Gaps

but King Joram had returned to Jezreel to have himself healed of the wounds which the Arameans had inflicted on him when he fought Hazael king of Aram. So Jehu said to the other men, “If this is your intent, then let no one escape from the city to go tell about it in Jezreel.” 2 Kings 9:15 NASB

Hazael – The religious world embraces (most of the time) the three pillars of logical argument: non-contradiction, coherence, and comprehensiveness.  Perhaps this is why theologians take such great pains to attempt reasonable explanations of the doctrine of the Trinity.  Unfortunately, I believe that in the end, this doctrine’s logic is best summed up by Millard Erickson’s conclusion that we believe it because it doesn’t make any sense.  We claim human beings are just not capable of understanding the “apparent” self-contradiction, but because it “comes from God,” it must nevertheless be true.

Coherence is another internal condition.  We want the propositions of our faith to square with each other.  We don’t like anomalies.  We want all the elements of our faith to fit together into a nice, neat whole.  Theologians attempt to do this by employing things like anthropomorphism, analogy, and application.  For example, the apparent vengeance of the Old Testament God is reconciled with the charitable New Testament God by using analogies from the experience of human parenting.  Both non-contradiction and coherence operate inside the theological construct.  Solutions offered in these two areas require internal alterations or explanations.  The third logical component raises a different problem.

Comprehensiveness is the requirement that our faith is not at odds with outside information.  If the Bible claims that such-and-such a battle took place in a specific year of the reign of some specific king, we want to find external evidence that verifies this biblical claim.  If we were to find that no such event ever occurred, our faith in the text would be challenged.  This is why the claims about the event of the resurrection are so crucial to the believing community.  If Yeshua wasn’t raised from the dead, then Paul’s right.  Our faith is baseless—and false.  We could still believe, but our belief would have to be  based on other grounds (e.g., that the disciples has a mass hallucination).  In this arena, we are loath to dismiss other scholarly work.  Faith might not depend on external verification, but it certainly expects external verification.

Such is the problem with 2 Kings 9:15.

The third solution raises an even more interesting problem. If we deduce from the inscription that there was a conspiracy between Hazael and Jehu, we are not merely closing a gap. Closing gaps is not a particular problem for the religious student of the Bible. The sages themselves in many places filled in missing details, sometimes even when the story could be understood without them. However, in this case, we return to a biblical story that lacks any apparent holes, and find within it new meaning because of an archeological discovery.  This implies that before the discovery our comprehension of the story was impaired by the absence of important information. What does this say about all the other cases in which we lack external information?  It seems to me that this example teaches an important message: not to content oneself with the traditional interpretations of the great commentators, because the traditional method of learning is no longer the only way to discover the truth.[1]

Archeology indicates that the biblical text isn’t correct.  We’ve learned more about these circumstances over the years, and what we’ve learned challenges our prior understanding of the text.  As Misgav points out, if new information acquired via scholarly pursuits outside theology alters our views of the text in this case, how many other texts could also be challenged by outside discovery?  If we want a faith that embraces comprehensiveness, we will have to be open to other fields of inquiry.  Theology alone cannot secure our beliefs.

Topical Index: archeology, comprehensiveness, Hazael, 2 Kings 9:15

[1] Haggai Misgav, “Archaeology and the Bible,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Studies Press, 2019), p. 525.