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The Embarrassing Footnote
"At the beginning of the narrative [II Kings 6:8-23], Syria is a great threat. At the end of the narrative, Syria has gone home in peace. The intervention of Elisha which changed everything is unlikely. His decisive action consisted in a prayer and a feast. It is as though in inscrutable fashion, he has said to both warring kings, 'I will show you a more excellent way,' a way which stands outside royal definitions of reality and possibility... The more excellent way is about human hurt, under threat by Syria. It is about human amazement, that the mountains are filled with horses and chariots of fire ... It is a tale of transformation in which the enemy is transformed into a festival partner who goes peaceably away."
THE enterprise of knowledge is in crisis. Since Bacon and Descartes, we have been schooled in the canon of certitude. All of us want to be credible in the courts of power and in the judgment of the academy. We tend either to be as scientific and critical as we know how and so dispel mystery, or we imitate those patterns of certitude in religious absolutism that crushes it. We are now in crisis, because we are learning that not only are the various certitudes we thought "objectively true" not objective, but likely are exercises in control which characteristically tilt toward domination.1 Our exercises in knowing turn out to be exercises in domination. We are in crisis about what we know and how we know it.
Recently, we have also noticed an embarrassing footnote to this enterprise of certitude. It is just a footnote, because, though it has always been there, it is never much credited or taken seriously in the places where knowledge counts. It is an embarrassment because it
Walter Brueggemann, formerly of Eden Theological Seminary, is Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. This article is a slightly revised version of his inaugural lecture at Columbia. Dr. Brueggemann is author of several well known works in Old Testament studies, such as The Creative Word (1982), The Message of the Psalms (1984), and Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (1986). Dr. Brueggemann is a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY.
1The basic critique of so-called objectivity has been made by the Frankfurt School. Concerning exegesis, see Donal Dorr, Spirituality and Justice (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), chap. 3 entitled, "Challenge from the Third World," and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
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smacks of weakness, sensitivity, ambiguity, uncertainty. The footnote has to do with the strange, powerful, episodic presence of human hurt and human amazement, odd experiences of human transformation which are always minority reports in our capacity to "get it right." What we have begun to notice (and may have known but tried to deny) is that this embarrassing footnote has a quiet, resilient authority of its own. It has staying power. It tends to heal and liberate; it does not seek to impose, subject, or dominate. It is the glad awareness that brokenness is real, that healing happens, and that such brokenness and healing have the power, generation after generation, of "abiding astonishment."2
If I rightly understand our epistemological situation, we find ourselves placed between the traditions of certitude that want to know and so to be safe, and the embarrassing footnote of hurt and amazement which defies the traditions of certitude and refuses to leave the world safe and unbothered. That, epistemological dilemma is now powerfully at work in the great conflicts of intnernational politics.3 The same dilemma is the main subject, even if unrecognized, in most serious church quarrels. In theological schools, we cover it over with vague discussions about spirituality in pursuit of another certitude. But we share in the cultural crisis, struggling with what we know and how we know it.
I
The books of Kings embody the tension between the canon of certitude and footnotes of hurt and amazement. These books, especially the post-Solomon coverage, proceed on a theory of certitude in which a remarkable amount of historical data, presumably factually correct, are arranged in a sober, predictable manner.4 The data are arranged according to a canon of certitude in which we can indeed know the age of the king, the length of each reign, the names of kings' mothers, and most interestingly, a clear, terse verdict about each king.
The Deuteronomic portrayal of Israel's past, then, is an exercise in certitude. The reporting of royal history is routine, predictable, and symetrical because the Deuteronomist had a set of criteria about which he was very sure. Such certitude enabled these theologians to read
2This is the phrase of Martin Buber, Moses (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 75, to characterize a miracle.
3The epistemological settlements and certitudes on which we have counted are now seen to be at least in part arrangements of Euro-American theology. As the hegemony of Euro-American power is jeopardized, so also the intellectual certitudes of that arrangement are placed in question. The monopoly of power and intellectual certitudes are mutually reenforcing and so are together placed at risk. That is why the "challenge of the third world" relates both to epistemology and to political-economic power.
4There are critical questions related to Deuteronomic redaction which, though important, do not invalidate this basic thesis. See Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 229-238, and more popularly Terence E. Fretheim, Deuteronomic History (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983). A most formidable critique of the "consensus and an alternative" proposal has recently been offered by Antony F. Campbell, Of Prophets and Kings. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 17 (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1986).
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history clearly, even if, with their selective data before us, we sometimes wonder how they could. Moreover, it is clear that their certitude was not disinterested, but was committed to a particular social arrangement.
