short narrative of about three pages. In it we can distinguish two series of events. One is quite surprising; the other is a string of miracles. Let us add this: the books that are the farthest from precise history teach us much about what happened in the heart of their authors and of those who read them. The ability to discern between types of narrative (what one calls their “literary genre”) requires a time of apprenticeship. Here is the first series of events, surprising in themselves: Nineveh, the capital of what had been, before Babylon, the great power of the region, was so vast that it took three days to cross it on foot. The Lord sends to the Ninevites a man named Jonah, prophet of Israel, with a message which consists in telling them that their wickedness is such that it has become known to God. They will be punished: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be destroyed!” ( Jonah 3, 14 [RSV]). Jonah reacts by fleeing because (he will later explain) he is afraid, knowing the goodness of God, that his prediction will not be fulfilled (an exquisite detail). But God takes him back to Nineveh. The prophet has even walked for a day and all the people, already, have put on sacks, are fasting and doing penance. The king then proclaims an edict: all, apparently even the animals, will have to continue to fast. God comes back on his decision. This turn around is a drama for Jonah, who sees happening what he had feared: Nineveh will not be punished. While Jonah still persists in waiting “to see what would become of the city” ( Jonah 3, 5 [RSV]), God ends up by telling him: “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” ( Jonah 4, 11 [RSV]). Even under this reduced form, the story of Jonah does not fail to touch us. The frustration of the prophet, contradicted by the event, is hilariously funny. And then, and especially, this lesson about the love

208 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits of God for every living being and even for the worst enemies of Israel tells us much about the horizons which opened up to some in the people from the time of exile and which closed to others. The author could well feel quite alone before a large majority. He will have wanted to invite Israel to recognize itself in Jonah. But what we have just related is only the framework for the book of Jonah. What is missing from our drama is the miraculous role played by nature, which provides the set and the actor, the instrument and revealer of the goodness of the Creator. Only the Ocean, worked up by God, was able to change a rebellious Jonah into an obedient Jonah. For, fearing to see Nineveh spared, Jonah has so strongly resisted his mission that he has taken a boat for another direction rather than obey. Once the storm has begun, the crew draws lots in order to know who, on board, has attracted the wrath of the gods. Fate falls on the prophet, on Jonah. Questioned, Jonah suddenly speaks as a true prophet, without lying. Far from protesting, he confirms the drawing of lots: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you” ( Jonah 1, 12 [RSV]). The kind sailors (pagans, however, who “each cried to his god” Jonah 1, 4 [RSV]) hesitate and only do so after the storm has doubled in strength. It happens that the God who had whipped up the sea and who had directed the lots has a large fish come by and swallow Jonah for a period of three days and three nights. After this, the monster, always obeying God, vomits the prophet onto the bank where he did not want to be. Later, when Jonah retires into the bitterness of his disappointment, God again has nature act. He has a bush grow in the space of a night so that its shade might refresh the head of the prophet. “Jonah was very happy about the bush” ( Jonah 4, 6 [RSV]). Then God calls forth a little worm in order for it to dry up the bush. He has a burning wind blow when the sun returns above Jonah’s head—until the prophet, overwhelmed, turns towards God. It is then that he receives this answer: “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow […] And should I not be concerned about Nineveh […]?” ( Jonah 4, 10-11 [RSV]). Thus does God have the sea monster and the small worm obey Him; He commands the wind, the shade, and the sun. Known and celebrated as creator, He is known and celebrated in His relation to every human being, be he Jew or pagan.

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 209 He is also celebrated by Jonah during the three days that he spends in the stomach of the monster. There the prophet composes a psalm, there that he exults, in advance, over his salvation, as have done so many psalmists. His prayer goes ahead of salvation. It already meets God in this Temple where, once liberated, he will go to carry out the vow that he has just made. The image of Jonah holds a large place in Christian iconography because, to those who asked a sign from him, Jesus answered that this generation would have no other sign but “the sign of Jonah” (Matt 16, 4 [RSV]). Although it is natural to think of the resurrection, occurring after three days, it is a fact that it was not a sign granted to those who wanted one. The disciples of Jesus asked, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” ( John 14, 22 [RSV]). It is probably necessary to understand the sign this way: Just as Jonah came out of the monster secretly, but proclaimed publicly in Nineveh the word which would save it, thus will the Nations not have a sign which might convince them, unless it be a word which will be as though freed from the bonds of death. This word will announce the Gospel to the Nations, a salutary word which will surprise Israel as it surprised Jonah. One would say, in reading these few pages, that, in spite of itself, Israel is the bearer of salvation for the Nations. The book of Jonah carefully reminds it of this. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. • Jonah 3,10 to 14, 1 [RSV]•

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Tobit junior, accompanied by a dog and the angel Raphael, returns to his father and restores his sight (Tobit 11).

Tobit, His Son Tobit, and Raphael

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he oldest writings of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus) “demand that they be believed”21 and in their manner they have something of the authority of the laws, which they precede and accompany. While tracing the first steps of the history, they contain the seeds of what it will become later, and this to the end. The book of Tobit does not have this weight. Written in the ambiance of Hellenistic Judaism, absent from Hebrew Bibles and known to us only through the Greek, it proposes to reconstitute for the reader’s pleasure and edification the manner in which the Jews lived, those who, after the exile, had settled in the lands of the conquerors. The family of Tobit lived in Nineveh, but traveled very much for business reasons. Tobit unfolds downstream from the narratives of Genesis, the majority of which belong to the grand literary texts. Here we find the same stream of water, but flowing in the plain. The narrative is more verbose, granting more to sentiment, to tears, to details which strive to be real. But the connection with the major narratives, with the prototypes, is evident. Moreover, it is a question of “Tobit and Tobit.”22 Having the same name, this father and this son represent under a form full of imagery the very principle of genealogy, which orders the narratives of Genesis. The story is touching. A family exiled in Persia welcomes a very young relative come from abroad, exclaims that he resembles his father, a father whose traits had disappeared, up to that time, from everyone’s memory. After this journey, Tobit junior, now an adult after much travel, discovers at the house his old blind father. The son then heals the father of his affliction. The circle of the grand journey closes with this face-to-face encounter of a father and his son. A prophet named Malachi thus represented for himself the end of times, or the heart of the promise. The prophet Elija, he announces, “will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents […]” (Mal 4, 6 [RSV]). The old towards the new,

