Missed Connection (1)
So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?” 1 Kings 3:9 NIV
Right and wrong – The translators of the NIV completely ignore the Hebrew connection between Solomon and Adam. I suspect it is deliberate. The Hebrew text in this story about Solomon uses the terms ṭôb le-raʿ. Literally, “good and evil.” That’s not quite the same as “right and wrong,” is it? Maimonides makes the distinction crucial. Adam already knew the difference between right and wrong. Otherwise the commandment given to him would have been meaningless. What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t know—was the difference between good and evil. That was the issue about the Tree. But the Genesis story isn’t about cognitive understanding. Cognitive understanding requires only knowing the difference between right (what God says to do) and wrong (what God says not to do). The Tree is about the experience of good and evil, something human beings are not equipped to handle, and therefore, prohibited for the purposes of protection.
Solomon doesn’t ask for the ability to discern right and wrong. He asks for what Adam was told he shouldn’t have—to know (yada’) good and evil. God grants his request—and it kills him. The Genesis garden story ends with Solomon’s idolatry.
Perhaps it’s worth noting the connection between Solomon’s request and the investigation of trauma. Bessel van der Kolk introduces the matter: “All trauma is preverbal . . . Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.”[1]
Was Solomon’s gift of divine discernment really a traumatic experience? Did it allow Solomon to see into the nature of things in the way God sees? Can the human constitution deal with such discernment—to know the difference between good and evil in the full sense of yada’ ? What happens to the psyche of a man who knows what God knows in the same way God knows it? Solomon wrote many proverbs. Were those attempts to articulate something that is preverbal, something that skirts the edge of what is possible for human beings to know? Is the story of Solomon coherent? Or is it about the schizophrenia that occurs when the mind is expanded by knowing too much?
What do we make of God’s silence in the life of Solomon? What happens to a man who cannot express what he knows of God?
What does it mean, “to discern between good and evil”? We have assumed, because we think we operate in a rational world, that this distinction is rational, that is, that it can be rationally expressed, articulated in a way so that we can categorize those things that are good in opposition to those things that are evil. We think “good and evil” is the same as “right and wrong.” But is this correct? Haven’t we experienced situations in life where the line blurs, where our rules for proper conduct seem inadequate and what is left is the feeling, the intuition, of what we must or should do despite the rules? What if knowing good and evil is not rational, but emotional—an experience of what it is like to feel as God feels?
“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety. Porges coined the word ‘neuroception’ to describe the capacity to evaluate relative danger and safety in one’s environment. When we try to help people with faulty neuroception, the great challenge is finding ways to reset their physiology, so that their survival mechanisms stop working against them. This mean helping them to respond appropriately to danger but, even more, to recover the capacity to experience safety, relaxation, and true reciprocity.”[2]
“Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way.”[3]
Topical Index: trauma, right, wrong, good, evil, raʿ, ṭôb, 1 Kings 3:9
[1]Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, p. 43.
“…a man of sorrows and ‘acquainted’ with grief…”
Thank you. Skip, and Richard your comment reminds me of the high priest that we have. He knows all of our ins and outs our ups and downs. Before they happen. He has chosen the high road for us. Telling us to press toward the mark of the High Calling which is in Jesus Yeshua. We are in his hands. She knows the plans he has for us continue to prosper in the heart. Which is to know our God and to love him and serve him. Which will cause us to bloom in the desert oh, and bring others to. Himself. Skip from what you are saying, I get the notion that there is a big difference between Godly wisdom and man’s Wisdom even though the difference is astronomical. The outcome is a pathway which leads to life or death. Which direction have we been going in. When you look at a compass what direction if our starting point is just a hair off the mark. Our end result is…… Lost!
The title of Bessel van der Kolk’s best selling book “The Body Keeps the Score” can be interpreted two ways, the way the author intended i.e. the physical body remembers and reacts to the mental and emotional trauma suffered by the psyche by correspondent physical symptoms and increased manifestions of disease. The second is The Body (of Christ) Keeps the Score, and from my experience of both, the latter is just as harmful and toxic as the first and because it is unexpected it is more damaging. While I may not have been in The Garden, as a child I was force feed enough evil to lose my taste for even the good. My head and heart, along with my body, keeps score too and because I kept losing for so long I became lost. When I “found” Messiah I thought my troubles would be over. Thus when my experience with members of The Body was no different than members of my family it felt traumatizing, as if I was being ignored, mistreated and rejected by the Messiah himself. Cognitive dissonance in extremis. I am just now beginning to recognize that it is possible that members of the Body are unaware of the traumatized individuals in their midst (for many reasons, though where else should they assemble?) and that means that Van der Kolk’s remedy is doubly relevant to The Body of Messiah:
“This mean helping them to respond appropriately to danger but, even more, to recover the capacity to experience safety, relaxation, and true reciprocity.”
