Sages, Visionaries, And Poets

In the Hebrew Bible the third section of the canon, alongside the Law and the Prophets, is called the Writings. This is a truly miscellaneous collection of witnesses. It ranges from the magnificent poetry of the Psalms and the Song of Songs to the strange visions of Daniel; from the assurance of Proverbs to the protest of Job; from the concern for Jewish identity in Ezra and Nehemiah to the universalism of Ruth and Jonah.

Virtually all the Writings received their final literary shape after the Babylonian exile (587-539 B.C.), although some, like the Psalms, are post-exilic collections of materials that come from Israel's earlier life. For the most part, the diversity of literature and viewpoint reflected in the Writings gives us a picture of the post-exilic period in Israel's story as characterized by great pluralism.

Before the catastrophe of exile, most saw history as the arena of God's working, either in covenant or in kingship. God's salvation history was unfolding in the midst of Israel's story. But exile undermined confidence in God's working in history. Although the prophets of the exile—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah—reaffirmed God's sovereign presence in history, it should not surprise us that following the exile, some alternative perspectives for understanding God's relationship to Israel and to history should emerge.

The diversity of the Writings witnesses to the differing theological options that drew interest in this last period of the Old Testament story. How should our relationship to God now be understood? More than one post-exilic answer to this important question emerged. In this article we will examine three main perspectives within the post-exilic witnesses and show how many of the Old Testament books contained in the Writings fit within those perspectives.

Return and Restoration

In 538 B.C., Cyrus, the king of the Medes and Persians, entered Babylon bringing its empire to an end. As already anticipated by the prophet of the exile we call Second Isaiah (Isaiah 45:1), Cyrus issued an edict allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:2-4; 6:2-5). It was in keeping with his general policy of autonomy for subject peoples and respect for their religions.

Many did not avail themselves of this opportunity to return, and Jews remained dispersed throughout many lands of the ancient world. Ezra 2:64 says that 42,360 persons returned in the first caravan led by a governor named Sheshbazzar. Judah was to be re-established as a province in the Persian Empire.

The hardships facing this returned group were formidable. Jerusalem and the temple were still in rubble. Among those descendants of Judeans left behind at the time of exile, no strong religious identity remained because they had inter-mixed with surrounding cultures by marriage and religious practice. The returnees, by contrast, had developed a strong bond of community centered on maintaining certain religious practices and identity.

Tensions developed quickly and included opposition to the plans of the returnees by ruling authorities in Samaria and Ammon. The Samaritans, descendants of the settlers brought by Assyria into the northern kingdom when it was conquered in 721 B.C., and the Ammonites had enjoyed essential control over the territory of northern Judah (Edom controlled the south) until Cyrus' edict had re-established a new province of Judah. Naturally, hostilities broke out. Early plans to rebuild the temple bogged down, and the returnees were demoralized by the problems and pressures of building a restored community.

Three terms of strong leadership in the restoration period enabled the community to survive. The sources for this period are the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the prophetic books of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

Under the leadership of Zerubbabel, a new governor and leader of a second group of returnees, and Jeshua, a priest, work was begun on the rebuilding of the temple in 520 B.C. With the encouragement of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, and in spite of serious opposition from the Samaritans, the temple was completed and rededicated in 515 B.C. (Ezra 3-6). This was a considerable achievement and raised great hopes among the returned Jews.

There is some indication that Zerubbabel was related to the line of David and that many may have hoped to see the restoration of the Davidic kingship and the rebirth of the nation. This was not to be. The focus of restored Israel became temple/ priesthood/religious identity rather than kingship/national identity.

New vigor in the priestly vision of Israel's future had already appeared during the exile. Ezekiel's vision of a New Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40-48) included a restored temple as the focus of Israel's life and the priesthood as its chief leadership. Portions of the Pentateuch—Genesis through Deuteronomy—written during this period, as well as the history work of the Chronicler, reflect this new vigor of priestly leadership.

At the risk of oversimplification, we might conclude that for many in the restored community of Jerusalem, the response to the challenge of exile was to turn attention away from king and nation and to focus Israel's identity in its religious life centered around the temple and common religious practices such as the observance of the Sabbath. By the time of Malachi (460-450 B.C.), the role of the prophet was almost entirely concerned with priestly and cultic matters, and, after Malachi's preaching, prophecy as a distinct role in Israel disappeared entirely from view.

