1 4335 the Man for Whom It Was Too Late

Men Behaving Badly

John Goldingay

Contents

Introduction

1 The Man Born To Be Tough

2 The Man for Whom It Was Too Late

3 The Men With A Terrible Affliction

4 The Men Who Didn't Want To Be Responsible

5 The Brown-eyed Handsome Man

6 The Man Who Made Little Mistakes

7 The Man Who Made Up His Own Mind

8 The Replacement Brown-eyed Handsome Man

9 The Man Who Loved (Too?) Much

10 The Man Who Learned To Lie

11 The Man Who Could Get No Answer

12 The Men Who Didn't Mind a Fight

13 The Man Whose Day Got Spoiled

14 The Man Who Wanted to Build a House

15 The Men Who Used Women

16 The Man Who Lost a Son

17 The Man Whose Love Turned to Hate

18 The Man Who Wanted to Be Another Replacement Brown-eyed Handsome Man

19 The Man Who Lost His Grip

20 The Man Whose Story Fell Apart

21 The Man Who Died Cold

References and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Or, Why I Wrote This Book and Why You Should Put It Down

Samuel, Eli, Saul, Jonathan, David, Amnon, Absalom…: they are a series of men doing men’s things, being husbands and judges and sons and priests and prophets and fathers and shepherds and hunks and fighters and elders and kings and generals and giant-slayers and outlaws and princes and buddies and fugitives and deceivers and killers and poets and conquerors and guitarists and losers and adulterers and builders and seducers and rapists and brothers and failures and worshippers, and men who are about to die. Men do not have a monopoly on all these roles or positions or experiences, but historically they have dominated most of them. It is thus in regard to these roles and positions and experiences that they (we) have had to work out what it means to be human/men. I assume that these stories are there in scripture partly to give us resources in doing that. They do not tell us how to do it, but they tell us about the way God was involved with some men who were doing it.

A generation ago, we read stories about men as if they were just stories about people. But these are stories about men. Even when women feature, they are subordinate to men’s lives. Some days, I want to subvert that and look for the women’s angle, and one of my interests in After Eating the Apricot (Paternoster, 1996) was to see where I could discern the woman’s angle in some Old Testament stories.

The last story I covered in that book was the one about `Hannah and her sister’, at the beginning of 1 Samuel. Subconsciously I was reflecting the assumption that this is a turning point in the Old Testament. At the beginning of Israel’s story, as happens at the beginning of the Christian story, women had some prominence alongside men in the way God worked and among the people whose stories needed telling. Arguably the greatest of the `judges’ in the Book of Judges, after all, is a woman. But as Israel grew up (!?), it became more patriarchal, as happened to the church. Hannah’s story is by no means the last story about a powerful woman in the great narrative that runs from Genesis to 2 Kings. But when Israel makes the transition to being an institutional state, this narrative becomes even more predominantly a men’s story.

As a man, I had learned a lot from thinking about those women’s stories. As a simple Bible-believing Christian feminist, I was then not sure what to do with the stories about `men behaving badly’ (for the most part) that follow in 1 and 2 Samuel. Then as a simple Bible-believing Christian post-feminist I came to the obvious realization that they must have the potential to illumine what it means to be a man. So today I am going with the grain of the text itself, in mostly looking at the stories from the men’s angle. That does not mean this is simply a book about masculinity or maleness. It does mean that I am interested in the way the stories talk about the pressures that come on a series of men, about the mistakes that characterize their lives, about the achievements they can rejoice in, and about the way God relates to all of those. Now that women can do most of the things that men can do, generally at the same time, they may also need to discover what it means to be women/human in regard to these. Perhaps these stories can help them to do so (if mostly by revealing messes it is possible to get into), as well as help them understand men if they should want to do that.

When someone writes history or tells a story, at least three concerns may interweave. These are plot, character, and theme. The plot is where the story as a whole goes, and how it goes there. It requires a beginning and an end, a problem to be solved or a situation to be explained. The material between beginning and end traces the circuitous route of events on their way from the one to the other. The characters are the people involved in this journey, though it may be that none of these characters lives through or is present through the whole. Then the theme or themes are the recurrent issues that the story raises.

It differs from story to story whether plot or character or theme is more important. By its nature theology assumes that theme is what matters: theology is the attempt to systematize material on various themes. It is often said that the Bible story itself is most interested in plot. It is the story of how God set the world going and then stayed involved with it in order to restore it and take it to its destiny. In 1 and 2 Samuel, too, the plot is especially important. This narrative is part of the story of Israel. In particular the books are an account of how Israel made the unexpected transition from a people led by people such as Moses and Joshua and the leaders called `judges’ to a state ruled by kings to whom God had made a permanent commitment. The major theme of the books is related to that. These books are a study of the nature of leadership, of the leadership God approves and does not, of ways in which God relates to human leaders, of leadership that works and does not, of what leadership does to people who want it and who do not want it, to the led and to the leaders.

But 1 and 2 Samuel are also books rich in character study, more rich than any other book in the Old Testament: Samuel, Eli, Saul, Jonathan, David, Amnon, Absalom…. And character is what grabs the touchy-feely era in which we live. We want to know what makes people tick. So in focusing on character in this book, I am colluding with that interest of ours. Here I issue a health warning or disclaimer like the ones at the beginning of television programmes that warn you that this film may disturb sensitive viewers. This book may pander to sensitive viewers and may mislead them about the nature of 1 and 2 Samuel.

