🦁 8th day of Christmastide
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the eighth day of Christmas. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 148, Proverbs 1, and James 3. And I love James. There is scholarly debate, but there's no hard evidence and certainly no consensus that the letter of James was not written by James, Jesus's brother, who was the Bishop of Jerusalem and his successor when he was killed.
Also known as James the Just may have been a Nazirite and was killed by Ananus, Benananus, which is actually the high priest's name. Anyway I love James, but I think it's really important to talk since we've, I usually hate the book of Proverbs because they're just pithy and easy to take them out of context.
But the first verse opening the, the book gives us the name, the Proverbs of Solomon. The Hebrew here is actually really important and it has to do with the political identity, the governing kind of structure that God intended Israel to have. I've said it before, I'll say it again, there are no kings in Israel.
Kings are a foreign concept that the people ask for. What God created and intended was for judges to judge. Disputes and also lead them in military campaigns against their oppressors and save them from the hands of those oppressors. And so when you get an understanding of the structure of Israel's polity, you ask, well, what kind of rules or what kind of rulers are judges supposed to be?
Because Melech is kind of a It means king, but they weren't supposed to have kings. The first king that they do try with in Judges 9, Abimelech, father of kings, doesn't turn out so well. You can check out the Bramble King on that, it's Jotham, who has this parable decrying the first king, Abimelech, the father of kings, for just trying to rise to power by murder, and we all know that's what happens.
If you want power, you can take it violently. But it isn't necessarily Melech. That is bad. It's, you know, there are good melecs and bad melecs. David was a good melek, king. And there are, I want to say, five kings in all of the United and Divided Kingdoms that were called good. aNd so it isn't, you know, kings are not the problem.
It's what kind of kings become problems. And I mention all this because the word here draws in. Where another, the Hebrew word is mashal. And mashal is also used very early in the book of Genesis to describe dominion. How humanity is supposed to have dominion over. The plants and animals and we name them and blah, blah, blah.
But Dominion kind of gets co opted. And we think of Dominus, the Latin word that we use and Jerome used to translate it is overpowering, hierarchical, you know, condescending the, the better word to use maybe his household Oikos, but Mashal. Is actually something more like responsibility or in this case the, the early church would have said rule or regulu, regulae, like the regulae fide, the rules by which we live, the rules that shape our faith.
And so Proverbs could also be called rules, the rules of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. And they're kind of like that. They're short, pithy, easy to take out of context, right? Don't steal. Well, what if you're starving and your neighbor is a hoarder, right? Easy to remember, but easy to take out of context.
So these are the rules. Also gets us back to dominion. What kind of rule is a good leader like David? Well, it's mishal, right? It's not lording over others, as in the Latin dominus, that gives us dominion. But in fact, it is to be responsible for, to rule in the sense of a ruler the standard against which all others are judged.
Right? Because kings took over from judges, and that's one of their things. They judged in disputes. And in doling out violence on God's behalf, they are judging Israel's enemies. So they also have to be, you know, I always think of this line that I was taught as a young, you know, slowly aging lower enlisted.
You know, supervisors and NCOs will never ask you to do anything they haven't done themselves. If you need a standard, I'll set the standard, right? You don't have to run faster than I do. That puts the burden on me to be a good runner so that my team is good, or I can expect my team to be good at running.
Because if I run a 10-minute mile, I can't expect them to run a seven-minute mile. That's fucked up, right? And that is the essence of what is meant by ruler in the biblical imagination. So when we hear rule, rulers, there's good and bad ways to describe them. Malics could, a lot of them could be bad.
It's similar to the word cop, right? However, law enforcement officers are something different, and they evoke the actual purpose of police officers. It's not just to police the populace, but it is to enforce the laws that are, you know created ideally through a democratic process. And if they don't know the law, that they're Claiming to enforce you might not have as much trust in them.
So the difference between like a cop or a pig to really be. Kind of messed up and a law enforcement officer is a similar difference between mashal and other forms of, of ruling. And I, I cannot remember, nacham is vengeance. There's another word that is sometimes used to describe why kings are not liked and, and, you know, they did evil inside the Lord.
But there's another verb besot, radach, I think it's radach. Shoot, I can't, I can't be certain. Don't quote me on it. But this is the rule book for King Solomon, who was supposed to be and tried to be a good ruler. It wasn't always. But it's really important because we, when we say proverb, we think of like these pithy sayings.
They're not really what we in the West think of as “rules,” but they do kind of share a lot of similarities with our understanding of rules in the West and then, like the underlying function of what we think of as Proverbs. I think there's some overlap there. And so, it might be just as helpful to call it Solomon's Rule Book.
And to keep in mind the classical sense of rule, ruler you know, the regular if you're a patristics kind of church person. And so. I mean, the moral of the story, I hate proverbs because they're taken out of context so regularly. But that doesn't, that's not, proverbs aren't the problem. yoU know, it's what people do with proverbs when they use them recklessly.
And the very word, proverb, mashal, is meant to evoke responsibility, concern, care, supervision, as opposed to this kind of, like, dominion. which is how the King James Version often translate, translates Mashal. And it was commissioned by a not so great king, in fact. But anyway, all that is important when you think about what is the broader governmental structure that soldiers, Christian soldiers you know, Israelite soldiers were serving by being in the military, by defending not just Lives and, you know, property, but the ideals of Israel, just like soldiers, American soldiers are supposed to fight for freedom, justice, democracy, right?
We say this all the time. But the more we say it, we sometimes forget and it becomes almost like a satire, right? And so don't miss, you know, kind of the forest for the trees. There are good soldiers and there are bad soldiers, there are good kings and bad kings. It's how they rule, it's how they perform their service, how they abide by their own regulations and restrictions and expectations, proverbs and rules that matters.
And so don't, don't let, you know, dominion determine. this word that is supposed to be so much richer. Don't let rules get in the way your, you know, what people have done to rules. Don't let that get in the way of what rules are really about. If you're a soldier, rules are there for a reason. But they're not the, the end of themselves, well, they're not, their means not an end.
I've probably hammered that in quite enough and I will read Proverbs, but my reflections on them are usually pretty short and unhelpful because I just don't, I don't know if they work with the lectionary cycle, but Better people than me have put it in there and I'm, I'm beholden to you know, what the lectionary contains.
So I hope my listeners will, will hold me to that.
