The real issue with God #2

Can God be defended from the charge of the atheists that “he” is evil and stupid? That’s the challenge that the plight of Job, the afflicted righteous man, posed to faithful scribes some millennia ago.

Not long after the later Redactor (c.400 BC) the people of Israel faced new challenges when they were forcibly included in the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great – then traded back and forth between “the King of the North” and “the King of the South” – the Greek rulers of Anatolia and Egypt respectively. According to the 1st century historian Josephus the Jews cleverly convinced Alexander that his coming had been predicted in the prophecies of “Daniel” – a Babylonian exile of the 6th century who succeeded even as a repressed minority in a foreign land, much to the inspiration of Jews ever since.

But Daniel wasn’t the only culture hero from that era. A slightly earlier figure, and an originally pagan one, is Ahiqar, who lived under the 7th century Assyrians, and also triumphed as a righteous man against scheming adversaries. We have some earlier texts of non-Jewish origin that feature his tale from the Assyrians. He was rewritten as a Jewish exile in Assyria in the Apocryphal book “Tobit” where he features as a minor character. What was the appeal to Jewish scribes of both these figures, Daniel and Ahiqar? Individual heroics, but also a theological answer – God will rescue the righteous from their enemies – to the charge against God.

By the 2nd Century BC religious freedoms under the Greeks, originally negotiated with Alexander, had deteriorated badly, so much so that the last native High Priest, Onias, had been assassinated and Greek puppets, of a modernising bent, had been put in his place. Jewish culture – a life and death matter in those days – had been under pressure to become even more Greek and even less Jewish, while much of the territory of the Jews had been settled by Greeks. The pressure to assimilate was intense, and exploded into armed insurrection when the Greek King, Antiochus, proceeded to replace the Jewish altar worship to Yahweh with a sacrifice of a pig to Zeus.

Many, many righteous Jews died in the conflict… posing an even tougher charge against God’s role as “Judge of the World”, the absolute standard of Justice. So what was the answer? Move the balancing of the scales into the Next World and/or the Next Age. God would settle the accounts, rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked in the Next World and, perhaps, inaugurate a new Dawn, a new Age of Righteousness. But this wasn’t exactly new… a similar vision underpins prophecies from the 6th century onwards.

So how did the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah, Malachi, Ezekiel and Zechariah, of a new Jerusalem under a new Deal with God become morphed into a New Dawn and a New World?