A Jewish Critique of a Christian Theologian’s Work

Walter Brueggmann, a prominent Christian theologian who died this past June, had a lot to say about Moses and other Israelite prophets.

In his influential book, “The Prophetic Imagination,” in print continuously since 1978, Bruggemann describes the significance of Moses’ pronouncements, not only for the Hebrew slaves and the ruling Egyptians, but for American society today.

Brueggemann characterizes the Egyptian religion in Moses’ time as a blunt instrument used for one simple purpose — to keep the Pharoah and his descendants in power forever. The Egyptian state was devoted to the needs of one man.

“The Gods of Egypt are the immovable lords of order,” Brueggemann writes. Pharaoh’s religion “served the interests of the people in charge,” he explains.

The only requirement of the Pharaoh’s Hebrew slaves is that they obey the commands of their overlords on the daily job of constructing the “storage cities” of Pithom and Ramses for the king of Egypt, Exodus 1:11 tells us.

“They (The Pharaoh’s minions) made embittered their lives by means of hard labor with clay and with bricks and with all manner of labor in the field; they embittered all their labors which they made them perform, with harshness,” Exodus 1:14 states.

The Hebrews are a marginal people, stateless, with no power to influence the Pharaoh or change their station in life.

We can easily infer that it is not only the Hebrews who are made to be puppets in this situation. The common folk of Egypt, who were not part of the ruling family, or its upper elite would also have been deployed to serve virtually every wish and whim of the Pharaoh.

“This is what Pharaoh has said,” found in Exodus 5:10, is a telling phrase. Only one person had real power in Egypt. The Pharaoh could be influenced, of course, but he had to make the ultimate decisions. He alone had the power to say yes or no to virtually anything of import that went on in the kingdom, including whether any given subject lived or died.

The genius of the Biblical writer, or writers, who gave us the Exodus story is that they imagined a world which could be very different than the one envisioned by the rulers of Egypt, and the ancient world.

Instead of a simple, but brutal society of the ruler and the ruled, Moses found in God an “alternative consciousness,” as Brueggmann calls it.

That consciousness consists of “the freedom of God,” which I think means that one, God is both able to act with agency over and above the Pharoah, and that, two, God offers the Hebrews a new life of freedom, in which everybody gets the opportunity to make their own decisions. They can now choose how to educate themselves, what they will do for work, how they will raise their children. Yes, there have to be some rules for their new society, which is where the Ten Commandments come in, but the Hebrews could operate quite freely within those boundaries, certainly more freely than under the Pharoah’s thumb.

But, before God acts, he hears from the enslaved Hebrews a wounded cry of grief over their plight. This is a notable event.  They are suffering. They seek help.

And God hears the cries of the descendants of the men with whom he made a covenant, promising them a land for their nation.

God does not respond to Pharoah. Pharoah wouldn’t even know how to ask Yahweh for help. If he did ask anyone for help, he would appeal to Horus, the protector of the Pharoah.

God’s decision to help the Hebrews is the first act of social justice in Biblical history. God is portrayed as an entity that cares about the downtrodden, those who are suffering.

Brueggmann next takes up the prophet Jeremiah, who sees his people in great distress, as Moses did.  Jeremiah lived in a different time. The citizens of Judah weren’t oppressed, but they were numb to injustice, according to Brueggmann.

The king and his circle “had for so long lived in a protective, fake world that their perceptual field was skewed,” Brueggmann writes.

The king of Judah during Jeremiah’s life was obviously fat and happy. He doesn’t see the dangers in not taking care of the poor and needy, and beyond that the imminent Babylonian invasion, in which the vast majority of the local population will be carted off to a foreign land.

Jeremiah does. He sees what the king refuses to see.

Jeremiah 22:16 states, “He judged the cause of the poor and needy, then it was good. ‘Is not that the knowledge of Me?’ says the Lord.”

Here we again have the identification of God with the marginalized. While the royal court of Judah may be satisfied, a substantial population of the land is distressed. If human life may be characterized as a competitive struggle for survival, where can relief be found from the difficulties, often extreme, of those trodden underfoot by the wealthy and powerful?

Jeremiah implicitly involves God in his condemnation of the rich, when he says, “For your eyes and your heart are on nothing but your gain and on innocent blood to shed and on the oppression and on the crushing to do.”

A nation whose elite has nothing else on its mind except achieving more wealth is fated for the vengeance of the Lord, in the form of the Babylonian conquest.

Jeremiah bewails the fate of Judah. The prophet has the ability to feel, while the king does not. As God empathized with the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, Jeremiah empathizes with the nation of Judah on the eve of its destruction.

The Hebrews are on the verge of being marginalized once again by a foreign power. But they are also implicated in this new national apocalypse, because of their failure to take care of the least among them.

In Babylon, as in Egypt, the now exiled tribes of Israel find themselves encased in a world not of their own making. They’re not enslaved, but they are lost. The Babylonian kingdom is taken to task by Second Isaiah. He likens it to a woman shaming herself by disrobing in public.

