Reading the Hebrew Scriptures through Christ establishes that what is under contention throughout is the identity of God in anthropology or conversely, the identity of humanity in theology. That is, the two topics, which we tend to separate, are made one in Christ, and where they are not synthesized there are characteristic errors. There is a divinization of what are assumed to be the controlling absolutes, such as law, retribution, and violence, and the dehumanizing of God. In turn, this divinization of human absolutes, now deified and reified, makes human revenge, retribution, and violence an imitation of God. This spiraling and seemingly inescapable evil, is broken open by Christ and thus the Scriptures are opened (they are constituted as Scripture), and counter-examples of God are made evident in human suffering, struggle, forgiveness and compassion. The Hebrew Scriptures simultaneously trace both narratives (the transcendent God of legal retribution and the immanent redeemer of mercy and love) but they are a confusion (a hodgepodge of contradictory texts) apart from the insight provided by this Christocentric hermeneutic, which puts a very different human stamp on the divine. Given the light of Christ, we can read Scripture as the gradual synthesis of the human and divine culminating in Christ.
One of the most bizarre incidents, in which God is first recognized as taking on humanity, is in Jacob’s wrestling match with a mysterious man: “Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Ge 32:24). This wrestling is a metaphor for what is at stake in the wrestling with God throughout Scripture. Jacob obtains his true identity in recognizing God in the face of his wrestling partner: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Ge 32:30). Contrary to the megachurch preacher who said “I can’t worship a guy I could beat up,” Jacob discovers a God who allows himself to be pinned down, and in so doing offers his blessing: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Ge 32:28). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![1] Jacob memorializes the event and the place calling it Peniel, meaning “face of God.” This is an odd sort of beatific vision, as Jacob is not transported out of the body, but it is very much an embodied, enfleshed, synthesis of divine and human. Spirituality and divinity are interwoven with being touched by this man/God who dislocated Jacob’s hip and transformed his identity (Ge 32:25).
This transformation is immediately evident: “Then Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him” (Ge 33:1). From his actions, hiding the most cherished part of his family (“He put the maids and their children in front, and Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last” vs. 2) it is evident Jacob presumed Esau would exact revenge. Rather than swaggering, Jacob is limping and humbled: “But he himself passed on ahead of them and bowed down to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother” (vs. 3). Jacob the trickster was out of tricks before the brother from whom he stole the birthright, the hunter and son after his father’s heart – a man’s man, if you will. But rather than exacting revenge, “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept” (Ge 33:4). This is unexpected and unexplained, though it points back to the lesson learned in the wrestling match. Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Ge 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother what he found in his visitor the previous night. “Esau’s face of love and nonviolence is the very face of God.”[2] As Bartlett explains, there is no explanation for Esau’s transformation from seeming armed avenger to weeping and loving brother, other than pure grace. “The man who wrestles with Jacob and loses and then becomes God is the same sememe (unit of meaning) as Esau who loses, who forgives, who is recognized as the face of God.”[3] Rather than God being identified with violence, he is identified in the victimized brother showing forgiveness and mercy.
Jesus, in the story of the Prodigal Son, plays on the story of Jacob and Esau, with the younger brother grabbing the inheritance and leaving the elder brother to work the farm, while he squanders his inheritance and is eventually forced to humbly return home. He expects rejection and servitude in his father’s house, but instead the father reenacts the response of Esau: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him and fell on his neck” (Lk 15:20). The Pharisees did not understand Jesus keeping company with sinners, and the point of the story is to change their image of God. The echoes of Jacob and Esau must have been obvious as Jesus directly ties Esau’s and the father’s action to the figure of God (rejoicing in heaven).