There is an oddity about this literature, this account of royal history. At important points in the recital, there are breaks in this relentless inventory. Specifically and most extensively, in the middle of the Omri-Ahab dynasty, the theologians break away from the royal recital to give voice to a very different historical memory, expressed in a very different idiom. These are the stunning narratives concerning Elijah, Elisha, and Maicaiah. These narratives are an extended account of the embarrassing footnote of hurt and amazement which the weighty royal report was unable to censor. While they are embedded in the royal tradition of certitude, they concede nothing to it. What I most want to note is that this alternative portrayal of human history is expressed in a radically different mode, that of legendary narrative which focuses on particular transformations which refuse to be routinized or generalized, and which are never predictable. For our larger question of knowledge, what must be appreciated in these prophetic narratives is that what is known in these accounts is intimately and inextricably linked to how it is known.5 Israel could not know these matters by a routine, predictable royal recital of what is already in hand, but only through narratives which are specific, unique fanciful acts which stay very close to the concreteness of human hurt and amazement.
These stories are placed in the midst of the royal recital, the location where narratives of transformation must always survive. Elijah must always live his faith in a world where a decree goes out from an Ahab (or a Caesar Augustus); Elisha is always one who suffers under a Jezebel (or a Pontius Pilate). When the prophet acts, Ahab (or Herod) is sent into a furious rage. But the narratives concede nothing to Ahab or Jezebel (or Caesar or Pilate or Herod), because this is an alternative account of history to which those royal figures have no access and in which they have no important role to play. Indeed, one of the purposes of such narrative is precisely to delegitimate the kings who are taken much too seriously in the main narrative, and who take themselves much too seriously. By being given minor parts in these narratives, the kings are made marginal.
In the royal enterprise of certitude by which the kings make the world safe, kings and all practitioners of certitude have no patience with human hurt, take no notice of human amazement, credit no human transformation. Indeed, it takes a different epistemology, articulated in a different idiom, treating a different subject, likely set in a different sociology, in order for this other portrayal of human history to be made available, heard, received, and embraced.
5The best articulation of this interrelation is that of Gail R. O'Day, Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claim (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), who demonstrates the way in which the "how" of the text is decisive for the "what" of the message.
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II
Let us pursue one single episode of this embarrassing footnote in greater detail. The narratives of Elisha have suffered in critical assessment. They are sometimes thought to be legendary derivatives from the Elijah narratives, which themselves are legendary. They are thought to be of little historical value. That judgment, however, is itself an assessment by the canon of certitude which seeks to recover the world "behind the text." The Practitioners of a footnote such as the Elijah narratives, however, are not much interested in "the world behind the text." They are not interested in knowledge that records, controls, and chronicles. They are interested in the world "in front of the text." They ask, what does this narrative give us in order that we may survive? Are there alternatives for us in the face of royal power?
The Elisha narratives, like all narratives of amazement, are not told to preserve past miracles, but to generate present awe and anticipate future astonishment among people not excessively subservient to the rulers of this age. The narrative does not just remember a world that was. It creates a world that could be-even though the kings insist that such a world is not possible. The narrative playfully probes to see what kind of world might yet exist if the canon of control, the authority of kingship, and subservience to established power are not taken too seriously.
In II Kings 6:8-23, we watch the construction of an alternative world.6 This text is a strange portrayal of public, royal history into which is decisively intruded the uncredentialed, but irresistible power of Elisha, carrier and embodiment of another world. The narrative can be treated in four scenes, two preliminary and two articulating the main action.
In the first preliminary scene (vv. 8-10), we are introduced to a serious Syrian crisis. The Syrian king makes a battle plan against Israel (v. 8). In v. 10, we are told that the king of Israel avoided the place of danger. He eludes the strategy of the Syrian king. In v. 9, between v. 8 and v. 10, we are told why this escape was possible: the "man of God" sent a word of warning to the Israelite king. The "man of God" is not named. We are not told how he knew, how he had access to military secrets, how he transmitted the secret. We are not even told how he got into the story between the two kings. All of that is left unexplored. What is disclosed is that the "man of God" has strange power, the power to "disclose" the closed world of military control. The narrative deftly asserts that the business of kings is all placed in jeopardy by the inexplicable but nonetheless real and effective work of this "man of God." The ones who seem to be in control are not. What seemed closed is opened.
In the second preliminary scene (vv. 11-14), the Syrian king tries to
6See the fine literary analysis of the text by Robert LeBarbera, "The Man of War and the Man of God: Social Satire in II Kings 6:8-7:20," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984), pp. 636-51.
