BEMA 71: The Prophetic Table

Transcription Status

19 Jan 23 — Initial public release

13 Oct 22 — Transcript approved for release

The Prophetic Table

Brent Billings: This is The BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we look at the multifaceted dialogue and the many voices found within the prophets that represent the battling perspectives found in the world of God’s people as they attempt to respond to the effects of exile.

That’s a good sentence right there.

Marty Solomon: We worked on it. I’m looking forward to this episode. This is kind of the—we’re going to have one more episode to close out—our capstone lesson—but this is one that I added to our schedule because I just really wanted to talk about this. We’ll see how this goes, but this episode comes from an idea that I gleaned out of that book—here comes that recommendation again. This is probably the last time we’ll have to do this. Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? Session 3, we’ll see. Walter Brueggemann, Out of Babylon.

Brent: I need to get one of those little bellhop bells to just smack that every time you mention Walter Brueggemann.

Marty: [laughs] It really wasn’t—it didn’t have the same presence in my last rounds of BEMA, but the more I’ve learned from that work and continue to wrestle with it in my learning, the more it’s just really shaped the way I’ve seen the prophets and what to do with it. Out of that book, I took this idea that I want to work with today. It’s really meant something to me and I feel like as I begin to teach it better, it’s starting to teach my students better and better. In order to do that, I want to ask you to employ an image, a metaphor. Close your eyes, if you will. You don’t have to do that. You’re listening to a podcast, and especially if you’re driving.

Imagine a table, a dining room table, maybe not modern. Imagine an ancient table, and there’s a meal set, not a huge elaborate feast. There’s a small, nice meal set at this table, many different places. This table is set during the Babylonian time period. It’s during the Babylonian conquest, the Babylonian exile. We looked at a lot of these voices. We got voices like Jeremiah or Isaiah or Zephaniah. We might even include people like Ezekiel and Habakkuk or even Job would be—that period of history that we looked at in Session 2—but there’s a table here and it’s a Babylonian table set during the Babylonian period.

Into the room walk those names that I just mentioned. Into the room walks Isaiah, and he takes his seat at the table. Maybe across from him comes Jeremiah and Zephaniah and they take their seats. Next to them comes Ezekiel and he sits down, and across from Ezekiel comes Habakkuk and Job. All these characters that we’ve looked at, they come and they sit around the table and they bless the Lord. They utter their meal blessing: Baruch attah Adonai elohenu malach ha’olam ha-motzi lechem min ha-aretz. They all begin to eat. The question gets posed—I don’t know who brings it up. Who do you think brings it up, Brent?

Brent: Probably Isaiah.

Marty: Probably Isaiah. Good choice. He brings up the question. “What do we do about Babylon? What do we do about this whole Babylonian mess? What do we do about the exile? What do we do about this time period? What are God’s people in light of Babylon and what Babylon has done to us and where we find ourselves? What are we supposed to do?”

This conversation ensues because there are differing perspectives. Brueggemann will point this out in his book. These prophetic voices all see the issue of Babylon from different perspectives. Isaiah, if he were to chime in, he might say something like, “What do we do? I’ll tell you what I think.” Isaiah’s narrative is a narrative of we need to stand for something. “As we sit in Babylonian exile, we need to stand for the right thing. We need to stand for what God wanted us to stand for. We need to stand for God’s way and God’s justice. We need to stand in the face of empire. We need to stand resolute. You know what that means? That means we’re going to have to suffer.” I think of Isaiah 3 in the suffering servant discourse, like I—go ahead. Were you going to say something?

Brent: Third Isaiah, not Isaiah 3.

Marty: Thank you. I think of that third voice of Isaiah and the servant discourse, and I think of Isaiah saying, “We got to stand and we got to—we have to fight this empire and we got to stand publicly and we’re going to suffer for it but if we’ll suffer in Babylon, we’re going to come out on the winning side of this,” but across the table sits Ezekiel. Then there was Habakkuk and Job and they have a different perspective. The three of them kind of, I don’t know if they gang up on Isaiah, but they’re like, “No, no, no, no. That’s not the best way to do this. You’re just fighting an uphill battle.”

Ezekiel, Habakkuk, and Job, they might say, “Exile is your home now. It’s your new home. We don’t like it. We don’t want it. Babylonians aren’t right in God’s eyes. Their way isn’t the right way but listen, we’re here in exile. We don’t need to fight. We need to get used to it and we need to learn what to do with it. We’re going to be here for a while, so let’s just learn how to be here well.” Then across the table from them sit Jeremiah and Zephaniah, and they’re like, “Man, I don’t really see it that way at all, you guys. I feel like we need to restore our relationship with God.” You remember what the word for Zephaniah was?

