BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 114
Copyright (c) 1999 Biblical Horizons February, 1999
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically:
A. 11:1: Joab is on the field besieging Rabbah, but David has stayed behind in Jerusalem.
B. 11:2-5: David sleeps with Bathsheba and she becomes pregnant.
C. 11:6-25: David arranges for Uriah’s death.
D. 11:26-27: Bathsheba mourns for Uriah.
E. 12:1-15a: Nathan confronts David’s sin.
D’ 12:15b-17: David mourns for his infant son.
C’ 12:18-23: David’s son dies.
B’ 12:24-25: David sleeps with Bathsheba and she becomes pregnant.
A’ 12:26-31: David goes to Rabbah and finishes the siege, then returns to Jerusalem.
This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up to that point, we have learned of David’s sin and his attempts to cover it. After Nathan uncovers the sin and pronounces the Lord’s judgment, the rest of the passage focuses on the initial outworking of that judgment. The Word of Yahweh delivered by the prophet is a sharp sword, dividing to joints and marrow. Through the Word of Yahweh, the course of events is turned in a new direction.
The specific transition effected by the Word is indicated by the two D sections, which raise the key typological theme of the passage. The end of David’s mourning is elaborately described: "So David arose from the ground, washed, anointed himself and changed his clothes; and he came into the house of Yahweh and worshiped. Then he came to his own house, and when he requested, they set food before him and he ate" (12:20). David rises from the dust, and moves from fasting to feasting. We can also note the two B sections at this point. David’s adultery with Bathsheba brings forth death, but after his repentance he fathers a child who will be called a "son of God" (see 2 Samuel 7:14).
David’s servants comment on the oddity of David’s lamentation (12:21). The C-D sequence in the first half of the passage is the expected pattern: a woman loses her husband and then mourns for him. By contrast, David mourns before and then rises from mourning after his son dies. This is a good proof text against the practice of praying for the dead, for David reasons that there was a chance that the Lord would relent so long as the child was alive, but death closed that possibility (12:22-23). Within the chiastic structure, however, another dimension of David’s behavior is implied. The two C sections bring the death of Uriah and the death of the child together. In strict justice, the death of Uriah should be connected to the death of his murderer, a reflection of the lex talionis woven into the text. Instead, the child pays for the father’s crime, and the father rises to new life, which points to the substitutionary death of a greater Child of David. David can rise because he sees, through the shadows, that his Son has paid for his sins. What turns the C-D into a D-C pattern is, again, the Word of Yahweh. David submits himself to the Word of judgment, acknowledging its truth, and so is delivered from death through the death of his Son.
The political dimensions to this whole episode are highlighted by the framing references to the siege of Rabbah. In 11:1, David remains behind in Jerusalem while Joab leads the army. The irony of David’s absence from the field is indicated by the introduction to the verse: this happened "when kings go out" ("to battle" or "to war" is an interpolation). "Going in" and "going out" are sometimes used to describe the scope of a king’s duties (1 Samuel 8:20; 1 Kings 3:7; 2 Chronicles 1:10), so a king who does not "go out" is failing to act like a king. Uriah’s refusal to go in to his house and to his wife further spotlights David’s unfaithfulness (11:11). David’s initial failure leads to more serious breaches of royal responsibility; instead of "coming in" to protect the brides of Jerusalem he stays behind to prey on them, and instead of "going out" to lead his men into battle, he arranges for the death of one of his mighty men. After the restoring Word corrects and disciplines him, however, he "goes out" (12:29) to capture Rabbah, receive its crown, and pile up the spoils, and the passages ends with David "coming in" to Jerusalem, leading the victorious procession back to his throne.
OPEN BOOK, Views & Reviews, No. 44
Copyright (c) 1999 Biblical Horizons
February, 1999
In a significant essay in the 19 April 1999 issue of The Weekly Standard, entitled "Wars of Hatred and the Hatred of War," Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., points out a significant shift that seems to be taking place in the modern world. He begins by asserting his thesis, that a comparison of Hitler to Milosevic may be more apt than Bill Clinton realizes because "ethnic cleansing and genocide, while not the same, are kin and spring from different sources than the traditional oppression of minorities."
Fairbanks distinguishes between ethnic oppression and ethnic cleansing. Saddam Hussein, for instance, has not tried to wipe out or to move out the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq, but rather to dominate them. He has been cruel and brutal on occasion, but his goal has not been elimination. Similarly, in places like Rwanda and Burundi, what we have is conflict between two peoples (Hutus and Tutsis) over who will rule, not a policy of ethnic elimination. By way of contrast, Serbian nationalists do not object to Albanians living in Albania; they just want them out of what they regard as historic Serb territory.
