Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible, Volume Three

Gottwald

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498292214
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

PART 1: EXAMINING TEXTS1. Social Drama in the Psalms of Individual Lament2. Kingship in the Book of Psalms 3. Abusing the Bible: The Case of Deuteronomy 154. Do not Fear What They Fear: A Post-9/11 Reflection(Isaiah 8:11-15)5. The Expropriated and the Expropriators in Nehemiah 56. How Do Extrabiblical Sociopolitical Data Illuminate Obscure Biblical Texts? The Case of Ecclesiastes 5:8-9 [Heb. 5:7-8]7. On the Alleged Wisdom of Kings: An Application of Adorno's Immanent Criticism to EcclesiastesPART 2: ENGAGING PRACTICES8. Framing Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary: A Student Self Inventory on Biblical Hermeneutics9. Theological Education as a Theory-Praxis Loop: Situating the Book of Joshua in a Cultural, Social Ethical, and Theological Matrix10. The Bible as Nurturer of Passive and Active Worldviews11. Biblical Scholarship in Public Discourse12. On Framing Elections: The Stories We Tell Ourselves13. Values and Economic Structures

Part 1: Examining Texts

1

Social Drama in the Psalms of Individual Laments

Abstract

Building on the exegetical work of Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Gerald T. Sheppard, and Walter Brueggemann, the individual laments in the Psalter are examined. The model of Victor Turner regarding social drama is employed to examine how the laments fit into the fabric of social conflicts in Israel and Judah: breach of norm-governed social relations, mounting crisis, redressive action, and either the reintegration of the disturbed social group or the social recognition and legitimation of irreparable schism between the contesting parties. The book of Job and Nehemiah 5 provide further articulations of those deprived of justice and their cries for redress.

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In The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction, I set forth the hypothesis that the psalms of individual lament served to support and advocate for oppressed Israelites in the absence of a trustworthy judicial system. I suggested that this ritual mechanism indicates that personnel of the temple establishment, who presided over the performance of the laments, sympathized with and sought to alleviate the misery of “the poor and needy” (Gottwald 1985:537–41).

Gerald Sheppard, in dialogue with my hypothesis, pointed out the prominence in the lament psalms of hostile friends, neighbors, even family members, who are pictured among the menacing “enemies” with whom the lamenting victims have to contend. Noting the tensions and conflicts that are frequent in peasant societies, family and peer violence understandably appear alongside the violence meted out by social and political superiors, particularly those engaged in seizing the lands of agrarian freeholders (Sheppard 1991:61–82).

In the performance of the laments, Sheppard suggests a scenario that would provide, not simply an emotionally cathartic effect for the victim, but an actual intervention in the conflict situation being lamented.

On the basis of occasional details in the psalms and anthropological studies of lament in agrarian societies, he claims that the laments were spoken out, and judging by their content, vociferously. The onlookers would include kinfolk supporting the aggrieved who would have some detailed understanding of the source of the lamenter’s pain and anguish. Likewise, the “enemies” would experience the lament performance, either directly as members of the audience or indirectly through the grapevine of community gossip. As a result, the lament performance served to spread the word about the injustice done to the lamenter with the hope that the social shame heaped upon the victim might boomerang on the perpetrator. On occasion, the perpetrator might cease attacking the lamenter in the face of cornmunity disfavor or because of actual repentance. The individual thanksgiving psalms, although not so numerous as individual laments, imply that sometimes there was a favorable outcome for the sufferer.

As for the state of Psalms studies to date, the vast majority of research has been and continues to be devoted to literary and theological inquiry. Even the Sitzen im Leben of the genres have come to be restricted largely to the cult in a narrowly circumscribed manner. By contrast, Sheppard has offered a sociological reading of the individual lament genre that connects the genre directly with social and economic life. Among interpreters of the psalms, Erhard Gerstenberger has, almost singlehandedly, insisted on the referential nature of the psalms in reflecting the life conditions found at all levels of society: family, neighborhood, tribe, state, and ethnic enclave. This “social layering” runs cumulatively throughout the history of the composition and transmission of the psalms. Although we cannot certainly date most of the psalms beyond identifying some of them as preexilic or postexilic, we can construct a plausible social historical typology of the psalms that grounds them provisionally in one or another of the social niches particular to each social level as these levels altered their configurations throughout the history of Israel (Gerstenberger 1988, 2001, 2003, 2007).

Sheppard draws insightfully on anthropological studies of prayer in peasant societies by F. G. Bailey, Max Gluckman, and Ian M. Lewis in order to construct a model of public prayer amid domestic conflict. In this paper I will employ Victor Turner’s scenario of social drama as a heuristic device to illuminate the way that the lamenter’s mini-drama “nests” within a comparable macro-drama involving the larger Israelite society.

Turner defines social dramas as “units of aharmonic or disharmonic [i.e. dissonant, discordant] process, arising in conflict situations. Typically, they have four phases of public action (1974:37–44; 1982:61–88). He finds drama to be a much more apt metaphor for society than mechanical, organic, or cybernetic metaphors since drama does justice to the volatile ebb and flow of social process shaped by contingent human interactions. Turner developed the drama metaphor while studying the Ndembu people of Zambia (1957, 1967) and applied it to the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket and to the Hidalgo insurrection in nineteenth-century Mexico. Subsequently, he used social drama as a lens to interpret the social history of Iceland as articulated in Icelandic sagas (1971). The stages of social drama bear some resemblance to Walter Brueggemann’s three-fold typology of the psalms: orientation, disorientation, new orientation, except that Turner’s model is more culturally and socially grounded (Brueggemann 1984).