Brent: T’shuva.

Marty: T’shuva. Zephaniah might be like, “I think we need to t’shuva, guys, we need to repent. We don’t need to worry about exile and figure out how to live here, and we don’t like standing and fighting. That’s really not the point. If we don’t t’shuva, if we don’t come back,” and Jeremiah might agree. He might chime in and he might say, “Yes, yes, yes, Zephaniah is right. We’ve broken our covenant relationship with God and God wants to restore that covenant. It’s really not about staying or leaving or fighting or it’s just about being right with God. If you just focus on being right with God, you can forget about everything else because everything else, let God worry about that. You just make yourself right with God.”

Around this table, this Babylonian table, would be all of these voices. When asked the same question, they would have all kinds of perspectives. This reminds me of, Brent, earlier in Session 2, when we talked about source A and source B, and what were we talking about when we talked about that? What was source A?

Brent: Source A is the headlines, current perspective.

Marty: Which Bible books?

Brent: We had Amos

Marty: Not quite Amos. Go before the prophets, where we run into source A.

Brent: Source A originated from Samuel and Kings.

Marty: Samuel and Kings. Then we had source B.

Brent: Which was the book of Chronicles.

Marty: You said source A was like agenda-driven headlines but Chronicles was…

Brent: It’s a documentary’s perspective. It’s looking back on the events and reassessing them.

Marty: Right. I remember when we talked about that, what did we say about which one was right, Brent?

Brent: Neither one was right.

Marty: Neither one was right. They were both accurate but they were just different perspectives. We talked about how there was ongoing dialogue in the text attention that the scriptures were wrestling with. Is it obedience and morality, or is it injustice and empire? What way do we look at it? We suggested that one rose to the top, but we definitely tried to begin to introduce this idea that there was a dialogue going on.

I want to point out in the prophets that the same thing is happening. There is an ongoing dialogue in the prophets and different perspectives in the biblical narrative that as readers of the Bible we have to wrestle with. For me, this is super, super important because we were taught how to read the Bible as a codified list of things that we’re just supposed to do. The whole Bible is just a “read-the-Bible-do-what-it-says,” but that understanding of the scriptures is not honest, it’s not accurate, and it doesn’t do justice to the power and the beauty that is packed even in the period of the prophets, because the period of the prophets is not one singular voice all saying the same thing. There would be—I don’t know if disagreement might be too sharp or too harsh—but there are differing perspectives on how to see the problem that sits on the table in front of you.

Brent: God said it, I believe it. That settles it. That’s the traditional way of looking at it, but that’s not how it is. God presents attention and asks us to wrestle with it.

Marty: That would be very Jewish. The last thing a Jewish perspective would do is to say, “God said it, that settles that.” They would say, “God said it, and now we all got to wrestle with it.” In fact, I don’t know if I said this on an earlier episode, Peter Rollins tells a parable about two Jews and they’re arguing about some issue. Did I already share this story once already?

Brent: It doesn’t sound familiar yet.

Marty: Two Jewish rabbis, they argue every single day about this issue. Again, I heard this from Peter Rollins. I don’t want to take credit for it. They argue about—I think it comes from the Talmud even—but they argue about this issue every single day and God’s so tired of it. He says, “You know what, I’m going to go down. I’m going to settle this argument. I’m going to tell them the answer to this issue. I’m so sick of listening to these two rabbis argue about this issue.”

God comes down and he enters the conversation. He’s in this room and He says, “Listen, guys, I’m here to tell you the answer to your issue,” and both rabbis in a rare moment of unity turn towards God. They say, “Who do you think you are, settling our argument? You get yourself out of here and you go back to heaven and let us argue about this” because to the Jewish mind, the power is in that ongoing wrestling match.

If there’s something that I want us to take away from this podcast, it’s that I want us to really grasp the power of coming to the Text with open hands every single time. The study of the Bible is not about figuring out the right answer. The Bible is more alive than that. The Bible is not just a book intended to point to the one road that you have to walk. The Bible is a story of God’s people, figuring out how to walk the many different roads that life and its different circumstances and contexts provide us with. We find ourselves on all kinds of different roads.

In order to make that point, let’s go to one more table. We got used to the Babylonian table, let’s clear the table in our mind. Let’s go to a table maybe a century, a century and a half later. Let’s go to a Persian table. It’s no longer the Babylonian time period. Same idea though. Similar setting, similar meal set in front of them. Into this room walks some different characters. Into this room walks Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah. Into the room walks Malachi and he sits down. Then into the room comes Esther and maybe Daniel, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. You put him in the wrong period. Hold on a second. They come in and they all sit down around the table.