212 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the new towards the old. This return is not a repetition, it is a fulfillment. By virtue of a secret law of life, the unheard of, always unknown and the only thing hoped for, is what springs forth when we believe that we have retraced our steps. Another round trip is related to us at the same location of these reunions. The hero of this other journey (invisible) is the third person of the book, about whom it is time to speak. His name is Raphael, which means “God heals.” This Raphael is in reality an angel and even “one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord” (Tob 12, 15 [RSV]). He is, shall we say, all the more an angel since we see him in the company of an animal, one that is also the friend of men, this little dog who is shown to us wriggling and yapping during the trip (Tob 6, 2; 11, 4). Between this angel and this animal, the little man goes his way. The identity of the angel has remained hidden until the last moment. Then we see him—the one who had left God, who had left his place near the Glory of God and come to this humble earth—return from this same earth to God. “…I am ascending to him who sent me,” he says (Tob 12, 20 [RSV]). The nature of this mission should receive our attention: several biblical texts told us that Wisdom, the same wisdom which came from God before creation, played with men before “the world’s first bits of soil” were created (see Prov 8, 22-31). The function of Raphael also presents itself as a rapprochement of heaven and earth, but its itinerant character is specific. Not only Wisdom made visible, but divine Providence personified. Raphael shares with Tobit junior the dangers of a journey and has him overcome them. The moment of his disappearance is rich with instruction. One only recognizes an angel when he is no longer there. But at the same time the hours spent in one’s presence are transfigured. The time of distress and of prayer with no answer is revealed in this instant which sheds light on the past. The past is what has transformed itself into presence. From that moment the past is no longer past, but passes. A past suddenly alive, from the death that it was. It is I, the angel says, who “brought and read the record of your prayer before the glory of the Lord […]” (Tob 12, 12 [RSV])! In returning to heaven, Raphael gives to those he leaves behind an unexpected instruction: “Write down all these things that have happened to you” (Tob 12, 20 [RSV]).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 213 Where is there, since then, the most real presence of an angel? Shall we find it in this adventure that is pleasant to imagine or, hidden, does this presence dwell for us in the text of the unknown author who heard this order and who obeyed it? The presence of an angel communicated to us in the text that we read because the angel wanted it thus for us. “Write down all these things that have happened to you.” This simple command hands us a most unexpected key in order to open the truth of this book as well as of many others. Tobit junior goes from his father to his father through ordeals. Raphael goes from Glory to Glory by accompanying these ordeals. Let us stop here for a moment. Lines may converge without meeting as long as they are not traced to the end. These two lines, the journey of Tobit junior and the journey of the angel, (the first horizontal, the second vertical), here keep their distance. If the distance were less strongly indicated, the conjunction would lose its force. The angel Raphael insists on giving this precision, on having one observe this distance, right at the moment when he is going to return to his point of departure: “Although you were watching me, I really did not drink or eat anything—but what you saw was a vision” (Tob 12, 19 [RSV]). A Spirit, also an angel, behind the back of the writer whom he saw so closely, did he see on the more distant horizon some envoy who, coming from Glory and returning to Glory, would empty, no longer in appearance but rather in the flesh, the chalice of hardship which would heal us? That one would not pretend to eat with us nor to die with us. Tobit junior travels a far distance in order to return to his father. This image takes us as far as the author. Author-actor of the drama that he relates, because from the fact that he writes he carries out the will of one of his characters. The author has also known exile and returns to his father. By this I mean to say that he returns to his fathers, on the side of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In effect, the book of Tobit is full of traits borrowed from stories in Genesis. The angel Raphael relays for all the messengers from on high who visited, helped, and tested the patriarchs. What happens after the Babylonian exile is superimposed on what took place before the first exile, that of Egypt. Thus young Tobit, a new Jacob, faces danger while crossing a river with a huge fish which began to bite his foot. Raphael then teaches the boy how to extract the gall from the enemy who is attacking him in order to compose a powerful remedy against the demon and every sickness.

214 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits In this way he will be able to cure not only his father but also marry young Sarah, after having freed her from the demon which had taken seven fiancés from her… The story of the wedding resounds entirely with echoes from weddings of yesteryear. The wedding celebration of Tobit is just as filled with providential attention from the Lord as was that of Rachel. We must also note that the test which has been overcome here is terrible: the arrival of young Tobit saves his future wife from suicide. As for Tobit senior, he had faced death several times in order to remain faithful to the law of Moses in a hostile and foreign land.

Esther or Disguises

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he argument of the book of Esther is relatively simple, although the narrative unfolds many arabesques. A plot has formed in the bosom of the Persian empire, which is almost without limits, in order to exterminate the entire Jewish population. Esther, a Jewish exile who has become the wife of King Artaxerxes,23 prevents the project from succeeding. A feast is instituted in order to commemorate this happy ending. It is still celebrated today. On the one hand, all is done, in the area of writing, in order to captivate the reader, who does not feel that he is in the presence of a historical narrative. On the other hand, the very beginning, this implementation of a “final solution” gives this fabulous text the incomparable weight of reality. Israel had never had to face such a threat and never, it seems, would it have to under this form until our twentieth century. The reader wavers between the less real and the more real. The more recent Greek version frames the Hebrew text with the narrative of a premonitory dream that is then verified. Because of this, the work could be placed with apocalyptic writings, which like to proceed with the interpretation of dreams. Besides its anticipatory importance, the book of Esther has some footing in experience. It witnesses to the complaints voiced against the Jews: “…a certain nation scattered among the other nations in all your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other nation, and they do not keep the laws of the king” (Est 3, 8 [RSV]). Such is the speech of their accuser. Well, these formulas are anachronistic, they reflect the statements made in the Greek milieu (Dan 1, 8; 3, 8-12; Jdt 12, 2; Wis 2, 14-15), whereas the Persians had become the guarantors of the law “of the God of heaven” (Ezra 1, 2 [RSV]) for the Jews. So historians place Esther less than three centuries before our era. However, much ink has flowed in order to justify or to deplore the fact that this narrative did find a place in the canon of Scripture. Its anticipatory force did not appear to our predecessors as clearly as it did to generations close to Hitlerian genocide and to several others. One has especially been shocked by the ending. In effect, Artaxerxes grants

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Esther 8. Queen Esther intercedes for her people with her husband King Artaxerxes (La Chaise-Dieu, tapestry).

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 217 the Jews the right to execute those who, among the people, had made themselves guilty or accomplices of this project of genocide against their people: the retaliation would have affected some seventy-five thousand persons. A concern for equity invites several remarks. The number chosen by the narrator (or, more precisely, the storyteller), aims at indicating the unlimited stretch of the empire, because it is arrived at from the number of executions observed in the capital, six hundred in two days. So we should suppose a large number of towns less populated, and therefore a lower number—or very lower—of those condemned in each of them, in order for the number of seventy-five thousand to be reached, a number which, in any case, is fictitious. Moreover, even though it is apparently not a question of a trial, the king only gives the Jews two days to carry out justice, and no one among them may claim the property of the condemned. It thus seems that the narrator was concerned about foreseeing some objections, even if he could not foresee those of someone living in the twentieth century. The first scene of the story (see Neh 2, 1-6) is a banquet. It is presented to us with the aura of a distant world, an atmosphere which characterizes the entire book. The author introduces us to the table etiquette and customs of the harem among the Persians. If Esther possesses the means of saving her people, it is because she has become the improbable Jewish queen of the Persian king. He wanted to replace Queen Vashti, guilty of resisting him when he wanted to show her to his invited guests as a way of concluding the banquet. She refused. The wise men consulted by the king had given their answer: if any husband was ever to be obeyed, the queen had to be removed from her throne. Only Esther is judged rather beautiful in order to become the new queen to replace Vashti. The fact that she is Jewish is ignored by all, even by the king. Her cousin Mordecai accompanies her and watches over her. At the court, Mordecai will meet another immigrant, Haman. Amalekite by nationality, Haman is a character who is chosen on purpose, because the enmity which poses his people against Israel goes back to the days of Moses: Samuel had remembered this by killing with his own hand the king of the Amalekites (see supra, chap. 21). Haman obtains from the king a decree of extermination which affects all of Israel and which would have his enemy Mordecai hanged from the highest gallows. Then Esther, at first hesitant, overcomes her fright

