The Trope of "Exile" and the Displacement of Old Testament Theology

Carolyn J. Sharp
Yale Divinity School, New Haven CT 06511

That Israel's experience of exile in 587 B.C.E. was profoundly formative for the shaping of traditions and texts in Scripture has long been recognized. What might it mean to construct a hermeneutically sophisticated theology that is attentive to the powerful trope of "exile" in the Old Testament, probing diverse biblical rhetorics for their constatais of communal identity, insider and outsider status, dislocation, and the presence and absence of God? For such a theology, it would not suffice simply to say the exile was a military trauma inflicted upon the people of Judah by the Babylonians that generated a number of responses in ancient Israelite literature. Nor should it be adequate to appropriate "exile" indiscriminately as a scriptural metaphor for any and all kinds of present-day displacement without considering carefully the cultural and theological points of disjuncture that might be being masked by such an interpretive move. A sophisticated understanding of "exile" as tropeas a culturally freighted sign rich in meanings, highly dependent on literary contexts and the constructions of readerswould need to take account of the hermeneutical complexities involved in theological claims of what "home" can mean and what dislocation from "home" into "exile" can mean, both in the relevant biblical texts and in their subsequent interpretation. The task of biblical theology is complex. This is clear when one consults recent tomes on the subject by Walter Brueggemann, Bernhard Anderson, and Erhard Gerstenberger, among others.1 Anderson confidently subsumes Israel's multiform theological beliefs and practices under the traditional governing motif of covenant, broadly sketched in what he presents as Noahide, Mosaic, and Davidic variations on a single theme. His approach provides a time-honored view of Scripture that is beautifully accessible to the beginning student, to be sure, but overwhelmingly homogenizing in tone. By contrast, Gerstenberger underlines the diversity of theologies animating family, clan, tribal, and monarchic social organizations in ancient Israel, arguing that these theologies were incompatible with each other in ancient times and cannot easily address contemporary worldviews that privilege the individual believer and the global community.2 Brueggemann offers a brilliant process-oriented

Salter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); Bernhard W. Anderson, Contours of Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002). 2 It may be noteworthy that Gerstenberger's subtitle emphasizing pluralism and syncretism was dropped in the English translation of the original German edition, Theologien im Alten Testament: Pluralitt und Synkretismus alttestamentlichen Gottesglaubens

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hermeneutic that honors diverse biblical modes of witness without allowing them to fragment the biblical canon irreparably, pressing hard for an underlying unity found in scriptural dynamics of testimony and countertestimony. These recent Old Testament theologies could not be further apart from each other in their methods. They invite the interpreter into a Bible that in one moment seems majestically consistent through centuries of tradition but in the next moment appears wildly incoherent from verse to verse. Indeed, the discipline of biblical theology seems itself to be something of a nomad in the conversationor parallel soliloquiesgenerated by these theology books, wandering uneasily from traditional foundational claims to assertions of the lack of a conceptual center in the Old Testament. It must be acknowledged that the cultural landscape in which biblical hermeneutics wanders these days is a postmodern landscape. Intellectual discourse since the advent of deconstruction, poststructuralism, ideological criticism, and "situated" reading strategies has encouraged our suspicion of grandiose claims and hegemonic summaries, inspired our exploration of exotic nooks and crannies of biblical interpretation history,3 and thoroughly complicated all manner of discussions about meaning and how we know. Whether we regard the postmodern turn in hermeneutics with joy, trepidation, or annoyance, it is the case that these days no alert reader of Scripture can afford an attitude of unschooled navet regarding the complexity of the task of biblical theology. The natures of literary texts and the signifying processes of language itself have become thoroughly destabilized. The activity of reading can no longer be taken for granted as a more or less straightforward decoding of authorial intent using natural intelligence, a bit of historical information, and a dash of competence in genre analysis. The very notion of interpretation has become deeply complicated both in the wondrous richness of interpretive possibilities and the potential for fierce and abiding hermeneutical contradictions. A journey lies before those of us who cherish Scripture. Biblical theology is stumbling and groping for ways to honor the sacred Word of God in the shifting landscape of postmodern indeterminacy. Where should we start? The present essay will reflect on representative ways in which "exile" has been understood in biblical scholarship in the last thirty-five years as a means of thinking theologically about the Old Testament. Considering the contributions of Peter Ackroyd, Ralph Klein, Walter Brueggemann, and Daniel SmithChristopher, I will suggest ways in which traditional views of exile and newer understandings of diaspora may show a way forward for Old Testament theology, not only as regards this particular theme but as regards the discipline itself,

(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001), perhaps rendering his perspective less obviously radical for American religious tastes. 3 A fine example of postmodern analysis of the history of interpretation of Jonah is Yvonne Sherwood's A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival ofJonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 To appreciate exegetical benefits that may be gained by probing the complications of biblical epistemologies, see the brilliant work of Carol A. Newsom, The Book ofJob: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford, 2003).

