Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Stephen De Young (EO) on the Ontological Existence of the Gods of the Nation (and background to Psalm 137)

  

In order to properly assess a text and its teaching, it must be read in context. This context includes not only the date and place of its writing and the ancient language in which it is written, but also the understanding and worldview of its author(s). Regardless of a given reader’s beliefs, the authors of Scriptures believed that God, angels, demons, the spirits of the dead, and other spiritual realities were real. They held them to be as real as rocks, trees, and humans. It is in light of those beliefs that they formulate their writings and interpret events, words, and actions. When readers refuse to enter into the worldview of an author, they end up constructing a false “reality” as a backdrop for the text. They then praise or attack that reality, even if it is false, misguided, anachronistic, or pure fiction. Condemning such fictional reconstructions should not be confused with a legitimate critique of the text itself.

 

For all ancient peoples, the gods of neighboring nations were not fictional. From the perspective of the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, the spiritual beings worshipped by other tribes, clans and nations surrounding them were real. Frequently in the Old Testament, the word gods is even used to describe them. They were not God in the sense that Yahweh is God, but rather spirits created by Yahweh, their God, along with everything else that exists, and who had since their creation fallen into rebellion against Him. These were spirits that sought the destruction of humanity.

 

Ancient Israel understood these “gods” of the nations to have been assigned to those nations by Yahweh, the Most High God, at one particular point. As part of the judgment against humanity at the Tower of Babel, described in Genesis 11, God distanced Himself from the nations of the world, assigning angelic beings to shepherd them (Deut. 32:8). The nations were not to worship these beings, not were these beings to seek to be worshipped (Deut. 4:19). They were not only to shepherd the nations in the sense of governance but to religiously shepherd them back to the Most High God. Other than St. Michael, who was assigned to the nations of Israel, these beings failed in this assignment. (Saint Dionysios the Areopagite described this in some detail in The Celestial Hierarchy)

 

Yahweh, the God of Israel, has promised to judge all of creation and restore to justice, its rightful order. This justification of the cosmos includes not only the visible, material world and human persons but also the invisible world of angels and demons. Several points in Scripture make this judgment explicit. Isaiah, for example, states, “In that day, Yahweh will punish the host of heaven above and the kings of the earth below” (24:21). The culmination of this final judgment is not only a new earth but also a new heaven (Rev. 21:1). The lake of fire as a description of eternal condemnation was created not for humans but for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41) This particular judgment of the powers and principalities both in the heavenly places and on the earth, is known as the death of the gods because of its descriptions in Psalm 82/81.

 

Just as in the case with humanity, the judgment of these principalities and powers, spiritual kings and rulers of nations, is not entirely put off to the end but intrudes at various points in history. The ten plagues that trigger nascent Israel’s Exodus from Egypt are described as Yahweh rendering judgment against the gods of Egypt (Ex. 12:12). It should go without saying that from the perspective of the author of Exodus, God is not judging or punishing a group of fictional characters. The gods of Egypt are seen as real spiritual beings who have led the Egyptian people into wickedness and evil. These principalities are the ones whom Yahweh, the God of Israel, holds most responsible for the evils of the Egyptian Empire and culture.

 

The humans who populated Egypt were moral agents responsible for their actions. They suffered the consequences when judgment came upon Egypt, and God levelled the scales, restoring justice. By directing the plagues of Egypt against the gods of Egypt, however, Yahweh not only judges those spirits but also conveys truth to the Egyptian people. The primary task of the pharaoh, in the Egyptian understanding, was to establish and maintain ma’at, justice. As king and priest, it was his task to make sure that relations between gods, humans, the river, and the land were maintained for continued prosperity. His inability to restore justice exposed him and the other Egyptian gods to be frauds, along with the illusion of their power, might, and worthiness to be worshiped.

 

Though the Israelites were enslaved, literally, to Pharoah and the Egyptian nobility, the common people of Egypt were not less enslaved in a spiritual sense. Yahweh not only redeemed Israel from Egypt; He also offered the truth of who He is to the Egyptians themselves, which had the potential to set them free. The condemnation in the Hebrew Scriptures of the gods and god-kings of the nations it not a condemnation of the humans who make up those tribes and clans. It is instead a condemnation of those who have oppressed, abused, and enslaved those people. An interpretation that delineates between the spiritual/political powers oppressing a nation and the people of that nation does not allegorize the text away or deny its historicity. It is simply a lense that validates the distinction that the authors of these texts establish and see as important. In other words, it is an example of reading biblical texts correctly and in context.