218 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits and, risking all, tells the king: “…we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, plundered, and made slaves—we and our children— male and female slaves” (Esth 7, 4 [RSV]). Then there is a dramatic turn of events: it is discovered at the same time that this cousin of Esther, this unknown Jew, Mordecai, had formerly saved the life of Artaxerxes. Without giving any hint, the king asks his wicked counselor how he would honor the greatest servant of the land. Thinking that he is preparing his own triumph, the Amalekite provides the information and learns too late that the triumph is foreseen for Mordecai and the gallows for himself. And so it will be. All this ends with festivity and is celebrated in the same way from age to age. A woman has changed the outcome. Thus is celebrated the power of feminine beauty throughout the history of Israel. There is something marvelous: the folklore born among the Jewish people after Biblical times has taken this narrative and taken it farther than it itself goes. It is in the form of carnival that the feast is celebrated and called “feast of the lots” (Pourim). This occurs during our own carnival time. Carnival fits well with the book of Esther and it seems to reveal its meaning accurately. Because the oppressed has shown himself under the appearances of the oppressor and conversely, it is the time for disguising oneself, to dress up as someone else just as Haman and Mordecai had to exchange their pourim, their lots. Everyone expected, until the last moment, to see on the gallows, the place for the criminal, the one who revealed himself, but only at the last second, to be the just one. The festivity is only complete if we go to the very end, farther than the last moment, when one is drunk “ad lo’yada,’” that is to say “until not knowing” which of the two is the good one. The true just man and the sinner only appear against appearances, in the depth of night. Our faith does not say otherwise.

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…at the end of the festivity the king gave a drinking party […] for six days in the courtyard of the royal palace, which was adorned with curtains of fine linen and cotton, held by cords of purple linen attached to gold and silver blocks on pillars of marble and other stones. Gold and silver couches were placed on a mosaic floor of emerald, mother-of-pearl, and marble. There were coverings of gauze, embroidered in various colors, with roses arranged around them. • Esther 1, 5-6 [RSV]•

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Judith 8, 7. [RSV] Judith “was beautiful in appearance, and was very lovely to behold” (Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres).

J

Judith

udith (a name which means “The Jewess”) has cut off the head of Holofernes, a general commanding the army of Nebuchadnezzar, after she has seduced him and made him believe that she would satisfy his desire. By striking down the leader, she has put to flight his army and saved her people without a battle. Such is the argument of the book of Judith. Quite late and known only in Greek, it has not been placed (unlike Esther) among the books that the Jews accept as being canonical, that is to say truly Biblical. The vision of a very beautiful woman holding the head of a decapitated man has fascinated painters, especially after the Renaissance. The head is that of Holofernes or of John the Baptist, the woman is Judith or Salome. From one painting to the other, values may be reversed. The woman, depending on whether she is Judith or Herodias, represents virtue or lasciviousness; the man, depending on whether he is Holofernes or John the Baptist, represents proud brutality or holiness. Painting thus reflects on itself, on its relation to appearances, by often returning to this couple of contrary images. And the relationship of the two paintings signifies for us how dramatically beauty can hide evil or render goodness sensitive. The opposite is true for ugliness. A reflection on ambiguity which, to see the light of day, had to wait until the end of the Middle Ages.24 The book of Judith is at ease with exaggeration. While the project of the Persian king, in the book of Esther, was already aimed at the destruction of “the Jewish people on a given day of the twelfth month, which is Adar, and to plunder their goods” (Esth 3, 13 [RSV]), Nebuchadnezzar wants nothing less than to get “his revenge on the whole region” ( Jdt 2, 1 [RSV]). Fantastical projections…but our century has fulfilled them with real facts. The Bible, in the book of Esther as in this prolongation written in Greek, ends with these visions. Holofernes carries out the orders of the king “so that all nations should worship Nebuchadnezzar alone […]” ( Jdt 3, 8 [RSV]). Judith parodies this style in order to deceive the officer when she tells him: “…but also the animals of the field and the cattle and the birds of the air will live, because of your power, under Nebuchadnezzar and all his

222 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits house” ( Jdt 11, 7 [RSV]). Everything is carried out, truths with a decisive and new meaning create the path of their fulfillment. Esther and Judith are two parallel books. In these two books, which might seem to be made in order for a reader to spend his time pleasantly, the entire world trembles on its base. On both sides, salvation comes from a woman, but that does not mean that it comes through weakness! Rather does salvation burst forth on a very thin line that separates, in the two narratives, law and transgression. From the beginning, the wives of the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham’s wife, were shown to us to be accessible, really or virtually, to the foreigner, Egyptian or Philistine (Gen 12, 10-20; 20; 26). The exiled Esther could not be refused to the foreigner, to the conquering pagan, and she shares his bed. Judith exposes herself to dishonor when, dressed up and smelling of perfume (see Jdt 10, 3-4), she enters the tent of a warrior taken with his strength and then stretches out at his feet for a banquet ( Jdt 12, 15-16). She takes pride in the fact that her ancestor is Simeon, who took revenge for the rape of his sister Dinah by spilling the blood of an entire population. Judith is going to lie in order to kill, but she will have thought about taking her own food to the table of Holofernes in order to observe ritual customs ( Jdt 12, 2-4), and she will purify herself every night in the stream ( Jdt 12, 7). She lies to the Assyrian by pretending that Israel will be handed over to him as a punishment for a sin that she invents, but she tells the truth when she affirms that God would have protected Israel if it had not sinned. This woman is admired not only because she put her own life in danger but because, relying on God and on her own determination, she risked breaking the law. Here we are given the spectacle of virtue which does more than avoid evil: she draws rather near to it in order to be done with it. Only life can conquer death. It seems that a number of these later works gather around the same mystery. Judith, whose appearance astonishes her own people ( Jdt 10, 7; 13, 16) as well as her enemies ( Jdt 10, 14, 19 and 23), passes through every appearance. Judith, who cuts off the head of the enemy, actualizes, at least in literature, the figure of Eve who, approached by evil more closely than Adam was, gave in to it, but to her was given the promise of a descendant who would crush the head of the serpent However, something would be missing from the brilliant scenario interpreted by Judith and Holofernes if we were not attentive to

