Bible Difficulties (67 page)

If Jonah fails to qualify as midrash, what about those dramatic passages in First and Second Chronicles that are characterized by lengthy speeches (such as David's to Solomon in 1 Chron. 28, or Asa's prayer before the battle with Zerah in 2 Chron. 14:11)?

Do these indicate a late storyteller's dramatic embellishments, as over against the more succinct and concise narrative in Kings? The basis for this judgment is meager; however, when a harmony such as Crockett's
Harmony of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles
is consulted, it appears that long and dramatic episodes occur in Kings that do not appear at 304

all in Chronicles. For example, the account of the ministry and tragic death of the prophet of Judah who came to Bethel in order to denounce Jeroboam I (1 Kings 13) is there related in as fully circumstantial and dramatic a manner as any episode recorded in Chronicles but missing in Kings.

The occasional differences in the choice of material that set Kings and Chronicles in contrast stem from the differing purpose that animated the author of each of these works.

The chief concern of the historian who wrote Kings was the response of each ruler of the divided kingdom to the covenant requirements imposed on Israel back in the days of Moses. But the main purpose of the Chronicler was to emphasize the religious institutions that were meant to safeguard Israel's relationship to the Lord (hence the attention devoted to cultic ordinances and celebrations, to the regulations relating to the duties of priest and Levite). Likewise he tended to dwell on the great moments of testing and triumph that featured the career of each of the great leaders of the southern kingdom. These elements have nothing in common with the midrashic literature as we know it, and the allegation of late embellishment on the part of professional storytellers cannot be sustained against Chronicles in the light of all the objective data when fairly considered. (For further information as to midrash as a genre, the reader is directed to the article on "Midrash" in
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
, 14th ed., 15:415-16.)

Must Jonah be taken as literal history?

The Book of Jonah has often been challenged as to its credibility and historical value because of the amazing adventures it narrates concerning the prophet from Gath-hepher.

How could a man be saved from drowning by the friendly offices of a whale (or "large fish"), who kept him safely in his stomach for three days and then ejected him safely onto the shore? And how could a pagan capital like Nineveh be so moved by an unknown foreigner addressing them in a strange language, threatening them with destruction from a God they knew nothing about, that they all went into mourning, fasting, and prayer so that they might be spared the threatened doom? Should we not therefore take Jonah as a historical short story with an allegorical purpose, intended to deflect the fifth-century Jews in Palestine from their nationalistic narrow-mindedness and to stir them up to evangelize the pagan nations about them?

There are several serious weaknesses to this fashionable modern theory, the most significant of which is that, according to Matthew 12:40, Jesus the Son of God believed that Jonah was completely historical. He showed this by stating, "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (NIV). This puts the issue on a very clear footing.

Jesus here affirms that Jonah's experience in the belly of the whale was a type of the death, burial, and resurrection that awaited Him between Good Friday and Easter morning. The coming experience of Christ, which certainly was historical, would serve as an antitype to the experience of the prophet Jonah. If the antitype was historical then the type must also have been historical. No fictional past episode can serve as a prophetic type of a future literal fulfillment. Only fiction can correspond to fiction; only fact can correspond to fact. All other types of Christ in the Old Testament were historical (Isaac's 305

near sacrifice on Mount Moriah, the priest-king Melchizedek, Moses, David, Solomon as types of Christ), as were the Exodus events referred to in 1 Corinthians 10 in a series of types and examples for believers in Paul's day.

The amazing response of Nineveh to the preaching of Jonah, unlikely though it may seem, was confirmed historically by Jesus when He said, "The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here" (v. 41). If in point of fact the Ninevites never did repent (as rationalist higher critics would have us believe), then any eschatological judgment on Jesus' unbelieving contemporaries would be quite unfair.

Jesus claimed that the men of Nineveh really did repent and set an example for the Israelites of His time to follow. But if the Ninevites did not repent and Jonah was only a folk tale, their example could not shame Jesus' contemporaries because of their unbelief.

Jesus, however, was sure that everything actually did happen as the Book of Jonah relates. Therefore His true followers must believe it, too.

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Zechariah

What solid evidence is there that Zechariah 9-14 was written by the same author
who composed Zechariah 1-8?

This is an extensive subject and requires a long, involved, and technical discussion in order to be dealt with properly. This writer has set forth the case for the unity and authenticity of Zechariah in his
Survey of Old Testament Introduction
(pp. 425-30). All the usual arguments in favor of a third-century or early second-century date for Zechariah 9-14 have been described and refuted in those six pages. The period of Zechariah's service extended from 520, when he assisted Haggai in the building campaign for the second temple in Jerusalem, to some period subsequent to 480 B.C., after the defeat of Xerxes' army in their attempt to conquer and subdue the Greeks (cf. Zech. 9:13). It is quite possible that a few decades intervened between the composition of chapters 1-8 and chapters 9-14, for there is a difference in focus and style that point to a later situation in the career of the second commonwealth of Judah than that of the earlier chapters, which are more closely related to the rebuilding of the temple (completed in 516 B.C.) and the ideological issues involved in that whole enterprise. But there is no good literary evidence for denying the composition of the two parts by the one and same author.

Special Note on Difficulties in Zechariah

It would be helpful to many readers if some attention could be devoted to the symbolism of the visions in chapters 1-6 and some of the predictive passages in chapters 7-14. These passages require very careful study and a painstaking comparison of all of the historical sources and ancient documents bearing on this period if one is to come to a clear understanding of this fascinating prophet. In this encyclopedia, however, I could do no more than suggest the correspondences and fulfillments that I have worked out in my personal study and classroom teaching of Zechariah over a period of three decades. But to present the conclusions without all of the supporting evidences on which they are based would be less than helpful to the reader. And because the only satisfactory procedure--the presentation of a brief commentary on the particularly troublesome portions that occur throughout these fourteen chapters--would far exceed the purview of this encyclopedia and would necessitate a similar treatment of the book of Revelation, I have decided to forgo delving into the involved symbolism of Zechariah. Instead, I refer the interested reader to some of the best recent treatments that are now on the market, including David Baron,
Vision and Prophecies of Zechariah
(London, 1918); George L.