In focusing on the books’ characters, we are concentrating on but one aspect of the books, and it is not one that the books see as all-important. While character is more important in these books than in others, it is still subordinate to plot, as is the case in the Bible story as a whole. We will find that some of our questions about the way God deals with individuals in 1 and 2 Samuel do not yield satisfactory answers, and one of the reasons is that the story’s focus does not lie here. It gives us only a partial picture because its concern lies somewhere else, with the place of these people and these events in the broader story of what God is doing with Israel.

David Jobling opens his book on 1 Samuel by telling us how he has lived with 1 Samuel for twenty years. His book shows that this has been a rich experience, but it has not resulted in his reckoning that he now has all the answers to the significance of 1 Samuel. Indeed, he has more questions than he had twenty years ago. That reflects something of the nature of this story. And thus sometimes in the pages that follow I will raise a question about why someone did this or that, or why God did this or that, and acknowledge that I do not know the answer, because the story does not seem to give it.

In a famous New Testament passage, 2 Timothy 3:15-17 gives us some description of the nature of the Old Testament and of its significance for us. It tells us about the purpose of `the sacred writings’. This means the Old Testament, because the New does not yet exist, though no doubt the description can also be applied to it. The Old Testament books are meant to teach us about the nature of the salvation that we have in Christ. To that end they are God-breathed writings, or (as I rather think it should be understood) they are writings produced as a result of people being blown over by God. They are therefore useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, and thus to take us on towards being well-equipped to live for God.

Christians make some assumptions about what must be the implications of all that, about what sort of book the Old Testament must be. Generally they have no need to test these assumptions because they do not read it. If they do, they may find themselves in crisis. At least, this happens to some of my students when I send them off to read the Old Testament books. They do not look like the kind of books they expected `sacred writings’ to be. Readers may then have one of several reactions. They may turn the Old Testament into the kind of book they expected, by reinterpreting the tricky bits and reading it through rose-tinted spectacles. Or they may decide that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 cannot be quite right: the Bible is not inspired after all, or not all of it.

The alternative response I commend to people is to accept this experience of discovering what the Old Testament is actually like and to let it change our idea of what it means for something to be `inspired’. I do not mean that it has mistakes in it. I believe that nothing is there by mistake. 1 and 2 Samuel, for instance, raise all sorts of questions about what makes human beings tick and about how God relates to them, and do not always give clear answers to these questions. Let us try the possibility that this is not because the Holy Spirit had an off day or could not overcome the shortcomings of their writers. It is because stories of this nature would actually contribute to our maturing in Christ.

It means that one of the things that God does in order to take us to maturity in Christ is to make us wrestle with questions. Indeed, in life in general we know that this process of wrestling is one of the things that take us to maturity. For some reason we sometimes assume that the Bible could do that simply by giving us straight answers and not by making us think about questions. But the ambiguity and allusiveness in these stories is something God is happy about, not something God wrings hands over. The stories leave us wrestling with what was in Saul’s heart or David’s. But we do not in the end need to know what was in Saul’s or David’s heart. We need to know what is in our own. And wrestling with questions may help us more to discover that than being told what was the answer for Saul or David.

Which takes me to another feature of these stories that we may find surprising. My title presupposes that most of characters are people of some moral and personal ambiguity.

There are two sorts of films and novels and two sorts of Christian biography. There is the kind that tells of heroes and heroines of unsullied honour and unwavering faithfulness, who go through danger and loss but find that things all work out OK in the end. And there is the kind that tells of people with deep flaws who pay a price for making fearful mistakes, or even pay a fearful price for making small mistakes. I imagine that this implies that there are two sorts of human beings, people who are inspired by the first kind of story and people who are inspired by the second kind. And this would fit with the fact that scripture offers us something of both.

The stories of the saints suggest that the church has usually emphasized the first kind of inspiration, and this has also shaped the church’s reading of scripture. A few years ago the Israeli government was almost brought down by a remark of a senior government minister who commented that he did not personally approve of everything that David ever did. David is one of Israel’s great heroes. How dare a mere 1990s politician criticize the great King David? People who asked the question showed that they had not read the story lately, or that they remembered the story through rose-tinted spectacles. The story of David, and the rest of 1 and 2 Samuel, is a narrative of men (and women) with deep flaws who pay a price for making fearful mistakes, or even pay a fearful price for making small mistakes. Their stories tend not to have very happy endings. If you do not think you want to know that yet, you had better take this book back to the bookstore.

But I will comment from time to time on the way in which their stories are set in a wider narrative that God guarantees will have a happy ending. It is that fact, among others, that makes it possible to face the unhappy endings.

1

The Man Born to Be Tough

(1 Samuel 1-3)

It is odd, really, to begin a book about `Men Behaving Badly’ with Samuel. When a research student a few years ago looked for the way Old Testament heroes are portrayed `warts and all’, he could include Moses and Elijah and Elisha, but not Samuel. There are no moral skeletons in his cupboard, at least none to which the books named after him offer the key. In Samuel's story the men behaving badly are the people he has to work with, the people who are a disappointment: his natural father, his adopted father, his adopted brothers, his sons, his people as a whole, and the two kings he appointed. When he challenges people to find fault with his life in his old age (1 Samuel 12:2-5), no one can do so.

Yet this does not make Samuel an easy guy. I suspect I would have found the more ambiguous, less austere characters easier company. Ancient saints and modern saints (lifelong missionaries and the like) seem sometimes to have been austere like that. It is their toughness that has made it possible for God to use them. But it also gives someone like Samuel a certain ambiguity after all.