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 223 an intrigue which takes place in the background and whose hero is Achior, the Canaanite “leader of all the Ammonites” ( Jdt 5, 5 [RSV]). Ammon is an ally of Holofernes. He belongs to a people that is one of Israel’s neighbors, whom the Assyrian has enlisted for his campaign. Achior’s role in the council is to enlighten Babylonian Holofernes regarding his chances in the battle. This battle should bring to an end the siege of the Jewish city of Bethulia, outpost of Jerusalem. Whoever takes control of Bethulia will be the master of Jerusalem. In order to inform his leader regarding the chances of the Jewish camp, Achior has him listen to a story which goes back to the time of Abraham. To summarize the history of Israel is to talk about the faith of Israel. The conclusion is that this people is invincible if it has not offended its God. It is as much as saying that Nebuchadnezzar, who has set himself up as a rival to all gods, is not equal to the god of the Jews. Such a statement can only offend the ear of a Babylonian. As a punishment, Achior is bound, then left at the bottom of the wall of Bethulia where he will wait to be massacred with the inhabitants of the city when it is attacked. But the Jews notice him, take him into the city, and treat him as a guest. In conclusion, Judith, who has returned to her own people with the head of Holofernes, calls for Achior so that he can see it. He then cries out: “Blessed are you in every tent of Juda. In every nation those who hear your name will be alarmed” ( Jdt 14, 7 [RSV]).25 He requests the story of her exploit up to the moment of their meeting each other. “When Achior saw all that the God of Israel had done, he believed firmly in God. So he was circumcised, and joined the house of Israel, remaining so to this day” ( Jdt 14, 10 [RSV]. It seems that Judith’s exploit was not complete as long as the Canaanite had not been converted. This work of God was not something that she had thought of when she contemplated saving her people! The motif of bonding with the Jewish people is borrowed from the narratives of conquest, with the entry of the prostitute Rahab into the conquering people. The literary technique of borrowings belongs to the archaizing taste of a recent epoch. For Rahab as for Achior, for these two children of Canaan, the narrative of the grand deeds of the God of Israel has played a determining role. A remarkable function is recognized in the narrative which would seem to concern only Israel: the narrative of Israel is desired by God in order to attract the

224 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits Nations. First of all, Achior is, at the risk of his own life, the narrator of what he had heard regarding the Jewish people. The same Achior is then the receiver of the narrative of Judith. The two narratives are quite distinct, as though to show that the story of Israel is never over. The ear of the Canaanite was receptive two times. At first it was to give credence to the ancestral story of Israel. Then it was in desiring to hear what had extended this same narrative up to “today”! A decisive moment, expressly noted by the words “he believed” ( Jdt 14, 10 [RSV]). To believe in the story of Israel is not only to hear it: that is what is proposed to the Nations. “To believe and to be circumcised”: the sequence of these two phases, so clearly distinguished, supported by “to believe,” and pronounced by a Canaanite, opens a new world. Perhaps, without these words, this book would never have come into our Scriptures. Thus, the real subject of the book of Judith is the crossing of the frontier that separates Israel from the nations. This is done twice: by a Jewish woman in order to go out towards the Nations and remove the evil from them, and by a Canaanite man in order to become a part of Israel and to receive its gifts, not without taking the gift of himself and of his own history. The two motifs hold together. A Jewess, a Canaanite, on each side of a besieged city, change camps. It seems, once again, that Israel and the Nations cannot avoid each another. The image of Achior handed over to death near the walls, then freed, merits a place in our minds as a memory not less important than that of Judith and her trophy. A wall comes tumbling down because of a body that was handed over to death. The enemy is eliminated, the foreigner becomes a brother.

D

Daniel and the End of Times

aniel is a proper name placed on a moment of history rather than the name of a man who would have played a role in history. Daniel is not the author, but the hero of the book which bears this title and whose content is made of three types of writing. Either we find ourselves before marvelous episodes that are related with a disquieting naturalness…would they not have a second meaning? Or, like a wise man, Daniel interprets the dreams of the great kings. Or terrible visions even overwhelm him, and he is unable to decipher them without the help of an angel. Their content deals with the ultimate fate of the entire world. The book of Daniel is a late text, the most recent of the Hebrew Bible, composed four centuries after the events that it relates. These unfold during the exile, between the reign of the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar and that of Darius the Mede, whereas the book is written under the reign of one of the successors of Alexander, around 165 before Jesus Christ, in the ambiance of Greek civilization, which a dominating politics wants to inculcate by force on Israel in complete disdain for its laws. The narration of events that took place well before the time of the narrator and his readers requires, for their transposition, quite an effort. It is a matter of having these readers understand through the fiction of an archaic framework what, in reality, has happened to them by the foreign pressure on their culture and on their faith. Regarding the incredible feats that save Daniel and his companions, who obey God rather than the king, historical criticism teaches us that the real heroes are, rather than Daniel, the martyrs who had quite recently suffered the savage persecutions inflicted upon Israel by one of Alexander’s successors, Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164). Perhaps the narratives with which the book was composed had already circulated during the crisis itself, and secretly. Thus could the coded character of the book be explained: other names (unknown to us) were to be read under those of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abdenego (Sidrak, Midrak and Abdenago of our ancient books), etc..

226 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits The extraordinary events which save the just in this book have an extreme and magical quality to them that we do not find elsewhere in the Bible. Although they have been thrown bound into the blazing furnace, “still wearing their tunics, their trousers, their hats, and their other garments […]” (Dan 3, 21 [RSV]), for having refused to adore a golden statue, the king finds them in the morning in the midst of flames, looking healthy, and with no burning scent about them. With an angel present, they sing the praises of God. Then, by no less a prodigious act, the idolatrous king begins to bless the God of Israel and to show the heroes some favor. Nothing like this had ever been seen. The author transposes, in a fairytale-like manner, real facts: some Jews had preferred to die rather than transgress their law. This took place when Antiochus Epiphanes, proud of the fact that he had gathered numerous peoples into his empire, had forbidden, under the pain of death, any obedience to the law of Moses, since it distinguished one people from among many. In the eyes of the Hellenized king, it was such a beautiful thing to become Greek, as all the others had hurried to do! Well, the fate of these martyrs of the law is painful for Israel. It introduces a new experience. This is because its religion, for centuries, had promised happiness to those who would keep the law of Moses, after which one was scandalized to see so many wicked people prosper. But, this time, things have become even worse: it was precisely because they had kept the law that the just had been killed, and God had done nothing for them. However, they had prepared themselves to be faithful, even though God would not intervene to keep them from being tortured. If they remained faithful, it would thus not be in order to escape death. Another episode shows Daniel thrown in the lion’s den, whose stone cover King Darius has sealed. The wild animals spare the condemned and, as compensation, the king throws in his accusers, devoured before they even reach the bottom, as well as their wives and their children as might be expected. What is most beautiful in this naive story is that the king had only acted by the constraint and force of his minister, had approached the den while trembling and, finding Daniel at peace among the lions, had proclaimed in his joy—a marvel more wondrous than what preceded—that all peoples had to bless the God of Israel. Behind the miracles can be seen what is most unexpected: it is shown that the just person does not obey through fear, and that fidelity to

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Daniel 6, 17-25. Calm between the lions, Daniel announces the victory of the just man over death (Abbey of La Sauve-Majeure).