Nehemiah, a Jewish official in the court of the Persian king, received an appointment as governor of Judah and returned to give leadership in establishing the security of the Jerusalem community. Work at restoring the city and its walls had been forced to a standstill by the hostility of the Samaritans. Nehemiah organized an intensive work schedule that completed and dedicated the walls of Jerusalem in 443 B.C.

With a new sense of security from external threats, Nehemiah turned his attention to the internal community. In a series of reforms, he sought to establish the identity and purity of the Jews by outlawing marriage to foreigners, urging strict observance of religious and sabbath practices, and demanding stricter purity in temple worship including the exclusion of foreign influences in the temple.

Nehemiah probably made two trips to Jerusalem to give it leadership, and he was followed by the arrival of Ezra, who was a "scribe skilled in the law of Moses" (Ezekiel 7:6). Ezra brought with him a book of the laws of Moses which was read and interpreted to the people in a great assembly (Nehemiah 8). This became the basis for renewal of Jewish faith and practice based on the law of Moses.

Most scholars believe that Ezra's law book was the first appearance of the Pentateuch as a completed written document put forward to provide a foundation and authority for Jewish faith and practice. Written Scripture as an authority in the community was established by Ezra's reading, teaching, and interpreting. Like Nehemiah before him, Ezra urged purity of religious practice and social community in conformity with the laws of Moses.

In this brief treatment of a complex period, we can see an important danger emerging—a danger often present in the history of the church as well. During a period in which survival of the community of faith seemed at stake, the leaders of the Jews chose to preserve the Jewish identity and security at the risk of exclusivism. We should not be too harsh in our judgment of this period of Israel's story, because the Jews could have been swallowed up and their identity forever lost. But even the Old Testament seems to judge that the Jerusalemite community went too far in an exclusivist direction in order to save itself.

Two small books contained in the Writings, Ruth and Jonah, are stories told during this period in a manner that protests the exclusivism of Nehemiah and Ezra. Ruth, a story set in the time of the Judges, tells of the courage of women. Against the odds of physical hardship and social custom, Ruth and Naomi found a way from death to life. Ruth, seen in the story as courageous and resourceful, was an unlikely heroine for she was a Moabite woman. Yet this Moabite woman not only made possible her own future but was revealed in Ruth 4:17 to be the great grandmother of David, the greatest of Israel's kings.

Jonah is the story of a reluctant prophet sent to preach God's judgment to the people of Nineveh. He tried to escape God's commission but could not. When he preached to the wicked people of Nineveh, they repented, to Jonah's surprise. To Jonah's utter dismay, God then relented and revoked the judgment. Jonah was then rebuked for his inability to see God as capable of mercy to all peoples, even Ninevites. Jonah's God is a universal God, caring for all peoples.

By Wisdom God Founded the Earth

Contained in the Writings are a number of books commonly described as the wisdom literature. These are Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. In addition there are two wisdom books in the Apocrypha—Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon—and scholars have more recently detected the influence of a wisdom perspective on other portions of the Old Testament: the Joseph stories, some of the material on David, prophets such as Amos and Isaiah, and a handful of wisdom psalms (for example, Psalms 16, 37, 49).

The beginnings of a wisdom tradition in Israel existed as early as King Solomon. It is an international tradition. Egypt and Babylon also have literature that reflects upon and teaches about the common concern for meaning in human life. These traditions are passed on in the teachings of sages and preserved in collections of proverbs and reflections on what makes for wisdom rather than folly. Israel's wisdom literature has clearly borrowed from and been influenced by this international tradition.

Yet despite the early appearance of sages and wise teachings in Israel, all of the wisdom books are from post-exilic times. It would seem that wisdom enjoyed a new popularity, appealing to a broader audience (early wisdom was probably found mainly in the royal court), in the period after the exile. Much of this can be understood as a reaction to the failure of salvation history. The notion that God is active in the great events of history seeking the redemption of the world and of Israel was called into question by the catastrophe of exile.

Wisdom has no concern for the drama of salvation in history. No mention is made of Exodus, covenant, kingship, or prophets, and only little mention is made of temple or priests or sacrifices. The concerns of wisdom are on the matters of ordinary life and how one is to be wise rather than foolish in the conduct of daily affairs. The stress is on individual life rather than the life of peoples. How appealing this down-to-earth context must have seemed to those scarred by exile.

