Contours of Old Testament Theology

7. The Characterization of Yahweh

7. THE CHARACTERIZATION OF YAHWEH We bflVe Seen that the God revealed to Israel is not an ineffable, inscrutable, unknowable "It" but a "who," as expressed narratively in many ways, for example, "God who brought Israel out of Egypt," "God who created heaven and earth." God, the Holy One, chooses to have identity, to be an I in relation to a Thou, to know and to be known. God has a name and gives that name to the people so that they may address God in prayer, though in doing so God takes the risk that the name will be used in vain. Knowing the name, people will try to make God part of their world, to use God to support their nation or their purposes, in short, to make Yahweh "our God" in a possessive sense. As Walther Zimmerli puts it, the danger is the "cage of a definition."1 In this I-Thou relationship, Yahweh's character is made known to the people. The English word "character" is a rich term with a variety of meanings: it may refer to a person's pattern of behavior,- it can mean a distinctive trait or attribute (from the basic meaning of Greek charaktein, "to engrave"),- or it can refer to a person in a play, story, or novel, that is, a character. God as Actor in a Drama Since Yahweh's name is given in the context of a story centering in the exodus of slaves from Egypt, it is tempting to emphasize the last meaning indicated. The Bible presents Yahweh as a character in a story or drama, and in this literary sense Yahweh is the God who acts, to recall the title of a little book by George Ernest Wright written in the days of the biblical theology movement.2 This approach is proposed by Dale Patrick in an intriguing book, The Rendering ojGod in the Old Testament.3 He describes himself as a refugee from the biblical the­ ology movement with its excessive emphasis on God's activity in history. He believes that one can preserve the concerns expressed in "God's mighty acts in history" by moving from history to story. Thus he proposes to revitalize biblical theology with a paradigm drawn from "drama and the other mimetic arts." The two "governing concepts" of this paradigm are "characterization" and "dramatic action." By characterization I mean the representation of personages in such a way that they engage an audience's imagination, in essence causing us to entertain their existence 1. Walther Zimmerli, Old Testament Theology in Outline, trans. David E. Green (Atlanta: John Knox, 1978), 20-21. 2. Wright, God Who Acts, SBT 1/8 (Chicago: Regnery, 1952). See above, chapter 4. 3. Dale Patrick, The Rendering of God in tbe Old Testament, OBT (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1981). 56 The Characterization of Yahweh 57 as living individuals. By dramatic action is meant the representation of deeds and occurrences within a spaciotemporal framework, exhibited in such a way that the audience enters in as participant.4 Accordingly, he proceeds to "characterize" Cod, the actor in the biblical drama. This is a fascinating book, because it helps the reader to take the Bible seri­ ously as literature. Others, also under the influence of new literary criticism, argue that attempts to go behind the text (circumstances of composition, authorship, etc.) are illegitimate. The power of a Shakespearian play depends not on its accu­ rate portrayal of historical realities or even its historical "referent," but on the way it creates an imaginary world and draws us into the dynamic of the plot. One can go a step further and say that the "characters" in the drama have reality only in the context of the story. That is true, for instance, in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. The author tells us that he creates the characters and lets them have a life of their own. Similarly, so it is argued, the biblical narrators present God as a char­ acter in a story, a dramatis persona. This view is set forth in a very interesting way by Harold Bloom in The Book of J, where the author—a professor of English literature at Yale University—argues that the Yahwist Epic (the J source of historical criticism) characterizes Yahweh vividly as an impish, mischievous, unpredictable, contradictory character. But this wonderful character is only an actor in a story, allegedly composed by a woman! In another recent book, God: A Biography, Jack...