Similar question. It’s a different context, though. It’s not the same thing. The Babylonian exile is much different than the Persian. We don’t even call the Persian exile, exile. It’s just the new Persian order. The first question in the first table was about a bunch of people arguing about Babylonian exile. Now, the question isn’t about that. It’s: What do we do about Persia? Is Persia okay? Is it bad? Do we need to leave?

Brent: Persia doesn’t have them in bondage the way Babylon did.

Marty: Exactly. Persia interacts with them completely differently than Babylon did. Somebody asks this question. We won’t pick a prophet. Maybe this time it’s a servant that comes in to fill up a glass with wine. He says, “Hey, guys. I see you’re all here. I know you’re all learned people. What do you think about Persia?” He scuttles out of the room dropping a little bomb on the table, a discussion bomb on the table.

Everybody starts to chime in. The first voice is by far the largest group at the table. I think it’s four different people. There’s Ezra, there’s Nehemiah. Nehemiah, he’s really passionate. He’s getting really worked up. He’s slamming the table because he’s really—Ezra is trying to calm him down. He’s trying to be like, “Let’s just talk about it. Let’s have a big meeting, town hall meeting. We’re here to have dinner. Relax, Nehemiah.” I don’t know if anybody appreciates my humor there. We talked about Ezra being the pastor and Nehemiah being the Prophet. Then you’ve got Haggai. You’ve got Zechariah.

These are guys that are going to have a particular agenda that Brueggemann talks about in his book. Their agenda is: We’re going to “return and rebuild.” We’re going to return and restore. What do we do about Persia? We have the opportunity to go back home, we return and we restore. It’s going to be hard, but we can do it. Is it worth doing it? Yes, it is. Is it worth rebuilding? Absolutely. We’re going to go back home, we’re going to build God’s house. We’re going to restore the walls. We’re going to restore Jerusalem. We’re going to go back and we’re going to rebuild. That’s what we’re going to do about Persia. Across the table sits Esther and maybe Daniel. I know we put Daniel in which period of prophets?

Brent: Exilic.

Marty: Exilic, right? We had Daniel in that period of time, but I also hinted at the fact I think Daniel was written a lot later. Scholarship will say Daniel is really not just a historical record about a guy named Daniel in Babylon. Maybe there was a guy named Daniel in Babylon. It’s very possible. The name Daniel means “God is my judge.” Most scholarship says Daniel was written much, much later, after the story of Hanukkah, and the Hasmonean revolt, and now you have the temple back. Daniel is written not about the Babylonians, but Daniel’s actually written about the Greco-Roman world, which would be a great parallel to Persia, so I put him at the Persian table. He has a very similar agenda to Esther. We talked about how Esther was written not for the Jews that went back home, Brent, but for who?

Brent: For the Jews who stayed in Persian.

Marty: Jews that stayed in Persia. We talked about the shrewd wisdom of Esther in our last podcast. She had this unbelievable wisdom to know exactly what the context called for. She was not here to assimilate. Daniel is not suggesting assimilation. Esther does not suggest assimilation. That’s not why you’re staying in Persia. You are not staying in Persia to bow down to the image of Daniel, you’re not staying in Persia—remember Daniel, he prays anyway. He doesn’t bow down, he gets thrown into the lion’s den.

Daniel very much resists empire; so does Esther. They resist it by having a shrewd wisdom of knowing how to live in the midst of it. Honor the king, but with a shrewd subversion. Esther and Daniel honored the king with a shrewd subversion that subverts the ways of empire. You don’t stay in Persia just to enjoy Persia. You stay in Persia to engage Persia, you stay in Persia to influence Persia, you stay in Persia to bring shalom order to the imperial chaos. You’re staying there in order to make a difference. That was the narrative of Esther.

As Ezra and Nehemiah, and Zachariah and Haggai, they’re all getting worked up about, “Come on, guys, we’re going to go back home, we’re going to rebuild.” Esther and Daniel are going, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. No, we’re not. If we go back home and rebuild, we just abandon Persia to their horrible ways. We’re going to stay right here and we’re going to make a difference right here in Persia.”

Maybe similar to Jeremiah of the Babylonian time period, you have somebody like Malachi sitting there by himself, and he’s going, “Wait because it really doesn’t matter if you stay or if you go back home and rebuild, if you don’t restore that relationship with God, if you don’t—” I think he’s different than Jeremiah, though. It’s not just about a covenant relationship with God. For Malachi, it’s about obedience. He says, “I don’t care if you stay, I don’t care if you go, but the one thing you better do is you better obey God. You better not rob God, you better not dishonor God, you better not give him blemished offerings and sacrifices, you better obey, stay in Persia, that’s fine, but you better obey God, and go back home and rebuild, that’s fine, but you better obey God.” That’s Malachi’s voice.

