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Psalm 45

Cancel!

After reading your April issue, we have decided to cancel our subscription. We were under the impression that yours was a Christian magazine and were sorely disappointed to find that it is anything but! It is bad enough when Mr. William H.C. Propp (“Is Psalm 45 an Erotic Poem?”) takes a perfectly straightforward wedding psalm and turns it into erotic fantasy. (He reminds me of a professor I once knew who saw men’s neckties as phallic symbols.) But you had to go and add pagan gods to the mix, too. [Propp’s article mentions various Near Eastern gods, including Anat, El and Qudshu—Ed.] This shows that you have no respect for the scriptures at all. You have gone the way of most of today’s magazines, appealing to the baser instincts, when the world is sadly in need of purity of heart.

Joseph’s Bow?

In his fascinating article on Psalm 45, William Propp suggests that the arrows mentioned in verse 6 have a sexual innuendo, citing a Ugaritic poem to support this. He might also have mentioned Jacob’s blessing of Joseph, where the biblical author refers to the ba’alei hitsim (“masters of arrows,” namely, archers) who attack Joseph and the strength of his qeshet, “bow” (Genesis 49:23–24). The blessing is probably an allusion to Joseph’s encounter with Potiphar’s wife, as the midrash suggests (Genesis Rabbah 98:20; see also Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 49:24). The midrash adds that during this encounter Joseph’s “seed was scattered and issued through his fingernails.” The reference to arrows in Genesis 49:23 may be just as sexual as Psalm 45:6.

Prayers

The Unanswerable Prayer

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor did a nice job in explaining prayers for items the community could (and should) provide (“Why Doesn’t God Answer Prayers?” April 2004). But how would he handle the prayer of the mother whose child is dying of a malignant brain tumor?

What About Atheists?

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor helps shed light on the perplexing problem of unanswered prayers, but he clouds the matter when he says, “Prayer is answered through the actions of Jesus’ followers.”

Might it not be possible that an atheist or non-Christian could be the one who sees the problem and supplies the needed bread? The exclusivity of Christianity that is implied is distasteful at best.

Skeptical

I subscribe to BR because of my interest in Christianity, but I remain a skeptic. It is from this perspective that I respond to the article “Why Doesn’t God Answer Prayers?” in the April issue. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor falls into a too-familiar pattern of Christian apologetics: He identifies a crucial problem, discusses it with great sophistication and then announces a solution—but his solution does not in fact solve the problem.

Murphy-O’Connor rejects those passages in the New Testament that seem to place the blame for unanswered prayer on the petitioner’s lack of faith. His solution to the quandary of unanswered prayer is that Jesus’ promise is linked in Matthew to the Golden Rule. “If people ask for what they truly need in a community of love, then the response will certainly be forthcoming,” he writes.

One problem with this solution is that it gives prayer and God credit when such credit is not necessarily due. In England and most Western democracies, churches are virtually empty Sunday after Sunday, and survive only because of the tradition of state support. Yet the secular policies 004of the governments make it much less likely that a child there will go hungry or unsheltered than is the case in the United States, where, by contrast, churches are well attended and active. In such countries it is clear that prayer has nothing to do with the proper care of children. This is accomplished through a social compact. Prayer and God are both superfluous.

What About God?

I found Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s thoughtful article very enlightening, yet not fully satisfying.

The good works of the faithful do indeed provide an answer to prayer. However, if this is the only means, it comes at a rather high price: God is impotent, dependent entirely on human intervention. Isn’t the primary thrust of faith quite the other way around?

Columnists

What Is Love?

I am perplexed by Ben Witherington III’s in-depth analysis of the meaning of “love” in the New Testament (see “From Hesed to Agape,” December 2003, and the letters that followed in the April 2004 issue). Witherington confines his discussion to the Hebrew term hesed and Greek agape. Although he does refer to the Hebrew Scriptures, his focus seems to be on what Paul meant in Greek rather than what Jesus clearly communicated in Hebrew and/or Aramaic.

