The Biblical Theology of Flawed Heroes

QUESTION:

Moses, God’s chosen one, is not permitted to enter the promised land. David, whose name means “God’s beloved,” is not allowed to build God’s Temple. Why is God so hard on His heroes? What is the message of this literary Biblical motif?

– Isaac

ANSWER:

God is the real hero of the library of books that constitute the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 32:4 reads “He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” Human beings are flawed. “There is no human being that is so completely righteous that he does only good and does not sin” [Ecclesiastes 7:20]. In contrast, Pagan kings often presented themselves to their subjects as divinities and claimed sovereign immunity with divine rights and material privileges. The quintessential pagan king was Pharaoh, the one who resided in the “big house,” the monarch’s palace. He was the embodiment of the falcon god Horus in life and Osirus in death. Everything in ancient Egypt that was Pharaonic was immense. The Hebrew Bible presents Pharaoh as the man who would be a god, as the enslaver and oppressor of Israel. Pharoah rules a society that is called “bet ‘avadim,” the realm where everyone, except the king who would be a god, is a slave. When some people become gods, everyone else become their slaves.

Unlike Pagan kings, Biblical heroes are human beings of ethical excellence who, because they are human, also have weaknesses, flaws, and failings, which they struggle to overcome.

 

MOSES

Moses had selfless courage, great wisdom, and a moral compass. He chose to identify with those in the right, his biological, oppressed people over immoral might, the ancient Egyptian aristocracy into which he was adopted and could comfortably have remained for the rest of an opulent but otherwise meaningless life. Anticipating Ecclesiastes 3:15, Moses identified with the lowly and oppressed Israelites, his family by his own choice, before God commissioned him to take Israel out of Egypt. In Exodus 1 Pharoah commits exactly three ethical outrages against the Israelites. [1] He orders that the Israelites be worked to death, [2] he orders the midwives to murder every male birth, and then [3] he commissions his people, the Egyptian population, to throw all of the Israelite baby boys into the river. In Exodus 2, Moses performs three parallel salvific acts: [1] he kills an Egyptian taskmaster who was oppressing an Israelite slave whom Moses saw as his brother, [2] he stops an Israelite who was beating a fellow Israelite, and [3] he intervenes in support of Midianite women who were bullied by fellow pagan shepherds. By these three incidents, Moses is moved by the ethical principle of justice, not an ethnocentricity that is concerned with “just us.” Moses has an innate disposition to oppose oppression, without and before he was called by the Lord. Indeed, this may be why Moses received his missionary call in the first place.

This same Moses was also the most modest of men [Numbers 12:3]; ego did not move Moses, but he did have an anger management problem. At Numbers 20:10, an exasperated Moses screams at the Israelites who asked for water, and with sacred snark announces,”listen rebels, shall we –not God–bring forth water from this rock?” Nahmanides notes that God was not given credit for the miracle performed by Moses. Moses was ordered to address the rock, but not to strike it. God’s response is exquisitely consistent. Moses was not to be publicly shamed, so the water did gush from the rock after Moses’s disobedient blow. But Moses, like all Israel, is subject of the Law. He failed to sanctify the Lord’s name. At Deuteronomy 34:5, Moses died ‘al pi ha-Shem, literally by God’s “mouth.” bBava Batra 17a speculates that the angel of death did not end the lives of certain human Biblical heroes, but rather God ended their lives with a kiss, taking “pi” to be an act, specifically a “kiss,” which is done with the mouth. The contextual, plain sense understanding is that God orders Moses to die, which he does by obeying God’s order, which sanctifies God’s name, thereby atoning for his leadership blunder when he wrongly struck that rock. Moses the Lawgiver lived, and died, according to God’s word and command. We recall that when Moses pleaded to be allowed to enter the Holy Land, he begged, “may I pass over that I might see the good land [Deuteronomy 3:25].” The Hebrew root rah/y that appears here usually means “see,” but in this context means “to undergo an experience,” as in Psalms 34:13 and Lamentations 3:1. Unexpectedly, God orders Moses to ascend Mt. Nevo in Moav, and see with his mortal eyes “the land of Canaan which I [=the Lord] will give the Israelites as a possession [Deuteronomy 32:49], and die on that mountain that you have ascended” [32:50]. Note that Moses is ordered to die and not merely expire as nature takes its course. God relents and formally allowed Moses to see, with own his two eyes, but not to fully experience, the Holy Land before his life ends.

