Michael Zank

There was a moment in today’s class that should not go unnoticed. The reading assignment this week in RN101 The Bible was Exodus 19-34, Leviticus 18-20, and a bunch of chapters from Deuteronomy for Friday. Yesterday we looked at the framing of the Sinai covenant, the quasi theatrical scene in Exodus 19, the deity’s physical appearance and the curious denial and affirmation that Moses saw YHWH face to face. I pushed the text to saying that the deity can only be “seen” through the (text of the) law itself, which enjoins an imitatio of the divine attributes of action  YHWH proclaims as he passes by Moses. So far so good.

Then, today, I started with Leviticus 18-20, showed how it addressed the people as a whole rather than the Aaronide priests who are addressed before and after, explaining what “holy” means in Hebrew and pointing out that the difference or separateness (“exceptionalism”) of the Israelites and their deity is based in lawful conduct, whereby the laws (here and in the “book of the covenant”) are – give and take a few exceptions – quite reasonable laws, establishing a just society, and enabling the nation to live and flourish in the land they inherited from the unwise and unlawful people whom the land had “vomited out.”

At some point I had raised the question, what kind of law is it that the Israelites are enjoined to follow if they wish to succeed in the land YHWH was giving them. And at some point a student said, that the entire matter of the laws of Moses was completely unlike what Christians made of it, that it had nothing to do with trying to please God and everything with establishing a successful society, with laws conducive to social welfare and public order.

The way he formulated it, briefly and succinctly, I cannot reproduce. But it was such an “aha!” moment, such a crisp articulation of what I had hoped for the students to understand and to some extent had forgotten that that’s what I had wanted them to understand that it took me by surprise. I thanked the student for his insight and paused before I continued, to let what he had said sink in.

What do we learn from this? If you have a profound text and you get out of the way just long enough that it can speak, it will speak and students will hear. But they also need to have thought and known something, even if what they thought or knew was wrong or erroneous, in order to benefit from the encounter with the text, with the text’s resistance to their assumptions. They need to have been part of a pertinent conversation to benefit from surprising deviations from the expected, the already known. There are few things more rewarding than moments like this.