I've been reading a bit and this is another one of those book report posts. Spoiler alert for the first one before the break.
https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506486321/Gods-Monsters
God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid
Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible
Esther J. Hamori
PUBLISHER Broadleaf Books
FORMAT Hardcover
ISBN 9781506486321
EBOOK ISBN 9781506486338
DIMENSIONS 5.75 x 8.75
PAGES 296
PUBLICATION DATE October 31, 2023
So I wanted to like this one more than I actually did. I liked Women's Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge. Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, which Hamori co-edited with Jonathan Stokl, was a blast. This new one, God's Monsters, was alright. It's more pop and breezy and while Hamori has, as Michael Newnham put it, a wicked sense of humor sometimes she cut corners, probably at the behest of editors. To say that Leviathan is a primeval monster beloved by Yahweh is one thing but to say in a footnote Behemoth is just a hippo is not something I can overlook. I read Mark Sneed's Taming the Beast: A Reception History of Behemoth and Leviathan. I know perfectly well Behemoth was not/is not a hippo and that medieval scholastics decided that Behemoth was a hippo and Leviathan was a crocodile. Sneed claimed that Leviathan has been "tamed" by scholars for centuries and that those who want to tame this beast have their agendas for doing so. So far so rote an American academic take. Sneed claimed that there is little about the axis mundi tradition of interpreting Leviathan. Maybe in English language scholarship but Andrei Orlov has put in a herculean effort to fix that with Supernal Serpent: Mysteries of Leviathan in Judaism and Christianity, a book I've only just scratched the surface of. Orlov mentions that in Jewish mystical literature there is a tradition that Leviathan is the sea-monster slain by Yahweh to form the foundations of the world. That Leviathan will be slain and be the basis of an eschatological banquet is another tradition, none of which you'd necessarily learn much about reading Hamori's book.
While Hamori
discusses the times Yahweh dispatches divine monsters to arrange for the deaths
of wicked bro kings (she mentions the situation in the narrative of Judges 9,
for instance) she points out that Job’s plight is engineered by Yahweh as an
experiment to see if Job will waver. The
Adversary just does what the adversary does. It is here that Hamori seems least
unique in pointing out things mentioned by other scholars such as Ryan T
Stokes, Archie Wright and, earlier, G. B. Caird. Caird mentioned that God’s designated
accuser/executioner seems like a minor divine functionary who evolves into a
more menacing and rebellious being by the time the New Testament books were
written. Caird proposed, too, a kind of
progressive demonology in which the stars (regarded as sentient in themselves
in ancient cosmologies) did not become demonic until generations of humans gave
them worship and the stars accepted that worship. It was Caird’s way of broaching the topic of
how we humans make otherwise good things into demonic powers by according them
too high or too much worth. But for many of Hamori’s readers, I suppose, the
idea that the Jewish scriptures time and again show human authors indicting
Yahweh for moral failure might be shocking.
Getting back to Hamor on 1 Kings 22, I remember Reed Carlson contended that 1 Kings 22 and the oracle should not be construed as teaching a spirit cosmology. In his book Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena Carlson proposed that the prophetic narrative of a dramatic scene in the divine council is a way to get attention. The practical upshot of the narrative is Ahab cannot trust his court prophets because they are leading him astray. Yes, there's the lying spirit dispatched by Yahweh to deceive the rest of the prophets but Micaiah issues a warning to Ahab. In other words, there is a last shot for Ahab to cease and desist. Ahab decides to ride out into battle in disguise and thereby hope to prevail in battle and hide (deceive) people on the battlefield as to whether he is king or not. Of course this goes badly and Ahab is shot by someone archer who sees "that's one of ours" and fires away, lending one among countless stories that have inspired a soldierly joke, "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it, the one that kills you is labeled `to whom it may concern'."