228 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the law of Moses does not mean that the chosen people would show disdain for the Nations of the world. By saving Daniel, God did not choose to convert the pagan king to the Jewish law, but he does change his heart. This is the theme of a story about Nebuchadnezzar who was changed into an animal, a punishment which finally had him repent and please God. On the surface, this is an unlikely story, but it is instructive regarding the dispositions that this book favors in men, an attitude that would not have the persecuted resort to blind fanaticism. What is most unheard of is this victory over the fear of death and friendship that extends beyond religious and ethnic borders. Well, essentially, this unexpected state will be shown, and this time without the detour of such images, in the second book of Maccabees26 which, fifty years later, relates the real events to which the book of Daniel had referred. Thus, seven brothers have died under the eyes of their mother because they did not agree to eat pork, since the law of Moses forbids it. They have been tortured for a long time and God has not stayed the hand of the executioner. Under torture they have declared with assurance their hope: God will bring them back to life. Their situation is thus not identical to that of Daniel and his companions. God had saved them before their death, whereas the seven brothers do not see their salvation with eyes of the flesh in this world. And those who watch them die see it even less. Salvation finds them in death and, for this reason, it remains unseen. We can then wonder why the story of Daniel did not pursue the narrative to the end. Since it is a question of two narratives about the same events, with the hidden or clear intention of talking about persecution leading to martyrdom, how do we explain that they differ in having us see either the loss or the salvation of the heroes? Daniel talks about the martyrdom as though he had attended it through a vision from on high: the time of martyrdom is, for the seer, the time of salvation. What appears to the seer, as a general rule, appears to no one else. At the same time, if he describes the situation to the extreme degree of the hyperbole, if he pushes the impossible to the end by getting rid of transitions, it still remains that he has taken from the tradition the aspects which he exaggerates in this way. The den and the mouth of the lion are images from the Psalms. Yet the psalmists say that one has been kept from the mortal den or asked to be: no one comes so near to it as do Daniel and his friends. But the strongest point of relationship

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 229 between the Psalms and our book is still the linkage of being tested and giving praise. To walk in the midst of fire while praising God, and to do so at the same time, describes rather well the entire Psalter. This careful attention to continue, and to prolong, the representations of an earlier time, when it is a question of crossing a threshold as radical as the one where light is cast on the resurrection, is of great significance. We can then understand that, in Daniel’s time, one already interprets the Psalms by means of a prophetic key, a key that most of Israel and the first Christian generation will use. David, Saint Peter will say, “was a prophet” (Acts 2, 30 [RSV]), and his psalms meant more than one could understand from them in his time. If, at the time of Jesus, the entire school of the Pharisees holds for certain the resurrection of bodies, this cannot be without some base in Scripture. But since, in the first Testament, Scripture remains more than discrete on the subject, it was even more necessary to interpret it in order to compensate for its silences: the theme of “rescue,” for which the psalmists thank God, was transposed, starting at a certain epoch, no longer upon the encounter of a particular danger but on that of death itself. Daniel represents a decisive stage on this path. He clearly takes a position regarding it, though with few words, when he writes: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake […]” (Dan 12, 2 [RSV]). Let us finally note that talking about the resurrection in veiled terms has its advantages. It will never be a truth that is possessed; it remains a mystery, an object of faith. It is a definitive and absolute good which is given to be desired from passing and relative experiences. Many interpretations of the Scriptures, and especially on essential points, should not be confused with demonstrations. That does not keep one from arguing, but one can reason in order to found hope without having it impose itself as a constraint on reason. The book of Maccabees applies the word “reasoning” (2 Macc 7, 21: logismon [RSV]) to the thoughts of the mother of the seven martyrs at the most tragic moment. Recalling the presence of her sons in her womb,27 she concludes that God cannot entrust to nothingness their body which is his work, while they freely abandon it through love for him. This is not to forget Daniel and his friends who, amidst the flames, live these moments by exalting with a hymn the work of the Creator of all things. That said, let us note in passing a divergence between Daniel and the Maccabees: we do not see the latter envisaging the eventual repentance of their judges and executioners. Daniel had certainly idealized the image of

230 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits the powerful who reigned during the exile or rather he had decided to account for one of the most audacious manifestations of hope. Daniel links up again with a tradition when he interprets the dreams of the same powerful people: he then takes on the role of a new Joseph, who had earned Pharaoh’s friendship in this way. But what is most new is the amplitude of the stakes: the king saw, literally, a “colossus with feet of clay,” which is his empire. His own place is that of the golden head, but he will be carried away like all the rest when a little stone, Israel, will come rolling down the mountain and strike the feet of the statue, composed of disparate elements which succeed one another or which coexist. The colossus will disappear and Israel will reign forever. In recognition of his gifts as an interpreter, the Jew Daniel receives authority over the entire province of Babylon! It is in this position that he becomes a prey to jealousy, is accused and thrown into the fire. While waiting, Nebuchadnezzar showed himself to be a fair player by granting such a promotion to an interpreter who had hid nothing from him regarding such a dreadful future! Everything in these perspectives becomes amplified between chapters 7 and 12, the last ones of the book. We cross the threshold which gives access to apocalypses. Everything also becomes obscure: it is again question of visions, confided to Daniel himself, who is overwhelmed by them. If it is impossible for us to link all the sequences of each vision with a precise historical context, the vision of the world that their totality allows to appear enlightens us on a key moment of biblical history, when the setting of what will be the New Testament is gradually put into place. Let us imagine a man who would see in a dream a scene of the same amplitude as that of the creation of the world. The four winds of the sky shaking the sea. Four monsters rising from it, each being of several mixed species and producing other destructive and vociferous monsters, as the twentieth century has shown us. On that is superimposed what recalls rather closely the chariot of Ezekiel, bearer of the divine presence and surrounded by heavenly bodies. “In the night visions […]” (Dan 7, 13 [RSV]), there comes forward on the clouds someone like a Son of Man to whom is conferred power over the beasts. In this tableau, readers of the time recognized without much trouble what new things were being inscribed in a pre-established framework. Here is the setting, the first chapter of Genesis: the Spirit breathes over the