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given its own dislocation from the familiar ideological frameworks by means of which it had been formed in the twentieth century.

Changing Understandings of Exile

We begin with consideration of an influential work on exile from an extraordinarily well-respected historian: Peter Ackroyd's Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C., published in 1968. The book had its genesis in the Hulsean Lectures at the University of Cambridge, which Ackroyd delivered in 1962, lectures whose purview is "some branch of Christian Theology." In his preface, Ackroyd feels obliged to go to some lengths to defend the idea that Old Testament studies are a matter for Christian theology, serving notice that the historical study that follows is theological in nature. Ackroyd is interested not only in the ways in which the historical events of military defeat and exile may have shaped the socio-political understandings of the biblical writers, but also in the ways in which the writers show themselves sensitive to the "purpose of God." Indeed, he sharply rejects the idea that historical events as such are the determining factor in motivating the writing of Scripture and therefore should be the governing factor in interpretation. The following quotation, concerning post-exilic prophecy but applicable mutatis mutandis to the period of the exile as well, is quite remarkable coming from a scholar who is a credentialed historian:
The impulse of political crisisas in the time of the accession of Darius Imay well stimulate the thinking of prophets such as Haggai and Zechariah. But this is far from suggesting that their prophecy is the outcome of those events, for it would be equally true to affirm that their reading of the events is itself determined by their apprehension of the nature and purpose of the God in whose name they spoke, and for that they are likely to have been much more dependent upon a continuing religious tradition than upon the impulses of a moment.5

That Ackroyd can reduce the forces of historythe political traumas of highly turbulent times, the textures of human life in Palestine dramatically formed and malformed by massive military prdations, extreme destabilization of security, and social upheavalas "the impulses of a moment" speaks volumes about his understanding of the exile. For Ackroyd, the exile is the historically real but theologically almost coincidental setting for the revelatory proclamations of those biblical writers who were attuned to God's timeless purposes. Theology comes first: history is understood and represented in the Bible, for Ackroyd, as the contextual accidents through which God makes the divine Will known. Ackroyd says that the exile "was to be understood as providing a means by which the nature of God should be revealed, a process by which both the people on whom it was exercised and also the nations as witnesses of the action should come to the

5 Peter R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), 13.

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acknowledgment of who he is."6 The idea of historical events as reflective of social and political identity is almost wholly subsumed under the category of theology: theological thinking may be influenced by events of the exile, may be catalyzed and shaped by those events, but ultimately, theological truths stand apart from the contextual particulars. The biblical writers may have been people of their times, but what matters is that they "had the depth of insight into the nature and purpose of God to enable them to see both the meaning of what they experienced and the outlines of the unfolding purpose of God."7 Ackroyd works competently with the complex histories of composition of biblical books, engaging in thoughtful dialogue with historical-critical scholars regarding dates and material evidence for historical events. He probes major themes and issues of language in Scripture, offering careful arguments for historical cause and literary effect. His traditional (pre-deconstruction) view is that the theology of the biblical writers represents a simple "combining of the appreciation of real conditions with an understanding of the meaning which lies within them."8 Throughout his book, Ackroyd does acknowledge the rich polyphony of perspectives represented in the biblical writings, finally suggesting that the unity of the Old Testament can be found only in the "purposes of God."9 He does not frame the motivations of the biblical writers as determinative, choosing instead to subordinate the realia of lived political and social life to the eternal will of the Divine as it was perceived by the biblical writers. A thinker of his times, Ackroyd seems to accept without question that the prophets and other exilic writers were pointing in a reliable and transparent way to the purposes of Godin other words, not only that it may have been the biblical writers' intention to do so, but that they succeeded. Ackroyd's work is a fine example of the "God who acts in history" model coupled with an earnest representationalism about the ways in which literary texts signify. Ackroyd's Exile and Restoration is a towering example of thoughtful historical-critical scholarship, providing numerous cogent readings and commendably urging caution about drawing unsubstantiated scholarly conclusions. But Ackroyd's book also serves as a classic example of the submerged agenda of writers who locate part or all of the process of Scripture writing in the eternal timelessness of abstract theology. Students of the Bible are much in Ackroyd's debt. But with the advance of ideological criticism in historiography and narratology providing increasingly refined methods for discerning the subtle motivations of ancient authors and editors, the interpretive landscape has by now shifted far too much for us to rely on his uncomplicated hermeneutic of historical biblical writing as representing transparent access to the purposes of God. Also theological in focus but quite different in approach is Ralph Klein's Israel in Exile: A Theological Interpretation, published in 1979. This intelligent work stands as a model of pastoral analogical thinking for those who would look to Scripture to find uncomplicated parallels to the contemporary life
6

