Another week, and another bonkers bible reading. I’m not gonna lie to you, I love this stuff.
Let’s set the scene. Firstly, we should date the text of Numbers. Numbers comes from the period after the exile in Babylon, but it is based on earlier texts. So the text comes from about five hundred years before Jesus, but the story is set about fifteen hundred years before Jesus. We call this sort of story ‘mythologised history’. It is based, perhaps, on some factual events, but transformed into literature as a foundational story for the Israelite people. A comparison would be Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte D’Arthur about a thousand years after the King Arthur events are purported to have happened.
Both the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy tell the story of the Israelites’ time in the desert, before crossing in the to the Promised Land, and they tell the stories a little bit differently. But let’s, just for fun, read the text in Numbers as a gripping story, and track what is going on.
The Israelites have been released from slavery in Egypt, and the story we tell children is that they were ‘wandering’ in the desert. This is codswallop – they were trying to invade the Canaanite territories which were fertile and comfortable place to live. The book of Numbers reports regular skirmishes with enemy armies, and just before today’s story of murderous snakes, King Arad who ruled in the Negev desert took hostages and the Israelites, with the help of their God whom we will call HaShem, destroyed them and their towns.
According to the story, the Israelites whinged to Moses about not having enough food to eat. In Egypt they were never hungry, but out here in the desert they are famished. In the book of Numbers, HaShem is so angry about the moaning, that his anger is kindled and he burns some of the camp down. Moses manages to calm HaShem down, but the people keep griping about the lack of ‘fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic’. They are grumpy because all they have is manna. Manna, in Numbers, was like coriander seed and it was a kind of straw colour, like gum resin. It could be ground up like flour and used to make cakes. This was all very well, but the people wanted meat as well. So HaShem sent a huge flock of quails for them to eat. But then HaShem got angry again, and ‘while the meat was still between their teeth… HaShem struck the people with a very great plague’.
Jump forward to today’s story. The people are complaining again. ‘‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’
HaShem is once again, pretty cranky. So obviously the best thing to do is send poisonous snakes to bite the people so many of them die. The people ask Moses to intervene, and HaShem tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. The murder snakes hung around, but when they bit someone, the person could look at the bronze snake and live.
There is a fascinating postscript to this story. According to 2 Kings, King Hezekiah is trying to cleanse the Israelite religious practices. He destroys altars to other gods and symbols of Asherah, and he also destroys the bronze serpent on a pole, because people were making offerings to it.
The story is completely bonkers but, as you know, I am just a simple bible-believing Christian, so I read the text that is front of me.
But here we are again with these absurd and, frankly, rather offensive stories? What do we do with them?
The character of HaShem that we meet in the earliest texts is capricious, jealous, unpredictable and downright nasty. He plays favourites and manipulates people. He can be swayed by pleading and argument, and he can also be stubborn and cruel, then sometimes excessively generous. If you’re familiar with the myths of Greek and Roman gods, and Hindu gods, and really any of the vast array of gods from the ancient world, then you recognise a pattern. The gods are not very nice, and HaShem, while he is the Israelite’s god, is nevertheless, very similar to all the other gods.
I meet people nearly every day who believe in a god exactly like this. A god who strikes people with cancer because they didn’t give money to charity, or a god who gives people a parking space because they ask nicely. A god who protects one family and smites another. A god who controls hurricanes and cyclones, chooses the lotto numbers and helps them get a good price on a new house. This capricious, ancient deity is alive and well and living inside the heads of countless people on earth today. It is easy to dismiss these ancient, faithful people as unsophisticated or uneducated, but their primitive understanding of god is still with us, everywhere.
The invitation of Christianity is not to linger in that place. To move beyond the initial assumptions and impulses about God and God’s character. Not to stay in the abusive relationship with the nasty, manipulative god from the shadows of our psyche, but to enter into the fulness of relationship with the one and only God, who is pure beauty and truth, who plays no favourites, but desires the best for all.
It is hard to escape the clutches of the vicious, mean god. He can be intoxicating when he’s on your side, confirming your prejudices or bestowing you with favour. He infects whole communities and makes us narrow and selfish and toxic. But, just as Jesus burst into the world as God in human form, so the Holy Spirit bursts into our world shining the light of truth on the false gods and idols we create.
This Lent, as we strip away chocolate or coffee or Instagram, or give over time to prayer or reading or silence – perhaps it is also our small and sick images of God that should be stripped away. Perhaps we have spent too long in the desert, wandering and whinging, and this Easter is time to bury the destructive images of God and embrace the image of God revealed in the risen Christ.