Reed Carlson took Hamori to task for an equivocation in translation. The necromancer at Endor is a woman Hamori describes as a spirit diviner and she hastens to add this woman has intrinsic power to summon shades of the dead from the underworld. But what Reed Carlson (and, I might add, V Philips Long) point out in commenting on the text of 1 Samuel is that the woman is a ghostwife. If you have never heard of a ghostwife but are a bit of a fan of Kurosawa then the end of Rashomon features what ghostwives were expected to do. Carlson highlighted that given the nature of dead summoning rites there's debate whether a spirit was seen or the woman was taken over by a familiar. Stuff like that. In other words, much as I have enjoyed Hamori's work in this newer book, clearly aimed for a popular/lay readership, she skimps on the kinds of things I know firsthand she doesn't stint on in her more formal, scholarly work.
That there are interpretive traditions in Jewish scholarship that emphasize the monsters (whether the scholars believe they are real or not) is a big reason to engage Hamori's work. At a different polarity there's Judit Blair's work to de-demonize the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, or Jacob Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus where he contrasts the biblical book on sickness with Babylonian exorcist lore. Both of these traditions are part of the Jewish reception history of interpreting the Hebrew Bible and both traditions have counterparts in Christian traditions, for that matter.
All in all
Hamori's book was a bit too pop for my tastes given what I've read of her work but
it retroactively is still a book I recommend as part of my aforementioned
reading list
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/updated-version-of-reading-list-from.html
Why? Because the fact that Hamori has no "pious bias" means she won't hesitate to tell you what the text says. She contends the Bible is not a book full of answers to our problems but a stirring human reflection on the nature of our never-ending human travails. Attempts by dogmaticians to get rid of the most terrifying aspects of Yahweh and his council full of monsters and assassins ignores what is in the texts.
Hamori points out something that is mundane to scholars but may be a shock to some lay readers, and it's a point Mark Sneed made in The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes, when southwestern Asian wisdom traditions reflected on whether god/s were all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good the first thing to go was all-good. God was good but not necessarily good in the way(s) we would presume. Hamori points out that this was the norm and not the exception and that we, as contemporary Western readers (particularly if secular, progressive and/or feminist) will find ghastly. For those of us who are not secularist or progressive and not necessarily feminist her point still stands. It's one thing for C. S. Lewis fans to roll out that Aslan is not a tame lion and another thing to wrestle with just how difficult it is to interpret 1 Kings 13, the story James Crenshaw invoked to open up Prophetic Conflict. Crenshaw . There is a book a relative ran by me on just the very topic of the fate of the man of God from Judah in 1 Kings 13 but I just got a couple of chapters into that book and will have to save writing about that for some other time.
I liked Hamori’s book but I wanted to like it more than I actually did.
The same can be
said for another book I finished recently by Randy Woodley.
https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467435611/shalom-and-the-community-of-creation/
Shalom and
the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision
by Randy Woodley
EBOOK
9781467435611
Publication Date: May 25, 2012
$27.99
PAPERBACK
9780802866783
I kind of
remember Randy Woodley’s chapter contribution to Majority World Theology
a few years back and learned of book-length work he’s written from Daniel Kleven
over at his blog. I admit to belatedly
coming to Native American Christian theology because while my dad was Native
American we didn’t always get along from time to time and he came more at
things from a Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Spurgeon and Bonhoeffer side of things
than formally Native American theology. There
have been Presbyterians among the Nez Perce since about the time of Chief
Joseph and while it might seem crazy to people who don’t know this already, a
Reformed contingent in Pacific Northwestern Native American circles is a thing,
whether Presbyterian or more generic low church Calvinist (I’ll come back to
this in discussing Woodley momentarily).
The more formative influence on me in my younger years was, for better or worse, more white Pentecostalism than Native American Calvinism but, hey, at least I grew up in the part of western Oregon that also gave the world the New Testament textual scholar Gordon D Fee! The older I get the more grateful I am that I providentially was granted a life in the PNW where having a cerebral streak in Pentecostal circles wasn’t always considered “head knowledge” (though some relatives sure saw it that way after a time). I am more and more grateful that my exposure to Calvinist soteriology, such as it was, was through the Native American side of my family and not through Southern Presbyterianism. I openly admit I regard the influence of R L Dabney as a blight on the Presbyterian traditions in the United States. I’m not going to sugar coat that. Does anyone think a half-Native American man raised in the Pacific Northwest was going to find Dabney heroic? I sure hope not.