Ackroyd, Exile, 234. Ackroyd, Exile, 256. 8 Ackroyd, Exile, 137. 9 Ackroyd, Exile, 256.
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of faith. Klein argues that the pressing theological questions troubling the biblical writers are questions that remain urgent for those who would understand God's ways in the contemporary world:
[T]he questions posed by the exilic age . . . were so acute and so modernquestions of identity and the grounds for hope, questions about who or what is the cause of Israel's malaise, questions about the continuing validity of symbols and symbol systems . . . questions for those who are rootless or whose future seems fruitless and fraught with conflict. Israel's exilic theologians . . . spoke to the types of questions that challenge academic theologians, the clergy, and the nonprofessional faithful also today.10

Klein ably explores a variety of biblical voices that address themselves to the trauma of exile. We find in his work accessible descriptions of themes of judgment, suffering, theodicy, sin, covenant, and biblical anthropology. With a light hand and eminently readable style, Klein brings source and redaction criticism into the discussion where they can help direct our attentiveness to important features of the text. Particularly important, Klein underlines for his readers a salient feature of exile: the experience of the silence of God. He writes:
Israel's experience of and reaction to exile greatly illuminate our own situation in faith and culture. For us too the old answers no longer hold. . . . Frantic attempts to prove God's existence through miracles or to ground faith in a precriticai view of Scripture indicate just how pervasive the silence of God has become. No one escapes this exile.11

Klein urges the reader to understand the signs of contemporary times as pointing to God's judgment on our idolatry and exhorts us to hear the words of exilic biblical writers anew today. We are to pray for the prosperity of contemporary culture, knowing that "here and now is the arena of our vocation"; we are to remember our identity with a sense of hope rather than triumphalism; we are to be prepared to suffer as we obey our God; and we are to speak our faith boldly into the dark corners of exilic experience.12 The appeal of the broadly confident analogizing modeled by Klein is obvious. Indeed, it has long been standard fare in church Bible studies. But anachronism and cross-cultural misunderstanding threaten the viability of the analogical endeavor more profoundly than many Bible study leaders seem to realize. The ease of analogy has become far more suspect in light of latemodern and postmodern challenges to the dominance of Western cultural assumptions, androcentric social norms, and industrial and postindustrial constructions of identity based unthinkingly and completely on competition for

Ralph W. Klein, Israel in Exile: A Theological Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 7. 1 ^lein, Israel in Exile, 149. 12 Klein, Israel in Exile, 150-53.

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economic power. One may question under what interpretive conditions it would be possible to appropriate for ourselves ancient words spoken to preindustrial peoples from vastly different sociological backgrounds, a mix of cultural heritages, and diverse political circumstances without our own cultural narcissism fatally undermining the whole translational endeavor.14 The analogizing move can very quickly become self-referential to an absurd degree. The profound vulnerability of ancient peopleswhether seminomadic and at the mercy of the elements, enemies, and economic powerlessness in earliest times, or eking out short life spans in subsistence-level villages, or buffeted by the terrible randomness of protection and exploitation under the often brutal monarchical systemis in few ways comparable to the vastly wealthy postindustrial, highly technologically oriented lives of many Bible readers today. And of the many more Bible readers in the contemporary world who do live precarious lives vulnerable to disease, famine, poverty, warfare, and exploitation, one must ask whether the discipline of biblical theology has yet begun to welcome their voices and acknowledge their experiences of the presence and absence of God. Analogy can be fruitful, but it also can suppress difference, can falsify, can manipulate and silence those who are not like "us," however we define ourselves. In the work of Ackroyd and Klein, we have seen history and theology wed in a union that is decidedly nave as regards both the ideologies shaping historiography and the complicated nature of analogizing interpretive moves. Already during the time that Ackroyd and Klein were writing, radical shifts had been taking place in English departments, with scholars employing methods based on deconstruction and ideological critique. These changes gradually
Gerstenberger notes the difficulty of drawing analogies between biblical traditions and contemporary [Western] life: "Two fundamental difficulties emerge for us if we want to connect the Old Testament evidence with our present-day world. First, the atomization of society into independent individuals . . . cannot easily be brought into line with the patriarchal (!) family ideology of the biblical witnesses. And secondly, the current understanding of a revelation from outside the world which moves some biblical texts . . . does not correspond either with the old faith of the family or with our scientific skepticism" {Theologies, 77). Gerstenberger unfortunately does not take into account contemporary societies other than those built on the Western urbanized model: kinship-based tribal groups in nonindustrialized regions, for example, are not considered. Still, his general point holds. 14 The palpable strain involved in remaking biblical texts in our own image is nowhere more evident than in Brueggemann's attempt to suggest that the wrenching trauma and wholesale destruction wreaked on Israel by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. might be compared with a disappointing vacation trip taken by friends: "Friends of ours went to England to birdwatch. They went to the sanctuaries of East Anglia and Kent. There were no birds! Something about a drought, or was it greenhouse? Was it natural cause or human violation, or divine power? . . . The powers of chaos seem closer than they used to, than they used to be in Jerusalem" (Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993], 84-85). Brueggemann does a better job of limning parallels between biblical diaspora and contemporary life in "Preaching to Exiles," in Exilic Preaching: Testimony for Christian Exiles in an Increasingly Hostile Culture (ed. Erskine Clark; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1998), 9-28 (cf. Journal for Preachers 16 [1993]: 3-15). But his characteristic ebullient romanticization is still in force here. One might have a difficult time with his characterization of Israel's exilic literature as "a buoyant response to trouble" (12) when one reads the searing internecine polemics of Jer 44, for example.

