Tuesday, August 11, 2020

John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton on 2 Kings 3:26-27

 

 

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven hundred swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his firstborn son who was to succeed him, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And great wrath came upon Israel, so they withdrew from him and returned to their own land. (2 Kgs 3:26-27 NRSV)

 

I have addressed this text previously on my blog:

 

2 Kings 3:27 and the ontological existence of other gods

 

More on the Plurality of the Gods in the Old Testament

 

Approaching things from a different perspective, consider the following from John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton:

 

Most commentators on 2 Kings 3:27 address the question, “whose fury goes out against Israel?” Boyd assumes that the fury is that of Chemosh (the god of Moab), but the text does not say—nor does it specify to whom the sacrifice was offered—and other interpretations have been proposed. One possible option is that the fury is that of the Moabite army, who failed to “break through” in 2 Kings 3:27 but who are now sufficiently motivated by the death of the crown prince that they try again and succeed. The word translated “fury” is indeed used of human anger in 2 Kings 5:11 and 13:19, but the collocation “great fury” used here always refers to the wrath of the LORD (Deut 29:28; Jer 21:5; 32:37; Zech 1:15; 7:12). This leads some commentators to propose that the fury is that of Yahweh. This interpretation states that Yahweh continues to rage against Omri’s dynasty and therefore intervenes at the end to deny Ahab’s son a victory; the sacrifice in this reading becomes more or less a coincidence. However, if this was the intended message, we would expect the sacrifice not to be mentioned at all, and instead some something to the effect of “but the LORD remembered the sins of Ahab” (compare perhaps 2 Kgs 23:36). The context indicates that the sacrifice is the more or less direct cause of the fury. A third option is that the wrath is Israel’s against itself; disgusted with themselves by the extreme measures to which they have pushed their enemies, they give up and go home. However, this kind of empathetic emotional reaction towards enemies is unlikely in a culture where besieging armies frequently force their victims to eat their children (Lev 26:29; Deut 28:53-55; 2 Kgs 6:28-29). Further, the use of the collocation “great wrath” to indicate a divine subject and the nature of the inciting action as a sacrifice (a cultic act) combined with the understanding of divine warfare that exists in the cognitive environment of the time . . . indicates that we should indeed understand the fury to be that of Chemosh or some other Moabite warrior god. Nonetheless, that in itself is not sufficient to conclude that the message the passage wishes to convey is that Chemosh is real and sometimes he is stronger than Yahweh . . . Since the purpose of the narrative is to legitimate Elisha, the details supplied by the Deuteronomist in 2 Kings 3:26-27 should be read as an explanation of why the siege failed, construed in such a way that Elisha does not turn out as a false prophet. Consequently, the explanation cannot be that Yahweh has decided that he will not grant final victory to Ahab’s house; this reading would make Elisha a false prophet by definition, since he has failed to accurately convey the intent of the gods. Further, it is unlikely that the explanation is that Yahweh tried to do what he planned but failed. Due to the conception of divine warfare in the minds of the original audience of Kings—and also in the minds of the besieging army the narrative describes—it would theoretically be possible for their God to lose in battle. However, the purpose of the passage is not to explain the phenomena of a military defeat but to vindicate Elisha, and the biblical authors never rationalize a failure on the part of a human (an inaccurate prophecy) by appealing to failure on the part of God (defeat in battle). Apart from theological considerations, such an explanation would be unlikely to persuade and thus would not suit the document’s purpose (or, said another way, proving that the god is weak would not serve to exonerate the prophet. When Baal is shown to be the weaker of two gods in the contest on Mt. Carmel in 1 Kgs 18:27-29 his prophets are not excused for their failure; instead they are put to death [1 Kgs 18:40] in accordance with the fate of the false prophets [Deut 13:5; 18:20]). The test of a true prophet is true prophecy and the nature of the test is strictly empirical: “If that a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken” (Deut 18:22; compare also 1 Kgs 22:28). The most likely explanation, then, is this: God has promised to “deliver Moab into [their] hands” (2 Kgs 3:18), but he has not promised to strike down Moab on their behalf (contrast 2 Kgs 18:24). If Israel fights then they will win, but they still have to go and fight (see 2 Kgs 3:24). However, when faced with the (manifested or impending) power of the enemy deity in response to the king’s sacrifice—that is, the “great fury against Israel”—they do not fight, but instead they give up and go home: “they withdrew and returned to their own land” (2 Kgs 3:27). If they had stayed to fight then they would have won, but it is neither the fault of Yahweh nor the fault of Elisha that they chose not to claim the victory that had been promised.

 

Therefore, 2 Kgs 3:26-27 does not depict Yahweh being thwarted by the power of an enemy deity and does not offer biblical proof that there are such things as deities who can successfully oppose the will of Yahweh. However, the passage does depict a deity, presumably Chemosh, accepting a human sacrifice. (John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in its Cultural and Literary Context [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2019], 169, 171-72)