Fairbanks writes that ethnic discrimination and conflict in such places as Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Iraq, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka is tragic, but not the same thing as ethnic cleansing. "It forces on ethnic minorities a bad situation, but not usually an impossible situation. One can live one’s life while accommodating oneself to the domination of another ethnic group and seeking to avoid victimization wherever possible." The conflict is over who gets the biggest piece of the national pie. "There are usually as much corruption, friendship, compassion, and favoritism as there is discrimination, precisely because such regimes stand for no principle that they rigorously impose." An illustration of this fact, familiar to me and perhaps to some of you, is the situation in the American South under paternalism, before the Civil Right’s Movement. As a group, blacks were dominated and oppressed, but there was plenty of "friendship, compassion, and favoritism" from decent whites to take up some of the slack, and "good niggers" could usually avoid victimization at the hands of evil whites. (I hasten to add, lest anyone misunderstand, that as a son of Georgia I rejoice that the evil system or paternalism has been abolished.)
Meanwhile, however, ethnic cleansing has or is taking place in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Croatia, Bosnia, parts or Georgia and Russia, and now Kosovo. In these places, people of differing racial, lingual, and religious orientations, who formerly lived side by side for centuries, are no longer willing to do so.
Why? Fairbanks refers to Michael Ignatieff’s book Blood and Belonging to argue that when an overarching and oppressive rule collapses, people tend to fall back into "the simplest, most instinctive definition of the political community: It is composed of people like us" [emphasis Fairbanks’s]. In short, it is a collapse into tribalism.
People must live among their own kind — that is the post-modern viewpoint. It manifests a radical collapse of historic understanding.
In the ancient world, only the early Romans and Greeks appear to have acted this way, and Fairbanks points out that these were democratic-republican types of communities. The great empires simply took over and dominated other groups, as the Romans wound up doing eventually. The Babylonians, Persians, later Greeks (after Alexander) and Imperial Romans thought that their civilizations were superior, and thus should dominate other inferior cultures.
We may add that after them came the Christian civilizations of East and West. However flawed, these cultures put into practice the Christian doctrine that God is One and Three at the same time, and so the human community should be unified and also diverse. Though poorly practised and not completely understood, the Christian ideal was that of many cultures as part of an overarching Christian oikumene. Thus was born a true "multiculturalism" with the Trinity as the overarching paradigm.
The rise of rationalism, first in the Renaissance and then in the Enlightenment, corrupted this nascent ideal. The One was given preference over the Many. Everyone should become alike, regardless of ethnicity and culture. In lesser ways, it was the goal of the empires, such as the British, to make the people they conquered conform to such a mono-cultural idea. The Americans think that way today: Everyone should become an enlightened, democratic, American. In its most vicious form, this ideal went on the march in international communism.
With the collapse of all forms of inter-ethnic rationalism except the American liberal one, we now see a reaction in favor of ethnic isolation. Ethnic movements are found all over Europe, from the Welsh in Britain to the Basques in Spain, from the Flemish in Belgium to the Kosovars in former Yugoslavia.
And we also see it in post-Western "multiculturalism," as Fairbanks points out, following the Hungarian thinker G. M. Tamas. We have shifted from integration as a goal (think of Martin Luther King) to ethnic isolation and racism (think of Louis Farrakhan). We now have academic departments in our uni-versities for Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Jewish Studies, and the like; and these are breeding grounds for absurd, extreme, racist, ethno-centric notions.
Gone is a universal standard, whether the Christian one or that of humanist rationalism. Fairbanks points out that Germany in 1933 was "the most intellectually sophisticated country, the most `post-modern,’ anywhere." Having abandoned any kind of moral absolutes, the Germans fell into thinking along the lines of blood and ethnicity, though they still retained enough of the older rationalism to seek to impose their race on other races. Americans are not much different today: The great sin now is to pass judgment on someone else who is merely "different." The American reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal shows that "different strokes for different folks" is the rule today.
Fairbanks summarizes: "The collapse of communism, with its deadening reign of a Truth in which no one believed, has opened the former Communist world to the impact of relativism. If no one has the right to judge what is good and bad, which form of government is better or worse, we must fall back on the only community that is given, prior to argument and demonstration: the community of ethnicity and religion. And if there are Others in our community, there is nothing to do but drive them out or kill them; the collapse of rationalism leaves no way of including them, the quality of values no excuse for ruling them. Thus, the possible consequences of this pattern of ethnic conflict are far worse than the consequences of the third-world pattern, the human price far higher. It simply becomes impossible for the outsider to coexist in a community dominated by post-modern ethnic consciousness."
