When God Acts Immorally

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The Bible is often called the Good Book. In the way we usually think about the Bible, its good reputation is warranted. From it we learn moral precepts such as “Love your neighbor,” “Honor your father and mother,” “You shall not murder” and much more.¹ The Bible urges us to envision the possibility of a peaceful world, a time when people will beat their swords into plowshares and practice war no more.² Rather than remaining complacent in our prosperity, we should advocate justice for the widows, the orphans and the oppressed poor.³ Rather than taking pride in our dutiful practice of religion, we should let justice flow like a river, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.⁴ The Bible challenges us to be good, to be moral and to put our ethical ideals into practice in our daily lives. Any book that advocates such a profound morality certainly deserves to be called a good book.

Yet, when we read the Bible closely, its goodness sometimes seems to fade in and out of view. Many of the characters in the Bible—including God—sometimes seem to act in ways that transgress the moral code that the Bible espouses. This conflict within the Bible (both within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) creates a dilemma for the reader. If God is good, how can He (She?) sometimes seem to be bad? If biblical heroes and heroines are supposed to be holy people, why do they sometimes do things that are immoral?

Should we ignore the problematic passages and concentrate on the good? Or should we try to harmonize the good with the bad? Perhaps—to take an extreme view—the Bible is really just a bad joke, or the product of a devil instead of God?⁵

Since the rise of critical reason in the modern Western world, especially since the 17th and 18th centuries, many authors have questioned the morality of the Bible. A particularly powerful example is Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, which appeared in 1793. Here Paine, a hero of the American Revolution, turned his critical pen from the crimes of King George to the apparent crudity and cruelty of the Bible. He thought its portrayal of God to be rather pathetic:

“Whence could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his perfections, should quit the universe and come to die in our world because they say one man and one woman had eaten an apple?”⁶

Paine condemned the stories of killing and 036violence in the Bible; they simply induced brutality and reflected a demon god:

“When we read the obscure stories, the cruel and barbarous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind: and for my own part I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”⁷

Paine’s goals were moral, he found that the Bible all too often failed to live up to its proclaimed lofty moral level. For him, the Bible was an obstacle to morality rather than a moral guide. In order to be good, humans ought to set aside their blind allegiance to the Bible and use instead the moral insight that God has endowed in each of us. Ironically, Paine’s methods and goals are not far from those of the biblical prophets, who similarly criticized the moral complacency of their time.

A recent book on the Bible and morality has taken up these themes once more, following in Paine’s tradition. Steve Allen—certainly as unlikely a Bible critic as Paine—has taken a break from his work as a television comic to write a rousing critique of the Bible. His book, On the Bible, Religion, and Morality,⁸ was begun in hotel rooms during his business travels, and perhaps a credit should be given to the Gideons for providing Allen with his reading material. Allen’s book is not as eloquent or rousing as Paine’s manifesto, but it is written in a modern idiom and has the enthusiasm of a newly rediscovered cause.

Allen treats a wide range of subjects, in alphabetical order, from “Abel” to “Zechariah.” Each discussion eventually returns to a familiar diatribe, in which Allen locates and criticizes the moral flaws in a biblical passage. His sharpest criticisms are aimed at modern fundamentalists who refuse to acknowledge the moral shortcomings of the Bible. These fundamentalists are “trapped in an intellectual prison” that Allen hopes to demolish (p. 333)

Although Allen’s political and educational aims might be praiseworthy, the picture he sketches of the Bible is very misleading and one-sided. Surely there is more to the Bible than a God who continually commits atrocities and a Jesus who is disrespectful even to his mother (see, for example, the articles on “God” and “Jesus”)! Allen’s book is finally a disappointment, because he spends so much time criticizing the Bible that he never gets around to trying to understand it.

Nonetheless, as Paine and Allen have pointed out, the Bible is, at times, morally problematic. It is good to be reminded of this. Responding to its moral problems is a difficult challenge, as many readers of the Bible have discovered. To test these dangerous and murky waters once again, let’s examine a well-known problematic moment in the Bible: God’s refusal of Cain’s sacrifice:⁹

“In the course of time, Cain brought from the fruit of the earth an offering to Yahweh; and Abel too brought from the first-born of his flocks and their fat. Yahweh paid heed to Abel and his offering, but he did not look with favor on Cain or his offering. Cain was much distressed and his face fell” (Genesis 4:3–5).