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 231 waters, animals are created in order to be fertile “each according to its species,” man has the mission to rule over them without eating their flesh, thus to rule in peace. It is clear that an order has been violated since the first week of the world. Whence an overwhelming violence, that the “Son of Man” will, however, dominate. The title “Son of Man” situates him at some distance from Adam, whose name only means “man.” The animals, for their part, represent the Nations that have become fierce, to such an extent that one can no longer, in these new forms, recognize what is of man and what is of the animal. In conformity with the dream of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan 2), the Son of Man represents the people of Israel, called to reign. But Daniel only understands this when one of the creatures which surrounds the Lord reveals it to him. He learns at the same time that the Son of Man will not rule over the beasts without having been first dominated by them and vanquished (Dan 7, 21-25). The Son of Man will not prevail against murderous violence without submitting to it first. It will also be said some generations later that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering […]” (Mc 8, 31 [RSV]). Then arises the imploring question that all apocalypses ask: “Until when?” (Dan 8, 13 [RSV]). One of those near God, Gabriel, hears Daniel and answers that “Seventy weeks are decreed […]” [490 years counting from the exile] in order for eternal justice to come as well to “seal both vision and prophet […]” (Dan 9, 24 [RSV]) and to inaugurate the true Temple. Around this decisive stakes will be played out during the two centuries that follow the book of Daniel. Determining the precise date, despite the exact number, remains debatable, but we learn enough about it to know that Israel enters a period characterized by the thought of an imminent change in the history of men. Designated as Son of Man, Israel is not only singled out. Its destiny is, to the very extent of its election, inseparable from that of all the other sons of Adam. The confrontation of these with evil and with death will experience a decisive and victorious stage. The people chosen by God has, by the mouth of “Daniel,” sincerely confessed its faults: in doing this, it thus showed the Church, in advance, the path of salvation. “It is not on account of our acts of justice that we place before you our supplications; it is on account of your great mercy” (Dan 9, 18 [RSV]). Having appeared one after the other, the anonymous as well as named just men: Elija, the prophets who suffered, the

232 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits unknown Servant—the man who is sick and who is the remedy, who is the anonymous one inscribed in the book of Isaiah, the Son of Man, they will all rise together. Near is the hour for coming back, the time which sees newness born. As I looked, this horn made war with the holy ones and was prevailing over them, until the Ancient One came; then judgment was given for the holy ones of the most High […]. • Daniel 7, 21-22 [RSV]•

Appendix Portraits and Genealogies in the Bible Portraits In the two Testaments we find series of portraits, more or less long: three in the Old, one in the New. The characters follow one another in the manner of medallions, which have been carefully designed. Each name is accompanied by either praise or blame. These lists, for the Old Testament, are of recent vintage: the second or first century before our era.

1. Ben Sirach The longest series is from Ben Sirach (Sir 44, 1 to 50, 21). It is comprised of about twenty-five names. The other series keep to about a dozen (1 Macc 2, 51-63; Wis 10; He 11). The list in Ben Sirach, we do not know why, barely names Jeremiah and ignores Ezra.

2. First book of Maccabees The testament of Mattathias (1 Macc 2, 49-61), a help for Israel’s memory left to posterity at a time of crisis, begins with Abraham and ends with Daniel while including, a sign of insistence, Hananiah, Azariah, Mishael, who are already the three heroes of Daniel 1. These men, according to this chapter, had already been put to the test of paganism, a test that those for whom the book was written were experiencing.

3. Wisdom of Solomon The list of Wisdom 10 begins with Adam and ends with Moses, whose activity, moreover, occupies the entire end of the book. There was no reason to go any further.

4. Epistle to the Hebrews The impossibility of being complete weighed on the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews who, not being able to go on, interrupts

234 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits himself immediately after Rahab: “And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets…” (Heb 11, 32 [RSV]). Assuring, in a list of names, a balance among periods was a problem that each handled in his own way. The solution taken by Ben Sirach is noteworthy. His last name could be Nehemiah. But this name only indicates the beginning of the postexilic period. Instead of going further than this turning point, the author goes backwards, unexpectedly, to Adam himself. He bestows laconic praise upon this father of men: “…but above every other created living being was Adam” (Sir 49, 16 [RSV]). After the most ancient, Adam, immediately comes the newest, who is even a contemporary. It is a question of the high priest Simon (end of the second century before Jesus Christ), described in all the glory of his liturgical function, at the moment when he blesses the people in the middle of the Temple. The list thus ends on what, more than a portrait, is an ample living tableau around which is ordered all the rest. All history is present in each liturgy. Nothing says better what, by itself, the form of the portrait means. The portrait is a presence. For the man surrounded by his portraits of ancestors, the past that is no more is present again, “represented.” Having formerly appeared successively, all are now side by side. The oldest (Adam) and the most current (Simon, then in office) occupy the same space, the same wall of memory as in a house, and together they surround their posterity with protection and solicitude. Thus does the past come to be in the present, at least as a wish and as a promise. As a promise on the part of God, as a wish on the part of man.

Genealogies 1. Genesis Genealogy undergirds the book of Genesis and, with it, the group composed of the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch, or the Torah of Israel). A genealogical list does not brook interruptions. It is true that ten ancestors can cover thousands of years when each one of them lives several hundred years and some more than nine hundred years (Gen 5). But the same list accepts brief and rare pauses for the description of this or that ancestor. “Then all the days of Enoch were

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 235 three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God, then he was no more because God took him” (Gen 5, 23-24 [RSV]). The pleasure of discovering that, comparatively speaking, Enoch died when he was rather young is left to the reader. Here, portrait and genealogy meet. In effect, once it is noted that this death, given the context, is premature, a commentator will be able to link the value of the man and the length of his life. If God took Enoch earlier than the others, it is because Enoch had pleased him. And that is an example to overthrow received ideas regarding longevity as being a recompense for virtue. Wisdom 4, 7-14 refers to our passage without quoting it.

2. Chronicles This book, a later rendition of the books of Samuel and Kings, completes their model with a genealogy of David which goes as far back as Adam! This places the figure of the king of Israel in the principal line of God’s vision, of God as creator of man. The usual discretion of the biblical authors does not keep us from seeing what, at the very least, is intended. Can a kingship that has been prepared so far in the past but fallen into obscurity at the time when this genealogy is written be interrupted forever?

3. Luke Luke has this originality in that, instead of starting with Adam and ending with Jesus, he begins with Jesus and finishes with Adam, Adam whom he calls “son of God” (Luke 3, 38 [RSV]) at the end of his genealogy, disposed, contrary to the usual way, in a reversed order. Here is Jesus proclaimed son of God by the intermediary of the father of all men. Then comes immediately after the scene where the devil arrives to tempt Jesus, in taking up the words: “If you are the Son of God…” It is clear that Satan does not understand this title in the sense that Jesus shares with Adam. He is actually asking that there be a show of some prodigious power: the power to change stones into bread, what no “son of Adam” would know how to do, but what would seem quite natural for someone who is “Son of God.” To manifest this power would have then been irresistible, and God would have immediately won the game that, with Jesus, was taking place. But this God would be the God-according to-Satan.