 

KING DAVID

King David was a man of great passion, compassion, courage, cunning, leadership, and loyalty. But he, like Moses was flawed. The constitution by which the king of Israel rules is the Torah, according to which no one enjoys sovereign immunity, not God and surely not the human king, either. II Samuel 11-12 reports that David saw Bat Sheva, the wife of Uriah, bathing, he summoned her, engaged in sex with her, and she became pregnant from the encounter. David did his dastardly deed when Bat Sheva’s lawful husband, Uriah, an ethnic Hittite who joined the Israelite people and took a name that means “my light is the Lord,” was loyally serving his king and country in the Israelite army. David then arranged a furlough for Uriah so that Bat Sheva and Uriah might engage in marital relations and so that David not be shamed by the extramarital pregnancy. Uriah refuses the offer to be intimate with his wife when his comrades are in danger at the front. With the cooperation of Yoav, David’s general, the death of Uriah was arranged; the Israelite army withdrew from the siege of Rabbah, leaving Uriah to his fate at the hand of the official enemy. The narrative contrasts Uriah’s loyalty, fidelity, and integrity with David’s indifference to the pain caused by his misdeeds, his infidelity to and betrayal of his patriotic, loyal soldier, and his libidinous lust for Bat Sheva.

David is portrayed as an entitled monarch whose subjects might be exploited for his princely pleasure. He demands sex from Bat Sheva, who was in no position to refuse the command of the king of Israel. David behaves just like other ancient pagan kings, including Gilgamesh, who used and abused brides by claiming their first night of the marriage for himself David uses and abuses the power of the state to dispose of a loyal subject in order to cover up his own personal outrageous behavior.

The Sumerian pagan King Gilgamesh took brides on their wedding night for his pleasure because he, two-thirds god and one-third mortal human, possessed a will and libido that could not be resisted by mere mortals. In radical contrast, Scripture’s Israelite monarch is not a law unto himself, and suffers the consequences of his actions. The prophet Nathan challenges David with a hypothetic parable. “There was a very rich man with many sheep and cattle, who had a guest to host. Instead of taking an animal from his large flocks, he took the one and only ewe of a poor man. What should be done?” Not realizingthat Nathan’s parable and message were aimed at him, David was convicted by his own words. David stood silent during Nathan’s scathing soliloquy and then confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord” [II Samuel 12:13].

 

THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF FLAWED HEROES

We now are able to decode the messages of these two challenging narratives.

At first glance, Moses’s sin was not as grievous as David’s, but Moses was punished far more severely given the relative gravity of their sins.

Unlike Moses, David expressed remorse for his actions. He explicitly confessed, “I have sinned against the Lord.” God [a] forgives David for his misdeeds and [b] does not put David to death as punishment for the Uriah incident. On the other hand, David’s public and private lives were violent, tragic, and troubled. Apparently, God thought that David was redeemable, but did not allow David to go unpunished.

mAvot 4:8 posits that only One judge is able to judge with infallible accuracy. The fallible human court is limited by what its human eyes are actually able to see [bSanhedrin 6b]. A human bet din consists of three judges possessing a trinocular perspective that compensates partially for the unavoidable blind spots that inhere in the human condition. Genesis 9:6 requires that “[a] one who sheds the [b] blood of [c] mortals will by [c] mortals that person’s [b] blood will [a] be shed.” This verse’s chiastic structure underscores the doctrine that one who murderously destroys an innocent human life has forfeited that person’s own life. And it is for humankind to execute this protocol. Cain murdered his brother, Abel, but at that moment in culture memory, [a] there was no law forbidding murder because that norm was not yet enacted and there is no indication that Cain knew his life ending blow would be so fatal and final. Genesis 4:13 can be read as Cain’s responding to God’s indictment of him, “the guilt of my terrible act is too great to bear.” In other words, unlike Moses, but like David, Cain conceded, “I’m sorry.”

At no place in the Biblical narrative does Moses express regret for his wrongdoing, and God still allows Moses to literally see the Land. And David’s subsequent life narrative is replete with recurring tragedies. Common to all three narratives is that God reject sins and evil, but not good people who on occasion behave badly. When one sins regularly, one’s character is defined by sin, and that person becomes evil. When a person sins out error, mistake, ignorance, or weakness, God may chastise but never rejects that person.

This theological doctrine appears at the end of Psalm 1:5-6,

Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the LORD knows the way of the righteous; but the way of the wicked shall perish.

The wicked are defined by sin; their character, their habits, and their life choices denied the moral compass and divine image with which they were created, and which they betrayed by making bad choices. They will not stand in judgment. They denied God in this life; God denies them entry into eternity.

Note well that the sinners, as opposed to evil people, do stand the final judgment. There are no 100% righteous people! A sinner remains on the righteousness track as long as that person “places God before me always” [Psalms 16:8]. The “righteous” do more mitsvot and make fewer mistakes. Sinners are those who sincerely try to be righteous. These individuals are what we call saints, or sanctified ones. On that day, the righteous, the saintly, the tsaddiqim will be marching in. May we be signed and sealed in the Book of Life, and merit to be included in their number.