I think that Fairbanks is on to something important. Long ago Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy predicted a return to tribalism for the same kinds of reasons Fairbanks discusses: relativism’s destruction of any universal human and/or cultural ideal. Rosenstock-Huessy observed tribalization as it occurred in Germany after the First World War, and saw it as a harbinger of a post-Christian future. What is happening in the former Communist nations is likely to happen elsewhere, in perhaps a more moderate fashion, for the same basic reason: the loss of a trans-cultural force or ideal. Tito kept the various groups in Yugoslavia together by force. Formerly, they had fought amongst themselves for domination of various regions, but they are not returning to that earlier model. It has been swept from their thinking. They are collapsing into tribalism.
Original tribalism held that only we are "human beings," and all others are sub-human "barbarians." A "live and let live" attitude could be found, but alongside a notion that we let them live just as we let other animals live. So we may enslave them if we wish, and treat them as we treat our cattle. Hitlerism shows this notion in modern garb. After all, many Jews were not slaughtered on the spot, but shipped off to camps, kept alive for future use. As sub-humans, they might be killed or enslaved.
Balkan tribalism does not seem to have sunk quite so low, though the evident Serbian policy of rape as a vehicle of warfare comes pretty close: They aren’t really human woman, so we can rape them as we choose, and thereby demoralize their men. Also, the Croats during the Nazi years gleefully slaughtered vast numbers of Serbs. This part of the world seems to provide an extreme case and a microcosm of things that happen elsewhere in a less extreme way.
Fairbanks wants a return to the ideals of rationalistic liberal democracy as a corrective. I submit that he fails to see that the period of European rationalism is over, finished, done. You cannot get the toothpaste back into the tube. Multiculturalism has no answer to give to retribalization; it is part and parcel of it. And multiculturalism is not going to go away any time soon. "Dead white males" (i.e. Western rationalism) are not going to direct civilization any longer. They will be challenged, and will lack the will to enforce their waning ideals.
Only a return to a fully Trinitarian and self-consciously Christian consensus will change this increasingly dire situation. This cannot happen with Croats and Serbs remaining "Christian" in name only, and of two different highly paganized varieties, and the Bosnians and Albanians remaining Islamic. Conversion of all groups is needed. Only the restoration of a truly catholic, Biblical Christianity will enable people of various cultural orientations to share the same neighborhoods.
The impossibility of a return to rationalist European/American humanism is displayed by Fairbanks in the second part of his essay. He deplores it, but has no answer for it. His proof is the inability of NATO to prosecute the war in the Balkans. NATO is only playing at war. NATO does not want to hurt anyone. The European/American leaders believe that Kosovo is worth fighting about but not worth killing over.
This is a monumental failure of nerve. It shows that despite the rhetoric, the NATO leaders don’t really believe in any kind of ideal that would motivate them to do what is needed. Men like Bill Clinton are only playing at war. Their eyes are on polls, not on ideals. The conflict has been ritualized — an insight worth pursuing in its own right — as we tell the "enemy" what we will and won’t do, and warn them in advance of our tactics. The English had no doubt but that it was the "white man’s burden" to subdue the warring groups of India and to rule them. No similar thinking is on the scene today.
Centuries of rationalistic humanism have had the effect of destroying both the archaic pagan way of living with others (domination by force), and the Christian one-and-many ideal (peaceful mutuality under the Triune God). With the collapse of rationalistic humanism (uniformity enforced in terms of an ideal), nothing is left but an extreme of ethnicity not seen in the "third world" of pre-Christian archaism. Thus, the crisis in the Balkans seems to me a harbinger of the general crisis that is coming upon the formerly Christian West. The crisis shows the total poverty of all solutions except the Christian one, and thus provides an opportunity for Christian apologists, if they will take it.
Jesus commands His people to disciple all nations, as the one nation of Israel had been discipled formerly. The material we have been considering shows us just how little progress has been made along these lines in history thus far, and how far we have to go. The model God sets forth in the history of Israel shows us that while some converts to Yahwism were circumcised and became Jews, many others remained as Gentile God-fearers. The unconverted "stranger" and the God-fearing "sojourner" in the land were to be treated the same as the "native" circumcised Jew: the same law, the same justice, the same societal privileges (except for the open worship of alien gods). There were also, from time to time, whole nations of converted Gentiles, such as Joseph’s Egypt, Hiram’s Tyre, Jonah’s Nineveh, and Cyrus’s Persia. These existed in peaceful mutuality with Israel. In Israel’s history we see what a situation of "discipled nations" might look like. In its way and with all its problems, the old Holy Roman Empire manifested something similar: an overarching Christian oikumene with many cultures existing in mutuality inside it. Thus, the true ideal is set before us.
