Originally posted by MaustrauserThis is one reading of this passage. I tend to prefer another, however.
In short, it says: "You obey me or I kill you." An unsophisticated but effective method of control.
Throughout history, people of varying religions have tended to portray good events to themselves as God's beneficence, and bad events to "the other" as God's retribution to non-believers. This goes hand in hand with the idea that those who do the right thing will be rewarded and vice versa. This is a very human construct. There isn't a culture in the world that doesn't have some sort of moral code that says, "If you don't do what you're told, the bogeyman is going to get you."
Given that good deeds are Good and bad deeds are Bad, there has to be some method of encouraging the former over the latter. Let's face it, most bad deeds are more fun or more profitable in the corporeal world. Thus, we have God (or whatever other name religions and cultures give) offering rewards or punishments for good and bad deeds respectively.
Now, back to Elisha. Since the basic understanding is that God will reward or punish, people (that is ANY people) observing the world had a tendency to divide the world into two groups, "us" and "them." And so, when the Jewish people observed the tragedy of the mauling of kids, they struggled to understand why such a thing would occur (at once assuming that God had some hand in it--the ever present question "Why do bad things happen?"😉. Perhaps the kids did make fun of Elisha, or another group of kids did, or something like it. Bingo! The Jewish writers now had an acceptable answer to a difficult question. God punished the Bad!
The writers and readers of Hebrew Scripture were very familiar with this: God punishes bad behavior and rewards good behavior. It was a way that the Jews attributed meaning to otherwise meaningless or even downright confusing events. There are even petitions to God to punish the wicked--the Psalms are full of them!--which attest to even more ways the Jewish people were trying to attribute their sentiments with God's Being.
These sentiments are TOTALLY unreconcilable with the earliest Christian Scripture, where God is Love, God is all-forgiving, that all people the Kingdom of Heaven, and so forth. This is what Jesus taught and this is why he got in so much trouble. The Synoptic Gospels (with the exception of a passage here and there in Matthew and the occasional redactive comment) and the letters by really Paul (most scholars agree that not all those attributed to Paul are in fact by him) which comprise the earliest Christian writings attest to this. Gentile, Jew, servant, free, woman, man...everyone. Even the Samaritins! Yes, later Christian Scripture renewed (with a vengenace) the idea that "Well, Jesus meant just "us," the true believers." And enter in all of the the arguing and creating of us/them lines that Jesus evidently strove to remove and that Paul, previously a persecuter of Christians, was so compelled to acknowledge as Divine Truth.
This debate reached a head in the 2nd century with what is called the Marcionite heresy. Marcion, too, found the writings of the Hebrews totally out of sync with those of the Christians. As such, he said that there were two Gods, or one REAL God and one FALSE God (us/them). The Christians had the REAL one and the Jews the FALSE one. And so, armed with the first known canon of Christian Scripture, he proceeded to exterminate the Jews because of their iniquitous ways.
The Church struggled (and still struggles) with this seeming diachotomy. It, of course, assumes at once that anything attributed to God in the Bible is in fact an act of God. That is, it assumes that God really did send the bears, which I think is ludicrous. If you reread the Bible as a historical document that portrays the understanding of a people trying to understand God, it makes a lot more sense; if you realize that God did not send the bears to maul children, and that the Jews were just struggling to make sense of their world from their hermeneutic, it's much easier to pallate. In this case, the Jews, like every other religion and culture, imposed what they believed was right upon God's nature; it's impossible to avoid doing this. However, the purpose of theology is to try to figure out what God is like and mold our actions around that. That's what Jesus, Buddha, and several other important people since the beginning of time were doing--destroying the mold of what is comfortable and instead casting one of moral correctness.
I would close with a reference to a passage in Hebrew Scripture (read in the Christian Church about two weeks ago): Genesis 18:20-32. In it, God is going to destroy a city that deserves it (anthropomorphizing). Abraham, in a moment of mercy (moral correctness), says "But what if there are innocent people are there?" In short, Abraham and God bargain (anthropomorphizing) such that God will not destroy the city as long as 10 innocent people are there. The moral? Even when it appears that something (and by extension, someone) is all evil, remember that there could be goodness, even a small amount, and that is worth saving. (It is, afterall, one of the principals of the US Judiciary; it is better to let a guilty man go free than imprison an innocent one.) It was a moment where God did NOT behave as the Jews would expect--that is, punish the evil!--but instead (ironically through the intermediation of Abraham) was compelled to clemency. It is a lesson we would do well to apply to the people we meet and with whom we engage, rather than the obscure anthropomorphized passage which has little to do with God.
Nemesio