So when I read Woodley describe the Protestant work ethic as somehow nebulously connected to Calvinism I was disappointed. Steve Hays and I discussed, decades ago, the problematic simplification of Max Weber’s “Protestant work ethic”. Had Weber said he was talking about the Prussian work ethic, Steve told me, okay, fine, that would make sense, but there’s no one to one correspondence between simply being Protestant and being industrious. Woodley’s educational background included a Baptist seminary education and so I don’t doubt he encountered WASP work ethic norms and I don’t necessarily contest his surmise that a lot of what passes for “industry” and “healthy ambition” in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant theologies of vocation is what Native Americans would regard as avarice.
That much of what passes for Christianity in the West is Eurocentric and not necessarily plausibly connected to Semitic interpretive traditions and was used to encourage the elimination of Native American cultures is not too hard to establish but time and again I found Woodley’s description of Native Americans as advocating the Harmony Way and that this Harmony Way is congruent with the concept of shalom in the Hebrew Bible tendentious. Why? Well, I’d have to say the problem is that because I was the son of a Native American man from the Puget Sound region I have no real reason to take the word of someone from the Plains Indians traditions as being in a good position to comment about the details of Native Americans across the continent. Even among tribes in the state of Washington it’s not a given that, for instance, the Quinault and the Yakima like each other or that the Duwamish necessarily like the Makah. As Sherman Alexie has had maybe too much fun pointing out over decades, a lot of the touchstone literary works attributed to Native Americans were pious forgeries drafted by white men who thought it would be easier to pass off their egalitarian/liberal ideals to the American public if they could mask it behind pen names purporting to be representations of the Native American tribes that were sidelined and oppressed. That Native Americans had brutal slavery systems in place before whites were enslaving blacks just needn’t come up.
So, yeah, there’s that. Dad was not especially eager to sugar-coat how many people I could or should trust about things on his side of the ancestry and I’ll spare you details. Drug use, alcoholism and other vices were not improved by the legacy of colonial/imperial impression (let’s just grant the point for conversational purposes) but similar levels of vice exist among lower class rednecks. So I’m afraid I’d have to say that I’ve known too many Indians to believe Woodley’s take on them having a more harmonious Harmony Way that white European descendent managerial technocrats.
That dualisms can be bad I agree with. That an anti-dualist take is distinctly Native American I’m not sure I can agree with. Just in the last year or so I was reading Emil Brunner’s Truth as Encounter where he pointed out that the Greek philosophical tradition introduced a plethora of dualisms, notably the dualism of Subject and Object that has permeated Western thought and that this kind of dualism doesn’t show up in the Hebrew Bible. So while Woodley may have plenty of reason to believe too many white Christians assume false dualisms in interpreting the world around them I am not sure he could say that about Emil Brunner and it doesn’t get more European 20th century than a Swiss Reformed theologian who was a contemporary of Karl Barth!
Woodley claimed that Schleiermacher introduced a kind of mind/heart dualism that was bad, somehow, but later in the book Woodley has positive comments about Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade proposing the arts can be a way to help us feel closer to the divine. Really? Guy L Beck wrote a book in the last few years in which he pointed out that Eliade and Otto were, with Gerardus van der Leeuw, scholars who really took Schleiermacher’s idea that the arts can instill a mystical sense of community, belonging and reliance on the divine. If anything Woodley might unknowingly be of Schleiermacher’s party despite having had bad things to say about his dualism. I have not actually read Schleiermacher for myself and confess I think I might have other things I’d rather do. What I can appreciate, if in a limited way, is that it is from the Schleiermacherian tradition of Protestantism that aesthetic pluralism can be defined and defended, not that you’d get that from, say, Roger Scruton or John Borstlap but there’s more than one way to read a writer such as Schleiermacher (or Herder).