Why does Yahweh^a reject Cain’s offering? There is no good reason—in fact, no reason at all—given in the text. Genesis simply states: “He did not look with favor on Cain or his offering.” Steve Allen’s recent complaint is legitimate:

“I’ve always felt sorry for Cain. The poor fellow had toiled from dawn to dusk to raise food … but that wasn’t good enough for the capricious Yahweh. Any child who has had a parent favor a sibling’s Christmas gift and had his or her own go unnoticed will understand how Cain felt.”¹⁰

Cain feels hurt, his gift rejected by his God. Why should Yahweh reject Cain’s offering? It is certainly easy to feel sorry for Cain. It would seem that Yahweh is pictured here as an arbitrary and capricious God, favoring Abel over Cain for no apparent reason.

Yet if this is so, many disturbing questions come to mind. Most of us assume that God, if He (She?) exists, is a good God. It seems axiomatic that God is good and that when God acts it is with forethought and just cause. But if God is good, how can God also be capricious? Doesn’t God abide by an impartial moral standard? If God “knows good 037and evil,”¹¹ certainly one would expect God’s decisions to reflect this moral difference. Then why is God partial to Abel over Cain? Over the years, commentators have proposed various responses to this problem. None of these responses makes the problem entirely disappear, but they do bring aspects of the problem into clearer focus.

1. Cain is really evil: Although Cain does not actually commit any evil act until he murders his brother Abel in Genesis 4:8—an act motivated by his jealousy over the favor shown to Abel—many commentators have proposed that Cain was already evil when he offered his sacrifice. According to this interpretation, Yahweh, who can look into the hearts of people, must have perceived Cain’s immorality and therefore rejected Cain’s sacrifice. If this was so, Yahweh is absolved of any charge of partiality or immorality, since His choice would have been guided by strictly moral concerns. If Cain is already evil before Genesis 4:3–5, then Yahweh is morally justified in rejecting his offering.

The problem with this explanation is that there is nothing in the text to support it. Some post-biblical writings claim that Cain was the son of Satan (and Eve),¹² and this would certainly support his inherent evil character, but this interpretation is nowhere supported by the text and is obviously motivated by the very kind of moral problem we are addressing. If Cain was the son of Satan, then Yahweh is off the hook, but this does not work for those concerned with the actual text of Genesis.

A more subtle support for this position can be mustered if one squeezes some additional meaning out of the description of Cain’s offering. In Genesis 4:3 we are told that “Cain brought from the fruit of the earth an offering to Yahweh.” This description seems quite straightforward and appears to cast no blame on Cain. Yet some interpreters find implicit blame when they contrast this verse with the description of Abel’s offering in Genesis 4:4: “Abel too brought from the firstborn of his flocks and their fat.” The phrase “Abel too brought” would seem to place his act on the same level as Cain’s. However, the word “firstborn,” say some commentators, points to a qualitative distinction between Cain’s offerings and Abel’s. Cain just brought “from the fruit of the earth,” while Abel brought “from the firstborn of his flocks.” The important difference is not between grain and livestock, but between any grain and the firstborn of the flock. While I think that this explanation is overly subtle, it is a quite ancient and still popular solution.¹³ If Cain’s sacrifice was indeed inferior, then one can see why Yahweh may have preferred Abel’s sacrifice. And yet, for this interpretation there remains a problem: Why would Yahweh reject an agricultural offering even if it weren’t from the “first fruits” of the harvest? This should still be an acceptable offering.¹⁴ A variation on this view is that Yahweh preferred Abel’s offering because the aroma of burnt meat is more appetizing than that of burnt grain.¹⁵ Burnt meat may, indeed, smell better than burnt grain, but this does not absolve Yahweh of blame for rejecting Cain’s offering. Yahweh’s manners, at least, should allow him to show no favoritism.