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stop the security leak. No doubt he wants to apply a lie detector test to find it. But his advisors know better. They tell the king, "There are no leaks, O king" (v. 12). "it is Elisha. He knows everything your majesty decides, even if you speak in your bedroom." Now Elisha's name has been uttered, and he assumes control of the narrative. The advisors of the Syrian king indicate no astonishment at this odd state of affairs, because the narrative wants the power of Elisha to be accepted as obvious. The advisors simply report the facts. They do not wonder out loud how the prophet has such uncanny access to high-security information. The king sounds like any king: "Stop the leak! Get control! Secure the borders! Seize him!" Surely the narrative means to show how ludicrous the king is. He sends horses, chariots, and a great army to seize the prophet, practitioner of another epistemology. Send the sword against the word. One can bear an echo through the narrative: "Not by might, not by power, but by my word.... "
Through vv. 8-14, the action has concerned the Syrian king. Elisha has been mentioned twice, once by name, once by allusion, but both times only at a distance. He is talked about, but is not present. We have read the report of his characteristic power, but we wait to see his odd authority in action. The narrative presents, as does the entire book of Kings, such an uneven confrontation. A great king and this nobody.7 But already we are on notice that the prophet will characteristically outflank, outwit, and finally outgovern the king. The world "in front of the text" concerns precisely the prophetic capacity to outgovern the king.
In scene three (vv. 15-19), we are ready for the real action. Now the scene is set in the locus of the prophet. The shift of scene makes the Syrian king only a marginal participant in the narrative. This is a narrative which displaces royal power and focuses attention and interest on the real actors in the historical process. Kings are not now central actors, but are acted upon. In this scene, the ludicrous contrast persists. There is one lonely prophet who does nothing. Yet his house is surrounded by horses, chariots, and a great army. It is an unequal match, and the narrator tells us twice that the house is surrounded so that we do not miss the contrast. And we may look forward to a later but similar situation when Jesus says, "Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me?" (Mark 14:48).
Elisha has a servant ministering to him (v. 15). The servant is a bit part, but we shall want to pay close attention to him. The servant looks out the window, is startled at the surrounding army, and becomes terrified. He calculates quickly that if they have come for Elisha, he as the prophet's servant cannot be very safe. I suspect he finds Elisha's first
7In his exposition of John 18:33-40, 19:1-16, Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 48-70, provides a normative discussion of the interplay of real power in the form of weakness and presumed power which is in fact powerless. That same interplay is at work in these narratives of the ninth century prophets.
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assurance quite unreassuring: "Do not fear, those who are with us are more than those who are with them" (v. 16). The boy must figure Elisha cannot count very well or has taken leave of his senses, for there are exactly two of us and a throng of them. Poor odds. But then, the man of God prays. It is a short prayer. It is a prayer that refuses to accept royal definitions of reality. It is a prayer by one who had read Barth and who knows that all serious prayer is petition. It is only petition, asking God to do the one thing needful, to give the servant eyes to see, eyes to see an alternative world, free of the presumed categories and the immobilizing fear of the royal world.
The prayer is answered. We know not how. We are not told. All we are told is that the boy sees. He sees as he had not seen. He sees that the reality of power in the world is not as the king had taught him to believe. He sees apart from the dominant ideology in which he had been schooled. He sees the mountains filled with horses and chariots of fire. The world behind the text is not very helpful, for then we must see this as metaphor or hallucination. But the world in front of the text, in hope-filled imagination, is replete with powerful resources that the Syrian king cannot administer, fathom, or withstand. The prayer of Elisha has reshaped and redefined the world for the boy. The prophet has known, and now the boy knows, what is unknown to the kings. Because of the prayer, the boy knows exactly what the king cannot surmise.
In v. 18, the prophet prays again. First, he had prayed that the boy would see. Now he prays that the Syrians (who seem to see and know everything) would be made blind-and they are. Thus the prayer enacts a great inversion. The blind see, the seeing are made blind. The powerful become powerless, the powerless powerful. The weak turn out to be strong, the strong weak. (Cf. I Cor. 1: 18-25: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.") Dangerous happenings are narrated against all conventional certitude. For not disinterested reasons, the strong and powerful and seeing will dismiss such stories as ridiculous, carrying no reality.
In the final scene (vv. 20-23), all the characters in the story have come to the city of Samaria. The Syrians have not come as an invading army, as they had proposed. Instead, they are helpless suppliants and guests, having been led there blind. Elisha prays again, and they see. Elisha is the only one who can cause something to happen. As a result of Elisha's petition, the Syrians see that they are indeed in Samaria. But now the Syrians are silent. They have been robbed of power, and so do not speak. They are removed as threats, or even as active agents in the plot. They are only passive recipients of the actions, reduced to irrelevance.