The collapse of rationalistic humanism into tribalism provides an opportunity for the Church, as I have discussed in my book Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future. The local church is the true form of the tribe, providing in Godly form the things that ethnic tribalism seeks but cannot find. Thus, the present cultural collapse of the West provides an open door for the Church, if she is willing to take it. While "conservative" Christians will keep banging the drum for this or that tradition or denomination, Biblical Christians must look to the present situation and rebuild the local character of the gathered assembly, offering the Kingdom to men in Trinitarian terms as did the early Church.
I believe that this is beginning to happen, and that a happy future awaits our grandchildren, though there will be trials and tribulations as it is born. The martyrs of Littleton, Colorado, slaughtered by a neotribal group, are forming a rallying point for the local Churches. This also is likely a harbinger of the days to come.
BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 114
Copyright (c) 1999 Biblical Horizons
February, 1999
James Jordan has pointed out in Through New Eyes and elsewhere that the Mosaic system of worship comes to an end with the dismemberment of the tabernacle in 1 Samuel 4-6. Because of the sins of Eli and his sons, that priestly family is cut off and the ark is taken into exile in Philistia, never to be restored to the Mosaic tabernacle. Instead, it remains in the house of Abinadab on the hill through the entire reign of Saul and some years into David’s reign. The sequence of events in this story can be summarized as follows:
A. Ark taken (house of Eli removed), 1 Samuel 4:1-22.
B. Ark exiled in Philistia, 1 Samuel 5:1-6:9.
C. Ark returned on cart (sin regarding ark), 1 Samuel 6:10-21.
D. Ark with Abinadab, 1 Samuel 7:1-2. The restoration of the ark to the center of Israel’s religious and national life does not take place until after David’s conquest of Jerusalem. Strikingly, the sequence of events in the ascension of the ark to Zion exactly reverses the events of the ark’s removal from the Mosaic tabernacle:
C’ Ark returned on cart (sin regarding ark), 2 Samuel 6:1-9.
B’ Ark housed with a Philistine, 2 Samuel 6:10-11.
A’ Ark Restored (house of Saul removed), 2 Samuel 6:12-19.
As Hebrews 9 implies, every covenant has its sanctuary and its system of worship. What we see in 2 Samuel is thus a covenantal transition: The ark’s arrival at Zion is the coming of a new covenant, as the disruption of the tabernacle is the end of an old covenant. Fittingly, once the ark is installed in Jerusalem, the Lord comes to David and delivers the promises known as the "covenant with David" (2 Samuel 7; cf. Psalm 89:34).
Several details of 2 Samuel 6 strengthen this pattern of reversal and restoration and help pinpoint some of the features of the new, Davidic order. First, Obed-edom (B) is a "Gittite," a convert from the Philistine city of Gath. Just as the ark is exiled among the Philistines for seven months (1 Samuel 6:1), so during its return the ark remains in the house of a Philistine for three months. The Lord’s treatment of the Philistines, however, is very different in the two cases. When the ark is in Philistine territory, Egyptian plagues devastate the land, but when the ark is in the house of the Gittite Obed-edom, the Lord blesses. David takes this as a sign that it is safe to carry the ark to Zion. Though Israel has acted like Philistia in transporting the Yahweh’s throne on a cart, the blessing upon Obed-edom gives David confidence that Yahweh is not going to break out with plagues upon the city of David, as He did upon the Philistine cities. Blessing to a Gentile "provokes David to jealousy" (Deuteronomy 32:19-22).
Moreover, the blessings upon Obed-edom reveal that the Davidic covenant will be a covenant of blessing to Gentile nations, a promise fulfilled especially in Solomon’s reign, when the nations came to learn wisdom from Israel’s king (1 Kings 10:24), but also seen earlier as many foreigners come to join David and become mighty men (like Uriah the Hittite). Though one cannot be dogmatic about his identity, an Obed-edom appears in the list of singers assigned to worship before the ark of Yahweh in the tabernacle of David; perhaps this is a Philistine incorporated into semi-priestly service at David’s tent, an earnest of the later incorporation of the Gentiles (cf. 1 Chronicles 15:18, 21, 24; 16:37-38). Even if this Obed-edom is not the Gittite who housed the ark, it is still evident that the ark now, in contrast to the earlier exile, is at home among Gentiles.