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4. Matthew While Luke is visibly interested in what links Israel to the world of the Gentiles, Matthew underlines the presence of sinners. He begins with the name of Abraham, because he limits himself to the genealogy of Israel, of the people chosen by God in order to have Jesus born into it, Jesus “who will save his people from its sins” (Matt 1, 21 [RSV]). The list of the fathers of Jesus is marked by some significant variants in this regard: four mothers are mentioned. Tamar, who commits incest with her father-in-law because she wanted to have a son in the line of her deceased husband. Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who was admitted into the alliance with Israel. Ruth, who was from the land of Moab. The wife of Uriah whose husband David had killed after he had committed adultery with her. The intention seems to be two-fold. On the one hand, Matthew wants to signify that Jesus roots himself in the sin of the people that he will save (Matt 1, 21) and that he is going to take upon himself, through this same people, the sin of all men: “He has taken our infirmities and born our sicknesses” (Matt 8, 17 quoting Is 53, 4 [RSV]). On the other hand, mentioning the names of these women justifies that the Christian community welcome into its bosom sinners and the uncircumcised. What other authority than that of an evangelist could authorize with such assuredness a reading of the Old Testament that is neither scandalized nor hesitant in view of the violence and covetousness manifested in it? These names are as though mixed with the name of Jesus. That will be remembered. By the rigorous composition of his genealogy, Matthew gives us another, more didactic, lesson. “The total number of generations is therefore: from Abraham to David, fourteen generations; from David to the deportation of Babylon, fourteen generations; from the deportation of Babylon to Christ, fourteen generations” (Matt 1, 17 [RSV]). The perfect symmetry of the numbers is there only to give some relief to what one could call a syntax of the history of the people of Jesus. Current catechesis does not always take this into account: none of the three periods has more or less importance than the two others. To know this is to know a lot: choices remain free, but we must not always take everything back to the beginnings. We should rather look at how to qualify each segment. David is a pinnacle, because the following segment only prepares for a fall. What David leads to is the history of the patriarchs Abraham,

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 237 Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Posterity, with no conditions, was promised to Abraham. David, a son of Abraham, receives the same promise, also without conditions: the throne in perpetuity for one of his sons. We notice the mark of continuity that is emphasized from the promise to Abraham to the promise made to David. Concerning the expected king, inheritor or ideal king, Psalm 72 proclaims: “Blessed in him will be all the races of the earth” (Ps 72, 17; cf. Ps 47, 10 [RSV]). The Lord had declared this about Abraham in almost the same terms (Gen 12, 3). The promise will be realized through the rallying of the Nations around the throne of David. In this conception of the history of Israel, David carries the conditions of a perfect fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham. Or rather he would carry them if the infidelities for which the kings, except for Ezechias and Josias, were principally guilty had not brought about the deportation to Babylon, which puts an end to the second segment. This end is the loss of the goods of the earth that went with the promise. With the exile the Promised Land is lost. The throne disappears, all power passes to the Babylonians before it belongs to the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans: the subjection to foreign powers is going to last for nearly six centuries. This is the third period. By listing, in an unperturbed manner, a new series of descendants extending from David to Joseph and Jesus, Matthew could have us think that this line had played, ever since the deportation, a role for the people. Well, it ceased to be active very early on, and even to be visible. In a sense, history stopped with the return from exile. Few narratives in the Hebrew Bible and few dated works remain for us regarding this period of few events that follows the return from exile. The writings of Judaism written in Greek, by dispersed Jews, provide us with more. Literary criticism can situate in history, in feeling one’s way about, only the authors of Job, Jonah, Tobit, Esther, Judith… but not the characters themselves, whom the authors created. And we know, thanks to the two Greek books attributed to the Maccabees, that the martyrdoms which they relate are those that the book of Daniel describes, conventionally placed at the time of exile. This lacuna of the third segment is quite filled with expectation, an expectation that goes as far as exhausting all reasons for hope. The true faithful are then taken to the frontiers of their being and often pushed to the borders of the collectivity. Although not dated or, symbolically, said to belong to

238 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits David, the Psalms tell us much about what was then lived. They also talk about the divisions that split the people. The enemies who are so frequently evoked are often those from within. It is possible that some of the faithful ones, alone in spite of themselves, were content with lists of heroes presented one by one. The Christian faith believes and announces that Jesus came not only to keep the promise, but to enter into the space created by this expectation without, however, bringing it to a close. The first readers gave us their key to the Book, saying that they received it from Jesus himself: “it was necessary” that the Messiah suffer at the hands of sinners in order that in his Name the “ministry of reconciliation” would be carried out (2 Cor 5, 18 [RSV]).

notes 1 That is to say “goes beyond them.” 2 J.-P. de Caussade, L’Abandon à la Providence divine. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, collection “Christus,” number 22, p.137, 1966. 3 Abraham and Sarah in Egypt: Gen 12, 10-20; among the Philistines: Gen 20; Isaac and Rebekah: Gen 26, 1-14. 4 We can be surprised by this, since Esau had already lost his right as the eldest child, as he himself will recall (Gen 27, 36). But this reminder is rather a manner, for the writer, to introduce a logical link between two distinct narratives which were current regarding Jacob and which he wants to put into one. 5 Eliezer had said to the young girl, “Please, let me drink a little water from your jug” (Gen 24, 17). It is near the well called “well of Jacob” that Jesus will tell the Samaritan woman “Give me a drink” ( John 4, 7). The same life which comes from God gathers from age to age the actors of one narrative. 6 Deut 26, 5-10 presents itself as a little catechism of the history of Israel, to be memorized for the liturgy of feasts. The first words--“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor”--are considered by many to designate Jacob, rather than Abraham (Deut 26, 5). For the names of the patriarchs were not grouped straight out on a genealogy tree, in order to express what the people felt about its own unity, from age to age, in the perspectives of God. 7 In research regarding sources, the difficulty lies in that the coherence of each isolated tradition is not necessarily superimposed upon the literary homogeneity (lexical, stylistic) of the “documents” which already connect them. 8 In French “le benjamin” means the youngest child of the family. (Note of the translator.) 9 Joseph “wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the house of Pharaoh heard it” (Gen 45, 2). 10 Bible de Jérusalem. “He became for her a son” (TOB). 11 The word is used in the rules and methods of interpretation of the Bible: one speaks of “typology.” 12 Referring to the Dictionnaire Larousse, Paul Beauchamp points out that the French word “airain” is “a literary or old word for ‘bronze, an alloy whose base is copper.’”

240 paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 13 The narrator has not taken the trouble to tell us, this time, why Saul did not want to kill the Amalekite king. As is often the case, we are faced with the compilation of several narratives rather than with one simple omission. 14 “Douceur” or “mansuétude” refer to David avoiding revenge. The Hebrew indicates rather: “sa peine” (Canah), “his efforts” (for the cause of the Temple), in accord with the context of the psalm (verses 3-5). The Greek translation hands down a pre-christian Jewish interpretation. 15 The bas-relief of Orvieto (p. 138) indicates the depth of this sleep, and also the innocence that is open to illumination. 16 ‘ish: man, ‘ishsha: woman. 17 “une voix de fin silence”--as Emmanuel Levinas translates, quoted and adopted by Jacques Briend, Dieu dans l’écriture [God in Scripture] (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992), p. 26. [The page number for the quote is 27. Note of translator.] 18 Commentators have discussed at great length these lines which they consider shocking. The most inflamed and the most eloquent is Saint Jerome. “What!”, he writes, “Moses, sent by God to speak to Pharaoh, balks and answers ‘Find someone else’; […]but Hosea, when he receives the same type of order, would hurry to obey and runs to a brothel!” (pergit ad lupanar). [See Saint Jerome’s Prologue to “In Osee”; note of translator.] An indignant Jerome prefers to understand that it is a question of an imaginary episode, presented as a parable. But is it more decent to imagine it than to live it? 19 The name of Jesse fulfills a precise function. By his father, David is rooted in the tribe of Juda that the oracles designate as the terrain for the monarchy of Israel (Gen 49, 10; Mic 5, 1). And this Jesse must have had some fame (1 Sam 16, 6-10) in order for the royal line to go back to him instead of only to David. At least three of Jesse’s sons were warriors of Saul (1 Sam 17, 13 and 28). 20 When the Jews of Alexandria, from the third century before Jesus Christ, translated the book into Greek, they shifted several passages in the direction of a “resurrection of the flesh.” 21 The wording is that of Eric Auerbach. [Auerbach writes: “The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy.” Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated from the German by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968; pp. 14-15. Note of translator.]