Particularly in Proverbs, the most representative of the wisdom books, we can see several emphases that deserve highlighting as characteristic of the wisdom perspective. First, God appears in wisdom only as Creator and Sustainer rather than as Deliverer, Covenant-maker, or Judge. The presence of God is as order and not as act. This is a return to the picture of God who blesses rather than the God who saves, which we saw in the first article of this series ("In the Image of God," Sojourners, January 1984).

Creation provides for the orderly parameters in which human existence is lived out. Salvation (wisdom) is found as the people recognize and actualize the potential for wholeness already inherent in the created order. Emphasis is placed on the continuity of God's presence in creation rather than on the discontinuity of divine intervention in history. Our attention is diverted from the hope for God's redemptive intervention to the effort to discern the wise order which God intended as the arena for human existence. In a sense human striving after wisdom aligns us with God's purposes in creation since "by wisdom God created the earth" (Proverbs 3:19).

Second, within the order of creation the purpose of human existence is life. Whatever does not contribute to bringing life is characterized as death. Life is intrinsic in the created order and needs only to become actualized in its fullness for each individual. Hence, the emphasis in wisdom is often on what seem like mundane matters. The wholeness (shalom) of human existence is already present as the promise of God's blessing on those who seek life.

In salvation history, existence is given its center of meaning by the intervention of God in a particular history. In the hands of a prosperous people, whether ancient Israel or modern America, this notion can foster a concept of election which claims a corner on God's presence.

Wisdom, on the other hand, stresses seeking after life as seeking after the welfare of the whole human community to which one is related. The path of wisdom is pursued by individuals, but the concern is the whole community. "When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices..." (Proverbs 11:10). This aspect of wisdom obviously helps provide a corrective to the dangers of exclusivism and triumphalism seen in Nehemiah and Ezra.

Third, great importance is placed on human freedom and responsibility in the wisdom literature. Persons are accorded a greater role in determining their own destiny. Each must decide responsibly by choosing life or death. If one chooses foolishly rather than wisely, then one must bear the consequences of that choice, but it is by no means assumed that a person is destined always to make the sinful choice.

The salvation history, symbolized by the Exodus event, stresses our powerlessness and inability to effect a change in the human situation and, therefore, the need for God's deliverance. Wisdom does not arise out of the experience of powerlessness; it stresses the trust God has placed in human creatures and their responsibility and capacity to make decisions that will bring life and blessing in the created order.

Limits to human potential exist, and persons are called upon to acknowledge their creaturely status. The limits are defined by the order of creation. To attempt to transcend those limits and become "like God" (Genesis 3:5) is to violate God's creation. God is present in the potential for life and wisdom as Creator and Sustainer, and God is present in the limits of creation exacting the consequences of sinful and foolish choices. There are limits to human capacity, but within those limits persons are not incapacitated, and much is expected of them. Such a biblical understanding provides a more fruitful base for reflecting on the use of power than does a sole stress on salvation history with its emphasis on human powerlessness.

Up to this point, we have been stressing the positive contributions of the wisdom tradition. Some dangers are inherent in the wisdom perspective, and they can be seen especially in the book of Proverbs. Wisdom is equated with righteousness, and folly with wickedness. It is assumed that these qualities are rewarded or punished in material terms. Thus, the righteous (wise) prosper, and the wicked (foolish) perish. In Proverbs it almost seems that a mechanical cosmos metes out rewards and punishments by tallying up one's wisdom or folly. This notion is called the principle of retributive justice and does not begin to do justice to the complexity of human decisions and relationships.

Another danger in the wisdom perspective is its tendency to avoid extremes. Wisdom is often related to moderation. This, of course, can sometimes be a virtue but also tends to weight things in favor of maintaining order in the status quo. Many of the prophets would hardly have been considered wise by the standards of Proverbs.

Fortunately within the wisdom literature itself some of these dangers were recognized. The clearest example is the book of Job. Job is an eloquent reflection on some of the most disturbing issues we confront in human experience: the meaning of suffering, the justice of God, the nature of our humanity. Here we can only touch briefly on the riches of this profound but disturbing and difficult book. In our context we want to stress the book of Job as a devastating protest to the notion of retributive justice.