Woodley’s description of Native Americans and their Harmony Way is, frankly, too vague. That Eurocentric consumerism has created an ecological catastrophe that potentially can’t be averted may be the case but it’s not clear that Native American approaches to fish and wildlife were necessarily better. It’s not as if Native Americans couldn’t have fished salmon populations into extinction. Among the Pacific Northwest tribes all of the groups were, for the most part, nomadic hunter-gather societies that created winter shelter, at least in the Puget Sound region, from what I can recall. There were also rigid status categories. If someone was born of a sexual union between a high status person and a slave that stigma would not be shaken off even a few generations later. In one of the books on PNW tribal slavery I recall a tale that a high-born woman became a slave and got pregnant and her sense of shame that the children would grow up slaves was so great she killed her children. High status Native American women would turn their slave girls into prostitutes through the Washington territory so, ,no, I just can’t take Woodley’s word for it that Native Americans had a better grasp of shalom than Europeans interpreting Jewish sacred texts. The whole idea seems a bit too tendentious for me.
This is not to say I didn’t like reading Woodley. That Christian teachings don’t have to be cast in Eurocentric terms is something I can agree with. Besides being the son of a Native American man who was in the low church Calvinist way a number of friendships I made in my college years were with Christians from Kenya as well as Christians from Japan. For all my adult life I have viewed Christianity as anything but a “Western” religion and that was before I had friends and family convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. I’m in the home stretch of John of Damascus’ On the Orthodox Faith. There’s all that in my background for why I’m sympathetic to a key idea in Woodley’s work yet I also think there’s a sense in which he was shooting fish in a barrel.
Woodley’s book is symptomatic of a trend I’ve read in scholarly works of setting up a dualism and proposing that this is good and that has something wanting. Woodley can say all he wants that dualisms and contrasts are a Western European thing but he has not, in this book, transcended that constraint. Maybe he does in his other works but I haven’t read those books yet. But on the whole, living as I do in the Pacific Northwest, articulating glib dualisms “can” be a thing people do whether they’re Native American or white. Douglas Wilson has literally sold book after book using glib either/or taxonomies for decades now. Either you’re an optimillennialist or a pessimillennialist. I think those kinds of dualisms are glib, idiotic, and irresponsible ways to interpret biblical texts but then I’ve probably said somewhere in my blog that I’m an amillennial partial preterist with historicist sympathies and I dislike the postmillennialist traditions that underwrote Manifest Destiny; I do not take it as given that those came about because of “Calvinism”. It’s a vice of the mind to conflate Calvinist or Reformed soteriology with a notion of meticulous sovereignty or providence that can exist inside non-Reformed traditions. That plent of Presbyterians in the American South thought they were destined to retain slavery you can read about at your leisure but the Native American tribes in the Puget Sound area had different reasons why they thought owning people as slaves was justified.
There are all kinds of reasons I regard a Douglas Wilson style appeal to optmillennialism or pessimillennialism as stupid but one of those reasons is the simple fact that eschatological schools of thought are not the same as providence. An arcane eschatological theory about what apocalyptic literature does or doesn’t mean is not the same thing as a blanket doctrine of providence wielded by white supremacists to justify their white supremacist actions.
That is precisely the point made early in Matt R. Jantzen's God, Race, and History: Liberating Providence (a HT to Daniel Kleven for this title). Depending on what kind of white supremacist you’re looking at, the rationales he will use to defend his racist views will be ones available to him in the milieu within which he lives. Or as John Gray put it in Seven Types of Atheism, white supremacists who were religious used religious arguments and white supremacists who were skeptical humanists like David Hume used scientific arguments to defend their white supremacist views.
Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet probably already know I'm emphatically not postmillennialist on eschatology. I've been an amillennial partial preterist for some time with some historicist sympathies. Why would that even possibly matter? Although I like me some Puritans I reject postmillennialism as not only not essential to being in the Reformed tradition I regard it as one of the roots of applied Manifest Destiny (despite the fact that, as Daryl Hart pointed out, the dogmas was given its most lucid formulation by a Catholic). On the other hand Roger Williams was postmillennialist and he advocated for religious tolerance and specifically a more gentle approach to Native Americans. I have mentioned being the son of a Native American dad over the years and, yes, it informs my antipathy to postmillennialism.
