Reading the Bible as a retired archaeologist, I am fascinated by the way God’s word speaks both to and against the cultures of the ancient Near East. In the pages of Scripture, the Holy Spirit repeatedly undermines the assumptions that lie beneath the political and social lives of the Israelites and their neighbors. Some of this is obvious to any careful reader, even without any special knowledge of ancient history. For example, many passages in the Old Testament are direct attacks on the religious beliefs of the pagan cultures surrounding Israel. In other passages, the attack may be a little hard to spot for modern readers who are not experts in the ancient Near East.
I’ve written previously about the three level of context we need to keep in mind when reading the Scriptures; literary context, canonical context and historical/cultural context. It is primarily this third level of context that I want to look at in this article.
To start with, we need to remember that every passage of Scripture had an intended audience; some person or group of people that the author specifically had in mind when he wrote it. And because the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Biblical authors, does all things perfectly, we can assume that this original audience was able to correctly understand everything the Holy Spirit intended for them to understand. We therefore ask “what would those original readers have understood this passage to be saying?” The answer to that question guides our interpretation as well.
Nimrod
My first example of a subversive Scripture is this one about a king that Moses calls Nimrod:
Cush was the father of Nimrod, who became a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD.” The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Kalneh, in Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah – which is the great city (Genesis 10:8-12).
Some scholars think that Nimrod is the Biblical name for Sargon of Akkad, also called Sargon the Great, who created the Akkadian empire (which covered much of Mesopotamia) and ruled it between about 2334 and 2279 BC. Even if that’s correct, however, knowing how Nimrod fits into the historical records of his era isn’t actually very important. What’s important is not who Nimrod was, but what the Bible says about him.
Many writers outside the Bible have claimed that Nimrod built Babylon. Scripture, however, does not say this, although it does tell us that Nimrod built the cities of Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen. He is the first person since Cain to be named in the Bible as a city builder (which, obviously, does not mean that nobody else built a city). And like Cain, Nimrod is not part of the lineage that leads to Abraham and the Israelites. Cities are not the only cultural advance that comes from outside Abraham’s lineage; metal working, music and the cultural pattern of nomadic herding are also attributed to people who were not part of Abraham’s family (Genesis 4:20-22). In fact, God seems to be going out of his way to show that when he eventually calls Abraham to follow him (Genesis 12:1-3), it will not be because there was anything especially glorious about his ancestors.
Getting back to Nimrod, we see that he was “a mighty warrior on the earth.” In fact, he is the first person after the flood to be called mighty, a fact that has led to a lot of speculation on the internet about whether or not Nimrod might have been one of the Nephilim. But the Biblical account does not imply any such thing. The Hebrew word translated “mighty” is gibôr. That’s a fairly common word in the Old Testament. This same word is used to describe the warriors who fought under Joshua, and later, those who fought for David. All this text is saying is that Nimrod was a warrior king. He did not inherit his kingdom, but built it through conquest. In fact, the Bible does not tell us that there was anything unusual about Nimrod’s birth at all.
This was not an accidental omission. If the Holy Spirit had wanted to say that Nimrod’s origin was supernatural, he could certainly have done so. The fact that he did not say this is intended to send a message. You see, throughout much of the ancient Near East north of Egypt, kingship was thought to have descended from heaven. Kings were set apart as divine representatives. And in Egypt, the pharaoh was believed to be an incarnation of the god Horus during his lifetime, and then of the god Osiris after his death. Kings were not ordinary people, in other words. It’s in this context that we get the story of Nimrod. He is the very first king to be named in the Bible, earlier than any of the kings of Mesopotamia or of Egypt. And he is a warrior king, a gibôr, but he is specifically not presented as any kind of divine being. And it’s also in this context that Moses told the Israelites that if there were ever to be a king of Israel, he would be a simply a fellow Israelite, subject to God’s law just like anybody else. This future Israelite king must not “consider himself better than his fellow Israelites” (Deuteronomy 17:14-20). The king, in other words, was not a divine being, but simply a man with political authority, nothing more. This is an important theological statement; there are no divine kings until Christ. Kings are ordinary human beings, just like everyone else.
