13. Antonia Noori Farzan, “When a Deep Red Town’s Only Grocery Store Closed, City Hall Opened Its Own Store. Just Don’t Call It ‘Socialism,’” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/22/baldwin-florida-food-desert-city-owned-grocery-store/, first published November 22, 2019, accessed November 25, 2019.
14. David A. Roozen, “American Congregations 2015: Surviving and Thriving,” Faith Communities Today & Hartford Institute for Religion Research (2015): 3.
15. Kim LaCapria, “Do 643,000 Bankruptcies Occur in the U.S. Every Year Due to Medical Bills?” Snopes, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/643000-bankruptcies-in-the-u-s-every-year-due-to-medical-bills/, first published April 22, 2016, updated January 15, 2018, accessed August 9, 2018.
16. Maurie Backman, “This Is the No. 1 Reason Americans File for Bankruptcy,” USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/05/05/this-is-the-no-1-reason-americans-file-for-bankruptcy/101148136/, May 5, 2017, accessed January 24, 2019.
17. “Bankruptcy Filings Decline Is Smallest in Years,” http://www.uscourts.gov/news/2017/10/18/bankruptcy-filings-decline-smallest-years, October 18, 2017, accessed August 9, 2018.
18. Mark Zdechlik, “Go Fund My Doctor Bills: Americans Ask for Help Paying for Healthcare,” MPR News, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/07/02/health-care-gofundme-crowdfunding-doctor-bills-minn, July 2, 2018, accessed August 16, 2018.
19. “Access to Health Care,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/access-to-health-care.htm, May 3, 2017, accessed August 15, 2018.
The Divine Economy in the Law and the Prophets
One of the more common questions I get asked when I meet someone for the first time is “When did you know you wanted to be a pastor?” I am sure people in other professions get asked the same thing. People appreciate being asked about their passions, and a job that a person enjoys can be one such passion. The most straightforward answer I can give is the story of my telling my aunt at a family get-together when I was nine or ten that I thought I wanted to be a biblical prophet when I grew up.
Seriously.
As I grew older and read my Bible more, I began to realize that being a biblical prophet had some serious drawbacks: the hair-shirt dress code, the locusts-and-honey diet, and the unfortunate tendency to be executed rather than simply fired from your employment when you upset others.
When I was ordained for ministry by my hometown region in the Disciples of Christ, that same aunt asked me if I remembered the conversation many years before. I had. She had as well. Being able to share in that memory, years and years later, is something I continue to cherish.
Through my religious studies—four years of college and six years of seminary—I learned that the prophetic spirit in the Hebrew Bible (or the Tanakh, in Hebrew) was not limited to the fifteen books named for the prophets. Concern for the economic as well as spiritual wellbeing of God’s children is paramount across the Tanakh.
All of the contributors to the Tanakh ought to be considered prophets. In ancient Israel, prophets functioned as divine spokespeople, intermediaries between God and the nation.1 But, in the post-Jeremiah exilic era of ancient Israel’s history, the prophetic tradition fell into disrepute, and was replaced by retinues of royal advisors.2 Postexilic prophets such as Malachi would likely have prophesied outside the king’s palace, in stark contrast to prophets like Jeremiah, who had substantial interaction with various court officials. But even when a prophet was attached to the royal court, such as Jeremiah, their concern for the working poor remained evident.
Two common denominators of the Tanakh passages chosen for this chapter are a focus on economic justice and fairness, and an uncommon rarity in much of Christian preaching and teaching. The passages gleaned using this criteria are not an exhaustive list. I hope you will take some of the tools and ideas here and apply them to other passages.
I should also add that I would love nothing more than for Christians to shed some of the overly simple lenses through which we often view the Hebrew Bible, particularly the “Jesus is all over the Tanakh” lens and the “Because of Jesus, we aren’t bound by the Tanakh” lens. This approach of (mis)using Jesus to diminish the Tanakh does a disservice to both Christianity, which still retains the Tanakh as a part of our sacred texts, and Judaism, which is fundamentally informed by the Tanakh, but interprets it differently than most Christians. Repairing Christianity’s exegetical relationship with the Hebrew Bible and its ecumenical relationship with Judaism are moral imperatives which undergird this chapter, and I would be remiss for not mentioning their importance. Judaism has a rich tradition of economic and social justice in its own right, and Christianity can learn from it.
Joseph Saves—and Subjugates—Egypt(Genesis 47:13–26)
The people said, “You’ve saved our lives. If you wish, we will be Pharaoh’s slaves.” (47:25)
The Joseph saga has been told and retold across entertainment, from a stage musical (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), an animated musical (Joseph: King of Dreams), and, naturally, a VeggieTales episode (“The Ballad of Little Joe”). All of these share some constants in the story: Joseph’s traumatic betrayal at the hands of his jealous brothers, his accurate interpretation of peoples’ dreams, his ascension to the position of viceroy over all of Egypt as it prepares for the seven-year famine, and his eventual reconciliation with his repentant family.
What is typically not included in these retellings, for rather obvious reasons, is Joseph’s management of the seven-year famine, detailed in Genesis 47:13–26. The famine-struck Egyptians grew increasingly desperate, and they began selling off their assets to Joseph in exchange for grain—first silver, then their livestock, and eventually themselves. The people came to Joseph and offered their land and themselves as sharecroppers, to keep from starving. Joseph agreed and provided seed for the people to work the land that now belonged to the crown, in exchange for a 20 percent cut of the grain. The people agreed to become Pharaoh’s slaves, and Joseph formalized their agreement into law.
You can see why that part never made it into the movies and musicals. It would not appeal to a modern audience to depict the story’s protagonist enslaving the nation he had been entrusted with, yet it is an accurate assessment of what happened. Even after seminary, I had not given serious consideration to this passage until it was brought up by a guest speaker at a Lenten lecture series I helped to organize some years ago. Joseph’s story is one that is often told through a particular lens, whether from the pulpit or on the stage.
If we see Joseph’s saga as only a story of familial and individual redemption, and disregard the economic and human implications of a people being willing to accept enslavement to survive a seven-year famine, then we do not fully grasp the story.
To see Joseph as a benevolent dictator after his rise to second-in-command in Egypt, fits with the plucky