Into an alternate world

To speak of biblical literacy poses an obvious question. What’s so special about the Bible that we ought to be literate in it?

The big-picture answer is that the Bible gives us knowledge about God. When applied to actual stories in the Bible, however, we will find that we have to work a little harder to provide a convincing answer.

Take scoundrel Jacob, for example. He flees to Haran. He is running from his brother Esau because, though born second, he managed to steal his brother’s birthright. He meets his trickster uncle Laban, but even before that, he meets Laban’s beautiful second daughter, Rachel. Jacob likes what he sees and quickly works out a deal with Laban to earn that daughter as his wife.

For seven years labour, Jacob will get his prize. The wedding day comes, then the wedding night, and then the morning after, and to his horror Jacob finds Leah, Rachel’s plain-Jane older sister, sleeping next to him. Furious, Jacob confronts Laban, to which Laban replies, “In our culture the older daughter marries first. You may have Rachel in exchange for another seven years labour.”

Caught at his own game of switching the first and second born, Jacob takes Rachel, whom he loves, as his wife, leaving his other wife Leah unloved and miserable.

God hears Leah’s cries of misery and gives her a child, a son, Reuben, to which he will add five more, plus a daughter. Rachel will grow increasingly bitter as she watches Leah provide Jacob with precious children while she waits to conceive. She finally receives a son, Joseph.

Joseph will flaunt his status as firstborn of the favoured wife and for his bragging will be sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt.

As for Rachel, Joseph is not enough (his name means, “may he add”) and in her striving for more children, she will meet her end. Her death brings forth Ben-Oni, Son-of-trouble, whom Jacob will rename Ben-Jamin, Son-of-my right-hand.

And so the question of what use is biblical literacy becomes more confusing in the face of this strange story, full of its unsavoury characters.

Creating more questions

We began by saying that biblical literacy is important because through it we gain knowledge about God. But upon second thought this answer sounds a little trite.

In all honesty, knowledge about God has limited value. It might gain us a gold star next to our name on a memory verse poster, but what can creatures of dust really know about the infinite God?

Those searching for knowledge about God in the story just recounted might have a hard time coming to any conclusions. We might conclude, “God wants us to be truthful.” But why does Laban’s deceit go unanswered? He gets 14 years of labour out of Jacob and a considerable increase in prosperity for his untruthfulness.

Or, drawing from Leah’s cries to God for help, we might say, “God hears the cry of the helpless.” But then why didn’t God prevent the whole wife-switching routine and find Leah a husband who would truly love her?

These simple examples point to the fact that in the human search for knowledge, we always create more questions than answers. Finite beings can never possess knowledge of the infinite.

So what do we gain by learning this story about Jacob and his family?

An alternate world

The short answer is that learning this story beckons us from the world where God is absent to an alternate world where God works. The long answer, as Karl Barth once remarked, “has a disconcerting way of turning about, facing us who ask it, and inquiring whether or how far we are capable of understanding the answer.”

A woman who has taught children in the church for nearly 30 years remarked that biblical knowledge continues to deteriorate with each passing generation. Many kids today don’t know Jacob from Adam; and Adam is just a boy in their class, not the father of the human race.

This decline in biblical literacy worries me. It worries me because, without the alternate world that the Bible evokes, all we have left is cold, grim reality. Without the world of the Bible, all we have are the hard facts.

We have scoundrel-Jacob taking what doesn’t belong to him. We have Laban treating his daughters like goats at the market. We have a world that prizes physical beauty above all else. We have the bitter tears of an unloved wife. We have brothers selling their kin into slavery. We have the senseless death of a mother in childbirth. We have only tragedy.

If we lose sight of the alternate reality of the Bible (or perhaps we should name the world of the Bible “Reality” and what our five senses detect as the alternate), we lose a world where God transforms anguish into something good. We lose a world where tragedy has a counterpoint.

Biblical reality

J.R.R. Tolkien names the opposite of tragedy “eucatastrophe.” When our human eyes can only see the tragedy in the situation, eucatastrophe proclaims that goodness will ultimately prevail.

From eucatastrophe erupts the happy ending when all hope seems lost: the army of the dead march in to rescue Minas Tirith from certain defeat by the armies of Mordor (in Tolkien’s fictional saga); scoundrel Jacob becomes Israel, God’s chosen one; lonely, unloved Leah has her home filled with the laughter of children; Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery, will rescue his people from certain starvation; and Rachel must die to gain what she most desired but her son will give rise to two noteworthy Sauls – Israel’s first king and the great missionary of the New Testament.

Without the Reality contained within the pages of the Bible, only this world remains. We are left holding godless reality. We find ourselves saying, “All that matters is the here and now. I didn’t know anything before I was born, and I will not know anything after I die. I will try to shield myself from as much pain as possible, and create whatever fleeting happiness I can.”

Biblical Reality, however, proclaims that the end of being human is not the shunning of pain or the grasping for fleeting happiness. The Bible gives us the glasses through which to see our world in a radical new light.

Biblical Reality proclaims that God still wields the “deep magic” called redemption in a world that has lost the magic of Eden. The Bible ushers us into a world where an instrument of execution can be transformed into a sign of unquenchable life.

The true value in biblical literacy is not primarily gaining knowledge about God, for in the search for knowledge about God we can miss the world that the Bible invites us to explore. The treasure of biblical literacy lies in being shown the shape of Reality.

With our eyes blinded by reality, we need the constant reminder that, like Jacob and Rachel and Leah, our lives have meaning and significance and purpose beyond what we can grasp.

David Eagle is pastor of Saanich Community Church, Victoria, B.C.