paul beauchamp • Fifty Biblical Portraits 241 22 In his reading of the book of Tobit, Paul Beauchamp will refer to Tobit son and Tobit father rather than to Tobit and Tobias. 23 Xerxes (or Artaxerxes?) 24 The Judith of Chartres (if however it is indeed a question of her) bears no trace of this. 25 Jdt 14, 7: a text used in the liturgy of the Hours for the Common of the Virgin Mary. 26 Called, in the Catholic liturgy since Vatican Council II, “Book of the Martyrs of Israel.” 27 That is why the text talks about the “reasoning of a woman,” with the one aim of underlining its pertinence: the mother of the martyrs leans on the memory of her maternity. Out of fear of offending, some translators have refused this translation, where they have seen, as an error, a sign of condescension. This is to betray oneself.

ABBREVIATIONS Old Testament

New Testament

Gen Genesis Exod Exodus Lev Leviticus Num Numbers Deut Deuteronomy Josh Joshua Judg Judges 1-2 Sam 1-2 Samuel 1-2 Kgs 1-2 Kings 1-2 Chr 1-2 Chronicles Ezra Ezra Neh Nehemiah Tob Tobit Esth Esther Jdt Judith 1-2 Macc 1-2 Maccabees Job Job Ps(s) Psalm(s) Prov Proverbs Eccl Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) Wis Wisdom Sir Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) Isa Isaiah Jer Jeremiah Ezek Ezekiel Dan Daniel Hos Hosea Jonah Jonah Mic Micah Ml Malachi

Matt Matthew Mark Mark Luke Luke John John Acts Acts of the Apostles Rom Romans 1-2 Cor 1-2 Corinthians Gal Galatians Eph Ephesians Heb Hebrews

Acknowledgements This translation would not appear without the generosity of Éditions du Seuil, the assistance of its agents Valerie Borchardt and Jenny Dorny, and the interest, work, and time of Dr. Andrew Tallon. Brad Petitfils, Deborah and Rene Blanchard, Jan Dugan, Terese Lyons and Mary Blish, RSCJ, helped me at key moments. Solange Bourguignon Woods and Matthieu Saulière, who had suggested that I translate Cinquante portraits bibliques, answered many questions regarding the text. Loyola University New Orleans granted monies for the payment of translation rights, and the Jesuit community of Xavier High School, New York, welcomed me with friendship, some silence, and the presence of libraries and museums. I owe much to Kay Labauve Rees, who kindly read and criticized the translation. Her written comments reminded me of the enjoyment and questioning that the Bible evokes if, indeed, it is read. That it should not fall into the hands of a young girl is the one agreement which, in Madame Bovary, unites Flaubert’s pharmacist Homais and pastor Bournisien. So, what does the Bible say to unite such antagonists in not recommending that scripture be read? Paul Beauchamp’s gallery of portraits has one wonder whether the frequently used phrasing—“The Bible says….”—should not be replaced with a more humble approach: “We read in the Bible, in the….” We read that one has seen God or, rather, that one says this has happened. One of the merits of Portraits is to have us realize how the Bible criticizes itself and to examine whether, in the words of Proust, “every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” Peter S. Rogers Loyola University New Orleans

A

index

allegory 149 Annunciation 21–2, 26

B banquet 217, 222 borders 228, 237

C composition 22, 122, 125, 129–30, 169, 183, 236 confidence 31, 177, 187, 195 conquest 79–82, 223 crime 49, 65, 99, 117 culture 48, 53, 162, 225

D darkness 14, 17–18, 21, 34, 39, 70, 75, 101 death 11, 13, 15, 23, 27, 31, 33, 47–9, 65, 69, 71, 75, 88, 96, 99–100, 112, 117–18, 134, 136, 140, 148–9, 151, 156–7, 159–60, 171, 174–5, 177–8, 181–2, 194–5, 201, 204, 209, 212, 214, 222, 224, 226–9, 231, 235 delirium 104 deportation 175, 236–7 dialogue 23, 58, 202 discontinuity 7, 95 dream 37, 41, 43, 47–8, 60, 215, 230

E

ethnic mixing 17 exile 10–11, 37, 91, 104, 122, 140, 164, 167, 169, 174, 178–9, 181, 185–6, 189–90, 193, 197, 199–200, 208, 211, 213, 215, 225, 230–1, 237 expropriation 156

F final solution 215 foreign 8, 23, 100–1, 127, 132, 168, 197–8, 214, 225, 237 forgiveness 49, 58, 118, 164, 198 framework 208, 225, 230

G genealogies 33, 51, 129 genealogy 234 genocide 215 grafted 8, 13

H heroes 152, 163, 225–6, 228, 233, 238 hospitality 20

I incest 18, 82, 91, 236 interpretation 8, 27, 47, 198, 200, 215, 239–40

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J

T

justice 66–7, 75, 141, 169, 198, 217, 231

tenderness 164 threshold 130, 229–30 tradition 7, 19, 21–2, 25, 27, 31, 70, 74, 77, 127, 228, 230, 239 transition 30, 79, 95–6 type 25, 51, 73, 82, 240

L laughter 29, 31 lie 18, 30, 34, 37, 75, 88, 100–1, 177, 205, 222

M

U

unexpected 7, 139, 212–13, 226, memory 11, 30, 40, 65, 75, 88, 228 91–2, 96, 115, 134, 145, 159, 211, 224, 233–4, 241 V misfortune 10, 47, 65, 69, 112, 139–40, 174–5, 177, 182, 201–2 violence 8, 22, 31, 53, 80, 101, 104, 112, 115, 159, 231, 236 vision 55–6, 58, 60, 122, 189–91, O 195, 213, 221, 228, 230–1, 235 obstacle 17, 43, 56 opulence 22

W

P philoxeny 21, 26, 29

R reconciliation 36, 45, 48–9, 108, 238 revenge 43, 100, 151, 221–2, 240 riddle 87–8 ruse 81, 101, 109

S sacrament 164 scandal 14, 99 schema 39, 48, 66, 82, 136 schism 143, 145 seer 95, 173, 188–91, 228

wager 7, 29, 132 wisdom 10, 49, 88–9, 112, 125–6, 136, 139, 168, 201–2, 212 women 43, 53, 66–7, 80, 89, 91–3, 100, 105, 112, 121, 125, 198, 236