2. The story is an allegory: Another ancient and, in somewhat different form, still popular type of explanation treats the story as an allegory. In this interpretation, the story is obviously impossible in its literal form, and therefore must mean something other than its apparent or plain sense. These interpreters propose that Cain and Abel are symbols of something else, usually either ethical or social concepts. The reason for this type of interpretation is 046generally straightforward: When the Bible says something that is contradictory, offensive or impossible, this is a sign that the statement should be understood symbolically. This principle was stated clearly by the third-century Christian theologian, Origen:

“[If] the logical coherence and the smooth flow of the historical narrative were automatically evident everywhere, we would not believe that it is possible to find some other sense in the Scriptures besides the obvious one. For this reason the Word of God has arranged the insertion of certain offensive features, of stumbling blocks and impossibilities amid the law and historical narrative.”¹⁶

The problem of God’s seemingly arbitrary rejection of Cain’s offering is an example of such an offensive feature or stumbling block, and so symbolic meanings have been proposed for the characters and actions in the story.

The most common allegorical interpretation in ancient times was the view that Cain and Abel are symbols of Evil vs. Good. If God chooses Good over Evil, then this is certainly moral and is an exhortation to the reader as well. The earliest allegorical interpreter whose works on Genesis have survived is Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century C.E.^b Philo believed that Cain was a symbol for the corrupting principle of self-love, while Abel represented the ennobling principle of the love of God. At the beginning of the story, when Eve conceives Cain and Abel, Philo comments: “Now both these views or conceptions lie in the womb of the single soul.”¹⁷ Philo reads the story of Cain and Abel as a cautionary tale warning us to guard our souls from self-love, which can overwhelm the love of God and lead our souls to misery. Similar interpretations were offered by others in early Judaism and Christianity; for example, St. Augustine regarded Cain and Abel as symbols of the morally corrupt City of Man versus the holy City of God.¹⁸

More recently, biblical scholars have changed the tenor of the allegorical interpretation of Cain and Abel somewhat. Many modern interpreters agree with the idea that obscurities or impossibilities in biblical narrative are to be interpreted symbolically,¹⁹ but tend to prefer historical over ethical allegory. A widespread modern interpretation views Cain as a symbol of “farmers” and Abel as a symbol of “shepherds.”²⁰

In the story, Cain is indeed a farmer and Abel is a shepherd, so this interpretation has a certain appeal. But to see the conflict between the two brothers as an enactment of some ancient or symbolic enmity between shepherds and farmers is far-fetched. As other modern scholars have pointed out, there is no reason to think that the ancient Israelites viewed farmers as evil, nor is there any evidence for some historical conflict between farmers and herders.²¹

A variation on this theory views Cain as a symbol of the Kenite tribe, a neighbor of Israel that may have been involved with copper smelting and metalwork.²² The problem with this variation is that, once again, there is no reason to think that the Israelites viewed the Kenites as evil. On the contrary, Kenites are pictured in the Bible in a very positive light. Moses’s father-in-law, who helps to establish a judicial system for Israel,²³ was a Kenite according to two biblical passages;²⁴ the righteous Jael who slew a Canaanite general was a Kenite;²⁵ and Saul shows mercy to the Kenites, “for you showed kindness to all the Israelites when they left Egypt” (1 Samuel 15:6). Though Cain’s name in Hebrew (Oayin) might suggest a connection with the Kenites (Oeni), it is far-fetched to see Cain’s relationships with Abel and Yahweh as symbolizing Kenite relationships.²⁶

3. God’s will is mysterious: A third interpretation takes the problem of God’s rejection of Cain’s offering as a symbol of another kind. Rather than Symbolizing some ethical or social conflict, God’s seemingly arbitrary choice points to the mystery of God’s will and the limits of human understanding. To these interpreters, our inability to understand a passage in the Bible is a sign of human finitude: God’s will is mysterious, and we should be humble before it.

While this may be an appealing theology of God’s inscrutable will, it also seems an easy way to avoid addressing the problems of this difficult passage. Couldn’t one make the same theological claim about any problematic passage in the Bible? One senses here an unwillingness to engage the passage seriously, or perhaps an attempt to avoid subjecting God or the Bible to criticism, whether justified or not. Certainly elsewhere in the Bible Yahweh’s decisions are subject to dissent and criticism, particularly by Abraham and Moses.²⁷ Why exempt Yahweh from criticism here? And yet this interpretation, which finds in God’s inscrutable will a sufficient response, is the one chosen by two very important modern interpreters of Genesis, Gerhard von Rad and Claus Westermann.