In Job 1 to 2 the well-known story of the pious sufferer is told. Losing everything and suffering personally, Job nevertheless remained faithful. Unfortunately, this is the only picture of Job that many people know (symbolized by the phrase "the patience of Job").

In chapters 3 through 31, in dialogue with three friends, another Job appeared who was anything but patient. He raged at God and the friends, declaring the injustice of his fate. The friends responded at first with the pious orthodoxies of the wisdom perspective. Since God would reward the righteous, Job was urged to patience, for God would surely adjust matters.

But under the prodding of Job's anger and sarcasm, the friends soon turned the notion of retributive justice upside down. Since Job was suffering extreme loss and pain, he must therefore be guilty of sin. We, the readers, know that this is not true. Even God acknowledged the uprightness of Job.

Although Job did not convince the friends, the book forces us to acknowledge that bad things happen to good people, that retributive justice works only in theory. In reality, material success is no measure of righteousness or wickedness. We are forced to see how often our rigid orthodoxies fail to take account of human realities.

At the end of the book (chapters 38-42), God appeared to Job in a whirlwind to confront Job with the power of God as Creator and the position of Job as creature. These chapters and their meaning are greatly debated, but some observations seem reasonably clear. Job saw more clearly than the friends, but in the end he too was unwilling to part with the notion of retributive justice. He wanted God to put things right—namely to give him back his just rewards.

In confrontation with God, Job learned that retributive justice is truly not operative. Even perfect righteousness cannot lay claim on God. The Creator is radically free, and we as creatures, no matter how righteous, are dependent on God's grace and not on some system of obligating God by our righteousness. The book of Job does not answer all of our questions about the difficult issues it raises, but it clears away many of the dead ends to which rigid notions of retributive justice would bring us.

Terrors and Visions

The history of the Jews in Jerusalem after the time of Ezra continued to be one of hardship. Persian rule was replaced by Greek when Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world. Following his death Judah was controlled at times by Greek rulers in Egypt and at other times by Greek rulers in Syria.

Finally, under Syrian domination, pressure began to grow for forcing all Syrian subjects, especially the Jews, to adopt Hellenistic culture, including its religion. This policy reached its height in 168 B.C. when the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes marched his troops into Jerusalem, desecrated the temple, and attempted to force all Jews at the point of the sword to worship Zeus. This persecution touched off the Maccabean revolt, a rebellion against Greek rule which led to a brief period of Jewish independence.

At the height of these persecutions, the Book of Daniel was written to encourage the Jews in their loyalty to Yahweh and their resistance to the policies of Antiochus. Daniel belongs to a class of literature called apocalyptic (from the Greek word meaning "to uncover, reveal"), and this represents a third theological perspective that emerged in the post-exilic period. Daniel, especially chapters 7 to 12, is the only example of apocalyptic literature in the Old Testament, although portions of Ezekiel anticipate some of its features.

Apocalyptic literature is characterized by strange visions, bizarre symbolism, and a desire to hide its meaning from all but the faithful inner circle. Its central theme is anticipation of the end of history when God will usher in the divine kingdom and the new age. The forces of evil will be vanquished once and for all in a final battle. In symbolic language apocalyptic literature interprets the events of the time of persecution when it was written and then attempts to describe the events leading up to the end time and God's vindication of the faithful.

Apocalyptic literature such as Daniel emerges out of times of persecution when the hopelessness of present events makes necessary a renewal of the vision of God's ultimate purposes for history. If one can see history moving toward God's ultimate fulfillment of the age and the vindication of the faithful, then one can endure the sufferings of the present. In the Book of Daniel, this is made even more explicit by prefacing the apocalyptic visions of chapters 7 through 12 with stories of the pious youth Daniel and his friends remaining faithful to Yahweh against great odds in the time of the Babylonian exile (Daniel 1-6).

At its best, apocalyptic scripture reminds us of the visionary side of biblical faith that always understands the future as God's future, holding possibilities even when crisis looms. It also reminds us of the biblical sense that history moves forward with purpose according to God's plan for the reconciliation of this broken world. For the community of faith, history does not go meaninglessly in circles. The visionaries of the Old Testament remind us of that quality of anticipation that must always mark the life of God's people and fuel our hope in the most hopeless times.