Robinson,
The Twelve Minor Prophets
(New York: Doran, 1926); Charles L. Feinberg,
God Remembers: Studies in Zechariah
(Wheaton: Van Kampen, 1950). The forthcoming volume 7 in Zondervan's
Expositor's Bible Commentary
will include Kenneth L. Barker's commentary on Zechariah. In view of the proven ability of this scholar, this will be an outstanding piece of work.

307

Malachi

What is the best translation of Malachi 2:15? Why do our various English versions
come up with such different renderings?

Malachi uses an especially conversational style in discussing the various grievances that God charges against His spiritually backward people in Jerusalem. In ordinary conversation we are apt to omit words that can be implied from the context. Because Hebrew does not have case endings like Greek, it is sometimes hard to tell the relationship of nouns to the verb in the clause in which they stand. So it is with this difficult verse. The KJV reads: "And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth." (The ASV differs from this only in substituting "although" for "Yet" and in capitalizing "Spirit," so as to indicate the Spirit of God.)

There are several problems with this rendition, the first of which is that it construes the first clause as a question, even though a negative question in biblical Hebrew usually is introduced by the interrogative particle
ha-;halo
, occurs very frequently in negative questions. The second problem is that this wording does not yield a very clear sense in line with the stream of the thought preceding. Thirdly, the reference to "one" is rather mystifying; who is this "one" who is spoken of in the first two sentences of this verse?

The best way to determine the answer to these questions is to study the preceding context with some care and thus arrive at the contribution that this particular verse makes to the completion of the thought.

Verse 10 presents God's indictment against those men of Jerusalem who have divorced their first wives, who were Jewish believers, in order to marry younger women of pagan background and conviction. This involvement in mixed marriages amounts to a grave violation of God's law as revealed through Moses (cf. Exod. 34:16; Deut. 7:3-4) and leads to surrendering to idol worship. This danger is spelled out very clearly in v.11: "Judah has profaned the holiness of the LORD ...and married the daughter of a strange god."

Verses 12-13 reveal this treachery as the reason for God's refusal to answer the prayers of Jewish worshipers who come to His altar for His blessing. Malachi says that the Lord does not accept their offerings because of the "treachery" that they have shown toward their older, legitimate wives. To each offender He declares: "Yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant"--a covenant made with her before God at the time of their marriage (v.14). From this background we come to v.15, which goes as follows (in the Hebrew word order):

"And/ But/ Yet/ not one has done/ made [
welo' èhad àsah
] and/ but/ while/ a remnant of the Spirit/ spirit to him/ Him [
use'ar ruah lo
]; and what/ why/ the one seeking for a posterity God/ of God? [
umah ha'ehad mebaqqes zerà 'elohim
]. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and against the wife of thy youth let no one deal treacherously [
ube'eset
neùreyka 'al-yibgod
]."

308

The KJV takes Yahweh as the subject of "made" (
àsah
) and assumes that it is the original wedding pair that is intended (following the clue of Gen. 2:24: "And they two shall be one flesh [
basar 'eha-d
]"). This is certainly a possible rendering, though it does require making the clause interrogative ("Did He not make one?"), even though the interrogative
ha
-is almost mandatory before the negative
lo'
, according to normal biblical usage. A much more straightforward interpretation would be "But no one has done [so]"

(i.e., has dealt treacherously with the wife of his youth, his first, Yahweh-worshiping wife, as implied from the previous verse). RSV makes
'ehad
the subject but understands it to refer to the one true God; but then it resorts to free paraphrase in the remainder of the sentence and blurs out the second
ha'ehad
altogether, saying, "and sustained for us the spirit of life."

If, then, the first clause refers to the individual Jewish believer who has kept faith with his first wife, the second clause probably refers to him as well: "But no one has done so who [taking the waw connective
u
before
se'ar
as a circumstantial or virtual-relative clause] has a residue of the Spirit [`has' is regularly expressed by
lo
(`to him') in Hebrew]." This means that
ruah
refers not to the human spirit of the individual believer but to the Spirit of God who wrought faith within the heart of all true believers who stood in covenant relationship with God right from the beginning of mankind. The following clause then asks, "And what does the one--the covenant-keeping husband just referred to-

-seek for? An offspring of God!" That is, the God-fearing father, faithful to his covenant with his Jewish wife and with the God whom they both love and serve, seeks to bring his children up as true believers, who will likewise be faithful to the covenant of grace. For these reasons, therefore, the men of Jerusalem are strongly urged to take heed to themselves and to the Holy Spirit who has made them children of God under the covenant and resist any temptation to deal treacherously with their first wife by marrying some other woman--who, while prettier and younger, does not love the Lord, and who will very likely produce children who will themselves reject the one true God in favor of the false gods of their mother.

The best rendition of this verse, then, would seem to be as follows: "But no one has done so who has a residue of the Spirit. And what does that one seek for? A godly offspring! Therefore take heed to your spirit [as a true believer under the covenant] and let none of you deal faithlessly with the wife of his youth [i.e., the wife he married when he was young]." This interpretation fits so smoothly into the flow of the thought in this paragraph that is seems almost certain to be the intention of the prophet himself. If so, the NASB is to be preferred over the NIV in the treatment of this verse. (NASB: "But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly offspring?" NIV: "Has not the LORD made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring.") 309