Abstract
In the case of scholarship on Old Testament ethics, many are familiar with the philosophical divide between descriptive and normative approaches, the former commonly described as ‘strictly historical’, the latter as ‘theological’. John Barton’s newest work, Ethics in Ancient Israel, has predictably been relegated to the former category. Such a relegation, however, does little to convey what Barton is actually attempting in this project, which is to lay bare the divisions between various descriptive assumptions about the history of moral reasoning and the part that the Israelites play in that history. The main argument put forth in this work is that we can no longer make the historical assumption that moral reasoning is our inheritance from the Greeks, when what we witness in the Old Testament is not just a kind of obedience-based morality but a critical reflection on morality. The Israelites, in other words, were thinking about ethics, were in the habit of moral reasoning, before Socrates was born.
The book’s ten chapters are set up in a manner that seems to anticipate the logical sequence of counter-arguments to this thesis. The first chapter, for example, argues that the key to recognizing the ethical reasoning on display in the shaping of the Israelite ethos is to recognize also that every one of the Old Testament’s literary genres serves as a source for unpacking Israelite ethics. As Barton suggests, though law, narrative, poetry and wisdom have ‘generic differences’, they are also alike ‘in being concerned with ethical insight, a certain style of living, and an ethic based on models and habits rather than simply on divine diktat’ (p. 39). That ethical insight is not offered to the reader in Platonic universals. Rather, the Old Testament is a more Aristotelian exploration of specific problems, meant to give practical wisdom once they are pondered.
The next two chapters deal with the questions of particularism that undergird the debates over the ethical assumptions of the Old Testament writers, the identity of their intended audience, and the ethical norms of that audience in everyday life. Consistent with the larger corpus of Barton’s work, his general argument is that the Old Testament texts manage to be both particularistic and universal. As Barton contends, redactions have led to the Old Testament’s particularistic tone, but several texts still put forth universalistic ideas about moral agency. Examples include the wisdom literature’s imperative that the good life be ‘lived by anyone, of any nationality’ (p. 51), the Levitical mandate that Israelites love neighbours beyond their covenant, and the prophetic ‘oracles against the nations’ that assume the culpability of foreign entities for their moral choices. Barton extends his discussion to the question of particularism within the Israelite community as well, addressing gender, class, and notions of the self as nuances in moral agency. For the question of the extent to which the ethics in the Old Testament reflects a particular ethos of the compilers or a broader ethos in the ancient Near East, Barton turns to the speeches of prophets. The result is an effective muddying of the distinction between the ideas of ‘popular’ and ‘official’ ethics. What we see in the Old Testament is not over and against custom and convention; rather, it is often a record of it.
The next four chapters take on questions of order, specifically the underlying fabric that orders both Israelite ethical thinking about one’s relations to others as well as to God. It is here where the book makes its most valuable contribution, because Barton puts forth an impressive challenge to the assumption that morality in the Old Testament is ‘the parade example of a divine command theory of ethics’ (p. 94). On the contrary, divine command is but one of the three models that Barton identifies in the Old Testament, the other two being akin to virtue ethics and natural morality. Virtue ethics is how Barton makes sense of the David narrative, in that it addresses a myriad of vices ‘without commenting much explicitly on these things, but by telling its tale in such a way that the reader is obliged to look them in the face, and to recognize his or her affinity with the characters in whom they are exemplified’ (p. 172). Barton reasons that there is evidence in the Old Testament of ‘a widespread belief that a well-ordered and pious life would bring one understanding of the world and God’s ways in it’ (p. 169). Thus we have stories like David’s which, though often at the expense of the protagonist, illustrate the understanding that a pious life requires the recognition that one needs ‘moral training’.
Barton’s language for the model of natural morality, or ‘moral order’, has shifted from his previous usage of ‘natural law’, a move which this reviewer applauds because it avoids the inevitable connotations of the latter. Here Barton’s focus is largely on the task of piecing together the moral ordering that is ‘obvious’ to the Israelites and which is implied rather than explicitly commanded in the Old Testament. As for the model of divine command, Barton concedes that Deuteronomy is the essential divine command text in the Old Testament. That being said, the covenantal obedience presented by the Old Testament is not the ‘irrational’ or ‘blind’ form that Hempel stressed. On the contrary, Barton shows how obedience is often named as ‘flowing from gratitude for benefits conferred’ (p. 137). The result is a picture of obedience that is actually closer to a posture than an act, elicited by the writers’ presupposition that the people to whom these laws are given need reason to understand why they should obey them. Barton argues that this presupposition is why laws often have motive clauses which argue the law’s necessity ‘on the basis of common sense, self-interest, a humanitarian concern, gratitude, a desire to imitate God’s own character, and an appreciation of what is inherently good’ (p. 142). Such a picture challenges that of ‘the Commander’ which many scholars have painted into some of these divine command texts. When the appeal is to reason, Barton contends, then in those instances God may be better understood in the Israelite mind as ‘a teacher, persuading his students to do the right thing by reminding them of how much they owe him, and of what good things will come to them if they do it’ (p. 144).
In a final matter regarding moral order, Barton addresses the divide many scholars have accepted between ‘ethical’ and ‘cultic’ laws. This is a timely engagement because, since Jonathan Klawans’s work on the distinction between moral and ritual impurity, the boundary that scholars have drawn between these two ‘models’ of Israelite thinking is becoming far more defined than it probably was in the experience of the Israelite community. Barton attempts to soften this line, arguing that ‘the language of impurity is constant all along the spectrum: there is no specific point at which we pass clearly from ritual to moral’ (p. 199). From a theological ethicist’s point of view, this is a welcome correction, because the notion of impurity—whether ritual or moral—is, in Barton’s words, ‘a way of ordering the moral world’ (p. 204). To that end, the removal of impurity is similar to God’s forgiveness in its effect: both constitute a return to ‘an original state’ (p. 208).
The final three chapters contend with ‘classic’ subjects of debate in Old Testament ethics: divine retribution, suffering and theodicy, and the moral character of God. These topics are fittingly at the end of the book because by this time Barton has undermined several of the rigid dichotomies which inform most arguments in these debates. Those wholly committed to divine command theory will be challenged, for instance, by Barton’s presentation of how the Old Testament texts convey ‘both an automatic and an interventionist way of understanding the nexus between guilt and punishment’ (p. 217). There is also the sticking-point Barton raises for those who side wholly with the Psalmist’s stance that suffering in the Old Testament is an evil to be defeated. As Barton outlines, in both Job and Proverbs the Old Testament also proposes that suffering can be formative. Finally, those who argue that the ‘Old Testament God’ is a capricious, irrational tyrant will be challenged by the many texts Barton puts forth that complicate this view. As it turns out, the authors of the Old Testament overwhelmingly affirm God’s goodness, however difficult they find it to justify at times. In the opinion of this reviewer, Barton’s work here specifically makes the ancient author’s role as agent in the depiction of God far more interesting and multi-dimensional than is usually presupposed.
Throughout this book, Barton puts forth clear and careful arguments for why ‘the gap between ancient Israelite thinking and early philosophy is not so great as is commonly supposed’ (p. 274). By the end the reader will be left with a sense of the Old Testament as an anthology of ethics as much as it is an anthology of genres. What is clear is that neither God nor Israel in Barton’s presentation is a simple subject with which to contend. This is mainly owed to Barton’s subtle theological point that, even with the most robust and explicit of commands which ground the Old Testament’s ethics, ‘there is a far stronger element of dialogue between God and Israel than is commonly imagined’ (p. 144). This is an important book for anyone who has a stake in such a statement.