The People God Hates
Forty years I loathed a generation and I said, “A people of straying hearts are they and they did not know My ways”; so I swore in My anger, “They shall never come to My resting place!” Psalm 95:10-11 translation Jack Riemer
Loathed – God is love, right? God loves everyone, right? God doesn’t want any to perish, right? Well, maybe not. Consider God’s voice recounted in this psalm. “Forty years I loathed a generation.” The Hebrew term is qûṭ. It’s very strong. “Our root denotes the deep emotional reaction of the subject issuing in a desired repulsion (or destruction) of the object.”[1] If we are to believe this statement, God despised the generation He rescued from Egypt and wished them all dead! Ah, but the root is also translated as “be grieved,” so perhaps we can rescue God from anger management by translating this verse as “Forty years I grieved a generation.” That makes God much friendlier. The problem, of course, is the subsequent statement, “They shall never come to My resting place.” If God is grieving over this generation, it makes no sense to refuse them rest. No, I’m afraid we will have to keep “loathed.” And that raises a serious issue. Jack Riemer is distressed with this translation, so he comments: “First, I take the words of God as the psalmist’s imagining rather than God’s actual words; . .”[2] In other words, God didn’t actually say this. He didn’t actually feel this way. He didn’t actually intend to punish the first generation in the wilderness. It’s the psalmist who makes this up—to emphasize a point, of course, but nevertheless, an imagined fiction.
This is an amazing exegesis. It allows me to alter the text according to my theological proclivities. If the psalmist’s words are fiction, what about the words of Jeremiah, or Moses, or Matthew? What prevents me from considering any difficult passage nothing more than the author’s imaginative fiction? So I don’t like the implications of some text in the Tanakh. Just dismiss it as hyperbole? Actually, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Consider the endorsement Riemer gives to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: “He had a fertile imagination that enabled him to find many insights within the words of the siddur and the Torah that no one else would ever have noticed.”[3] That’s what we need, right—a fertile imagination—so that we can circumvent the uncomfortable texts. I wonder if the rabbis of the Talmud didn’t have such fertile imaginations.
Is the psalmist’s record of God’s statement true? Well, if it is, we might have to rethink some of those “God is love” ideas. And if it’s not true, if it’s just poetic license, well, then we’ll have some serious exegetical issues to confront. No easy out of this one.
Topical Index: exegesis, fertile imagination, poetic license, loathe, qûṭ, Psalm 95:10-11
[1] Coppes, L. J. (1999). 1996 קוּט. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 792). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Rabbi Elie Spitz, in Jack Riemer and Elie Spitz, Duets on Psalms: Drawing New Meaning from Ancient Words (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), p. 173.
[3] Jack Riemer, in Jack Riemer and Elie Spitz, Duets on Psalms: Drawing New Meaning from Ancient Words (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), p. 87.
Indeed, there is, “No easy [way] out of this one.” Perhaps it is most reasonable to consider and focus upon what it is that gives structure and shape not only to texts but to reading and writing subjects as well. That is to say, what is it that grounds the proper meaning of the text? Is it subjective?… or is it objective?… or is it an “interactive interaction” with the text by a writing subject and reading subject? Moreover, what is the case prior to “the text” becoming written text rather than being spoken or proclaimed? And just what is the nature of that Decalogue inscribed by “the finger of God” on the tablets of stone… which then was kept from the people’s view… being placed within the ark of the covenant?
I think the Apostle Peter provides us with the proper perspective: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable…for every good work.”
“…these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:10-11)
“But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.” (Job 32:8)
In biblical theology we have to remember its profoundly personal character. This implies that any approach employing an impersonal model of thought would not be scientifically appropriate or theologically useful; yet neither does it imply a personalistic approach (which operates from a center in the self of the human interpreter), for that would involve becoming trapped in a subject/object relationship and a lapse into subjectivism. What is theologically required here is some form of personal knowledge that is a responsible participation of the person as an active rational agent in all acts of understanding and knowing, but a participation that is controlled from beyond the knowing person by objective reality and universal standards which transcend his own subjectivity… i.e., a participation that is controlled from beyond the knowing person… by being made a responsible (and accountable) knowing participant through the Spirit of God.