Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
Andrew Davies, Barton draws attention to the passage from Isaiah 3 that I have quoted above: “Even if we grant that there is something wrong with the women of Isaiah 3:16–4:1, who take such pleasure in their jewelry and cosmetics, it is impossible to find any human moral principle that would justify the cruel and degrading punishment with which the prophet threatens them.”162
Yet, I think the point of the first chapters of Isaiah is far from unjust: God has abandoned Israel to her enemies, because Israel has become deeply corrupt. As God says in his law case against Israel, “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Every one loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them” (Isa 1:23). God adds that the “land is filled with idols” (Is 2:8)—as archeological evidence confirms was the case. In sum, I do not agree with Barton insofar as he implies that God’s abandonment of Israel—which follows from Israel’s abandonment of God—is unjust. The imagery of the smiting of the “daughters of Zion” (Isa 3:15) is paired with similar insistence that the men of Israel will be humiliated and punished. As God says through the prophet Isaiah, “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: ‘It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’” (Isa 3:14–15).
Baumann’s concern is a deeper one than Barton’s. She wonders how anyone could accept a Scripture as “holy” if it employs images that involve God violating women sexually or images in which God causes women to be publicly humiliated in the very ways in which men of the time caused women to be publicly humiliated. The fact that Jerome insists that such metaphors are meant to be interpreted tropologically or as allegories whose meaning is the opposite of what the metaphor implies, may seem only to confirm Baumann’s outrage. Baumann notes that from the outset of her research, “the center of my interest in the prophetic imagery of marriage was not YHWH the ‘loving husband.’”163 On the contrary, she always focused on the punitive imagery, which in her view predominates over love in the prophetic literature. She asks, “Is the complex of metaphors of sexual violence really inseparable from the prophetic marriage imagery?”164
This question is all the more urgent for her because she finds that in contemporary culture (she lives in Germany), women are subjected to misogyny and violence. In her (mistaken) view, “marriage is the relationship in which it is easiest for violent men to make women their victims.”165 There is also the problem of male fantasies about violence against women, fantasies that are regularly played out in pornography.166 Her fundamental point is that “[t]he version of God in which ‘he’ is presented, in connection with the prophetic marriage imagery, as a sexually violent male is just one of the many problematic sides of the biblical God-image.”167 Even if Israel, having abandoned God, deserved its punishment (namely, abandonment by God), how could a good God permit himself to be described in sexually violent and abusive imagery? As Cheryl Exum states, “Claiming that there is a suffering and loving god behind this imagery will not make it go away.”168 Like Baumann, Exum warns against trying to sidestep the problem by “creating a canon within the canon.”169
By contrast, other biblical scholars have argued that the metaphors must be read as metaphors (in light of the actual destruction brought about by invading armies) rather than as descriptions of acceptable behavior. Robert Carroll urges in this regard, “The voice I hear and read in Jeremiah 2–3 (and also in 5.7–8) is a voice expressing strong disapproval of the community or nation’s past behaviour as wild, uncontrolled and apostate. . . . The target of the mockery is the male society.”170 For Carroll, it is important to perceive that the metaphorical woman in the prophetic text is not intended to be a real woman, but rather to be a description of the corporate people. He states that “the only women in the chapter [Ezek 23] are metaphors. The narrative is not about women but about cities or communities represented by those cities. . . . [T]he use of metaphors of women for the community, nation, city and land in the prophets may have little to do with the representation of women as such.”171 The metaphors disturb us, but their original readers may not have understood them the way that we do, and, besides, they too would likely have been disturbed. Somewhat similarly, Else Holt thinks it possible to criticize the disturbing metaphors while retaining the overall portrait of God in the book of Jeremiah. She does not think that we have to “distance ourselves from” or repudiate the prophetic books.172 From the perspective of studies of trauma, Kathleen O’Connor suggests that the disturbing metaphors are understandable given the prophetic task of articulating and giving meaning to the extreme horrors that the people of Jerusalem and Judah experienced during the events that led to the Babylonian exile.173 This does not mean that today we need to approve the portrait of God as an abusive husband (or of Israel as a nymphomaniac), but we can appreciate some aspects of what the prophet was doing in his own context: dealing with trauma requires naming it boldly rather than repressing it.
All this is a variation of the problem that also faces interpreters of passages such as Joshua 10:40, where Joshua’s destruction of “all that breathed” in the cities that he conquered is seen as obedience to God, “as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” How could a good God be one who commands Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam 15:3)? Indebted to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas suggests that actions against non-combatants, which appear to conflict with the Decalogue’s commandment against killing the innocent, may justly be undertaken in obedience to divine command, because God “is Lord of life and death: for He it is who inflicts the punishment of death on all men, both godly and ungodly, on account of the sin of our first parent, and if a man be the executor of that sentence by divine authority, he will be no murderer.”174 I consider this argument to be untenable. Certainly God is the “Lord of life and death,” but if he commanded Israelite soldiers to kill pregnant women and babies, God would be culpable for morally warping the soldiers who performed such heinous actions. Unlike the divine retribution caused by disease or natural disaster—in which the agent of the punishment is not a conscious agent—an intrinsically evil action has a distortive impact upon the person who carries it out. Thus, Church Fathers such as Origen were correct to infer that the human author has a purpose in attributing such commands to God (for example, to warn readers against becoming assimilated to the nations and their gods), but that in actual fact that living God revealed in Scripture could not have issued such commands.
With respect to publicly stripping a woman naked, Baumann points out that John Huehnergard’s studies of ancient Near Eastern texts indicate that “if a widow remarries she is to be deprived of the property of her first husband and leave his house naked. In Huehnergard’s opinion this stripping [an instance of which is found in Hosea 2:3] has a humiliating aspect: its purpose, however, is primarily the protection of the property of the family or clan.”175 Likewise, Thomas Podella has suggested that the lifting of the skirt, such as is found in Nahum 3:5, is connected in the ancient Near East to legal rites surrounding a divorce, so that it is less about humiliation than it is about indicating that a change of status has taken place.176 Baumann also recognizes that given the ancient Near East’s expectations for covenantal treaties, in the prophetic literature “[t]hreats of violence against women are . . . found within the framework of scenarios in which it is prophesied that a vassal, should he prove unfaithful, will be subjected to every kind of fearful punishment imaginable. Rape of women in the ancient Near East is therefore no more to be regarded as part of ‘normal’ life than are the other curses.”177 She adds that in the context of exile, there are ancient Near Eastern “iconographic witnesses to the fact that deported persons or prisoners in many cases had to strip or be stripped.”178
Alice Keefe argues that the disturbing imagery arises, in fact, from how profoundly women were valued in biblical Israel. She explains that women had in their power the very survival of the people: “The social character of sex in ancient Israel relates to the pragmatics of survival in a marginal agrarian frontier zone . . . where the survival and strength of the family group depended upon its size. . . . Such a culture would not likely abstract concerns about group strength and survival from its symbolic constructs about woman’s body and female sexuality.”179 With regard to the prophets’ symbolic references