Around this table sits, again, just like the Babylonian time period, different perspectives about how to deal with their context. Brueggemann says, This is the table that you and I, in 21st century America, we have to wrestle with that Persian table and look at those narratives because we don’t sit in Babylonian exile. We sit under a Persian order, under a Pax Romana of our own, that’s more fitting to our context. We have to wrestle with these voices and figure out which is the voice that we need to embrace as 21st-century believers in our own American context.

He says, and I totally agree, that the voice sitting around the Persian table that we need to embrace in our context, is the Esther-Daniel voice of what he calls “accommodation and resistance.” We have to figure out how to accommodate the world around us. As shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves, we have to resist that—he wrote this book years ago, long before any of this Trump stuff and the resistance movement started. He wrote this years ago, long before that. He doesn’t have that cultural—he’s not trying to play into some cultural agenda. He said, in our American world, we have to resist this imperial narrative. We have to live in a world, accommodate that world, but all the while shrewdly subverting it and resisting it.

The thing that I really want us to take away, I want us to pause right there and just wrestle with whether or not we agree with Brueggemann. If we agree, we need to go back into those narratives. We need to go back into the book of Esther and go, “Wait a minute. What does that mean? What does the narrative of Esther and the story of Purim mean for living in America?” That’s a good enough conversation by itself.

Then I want to back back out and I want to reassert something I just said a few minutes ago, which is it’s not about which voice is right because there are contexts where maybe if you weren’t living in 21st century America, you would need to embrace the voice of, say, Ezra and Nehemiah, the whole return and restore narrative. I think about our brothers and sisters in Egypt, believers in Egypt or Libya, who are literally being killed, slaughtered, or churches are being burned to the ground, everything you try to do in the name of Jesus gets met with violent opposition, murder, strife.

I can imagine them asking the question, is it even worth it? Is it even worth, after another church, another Coptic Church is burned to the ground, is it even worth trying to rebuild? I can imagine in their world embracing a return and restore narrative. Yes, it’s worth rebuilding, rebuild that temple, rebuild that church, rebuild that community, rebuild the people of God. You’ve got to hang in there. I think of the narrative of Zechariah, the apocalyptic literature, that apocalyptic message to bring hope to their present day.

I can imagine a place where you would embrace that narrative. I can imagine a place where you would embrace a sudden obedience narrative, a Malachi narrative. I think of our brothers and sisters, possibly even in places maybe like certain parts of Europe, where they don’t live in a similar context that we live socially, politically, or culturally, or anything else. Maybe their narrative that they would embrace as a narrative of obedience, like whatever you do, wherever you go, whatever your call is, obey, follow God, but in our unique context, to embrace this accommodate and resistance, and to come away from this conversation realizing that scriptures represent this ongoing dialogue, it is not—and I’m just going to start repeating myself now. I need to say this and be done.

We are not called to read the Bible and just figure out the right answer. We are called to read the Bible and realize it is this living, God-breathed—we say inspired—dialogue, where God’s people are continually, to this day as they wrestle with the Text, wrestling with what are appropriate responses. Based on our understanding of what the mission of God—we said the Torah was all about the word partner. If we are a partner with God and His mission, what does the mission of God demand in our context?

This is what I wanted to call the prophetic table. If we can start engaging the scriptures on this level, entering into an ongoing dialogue rather than just trying to decipher and exegete the propositional answer. It’s a powerful thing. The scriptures become a compelling, empowering device that compel us on how to live and make decisions and engage the mission of God. It’s good stuff. Good way to end Session 2.

Brent: We’re never done wrestling.

Marty: No, we’re not. We got one more, we got a capstone conversation coming up. We’re going to review where we’ve been in Session 2, and we’re going to talk about instructions on how to move forward because we got three more sessions left. We need to go from Session 2 into Session 3.

Brent: Alright, well…

Marty: No discussion groups. Not right now.

Brent: Pretty straightforward situation we got going on here.

Marty: Yes.

Brent: Just go to bemadiscipleship.com. You’ll find everything you need to know there. If you need to catch up on past episodes, it’s all there. You can contact us, you can find discussion groups around the nation—actually, around the world now, we’re international.

Marty: That’s right.

Brent: That happened a few weeks ago, we added a group up in Canada.

Marty: That’s right.

Brent: Pretty exciting. Had to expand the map a little bit.

Marty: That’s right.

Brent: Yes, thanks for joining us on The BEMA Podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.