Say What?

Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?  Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.  For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”  Genesis 18:17-19  NIV

Lord – When you refer to yourself in conversation, do you say something like this: “I [Skip] have decided to do this so that Skip (insert your name) will bring it about”?  No, you wouldn’t.  In fact, referring to yourself in the third person in your own speech seems to verge on insanity.  With that in mind, reread this verse.  Doesn’t YHVH refer to Himself in just such a crazy way?  “I have chosen Abraham so that he will direct his children in order that the Lord (that’s Me, by the way) will bring this about.”  What?  We pay so much attention to the blessing for Abraham that we forget to ask why God refers to Himself in the third person.  Unless, of course, He doesn’t.

Let’s look at this blessing.  For the moment put aside the promise of becoming a great nation and the subsequent relationship to all other nations.  (You might notice, however, that the promise assumes that there will be other nations.  Apparently all other nations will not be absorbed into Israel, as the Church’s manifest destiny claims about the “new” Israel.)  Notice the role that the father of the nation will play.  He will direct his children and his household in the ways of the Lord by doing “what is right and just.”  This isn’t simply a teaching role.  He doesn’t assign homework from the scrolls.  He demonstrates the validity of his words through his actions.  In other words, to be a father is to live faithfully.  And that means ṣĕdāqâ (righteousness) and mišpāṭ (justice).  Actually, those two words mean a lot more than their simple translated English, but you can discover the full range by searching for them on my web site.  What matters here is that this outlines the primary role of the father—the teacher and practitioner of righteousness and justice.  If you, as father, haven’t done that with your children, then you haven’t been a father to them.

It’s painful for me to write this.  Maybe I did a good job of academic instruction with my children, but I can assure you that I failed miserably in the practitioner role.  That’s why there were so many years of estrangement, so many tears of sorrow and grief.  I understood the moral scheme; I just didn’t practice it when it counted.  It’s taken decades to see some recovery.  I might be able to articulate what a father should be, but I feel what happens when a father doesn’t meet the standard.  As Denzel Washington said in the movie Man on Fire, “Do you think God will forgive us for what we have done?”

I think that awareness of the distance between theory and practice helps explain this odd third-person reference to God.  What we might have here is a speech-narrative, that is, the words God spoke to Abraham and the added explanation of the Genesis narrator.  Both are collapsed into a single sentence.  Perhaps the narrator’s comment begins with “so that he will direct his children . . .”  Clearly God doesn’t need to tell Himself why He chose Abraham.  But we, the readers, need to know, so the narrator provides the explanation.  God says, to Himself, “Shall I hide what I am doing from this man?  After all, I’ve chosen him.”  Then the narrator picks up the idea and offers expansion.  Thus, the third-person reference.  We read about the mind of God and the implications for being a father.  The grammar might be wrong, but the message isn’t.  Being chosen means responsibility in word and deed.

On the other hand, a similar occurrence in Genesis 4:23 suggests that the shift from first person to third person by the speaker might just be common communication in the ancient world.  Lamech writes to his wives, but he doesn’t refer to them as “my wives.”  He refers to them as “the wives of Lamech.”  But they aren’t anyone else’s wives!  Once more the speaker switches to the third person.  The Gemara suggests that the reason Genesis 18:19 uses both first and third person is that the third person reference allows the audience to think that there are other gods, and if they so choose, they could follow them, or at least God (the only God) would allow them to be self-deceived.  But since the audience is only Abraham, it seems unlikely that Abraham is being presented with the option of following another god.  Perhaps the explanation in the Gemara fits a much later time of the reading audience, not the person actually addressed in the dialogue, i.e., Abraham.  It is true that in later times the formal address was used to signify status in the community, for example, referring to the person as “the rabbi” in a sentence like, “Does the rabbi want a glass of water?” when addressing the rabbi directly.

What do we learn?  Maybe only this: strange things happen in biblical grammar and syntax; strange things that don’t fit the evolution of the language today.  But we aren’t ancient people, are we?  Show some tolerance, but don’t stop asking why.

Topical Index: I, third-person, father, ṣĕdāqâ, righteousness, mišpāṭ, justice, Genesis 18:17-19