The Magnificent Otherness of Yahweh

I recently received a letter from a friend who expressed difficulties with certain Old Testament passages and requested my help coming to terms with them. Like many, she is turned off by the apparent harshness of Yahweh and struggles to reconcile what she reads about this fearsome deity with her own common sense of justice and morality and what she thinks a loving God should look like.

This is a common hangup. Many people find the depictions of God in the Old Testament problematic; they are embarrassed by certain Israelite narratives, such as Joshua’s herem warfare, Uzzah’s death for touching the Ark of the Covenant, or Elisha’s summoning bears to maul the teasing youth of Bethel (cf. Deut. 20:16-18; 2 Sam. 6; 2 Kgs. 2:23-25). Even the Church has acknowledged the problem. The working document for the 2008 Synod on the Word of God observed that “knowledge of the Old Testament…seems to be a real problem among Catholics…. Because of unresolved exegetical difficulties, many are reluctant to take up passages from the Old Testament which seem incomprehensible.” People struggle to figure out how the intimidating, warlike God of the Old Testament can be reconciled with the gentle, forgiving Gospel preached by Jesus Christ.

Though I sympathize with the difficulties my correspondent expressed, I have never considered God’s nature in the Old Testament to be a stumbling block. Quite the contrary. When I first read the Old Testament as a teenager, I was enamored by the mysterious figure of Yahweh. He made me sit up and take notice; He was compelling and mysterious. I was already familiar with the pagan mythologies of the Greeks and Norse, et al., which are heavily anthropocentric. As the mid-20th-century classicist Edith Hamilton noted, the Greeks and Norse made gods in their own image. It is easy to understand the adulteries of Zeus or the jealousy of Hera because these beings are fundamentally human actors, that is, they exhibit traits proper to human nature — humans endowed with certain special powers and abilities, yes, but still essentially human in their thoughts, character, and passions. They are recognizable and empathetic because they are presented as sharing our essential nature, warts and all. This makes them endearing and is one reason for the perennial popularity of pagan mythologies.