Even under the Mosaic order, Israel was to be the priestly nation among the nations, yet the accent during the earlier period of Israel’s history was on the Lord’s judgment of the nations. Under the Mosaic economy, Egypt was judged, the Canaanites eliminated, foreign invaders assassinated by judges, and Philistines judged with plagues. In an unprecedented turn of events, at the outset of the Davidic covenant, the ark of God is placed among Gentiles and brings blessing. 2 Samuel 6 thus provides important background for the prophecy of Amos 9:11-12, which James quotes at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15:16-18 to justify the incorporation of uncircumcised Gentiles into the new Israel.
Second, the two A sections in the above outline are linked not only because of the "ark taken/ark returned" dynamic but because each section records the end of a dynasty. On the same day that the ark is taken into captivity, Eli and his sons die, definitively ending the house of Eli as a priestly house (though this is not finally carried out until the time of Solomon, 1 Kings 2:26-27). When the ark is returned, a royal dynasty comes to an end — the dynasty of Saul. Michal, we recall, sees David rejoicing before the ark, despises him in her heart, and is punished with barrenness. And Michal is Saul’s daughter, so that her barrenness means that Saul’s blood will never run in the veins of Davidic kings. With the closing of the Mosaic tabernacle, a priesthood ends; with the erection of David’s tent, a royal house is cast down.
This dynastic and covenantal transition is an Old Testament type and image of the transition from Old to New Covenant. Along with the implications for Gentile participation in the worship of Yahweh brought out by Amos and James, this type also has practical liturgical significance. The most evident difference between the Mosaic worship described in Leviticus and the Davidic worship set up in 1 Chronicles is the role of music and song. If Leviticus is taken as a complete account, the Mosaic worship was a wholly silent affair. Nowhere in the sacrificial laws are priests instructed to say or sing anything. I imagine that in fact the priests did speak during the course of their sacrificial rites, but even if they did, word and song did not play a prominent role. In the worship prescribed by David in 1 Chronicles 15-16, song and instrumental music are massively emphasized. Sacrifice is still performed at the Davidic tent, conducted by Zadok and his priestly house (1 Chronicles 16:39-40), but it is almost incidental to the Levitical orchestra and Psalm-singing.
This provides a strong line of argument against Reformed liturgists who would reject the use of instruments in worship. Instrumental music is not merely "not forbidden"; on the contrary, it should be a central part of Christian worship. According to the very first church council, we do not worship at a silent Mosaic tent; we worship at the restored tent of David, and our praise in Psalms should be accompanied by an orchestra at least as robust as that of the Levites (1 Chronicles 15:16-24).
Additional Notes on Musical Instruments
by James B. Jordan
As Peter points out in his essay, the coming of musical instruments is in connection with the coming of the Kingdom. A few additional thoughts along these lines:
1. As I showed in my essay on the Fourth Book of the Psalter, in Biblical Horizons No. 100, this entire book is concerned with the coming of the King and of the Kingdom. It is structured chiastically, and the central Psalm is Psalm 98, which celebrates the fact that the King has finally come. Psalm 98 is also structure chiastically, and at the heart and transition point of the psalm, the people are exhorted to take up musical instruments and praise Him. Here is that center section:
Shout joyfully to Yahweh, all the earth;
Break forth
and sing for joy
and make music.
Make music to Yahweh with the lyre;
With the lyre
and the voice of song.
With trumpets and the sound of the ram’s horn
Shout joyfully before the King, Yahweh.
2. Similarly, in Revelation 4-5, we see that the heavenly worship is spoken until the King (the Lamb) comes to the throne. Then we read that the angels take up instruments and sing.
3. Thus it is a pretty fair conclusion that singing without instruments is not an adequate way to praise the King. The transition from the priestly phase to the kingly phase in the Former Days (from Moses to David) means that instruments are now to be used in the praise of God. Similarly, the transition from the Old Adamic Creation to the New Creation shows the same thing.
4. A final observation: There is no example of a cappella singing (singing without instruments) in the Bible. We are told on occasion that people sang, and instruments are not mentioned, but never are we told that people sang without instruments. Thus, any strict construction of worship based on the simplistic notion that anything not commanded is forbidden, will have to assert that it is wrong to sing without instruments. Clearly that would be going too far, of course. Singing without instruments is not forbidden, but for the full expression of worship, instruments are necessary.