In other words, if you have a white supremacist who is committed to that stance he (and so often he is a he) could be a Presbyterian minister like R L Dabney or he could be David Hume or Immanuel Kant. Rather than a one size fits all approach that maps a one to one correspondence between idea X and actions Y and policy Z, we may all have to slog through specifics. A white supremacist in a Reformed tradition will draw upon that tradition while a white supremacist from a New Atheist background might draw on something else. A Methodist white supremacist would draw on something else still. Jantzen's case is, so far, that providence is the more pervasive doctrine white supremacists in Europe drew upon than any specific eschatological paradigm about millennialism. Whether or not I agree with what he believes are alternatives remains to be seen. I'm too early into the book. I am not necessarily on board with all forms of liberation theology. There can seem to be a fad for pneumatological quick fixes in contemporary theology. Pardon me for being ambivalent at best. I read Mark Driscoll's Spirit-Filled Jesus a few years ago out of a sense of duty and I can tell you that just waving around "Spirit" doesn't necessarily lead anywhere. Hegel could write about the Spirit while advocating ideas I find ghastly. :)
As I've been going through Jantzen's book I am interested in his case that providence has been wielded by Europeans with Eurocentric aims. While postmillennialism has been an ingredient in white supremacist visions of entitlement it is not sufficient. There also needs to be a view of providence with that postmillennialism. There are ingredients, so to speak, that may not be toxic in themselves that become virulently toxic when combined with other ingredients. Oxygen we cannot live without but ozone is harmful. I’m only a few chapters into Jantzen’s book but I’m finding it worthwhile reading. Whether or not I’m going to be on board with the liberation theology he plans to bring in at the end, I doubt it, to be blunt.
I don’t have to agree with everything Jantzen draws upon to find the contention that Hegel redefined the doctrine of providence away from the Augustinian and Calvinist traditions that held that God’s secret counsel is actually inscrutable to a view that History reveals providence as a kind of panentheistic self-awakening of Spirit that doesn’t just so happen to emerge among the whitest of white Germans in Europe. Even among fairly conservative Anglicans and Reformed there has been a consensus that the Kantian tradition is hard to square with traditional Christian dogmatics and that it has bolstered a lot of patently bad ideas. Critical race theorists the world over could probably agree! There seems to be room for critical race theory and Reformed theology among Anglican, Dutch and Swiss Reformed traditions to take aim at what could be regarded as satanic white supremacist misuses and redefinitions of doctrines such as providence. Charles W Mills pointed out that just because white supremacists have had the most pervasive global influence does not mean racially supremacist dogmas don’t exist or haven’t existed among other peoples and he cited the imperial era Japan of World War II as a particularly vivid and awful example of racial supremacist regime dogmas in Asian contexts.
Woodley’s book is readable and the issues he raises are worth talking about. He did leave me feeling that I want to get back to Richard Twiss’ Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way. I remember thinking Woodley’s entry in Majority World Theology was solid. Maybe my impression, such as it is, that Woodley’s better at making short punchy essays and chapters than books. I do have another Woodley work I want to get to. Native American Christian theological works is, dare I say it, obscure and niche but I trust by now I don’t have to explain why I would have any interest in that topic. Christianity is not smiled upon in many Native American circles. I heard it was not the usual thing when my grandparents converted on Dad’s side. Woodley’s descriptions of the Harmony Way just ultimately couldn’t convince me. I am too steeped in the traditions that take the Fall seriously and too steeped in the reception histories that propose that human wickedness became pervasive enough that the Flood was brought about. These traditions do not suggest that with a few gentle circle repair customs things will work out. It’s not even a given that monist views are less violent than dualist views. Empires tend to be monist about their own cosmologies for those who are “in” and dualist for those they can’t or don’t want to assimilate.