 

The Christian Old Testament is filled with texts calling for judgment and condemnation, and even the deaths, of kings and rulers and principalities over the nations. Psalm 149/148 speaks of the saints carrying two-edged swords in their hands “to execute vengeance on the nations and judgments on the tribes by binding their kings with chains and their nobles with iron chains, in order to execute on them the judgment of the Scriptures” (vv. 7-9). Isaiah speaks of the demonic powers of Sheol being punished and never rising again (26;14). In the Greek text, the translator adds the interjection, “being more evils upon them, O Lord, bring more evils upon them who are glorious upon the earth” (vv. 14-15). The “them” of this call for justice is quite clearly these aforementioned demonic powers of Hades.

 

Examples abound, but one passage in particular is of note for its prominence in discussions of imprecations within the Christian Old Testament. Psalm 137/136 is a psalm written in Babylonian exile. This exile in a foreign, pagan empire is the theme of the psalm itself, beginning with the question as to whether it is even possible to truly worship Yahweh in a foreign land (v. 4). The worship of Judah’s God was so closely associated with Zion, with the Jerusalem temple, that attempting to offer such worship, even through hymns, seemed difficult in light of its destruction (vv. 1-3). The memory of Jerusalem was key to the continuation of that worship (vv. 5-6). This is not merely nostalgia for a time and place now lost, but the memory of all that transpired in Judah’s wickedness and the subsequent judgment.

 

The psalm then takes what modern readers understand to be a sharp turn. It speaks of the nation of Edom and its actions at the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon (Ps. 137/136.7). It speaks of Edom as a daughter of Babylon, a loyal collaborator of Judah’s oppressor (v. 8). It states that the one who takes vengeance against Edom will be blessed, in particular the one who smashes Edom’s little ones against the rocks (v. 9). A literal reading of this psalm, the reading that has made it controversial, understands this to be an angry and bitter human in exile calling for the violent murder of Edomite babies as retribution.

 

The subtext here, however, is the long history between Edom and Judah, which includes and overarching spiritual dimension. Judah and Edom are descended from Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edom, respectively. These two brothers experienced conflict and ultimate reconciliation, as described in Genesis. Edom had received a portion of Abraham’s inheritance as his descendants, but this involved a vassal relationship with Israel and later Judah. Some of the Edomites, as described in the psalm and in the historical accounts of Jerusalem’s fall, took pleasure and rejoiced in that fall, seeing it as freedom despite their now being vassals of Babylon.

 

The author of Psalm 137/136 and other ancient Judahites understood there to be a spiritual cause behind Edom’s schadenfreude over Judah’s fate. Just as St. Michael the archangel was seen to be the guardian angel of Israel and later Judah as a nation (Dan. 12:1), Edom was guarded and governed by the fallen archangel Samael, who is often equated with Satan in Jewish writings of the period during and following the exile. Only such an evil spirit could have inspired Edom’s rejoicing in Judah’s devastation. The psalmist seeks the destruction of this demonic spirit at the hand of Yahweh, the Blessed One.

 

This understanding of this psalm led the Church Fathers, nearly uniformly, to understand the “little ones” here spoken of not as infant humans of Edomite ethnicity. Ethnicity, in fact, was not really a concept in its modern sense at the time of the psalm’s composition. Rather, these little ones are the progeny of the evil spirit who is here being condemned. They are the sins, evil thoughts, and temptations placed in the minds and hearts of humanity that lead humans to destruction. These thoughts and temptations lead, for example, one people group to rejoice at the suffering of her neighbor. They are the source of all resentment and wickedness and violence. Just as Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the Blessed One par excellence, so also is the person blessed who resists and defeats Satan, not falling prey to him as did the Edomites of the sixth century B.C. (Stephen De Young, God is a Man of War: The Problem of Violence in the Old Testament [Chesterton, Ind.: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021], 64-69)