Von Rad, in his Genesis commentary, mixes his interpretation with some fine theologizing:

“Writers have looked diligently for the basis of [God’s] preference, but it lies neither in the ritual nor in Cain’s attitude. Nothing of that kind is indicated. The only clue one can find in the narrative is that the sacrifice of blood was more pleasing to Yahweh. Obviously the narrator wants to remove the acceptance of the sacrifice from man and place it completely within God’s free will. He refrains from making the decision for Abel and against Cain logically comprehensible (‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy,’ Exodus 33:19).”²⁸

Westermann, in his Genesis commentary, solves the problem of God’s decision on a similarly lofty theological note:

“When it is narrated that God regarded the sacrifice of one brother and not of the other, then it is saying that one experienced commendation from God and the other rejection. When such an experience as the brothers had is traced back to a divine action, then this is a sign that it is something immutable. It is fated by God to be so. God’s disregard for Cain’s sacrifice does not go back to Cain’s attitude nor to a sacrifice that was not right nor to an incorrect way of offering the sacrifice. It is saying something about the immutable; it happens so.”²⁹

One feels the fervor of Von Rad’s faith in God’s free will and grace that so transcend human understanding and of Westermann’s strong conviction in the immutability of God’s decree: “It is fated by God to be so.” And yet, one also feels that the story of Cain and Abel has somehow been forgotten, and that Von Rad and Westermann are using the problem as an occasion to expound their theologies, rather than the theology of the text. Indeed, if God’s will is so mysterious and immutable, why does He change His mind later in the story when Cain complains that his punishment is too harsh? (Yahweh gives him a mark to protect him against murderers who may attack him in his wanderings.)³⁰ In this part of the story, Yahweh is reasonable and straightforward. If Yahweh elsewhere in the story is a moral and understandable God, why does He act in a seemingly capricious way with regard to Cain’s offering?

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4. Yahweh is capricious and arbitrary: If none of these three interpretive approaches seems to solve the problem, then it may be worth considering the possibility that the most obvious sense is the true sense: Yahweh is indeed acting arbitrarily and capriciously. Very few modern biblical scholars have pursued this possibility,³¹ but some well-known writers in other fields have taken this view very seriously.

The most famous modern scholar to consider the problem of God’s ambivalent character is Sigmund Freud. Freud is such a looming figure in modern consciousness that it may be difficult to assess his interpretation calmly. Moreover, his views on the nature of God are often tied to theories of historical origins that are now untenable.³² Nonetheless, on the ambivalent character of God in the Bible and elsewhere, Freud had a clear theory: God is a projection of the childhood memory of the father, and God’s ambivalence is a projection of the child’s mixed feelings about the father. Freud writes:

“[The] god-creator is undisguisedly called ‘father.’ Psychoanalysis infers that he really is the father, with all the magnificence in which he once appeared to the small child.”³³

Elsewhere he adds:

“The child’s attitude to its father is colored by a peculiar ambivalence.… [I]t fears him no less than it longs for him and admires him. The indications of this ambivalence in the attitude to the father are deeply imprinted in every religion.”³⁴

If God is capricious in His rejection of Cain and his sacrifice, in Freud’s interpretation this can be explained by the very nature of the concept of God. As a child, one often feels that the father’s decisions are arbitrary, yet the father remains an object of love, respect and awe. God’s decision is inexplicable and unmotivated because, in a child’s view, that is how a father sometimes acts. The childhood memory of the father gives God a warrant for arbitrary acts of favoritism and punishment.

Whatever one’s evaluation of Freud’s theory of religion,³⁵ his description of God’s fatherly outbursts have a remarkable similarity to the occasional outbursts of Yahweh in the Bible, particularly in the J source.^c In a fascinating recent book called The Book of J,^d Harold Bloom makes a bold linkage between Freud’s theories and J’s description of Yahweh. Bloom observes that “in one of the greatest of ironies, Freud is J’s descendant and is haunted by J’s Yahweh.”³⁶ Whether or not it is J’s Yahweh that animates Freud’s theories of the psyche and religion, there is a curious equivalence between Yahweh’s character in the J source and Freud’s theory of God.

In what is perhaps an extension, or transformation, of Freud’s view, Bloom holds that J’s Yahweh is a “grand character” who embodies the dynamism and irony of J’s view of reality: “Nothing in J is quite what it seems to be … since Yahweh is for J just the name for reality.”³⁷ Elsewhere Bloom describes J’s Yahweh as “pure will, as well as willfulness.”³⁸ It may be that Bloom is here becoming an allegorist himself, with Reality or Pure Will as the symbolic meaning of Yahweh.