When Jesus proclaimed the two “great commandments,” he was neither speaking in Greek nor indulging in complex theological analysis. Jesus used the Hebrew ahavah (or its Aramaic cognate) when he quoted Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love [v’ahavta] the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might,” and Leviticus 19:18, “and you shall love [v’ahavta] your fellow/neighbor as yourself.”

How this leads to Witherington’s scholarly fixation on hesed I cannot understand. He writes: “In the Hebrew Scriptures, hesed refers to a sort of love … covenant love … as in Hosea 11:1: ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him.’” Yet the Hebrew uses ahavah and not hesed: “Ki naar Yisrael v’ohaveyhu” (“When Israel was a child I loved him”). And despite the absence of hesed in his proof-text, Witherington plunges ahead as if he had proven his point!

The standard Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon cites all of the uses and meanings of hesed in the Hebrew scriptures, but never translates this word as “love”—the closest being “lovingkindness,” which is not synonymous with “love,” and in Hebrew is not linked with “love.”

Further, in both Torah passages cited by Jesus, “you” is singular, not plural, and clearly addresses the individual. Why then does Witherington’s response to a letter go into the individual vs. the community, and insist that biblical love is communitarian and not individual? Paul may not have been “an early advocate of modern Western individualism,” but Jesus was certainly not being a “communitarian” 006when he addressed Leviticus 19:18 to the individual.

Witherington notes that agape “is probably the least well understood” term for “love” in the New Testament “in part because it does not crop up much outside the New Testament in that period.” The Hebrew triliteral root of aleph-he-bet, is the exact counterpart of the Greek alpha-gamma-pi. Could it be that agape was actually the Greek borrowing of the Hebrew ahavah because the Greek language had eros and philos, but no counterpart to the Hebrew concept of non-familial and non-erotic love?

Ben Witherington III responds:

I am pleased to have Rabbi Bloom’s broader discussion of love, including terms other than ones that I briefly discussed. He is right about a good deal of what he says, particularly the focus on the individual in the love commandment. It seems quite unlikely to me, however, that agape is a term derived from one or another Hebrew or Aramaic terms for love, for the very good reason that we do very rarely find the term agape used in Greek literature before New Testament times and used by writers who would have no knowledge of the Hebrew Bible or of Aramaic. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon, while a standard dictionary for many years, is dated and by no means takes into account the lively discussion of terms for love by biblical scholars in the last thirty or so years. I would refer him to the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament published by Eerdmans.

More Please

Mary Joan Winn Leith believes that the traditional characterization of the God of the Old Testament as a God of justice and the God of the New Testament as a God of love is in error (“A God of Love and Justice,” April 2004). I agree. It never made sense to me that God would have a 180-degree change in his personality upon the birth of Jesus. Besides, it was the God of the Old Testament who planned and prepared the way for our salvation.

I was enjoying the article when all of a sudden in her final sentence she offers up the following: “How sad and ironic that born-again Christian Charles Colson asserts that Christians and Jews share the same loving God while Muslims worship a different God who is ‘aloof and distant’—a surprising claim considering that virtually every chapter of the Koran and the daily calls to prayer invoke God as the ‘merciful and compassionate.’”

Huh? Where did this come from? Why is it ironic? Nowhere else in the article does Leith mention Colson, Muhammad, the Koran or Muslims. This is out of the clear blue sky. Maybe she’s right, maybe not. I think she probably is, but I would appreciate a little more information before I make up my mind.

Mary Joan Winn Leith responds:

As I noted in my column, what I called the “comparative gods” trap is still all too easy to fall into. Mr. Colson’s organization daily demonstrates its sincere Christian commitment to helping the despised and rejected. What is sad is that an avowedly Christian group has retrieved from the dustbin of theology a discredited and discarded argument once used by Christians against Jews. What is ironic is that Christians would appropriate this recycled rhetoric to align themselves with Jews against Muslims. Changing the target does not render the rhetoric less wrongheaded, hardhearted or erroneous.

Psalm 45