With this language, Second Isaiah seeks to humiliate Babylon, by showing that she has nothing in which to take pride. Babylon may be an empire, but it is an empire built on a false promise, a culture which seems centered on obtaining wealth. Second Isaiah likens Babylon to Sodom and Gomorrah – it is a wicked place and must be destroyed.

By insulting Babylon so brazenly, Second Isaiah seeks to reduce its status in the minds of the exiled tribes, to show that this kingdom has less power over them than they think.

Second Isaiah does not just tear down the Babylonian kingdom. He attempts to build up his people, by offering them the possibility of hope and redemption. He reminds the exiles of his covenant with David.

God is waiting for their embrace, Second Isaiah states. And when the people come to Him, they shall receive renewed strength and “mount up with wings like eagles.” God is there to lift the spirits of the Hebrews and strengthen their ability to resist the Babylonian royal consciousness that works to lull them into a state of acceptance and acquiescence of their lot in a land not their own.

“The Prophetic Imagination” takes a curious turn when Brueggmann turns to Jesus, whom he considers part of the Jewish prophetic tradition.

Once again, the Hebrew tribes find themselves marginalized, as they are living under the thumb of Rome, which taxes them to the point of exhaustion and monitors their movements with phalanxes of imperial soldiers, governed by Pontius Pilate, who had no use for the religion of the locals. In fact, he was contemptuous of the Judean God. For instance, Pilate brought images of the Roman emperor into Jerusalem, which was forbidden under Jewish law.

But instead of attacking the Roman rulers of Judea for opposing Jesus, Brueggmann trains his sights on the Hebrew political religious establishment, from King Herod to the Pharisees.

For example, Brueggmann talks about the depredations of King Herod against the infant Jesus, and other innocent children.

The Christian Bible claims that Herod, upon hearing of the birth of a child in Bethlehem, a savior and a future king of the Jews, decrees the slaughter of every male child under the age of two years old. This incident is an example of imitative writing, taken from the book of Exodus, reflecting Pharoah’s order to kill all the male Hebrew babies in Egypt.

The question, crucial to Jews today, is whether the nominally Jewish Herod actually ordered these killings.

There is no historical record of this event.

We might think something as notable as this decree of massive slaughter of Judean babies would be written about by scribes at the time. But the scribes didn’t write anything about this incident. Because it didn’t happen.

Also, it seems quite reasonable to think that Herod would have to get approval from his Roman overlords before committing a genocidal act as massive as this. There’s no record of such a request by Herod or Roman approval for something so heinous.

So, even before the Gospel writers’ completely imagined demands by the Jewish crowd to crucify Jesus, we have here the first act of tribal hatred toward Jews in the Christian Bible.

Brueggmann continues in this vein with his description of the Pharisees’ treatment of Jesus. Jesus’ preaching represents a challenge to their authority. Brueggmann quotes the Gospel of John: “Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he (Jesus) was, he should let them know, so they might arrest him.”

There is no mention of the Romans at all in episodes like this, in “The Prophetic Imagination.” Brueggmann doesn’t discuss the vise in which the Judeans were caught. The Jewish authorities were terribly cowed by Roman tyranny and wary of exciting the notoriously obnoxious and cruel governor Pontius Pilate to the point where he commanded their soldiers to crack Jewish skulls.

Whether Brueggmann intended this or not, his message contains the same poison as the Gospels – the Jews are the main culprits in getting Jesus killed, while the ruling Roman authorities are mere bystanders.

The false accusations in the Gospels have been an albatross around the necks of Jews for almost 2,000 years. Brueggman doesn’t do anything to help us lift the terrible weight of the lie of Jewish deicide against Jesus. Instead, he reinforces it for Christians.

It’s painful and ironic to realize that Brueggmann, in promoting Jesus as a champion of the marginalized, continues the Christian effort to marginalize the Jewish progenitors of Jesus, and by extension, their descendants, a people who’ve  suffered terrible, almost unimaginable slaughters and losses at the hands of Christian monarchs through the centuries.

Brueggmann’s ideas about using religion to fight for social justice are potentially useful in helping churches improve the lot of the poor and needy. His critique of American consumerism as the new Pharaoh, a kind of state religion which shields the population from caring about the plight of the poor and disadvantaged is insightful and penetrating.

But his blindness about the effect of his book on the Jewish people is a blight on Brueggmann’s work. An ordinary Christian reader of Brueggmann might well take the author at his word concerning the deadly accusations directed at the Judean priests and population in the Gospels, claiming with no evidence that they demanded Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. The repetition of this 2,000-year-old falsehood can only reinforce and deepen tribal feelings of anger at the modern-day Jewish people.

The Jews survive, as we always do, but the wounding hatred directed toward us keeps on coming. Brueggmann may be gone, but his book lives on.