Yet even if Bloom’s own exuberance and irony colors his perception of J’s Yahweh, there is something to be said for this style of approach to the moral problem of Yahweh’s rejection of Cain’s offering (the story in Genesis 4 is attributed to J). The nature of Yahweh as “at once human-all-too-human and totally incommensurate with the human,”³⁹ a paradoxical yet familiar deity, somehow corresponds with our experiences of life and our expectations of God. To put it differently, if God’s nature were too uniform, too predictable, then He would be a poor match for the complexity of the world.

In some later writings in biblical Israel, we see an increasing lack of fit between God and the world. By the time of the Book of Job, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, the “ethicization” of God has become inevitable.⁴⁰ If God is wholly good and wholly powerful, then there can be no just grounds for the existence of unmerited suffering. And yet Job, who is blameless, suffers. This is the crisis that the Book of Job confronts, culminating in what Ricoeur calls Job’s “tragic wisdom … that triumphs over the ethical vision of the world.”⁴¹ If Job’s final understanding is in some sense tragic, and if his is somehow a “tragic” God, then perhaps we can consider J’s vision of Yahweh in a different light. That is to say, perhaps J’s morally complex Yahweh might have some advantages over later conceptions of God.

If J’s Yahweh is sometimes unpredictable, even arbitrary, there still remains the possibility of a moral order. Elsewhere in the J source, Yahweh acknowledges the existence of moral principles even when He falls short of them. Abraham and Moses both argue with Yahweh over ethical matters (Abraham in connection with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Moses in connection with God’s threat to destroy Israel after the Israelites made the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai),⁴² with the result that Yahweh concedes to them and alters His decisions.

This is far removed from the situation in Job, where it is Job who concedes to God’s indomitable presence. It seems that J’s Yahweh even argues with Himself over moral matters: He wonders whether it is right to hide His intentions from Abraham before the destruction of Sodom;⁴³ and He even has an inner struggle about the rightness of destroying all humanity in the Flood, finally deciding that He will never do it again, implying that He ought not have done it in the first place.⁴⁴

A God who is sometimes capricious, who sometimes makes mistakes, who at times doesn’t do the right thing, is still a God of a world where morality can exist. Yahweh may not always live up to the ethical standards of His laws and exhortations, but at least there remains the hope that next time He will. Perhaps it is this sense of the ever-present possibility of morality in the world—even though it may often be thwarted—that gives J’s Yahweh His moral quality and makes His failings easy to forgive.

Even if we agree with this last interpretation—that Yahweh does sometimes act in a capricious manner—this still provides no moral basis for Cain’s jealousy and his subsequent murder of Abel. Nor does this view deny the existence of morality. Perhaps this interpretation best acknowledges that immorality exists—even in God’s thoughts and deeds in the Bible⁴⁵—and that, as Yahweh tells Cain in the next verse, life consists in a continuous moral struggle. Yahweh exhorts Cain: “Sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, yet you can master it” (Genesis 4:7). Yahweh may not be a wholly good God in his rejection of Cain and his offering, yet He has a good moral sense, and His advice to Cain is certainly wise. Perhaps Yahweh in this story is not ethically perfect, but He is a good God nonetheless.

Perhaps the Bible itself, as its critics have argued, is not completely good. I would certainly agree that its moral blemishes deserve to be challenged and criticized. And yet, after the criticism has been completed, it would still seem that the Bible has its moral virtues. It may not be a wholly Good Book, but perhaps it is a good enough book. The moral problems and possibilities in the Bible may yet serve to 050stimulate our moral sensibilities, and in so doing we may gain insight into the moral complexities that exist not only in the Bible, but in our world and in ourselves.

The Bible is often called the Good Book. In the way we usually think about the Bible, its good reputation is warranted. From it we learn moral precepts such as “Love your neighbor,” “Honor your father and mother,” “You shall not murder” and much more.1 The Bible urges us to envision the possibility of a peaceful world, a time when people will beat their swords into plowshares and practice war no more.2 Rather than remaining complacent in our prosperity, we should advocate justice for the widows, the orphans and the oppressed poor.3 Rather than taking pride in our dutiful […]