A speculation on Bible reading

When it's really, really dark, any light will do.

 Suppose a king of an unnamed country becomes ill with cancer and is desperate to know if he will recover or die. And suppose he hears that a wonder-working seer is passing through the countryside and decides to send his chief servant to meet the seer and ask him if there’s a chance he might recover from his illness. The seer accepts some gifts of courtesy and gives audience to the chief servant who puts to him the question of the king’s chance of recovery. Naturally, the see-er sees far more than the immediate question but tells the servant, “Say to your master the king that he will recover.”

But then the seer begins to weep and the chief servant asks why he’s crying. The seer says, “I foresee that you, chief servant of the king, will yourself become a wicked king that will attack my people.”

Chief servant, of course, asks, “How can that be since the king will recover and I’m just a servant?”

The seer says, “I prophesy that these things will happen nevertheless.”

The Chief servant obsesses over the seer’s words as he travels home, and in the night, he smothers the king in his bed and becomes the wicked king the seer foresaw.

Now, did the awful event of the king’s murder result from the seer’s prediction? Or was the event written in the stars that the seer as prophet was given as the special emissary of God?

It raises the question of the self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s a phenomenon whereby the “foreseeing” is itself the cause of the event. Like saying to a youth, “You’re lazy and stupid and will never amount to anything,” and watching the young person fulfill that prophesy out of the assumption that he/she is incapable of being anything but useless.

The fable above, by the way, can be found in II Kings 8:7-14. The seer is Elisha, the king is Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, and the murderer is Hazael. We can’t know for certain, of course, if Elisha’s prediction motivated Hazael to murder Ben-Hadad; it’s a problem for Bible-believers to admit that God’s revelation to Elisha might have been delivered as treachery aimed at the murder of a king . . .

. . . if, that is, we haven’t read the rest of the Kings/Chronicles historical narratives where genocide, murder, even cannibalism are retailed as matter-of-factly as if one were reporting on the weather. Take for instance, this bizarre complaint to the king by a woman caught in the siege of Samaria when the country is starving 

(in II Kings 8:28 & 29):

She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’ So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.”

To the king’s credit, he tears his clothes and initiates action against the besieging army, but the woman’s complaints on the basis of unfairness remains—without commentary—about as bizarre as it gets.

God forbid that anyone should embrace a set of values through the reading of this story.

We speak often of the value of “reading scripture.” Plans are offered that will guide anyone in the project of plowing through the entire Bible in one year, for instance. What’s often missing is the caution that the Bible is not a book, but a library of books written in different times and for different purposes and that reading all of it with the same mind-set, assuming all of it to have equal import, equal authority, simply isn’t appropriate. 

A second thing that’s often missing is the accompaniment of a teacher who can shed light on the history and context of the different books, so that the naive reader (which includes me and most of the rest of us, I fear) isn't as likely to wander down whatever rabbit hole of misunderstanding a book or passage might suggest.

We might usefully begin with some consideration about the reading process itself. Most of us have at least some skill in reading skies, for instance. When we see dark clouds coming our way we can predict (prophesy?) that taking an umbrella would be advisable. But a farmer has probably become skilled at doing a much finer reading of skies and a meteorologist possesses more skills and equipment for weather prophesying than most of the population. We should use whatever help we can get when understanding is critical.

The ability to look at words and say them correctly still leaves us a long distance from “reading.” The assumption that saying the words of any book—whether aloud or in our heads—guarantees that the intent is being conveyed, is not certain and needs to be recognized.

My advice (directed to myself primarily) is to spend less time looking at the Bible (reading, as we may call it) and more time reading and listening to the wisdom about the Bible given to the meteorologists of scripture.

Acts 8:29-31 New International Version (NIV)

29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.