Hopefully the traumatised in our midst won’t have to wait for the Olam haBa for things to be reversed and the Score to be settled. I know I can’t wait.
Michael, I am slogging through a couple of books an uncle of mine wrote about his traumatic experience in the church (in which he eventually got ousted) because he was questioning the dogma. I will have to say, it’s quite horrific. My experience was not much better, either. Well, he is still a Christian and so am I: we just had to scoot over a little.
I have been having to grapple with HOW he (and I) found ourselves at odds with our Body of origin. My conclusion is that, in his case (I can’t speak for him: I am just trying to understand him) it appears that he got ‘sold’ (he joined the church in his youth) on the cognitive doctrine. My experience was that I, also, got sold a cognitive version of love: a ‘spiritual’, philosophical, dogmatic “it’s true because the WORDS are in the right order in the sentences” type of reasoning. In both cases, abuse and neglect occurred where love should have been.
I am suspicious that, pre-Tree, there was no essential way to separate cognition from experience: that, before the Tree, goodness was instinctual and automatic in that there was no platform of conscious separation of the will of the human and the reflected will of God in the human. You did what you ‘wanted’ and didn’t have to think about it because, pre-Tree, what you wanted WAS what God wanted. His Spirit had free access to the human spirit and they were in perfect agreement: seamless: couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began.
I think what we got tempted with at the Tree was the ability to recognize, like Skip says, WITH OUR REASON, God’s good as well as another choice: evil. To be able to consider choices as valid, however, we have to perceive them as valid, first. If I told you to choose between getting in a car and going home vs. flapping your arms to get there, you would tell me that there was no choice because one of the options was not valid: possible. For us to THINK that evil is valid: possible, then, we have to have a paradigm in which our experience assures us that, indeed, evil CAN ‘work’: is valid as an option, or, substitute for love. To do this, I think our reason HAS TO BE TWISTED already. When Havvah believed the snake, I think she went insane. To think evil is a real choice, we have to be insane – have to already have had the experience of insanity to set our paradigm to the possibility that evil is a real choice. Cognitive reason? Post-Tree, when has that ever been a reliable way to ‘tell’ what is love (what is the truth) and what is not? Even the slightest twist in the truth and love can be left behind. Without love, reason is not even reason, for without love, we are already insane.
So what does modern religion base itself on? Love? Or reason? I say, to the extent that we think reason is going to get us where we need to go, we have set ourselves up for a profound lack of love AND reason. We cannot depend on sanity to get us to love: we now have to rely totally on faith in love to get us back to sanity. Sanity – reason – is a mere side effect of love. I think the most sane parts of my day are where I question my sanity. It’s certainly not enough to build institutions and seminaries on. In my experience, anyway, I have seen that you can ‘reason’ yourself straight into the grave and out of relationship, too. Adam and Havvah did.
Oh, my brother! Thank you for your transparency. My heart breaks for the disconnect in the Body, for the struggle we face to become the beings we were created to be rather than the beings trauma made us – wherever it comes from. Healing is for now and “Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way”. I had the misconception that looking into these things was “self-focus” and wrong. Not true. It is the enemy who lies and says examining these things will only cause more pain. Father, thank you for empowering us with the courage and persistence to seek out the places of trauma and expose them to the healing light of Your Presence.
I have heard, that taking five minutes a day to learn one new thing teaches you 365 new things in one year…
I learned at least 5 new things in the 5 minutes it took me to read this (OK…I’m slow!).
At that rate, it means I have to remember the 1825 new things I am learning this year. The pressure is on!
But so worth it 🙂
Thank you Skip for the lessons.
wow. (Attempted articulation of that which knocks you up side the head!) How often I have considered this “wisdom” Solomon asked for and why it made him nuts. Knowing good and evil experientially. Sad consequence of the disobedience. My goodness, this speaks so much. The tree of Life vs. the tree of Knowledge . . . And yet, we are told it pleased YHVH for Solomon to ask this. It would appear that YHVH knew he could handle this, so was Solomon’s problem the same as Adam’s? Disobedience to what he already knew was right and wrong? OK, Skip. Waiting for 2.
This is a sincere question, not an argument! I can see the connection to Adam, but am confused about how the next verse in I Kings says God was pleased with what Solomon asked. Is this a translation thing?
Sorry, I’m a day behind and it looks like I should have read the next post before asking!