The first phase in social drama is a “breach of regular, norm-governed social relations . . . between persons or groups within the same system of social relations” (Turner 1975:38).

In the individual lament psalms, the social drama opens with the assertion that unnamed “enemies” have treated the psalmist unjustly, falsely accusing him of crimes, depriving him of his possessions, his good name, and threatening his very life. He is stigmatized and ostracized as a “sinner” by friends and kin, sometimes even by family. These “enemies” have violated the norms and moral code of society by their dishonesty and violence. In short, the lamenter has lost physical, emotional, social, and even religious support. The suppliant appeals to God to protect him from his enemies and vindicate him by public demonstration of his innocence and by return of the property and livelihood that the pursuers have stolen.

A number of the laments state or imply physical illness. Only occasionally does the sufferer confess that his sins have made him ill. In most instances, the illness is inexplicable, even in the face of the hostile public taunting of the sufferer as deserving of his disease. The suppliant appeals to God to lift the illness and restore him to health and to honored standing in his community.

Interspersed with the “I” voice of the suppliant are frequent brief generalizing statements about victims in society at large (e.g., Pss 5:11–12; 7:12–16; 34:11–22; 62:8–12; 102:12–22). The “rich” and “wicked” appear as a word pair for the perpetrators, and the “poor” and “needy” as a word pair for the victims. The larger social drama gathers up and amplifies the social drama of the individual lamenter. These generalizations serve to validate the sufferer’s complaints since many in society are shown to be in situations similar to his. These references to the wider social drama may have been spoken by the person officiating at the lament ritual. This background assumption of widespread social oppression and unrest closely parallels the witness of the prophets and sages, who decry injustice, and the legal codes that strive to inculcate and enforce social and economic justice (Premnath 2003; Pleins 2001).

The second phase in social drama is mounting crisis, “during which . . . there is a tendency for the breach to widen and extend until it becomes coextensive with some dominant cleavage in the widest set of relevant social relations to which the conflicting or antagonistic parties belong” (38–39).

The suppliant bewails the increasing attacks of his enemies and the social isolation that cuts him off from support and consolation. He is on the verge of death, virtually hopeless and helpless in the sea of troubles that engulf him. The plight of the individual lamenter is placed in the context of spreading corruption and violence committed not by a few bad apples” but by a cross-section of the rich and powerful.

Surveying the course of Israel’s history we can identify recurrent social dramas in which breaches of the moral order and mounting crisis tear at the social and political fabric. There come to mind: 1) Solomon’s oppressive treatment of his peasant subjects; 2) the virtual civil war that initiated Omri’s reign in the north; 3) the growing rift between rich and poor in eighth-century Israel and Judah; 4) ongoing injustice in Judah that overwhelms efforts at reform and issues in the fall of Judah; and 5) the rapacious loan sharks in the period of the restoration who foreclose on their impoverished debtors. One can say that an ongoing series of social dramas punctuate the history of ancient Israel with “breaches” and “crises” that are only partially resolved.

But the mounting crisis for the individual sufferer is not simply social and physical. It is deeply cultural and ideological. The culture is permeated by the confidence that those who are just will be rewarded with a happy and prosperous life. Yet the experience of those speaking in the individual laments is an unnerving tale of hardship, declining fortune, and loss of goods and good name. Most of all it is a shaking of foundational trust in God as the guarantor of the moral order. Job is only an extreme case of the unjust suffering that motivates the individual laments. The isolated lamenter, absorbed in his own plight is nonetheless aware that he is typical of other sufferers and that he speaks in part as a representative of all who likewise suffer breaches of the moral order.

The third phase of the social drama is redressive action “to limit the spread of crisis” by undertaking “adjustive and redressive mechanisms, informal or form, institutionalized or ad hoc . . . swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system” (39–41). The anguish of the individual lament is that there has been no redressive action. The illness has not been healed. The attacks on his person and property have not been restrained. The isolation from his community has not been broken. No one has given him back his honor. The suppliant is still “stuck” in the crisis stage of the social drama, yearning for the redressive action which seems just within reach and yet so far away.

Redressive actions taken by leading members of society and state have not reached down to those who speak in the individual laments. The effects of public actions such as Jeroboam’s lifting of Solomon’s labor corvée; or the pre-exilic reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah; or the post-exilic intervention of Nehemiah in the debt cycle; or the issuance of reformist laws in the Covenant Code, the Deuteronomic Code, and the Holiness Code, are not felt in the psalms. At best, in the royal psalms we have declarations of the king’s maintenance of a just social order on behalf of all his subjects; yet even this promise is made with uncertainty as to its fulfillment (e.g, Psalms 45 and 72; see Jobling 1992).

This is not to say that the macro redressive actions had no effect, since they clearly did in some cases, such as Jeroboam’s relief of the corvée laborers and Nehemiah’s rescue ot the imperiled debtors. The point is that the redress was not always far-reaching, depending as it did on the cooperation of many social actors who would profit from maintaining the status quo. Nor does the reform necessarily endure. A one-time debt release does not solve the systemic reality that the poor cultivators depend on getting loans to survive and thus the debt cycle starts all over again as a sheer matter of survival.

The individual lament, lacking as it does any evidence of relief by society’s leaders, is an anticipatory ritual of redress, offering at least limited public religious solace for the lamenter. The socio-cult...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Examining Texts
• Part 2: Engaging Practices
• Acknowledgments