As an aside, I should point out that I am talking about Moses here because he is the one who (we believe) wrote Genesis. A very common mistake in reading Genesis is to only look at the cultures the book describes and forget that it was actually written for the benefit of people living hundreds of years later. It might be interesting to speculate about what Nimrod understood his role in history to be, but for the sake of understanding Scripture, we need to ask what Moses expected the people of his own era to get out of this story.
Abraham’s Slaves
The story of Nimrod subverts the widespread idea that kings were a different order of being than the people they ruled. My second example looks at the opposite end of the social hierarchy – slaves.
Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner – those who are not your offspring. Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:9-14).
This is, of course, the point in Genesis where God establishes circumcision as the sign of his covenant with Abraham and his descendants. And one thing that stands out is that this covenant applies to every male “whether born in your household or bought with your money.”
To state the obvious, Abraham owned slaves, a fact that had actually been mentioned in several passages prior to this one. Male and female slaves were among the wealth Abram had acquired in Egypt (Genesis 12:16), and Hagar was Sarai’s slave (Genesis 16:1).
One problem we’re likely to have in understanding this passage is that the English word “slave” has a very broad range of meaning, but for historical reasons the connotations, and the emotional impact, stem almost entirely from the practice of slavery in the United States prior to 1865. That’s a little unfortunate, because we use the same word to refer to situations that were very different from American slavery. Like this one.
Abraham’s slaves were members of his household. One of the hardest things for modern Americans to grasp about Biblical cultures was that, in the ancient world, the position of a slave was often more desirable than than that of a hired worker, because slaves had better security. We need to remember that crop failures resulting in famine were not uncommon. Three of them are described just within Genesis; one each during the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and there were most likely other famines that are not recorded because they did not directly affect the story Moses was telling. In tough times, hired workers lose their jobs, but slaves remain in the household. When lives are at risk, people can hardly be blamed for deciding that food is more important than freedom. The fact that this is not obvious to us today is largely because most of us have never faced a genuine threat of starvation.
The important thing to notice in this passage, however, is that God required male slaves, whether born as slaves in that household or purchased, to be circumcised right along with Abraham himself and his children. Although not descended from Abraham, they were included in the covenant. And I think we have very often missed this point. Right from the beginning, God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants included people who were not physically descended from him, but who simply belonged to his household. It was never just about Abraham’s physical offspring.
I think that the Holy Spirit wanted to especially record this point in Genesis because there were many among the Israelites in Moses’ time who were also not physically descended from Abraham. Exodus 12:38 tells us that when the twelve tribes left Egypt:
Many other people went up with them, and also large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds.
Just a few verses later God declares that these foreigners can celebrate the Passover, marking their participation in the covenant community, provided that every male in their household is circumcised. He makes it clear that “the same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you” (Exodus 12:48-49). From the beginning of the covenant with Abraham, then, God refused to distinguish people by social status. Both the master of the house and the slaves were included on exactly the same terms.
Subverting Cultures
Genesis is an extremely subversive book. In just the first seventeen chapters, Moses has already attacked the religious foundations of pagan society, denied the claims of divine superiority by kings, and shown God establishing a covenant that treats slaves as equal to their masters. From the standpoint of the cultures of the ancient Near East, this book is dangerously radical. And this, despite the fact that the Bible is not primarily about changing a bad society, but about revealing who God is, and who we are in relationship to him.
We aren’t told why God chose not to simply abolish both slavery and the rights of kings. It might simply be that doing so at that time would have disrupted society in such a way that it would have done more harm than good. Or maybe that wasn’t one of the reasons. I don’t know, and I’m okay with that. If God chooses not to explain why he did something, I don’t feel that I need to explain it either.
But if God does not immediately abolish inequality, he does begin undermining both slavery and divine kingship. And he begins setting the stage for Christ to eventually end the true slavery (Romans 6:6-7), and the Holy Spirit to put an end to social distinctions, and make us all one in his kingdom (Galatians 3:28-29).