The pattern is repeated in the story of Joseph and his brothers, in which the brothers who are jealous of Joseph would kill him, but he instead becomes their savior in Egypt. Rather than becoming a scapegoated and perhaps a deified victim, Joseph is a type of Christ, exposing the scapegoating intent of his brothers through a long and agonizing process, in which they are put in the place of either sacrificing their brother Benjamin or of laying down their life for their brother. The brothers tell Joseph the story of the lost son (of course, he is the lost son) and explain their father could not bear it should he lose Benjamin, the second son of his beloved Rachel. Joseph plays out the game until he cannot stand it any longer: “Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him. . . He wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard of it” (Ge 45:1–2). Then there is the scene like that between Jacob and Esau: “Then he fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers and wept on them, and afterward his brothers talked with him” (Ge 45:14–15). “Here Joseph becomes the single righteous individual who forgives and saves all his brothers.”[4]
In spite of the brothers agonizing experience, when their father, Jacob, dies, they assume Joseph will now exact revenge. Joseph, in response, calls up the words of his father upon seeing Esau: “Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones” (Ge 50:19–21). The betrayal of both Joseph and Jesus was the result of evil plotting, but God turned the evil into his purpose of salvation, not by confirming retributive justice, but by revealing himself in human victims, through forgiveness and blessing. The God of vengeance (or human vengeance as divine) is displaced by the God victimized and even demonized by vengeance. Recognition of the divinity of the crucified and forgiving Christ, accentuates this synthesizing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.
While large sections of Scripture seem to stand against the non-retributive God of the forgiving victim, Job may be the book where these two conceptions are most clearly under contention. The friends of Job explain Job’s suffering as required by divine righteousness, and after seven days of silence before their suffering friend, they start demonizing Job. As Zophar explains, the wicked have it coming, and their triumph is short (Job 20:5). Soon they will be trashed like so much garbage (vs. 7), and will be turned to dust (vs.11) and will experience continual vomiting due to the poison they have swallowed (v.15). He waxes elegant describing the agony but the point is, “God will send His fierce anger on him” (vs. 23) and the implication is this is what is causing Job’s calamities. In fact, Job is not suffering enough, as “God forgets a part of your iniquity” (11:6). God is the cause of suffering and violence in their estimate, and Job has it coming.
The friends of Job want to account for everything according to the working of the righteous requirements of God and they cannot forgive Job’s illness. The law of righteousness separates them from afflicted sinners and this explains their relative prosperity. For Job, on the other hand, this law is in tatters. There is the realization of an excess of evil which cannot be accounted for by legal righteousness. In Job’s estimate, either evil reigns, and God and evil are indistinguishable, or there is another explanation
The story begins with God consulting Satan, and then He and the devil wager on Job’s response to random suffering (Job 1:6 ff). It is not a very exalted view of God, posing the possibility that God and Satan might collude in causing suffering and in fact might be confused for one another. Though some might feel uncomfortable putting God in league with the devil, Job does not feel such hesitation: “It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys the guiltless and the wicked. If the scourge kills suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?” (Job 9:22–24). Job is posing the possibility that God is evil, and there is no justice, as his suffering is unjust.
This false choice brings him to a Messianic realization: “This I know: that my Defender lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth. After my awakening, he will set me close to him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part: he whom my eyes will gaze on will no longer be a stranger” (19:25-27). He will see God face to face, in the flesh, not as adversary but as advocate. In place of Satan (the adversary which also includes his friends), Job pictures a witness for the defense who will address the problem of violence and bloodshed: “O earth, do not cover my blood, And let there be no resting place for my cry. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high” (Job 16:18–19). “It’s as if the ancient biblical topos of Abel’s blood crying out to the Lord from the ground has leaped in the mind of the author and produced a second iteration of God, one who listens to victims.”[5] Job’s hope is for the blood “that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24).
Job wishes his words could be written down, chiseled in stone like the law, or gathered up in a book, as he sees his insight as a new order of meaning (19:23-27). As Bartlett asks rhetorically, is Job claiming that his words “serve to transform the meaning of God, so that one day that meaning will be established on earth?”[6] The Satan figure disappears from the book and God sides with Job against his friends: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has” (Job 42:7). God stands against the calculus of a law of vengeance and wants nothing to do with it.
The confirmation in Christ of Job’s perspective indicates that retributive conceptions of God are human projections (arising from the adversary) and not worthy of the image of God grounded in his humanity. The identity of God is not with the victimizers, with the accusers, with the satan, but with suffering, forgiving victims. The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s wrestling opponent, in the face of Esau, in the face of Joseph, and in the face of Job’s messianic defender, and this is confirmed through the interpretive frame of Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). In this divine/human synthesis the humanity of God displaces falsely deified human projections.
[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 35.
[2] Ibid, 36.
[3] Ibid, 37.
[4] Ibid, 38.
[5] Ibid, 57.
[6] Ibid, 58.