The conversation is between the prophet (who is still in charge) and the king of Israel (who is unnamed, indicating that he is not very important to the narrator). Through the prayers of Elisha, the king of
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Israel has received new power, and he wants to exploit it. He asks the prophet for permission to kill his Syrian enemy: "Shall I slay them, shall I slay them?" (v. 21). Notice: the king must ask permission from the prophet. But the prophet refuses. For all his massive, inscrutable power, the prophet is a man of peace. He refuses a slaughter of the enemy. Instead, he authorizes a feast. "Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master" (v. 22). So they prepared a great feast, and when the Syrians had eaten and drunk, they went home, defeated but fed. The narrative ends with this succinct but marvelous conclusion: "the Syrians came no more to raid Israel." Elisha's way led to peace, something the kings could not have devised. He did not seek an ultimate triumph, but opened the way for a different international world.
At the beginning of the narrative, Syria is a great threat. At the end of the narrative, Syria has gone home in peace. The intervention of Elisha which changed everything is unlikely. It is wrought by an unlikely agent, an uncredentialed prophet. His decisive action consisted in a prayer and a feast. It is as though, in inscrutable fashion, he has said to both warring kings, "I will show you a more excellent way," a way which stands outside royal definitions of reality and possibility. The prophetic narrative, embedded in these royal recitals of certitude, is a strange idiom. It protests against and undermines the royal certitude with a rival show of power for life. Royal power could only lead to death and endless hostility. The narrative proposes another way and breaks the vicious cycle of death and hostility.
III
"A more excellent way" has been given us in narrative mode, the only mode available outside royal rationality. Only stories lie beyond royal reason. The narrative has appealed to and practiced a different epistemology. In order to know something different, Israel must know differently. The more excellent way is about human hurt, under threat by Syria. It is about human amazement, mountains filled with horses and chariots of fire that Israel did not know were there and cannot explain. It is a tale of transformation in which the enemy is transformed into a festival partner who goes peaceably away. The transformation is worked as the seeing ones becoming blind, the blind seeing. (Cf. John 9:29-41: "That those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.") This is a transformation that permits new patterns of conduct and policy. It is a more excellent way because a vicious cycle is broken.
The facets of this more excellent way, present in this embarrassing story, include the following:
(1) The key action is petitionary prayer. Elisha, the central actor, has no power of his own, but refers the action beyond himself to the One who has power. Kings always imagine they have authority, but this
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narrative asserts that human history concerns submission to its true Governor. Those who submit find themselves with strange power, even in the royal enclosure.
(2) The decisive action eventuating from prayer is the power to perceive the world differently, to perceive the world according to the reality of God's rule.8 To perceive the world differently means to reject and be freed from conventional portrayals of reality which are characteristically ideological constructs of the king. Without the gift of alternative perception, the boy "knew" there were only "two of us" and legions of them. But that turned out to be a contrivance and a fantasy which could not withstand the power of faithful, obedient perception.
(3) The narrative as a whole concerns the real shift of power in the world. This is not an exceptionally religious narrative nor does it deal with spiritual matters. It concerns the real world, real armies, real threats, real possibilities. The transactions of the story have to do with a rebalancing of military-political public power in the world, so that the Syrians become less powerful and unable to threaten. Conversely, the company of Elisha (and with him the king of Israel) receive power they did not have at the beginning of the narrative. The one with arsenals as defined by the world is not the one who has serious power at the end of the story, because serious power is not gotten through Pentagon procurement officers. This is power which the world cannot give and which the world cannot take away.
(4) The narrative is a partisan, delegitimating narrative "from below." The action occurs precisely among the ones who are weak and jeopardized and have no other recourse. Insofar as the story is paradigmatic, it is not an assurance that anybody who wants to pray for power can pray and receive. We misunderstand the way of knowing given in the story if we miss the social reference of the narrative. The action in this narrative is a model "from below." The marginal ones are the ones authorized by the narrative to perceive the world differently and to act on that difference. The others, the ones who already have power when the story begins, are, by the end of the narrative, delegitimated and reduced.
(5) The outcome of the narrative is a transformation which has happened by way of empowerment and delegitimation.9 The power of the Syrian king has been delegitimated by the narrative, made ineffective, pitiful, and ludicrous. The community, though powerless, exposed, and vulnerable, has been empowered to bold and effective action. The
8To perceive the world differently is the aim and intent of serious kerygmatic language. On the capacity of such language to "redescribe," see Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia 4 (1975), pp. 31, 127, and passim.