But apocalyptic scripture also has its dangers. The apocalyptic perspective has often become so hopeless of possibilities within history that it regards all history as captured by evil. The tendency is then to give up on labor for justice and righteousness in our own time and to live only in longing for the end of time.

In the period between the Old and New Testaments, this led some groups, expecting and longing for the end of the age, to withdraw into communities in the desert to prepare for and wait for the end of time. Qumran, the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was one such community. Throughout Christian history, interest in the apocalyptic literature has thrived when hopelessness for the present has increased.

Jesus Christ Is Our Peace

The Old Testament does not come to a neat end point where all loose ends are tied up in a fitting conclusion. Daniel was probably the last Old Testament book to be written. Important and edifying books were written later than this. Many of these are included in the Apocrypha, but for a variety of reasons the Hebrew canon was closed after Daniel. The result is that the Old Testament simply ends in the middle of the ongoing story of the Jews.

For the Christian church this is, of course, not the end of our Scripture. Many earlier figures in the history of the church, including some influential 20th-century theologians, have thought that there was a radical discontinuity between the Old and the New Testaments. It was almost as if we had two different Scriptures witnessing to two different Gods.

Fortunately modern scholarship has taken quite a different direction. Recent studies emphasize the close and important relationship between the Old and the New Testaments. Our understanding of the New Testament must acknowledge the deep roots in the Hebrew tradition of the early church's witness.

This allows us to see clearly that Jesus Christ, the very center of our faith, is not something totally new and unheard of, but the fulfillment of all that had gone before. God in Christ is none other than the God Israel knew. The Word made flesh to dwell among us is the Word which was in the beginning with the Creator. Jesus himself declared that he had come in fulfillment of the Hebrew tradition (Matthew 5:17; Luke 4:21).

When the early church sought to interpret to the world the radical presence of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it had no better categories at hand for that witness than those already available to it in the Old Testament Scripture. So it proclaimed Jesus to be the embodiment and fulfillment of all that had gone before.

Jesus is the new creation, a second Adam. He is the fulfillment of the promise given to the ancestors, the true seed of Abraham. Jesus is the one whose resurrection releases from bondage to death and brings deliverance into new life. Baptism is both a passing through the waters to new life (Exodus) and a rising from death to new life (Resurrection).

Jesus is a second Moses, the giver of a new covenant. He teaches the law on the mountain (Sermon on the Mount); he appears on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, the only two Old Testament figures who ascend Mt. Sinai. Jesus also fulfills the royal tradition. He is the true Messiah, the Son of David anointed by John the Baptist, and the proclaimer of the kingdom of God. He is Immanuel, the root from the stump of Jesse, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 7,11, and 9), the long-awaited one who will reign in justice and righteousness.

Jesus is pictured in prophetic terms as well. He announces his ministry in Luke 4 by declaring his prophetic vocation reading from Isaiah 61, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... to preach good news to the poor... release to the captives... sight to the blind...liberty to the oppressed." He confronts the powerful, champions the outcast and the powerless, proclaims God's Word. He teaches in images drawn from ordinary life like one of the sages. He is the great high priest after the order of Melchizedek whose sacrifice makes all future sacrifices unnecessary, thus fulfilling the priestly tradition. Jesus is the One who will come again on the clouds of glory to usher in God's kingdom at the end of the age.

In short, without the witness of the Old Testament, we frequently would have little idea what the early church was saying about Jesus in the New Testament. If Jesus Christ is the flower of our faith, then the Old Testament witnesses we have described in this series are its roots.

We can close by calling on the great Hebrew symbol of shalom—wholeness, peace—for a concluding witness to the unity of our biblical faith. God's intention for the world in creation was shalom. In a broken and sinful world, God entered into covenant with Israel, and the goal of covenant community was to be shalom. Now Jesus Christ is our peace (shalom): "he has broken down the dividing wall of hostility... reconciled us to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing hostility to an end…preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Ephesians 2:14-17). May shalom ever be the vision we claim, even as it claims us.

Bruce C. Birch was professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. The series "What Does the Lord Require?" was scheduled to be published as a book by The Westminster Press in 1985.

This article is the last of a six-part series on the Old Testament roots of our faith, regularly published in 1984.