86. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 109. Describing the coming Messiah, Soloveitchik states that “everything good and fine and noble in man must be passed on to the Messiah. He will have the capacity for gevurah and hesed. He will be a hero with unlimited power and strength who will defend justice. He will also be a man of unlimited loving-kindness, humble and simple. All these capabilities, capacities, and talents will merge in beautiful harmony in the King Messiah. The Messiah will represent creation at its best” (Abraham’s Journey, 177).
87. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 22. The same insistence is at the root of de Lubac’s Catholicism. See my discussion of de Lubac and Gaudium et Spes in chapter 4 of my An Introduction to Vatican II.
88. Soloveitchik holds that after their sin, “Adam and Eve heard the footsteps of the Holy One walking out of the universe. God broke the intimate relationship that was supposed to be realized by Adam. The purpose of the covenant concluded with Abraham was to restore the intimacy that God wanted to prevail between Him and man. At Sinai, the covenant embraced not only one individual but the whole community. The ideal is to extend the covenant even further, to the rest of the world” (Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 164–65). For background to the marriage metaphor in Judaism, see Satlow, “Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism.” Satlow summarizes: “In the Hebrew Bible, the metaphor of God as the husband or lover of Israel or Zion occurs not infrequently. . . . [Yet] Jews in antiquity by and large ignored, or even subverted, the biblical metaphor that compares the relationship of God to Israel as a husband to wife” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 14). Satlow explains this shift in part by pointing out that the metaphor seemingly “gives God the right to take other nations as ‘co-wives’” and also that the metaphor “implies a degree of intimacy between God and Israel that is not always compatible with an asexual and transcendent understanding of God” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 17; cf. the cruder position of Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus). He adds that the shift may also be a response to Christianity’s emphasis on the marriage metaphor.
89. Küng, On Being a Christian, 442.
90. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.
91. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.
92. Levenson, The Love of God, 99. In particular, Levenson draws attention to Gerlinde Baumann’s work, which I also discuss at length. Levenson emphasizes that the men hearing Hosea’s prophecies would have identified not with God but with the wife, symbolic of the whole Israelite nation. He quotes Phyllis Bird, who writes, “It is easy for patriarchal society to see the guilt of the ‘fallen woman’: Hosea says, ‘You (male Israel) are that woman!’” (Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot,’” 89, quoted in The Love of God, 100). Levenson also quotes Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s remark, “Through this imagery, the people of Israel are enabled to feel God’s agony. . . . As a result, the image of God as betrayed husband strikes deep into the psyche of the people of Israel and enables them to feel the faithless nature of their actions” (Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 147, quoted in The Love of God, 101). In accord with my own emphasis in this book, Levenson adds: “The grand finale of Hosea 2 is God’s promise to re-betroth his wife whom he divorced, or seemed to divorce, and the prediction of the redeemed cosmos that marriage to her is to inaugurate. The passage thus adds a strong note of expectation, the expectation of nothing less than a transformed world when the Lord and Israel have resumed their intimacy” (The Love of God, 104). For the fundamental problem, however, see Collins, What Are Biblical Values?, 96: “Neither prophet [neither Hosea nor Ezekiel] is inciting violence against actual women. But the force of the metaphor depends on the credibility of the literal meaning. Readers are expected to agree that this is an appropriate way to deal with an adulterous woman, at least in principle. . . . These metaphorical passages are not representative of the view of women in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, and they were never meant to be prescriptive for the treatment of women. Nonetheless, they provide language that lends itself to supporting abusive views of women.”
93. Frishman, “Why Would a Man Want to Be Anyone’s Wife?,” 44. Bromiley offers some cautions in this regard: not only is it true that “the prophetic understanding of God as the husband of Israel obviously does not conform to the actual situation in normal human marriages,” but also “[s]ome prophets do not use the comparison with marriage at all. Even in those who do, it occupies only a relatively small amount of space. Hosea, for whom it has a shattering significance, still uses his lively poetic imagination to describe the people not only as an unfaithful wife but also as silly doves (7:11), a stubborn heifer (4:16), and even a half-baked cake (7:8). For Hosea, Israel is also a luxuriant vine (10:1) and a refractory child (11:1). Ezekiel can also give very realistic depictions of the actual sins and idolatries committed by the people (see 8:7). Jeremiah, too, uses the metaphor of disobedient children (3:14) and an implied comparison with scattered sheep (3:15) in the very same context in which he speaks of the unfaithful wife. God himself appears not only as the faithful husband of unfaithful Israel but also as the good shepherd (Jer. 23:3; Ezek. 34:11), the father (Isa. 64:8), the liberator (Isa. 40), and the mother (Isa. 66:13)” (Bromiley, God and Marriage, 33).
94. As will be clear, I read the biblical texts as a canonical unity formed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. By contrast, for a historicist view of the biblical texts, see for example Muir, “Accessing Divine Power and Status.” See also Troeltsch’s “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.” Soloveitchik aptly observes, “When we study the Bible, we must be concerned about two things. We must understand the semantics of the word, and we must understand the spiritual message of the Bible. There is an enormous literature of biblical criticism, and the problem with that literature is that it completely misses the spiritual message” (Abraham’s Journey, 17).
95. For critical discussion, see Shields, Circumscribing the Prostitute; Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors.
96. Peggy L. Day warns against “reconstructing alleged social reality” on the basis of such biblical texts, and specifically she shows that it is a mistake to conclude from texts such as Hosea 2:4–5 that “prostitutes and adulteresses in ancient Israel were stripped naked as a punishment for engaging in these activities” (Day, “Metaphor and Social Reality,” 63). See also Day, “Adulterous Jerusalem’s Imagined Demise.”
97. For a sharp critique of Hosea, see Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 206–68. In an effort to redeem the prophetic text, Moughtin-Mumby states that “we could argue that it is Israel who has taken the initiative to break the relationship with YHWH, leaving him to plead for her return, rather than YHWH who is banishing his passive wife. On this reading, the relationship between YHWH and Israel remains a deeply unhealthy and damaging one, and Israel is left playing the far from ideal role of ‘prostitute’, underscoring just how problematic is this troubling text even for resistant readers” (Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 266). Sadly, the practice of physical abuse of wives by husbands is explicitly permitted (though also limited) by the Qur’ān: see al-Kawthari, Al-Arba‘īn, 97–98.
98. White, The Light of Christ, 273. See also Kerr, Immortal Longings, although White and Kerr differ regarding