9LaBarbera, "The Man of War and the Man of God," has seen the powerful social intent of the text. However, in labeling it as "social satire," I am not sure he is radical enough in his understanding of the function of the text. Its purpose, I propose, is not simply to expose or make fun of the royal arrangement, but to subvert its authority. The outcome of the narrative is that the royal claims should be completely nullified for the listeners of the narrative.
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relations between the two have been transformed. But note well the transformation is not simply inversion whereby the weak are made strong. Rather, the transformation is much bolder. The Israelite king wants to kill now that he has power, but the prophet restrains him just as he had immobilized the Syrian king. The narrative proposes that festival is better than war, that feeding one's enemies is better than killing. The hostility at the beginning of the narrative is transformed into amazement.
It need only be observed that every facet of this prophetic proposal of social reality is subversive of royal notions of reality:
(1) Kings do not believe that prayer is powerful, because they are preoccupied with and mesmerized by missile systems in which they have placed idolatrous trust.
(2) Kings are so committed to their perception of the world they scarcely know freedom or willingness to perceive the world differently. Indeed, to perceive differently is for the rulers of this age to be delegitimated, for it means the surrender of carefully devised ideology.
(3) Kings neither believe that real power can be redistributed nor want it to be. Thus the royal consciousness can assign prayer merely spiritual functions, removed from the arena of real power.
(4) Kings are accustomed to moving "from above" and are not likely to credit the prayers which emerge from below, because those below are scarcely reckoned as serious social agents.
(5) Kings, on the whole, resist transformation from war to festival, from killing to feeding, for such transformation appears not as change but as diminishment of royal significance.
A more excellent way is possible among us if we can see with the eyes of Elisha and not with the eyes of kings. In personal and in public life, to be able to see the working of God that unfaith cannot see is what permits the overpowering conclusion, "we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." If we are unable to see the horses and chariots of Yahweh which overwhelm the enemy, then in fact we have nothing important to say at funerals, or at any other time in the face of death. The alternative to such daring seeing is to be defeated, to abandon the subversive dream, to nullify our baptism, and to settle for the royal reading of reality. That leaves the king and his army finally in charge. This text calls us to re-examine how and what we see.10
IV
As teachers of the church, we have been entrusted with this text, this embarrassing footnote. Theological education is not about reasonableness and skill and management, all of which may be necessary. Rather, it is about power, insight, vision, courage, and freedom of another kind, wrought precisely against the rulers of this age. It is now a question in
10On Scripture as re-seeing, see Gail R. O'Day, The Word Disclosed: John's Story and Narrative Preaching (St. Louis: CBP Press, 1987).
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the church whether faith and resources are available for a radically different reading of reality.
A community of faith or of learning practicing conventional certitude will not easily entertain such stories as we have been examining. Whether the certitude takes the form of political control, economic domination, theological orthodoxy, or moral correctness, the narrative witnesses against them all and hosts the prospect of transformation with which they stand in tension. Not only our knowledge, but our way of knowing, is jeopardized when we must listen to tales from below that are so disrespectful of our reasonableness. We are assaulted in our power, in our knowledge, in our certitude.
Let us return to the boy, the servant of Elisha. He plays a minor role in the narrative. He is a creature of fear when he sees that the house is surrounded. He is the object of Elisha's astonishing prayer. He reaches his completed part in the narrative when he is granted sight. Receiving sight is the dramatic trigger for the entire subsequent transformation.
Not many are summoned to be Elisha, but all of us have minor roles in the narrative of transformation. We are all invited into the narrative to watch while the scandalous man of God works his odd power. We watch the narrative, the narrator, the central actor in the narrative. Our watching is spiritual formation, nurture, conversion, theological education.
To be drawn into this new and different way of knowing the real world around us involves a radical re-education: (1) to learn the cruciality of prayers of petition which resubmit life to the one with life-giving power, to be weaned from the promise of kings; (2) to learn to perceive and experience the world differently, apart from royal ideology and slogan; (3) to watch, expect, and participate in the shift of power which the gospel works in the world, shifts of power toward women, blacks, poor, and all the other marginal ones whom royal modes of life have declared to be nonexistent; (4) to be present with, as we are able, the communities from below who treasure such subversive narratives, who know differently, who are special recipients of God's gift of power for life in the world; and (5) to participate in the transformation toward a more excellent way in which our wars may turn to feasts, in which our killing becomes feeding, in which we enact the feeding of the strong who do us in, so that vicious cycles of hostility will end.
I have been wondering what Elisha might have said to the boy-servant at the end of this episode. I imagine it was not unlike what that other "man of God" said to his, apprentices: "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (Luke 10:23-24).