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began to make themselves felt in the generally conservative field of biblical studies, which tends to join larger interdisciplinary discussions about fifteen years behind other academic departments. In biblical studies, the shift has been noticed most sharply in the rise of "minimalist" historians who claim that much in the Old Testament was the product of Persian- or Hellenistic-era imaginations rather than earlier tradition. Bitter debates have flared concerning minimalist theories that the exodus and the Davidic monarchy were greatly exaggerated in scope and importance by the biblical material. The exile, too, has come in for critique, if perhaps less famously. Ideological motivations for the return literature (notably Ezra-Nehemiah) have been explored in light of the hypothesis that the "myth of the empty land" more clearly served Persian-period political interests of a segment of the governing elite than it reflected actual historical circumstances in Judah after 587 B.C.E. Even the stature of the exilic period itself as historically formative for Israelite literature has been challenged. Baruch Halpern has commented acidly on scholars' obsession with the exile: "Were it not for the Exile, the Bible would be no more than a pamphlet!"15 Halpern's goal is to argue for the presence of bona fide earlier traditions in the Bible; but on the other end of the spectrum, skeptics find even the exile itself to be a fiction created in the service of later political rhetoric. For minimalists, textual variants and contradictions represented in biblical traditions, problems with the feasibility of numbers of deportees and returnees, and other historical-critical considerations call into question the historical reliability of biblical accounts of the exile. Ideological critics urge the competent reader to attend to the political question of who might have had the most to gain in heavily politicized versions of the deportations and return(s). Robert Carroll's work on exile may be taken as representative here. Standing in a minority tradition of skepticism that claims C. C. Torrey as its patriarch, Carroll sees the "exile" as largely a figment of the biblical writers' political imagination, a narrative constructed to justify political and social bids for power that were pressed hundreds of years after the events the texts propose to narrate.16 These challenges to the erstwhile navet of historical criticism have prepared the ground for Walter Brueggemann's compelling rhetorically oriented approach. In prolific contributions to Church and academy, Brueggemann has articulated a deep suspicion of the historical-critical endeavor while remaining magnificently uninterested in close work with literary difficulties of the biblical text. But Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament (1997) constitutes an important advance in the discipline of biblical theology. His theological model
15

Baruch Halpern, "Sociological Comparitivism and the Theological Imagination," in "Sha 'arei Talmon ": Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon (eds. Michael Fishbane and Emanuel with Weston Fields; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 53-67. l6 See Robert P. Carroll, "Exile? What Exile? Deportation and the Discourses of Di aspora," in Leading Captivity Captive: The "Exile" as History and Ideology (ed. Lester L. Grabbe; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 62-79 and "Razed Temple and Shattered Vessels: Continuities and Discontinuities in the Discourses of Exile in the Hebrew Bible," JSOT75 (1997): 93-106.

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is not built on abstract propositions or reductive summaries; instead, he speaks of multiple core testimonies and countertestimonies. Israel's enduring claims about the character of God and God's relationship with Israel coexist in Scripture with rhetorics of skepticism, loss, and anger that continually challenge the confidence of the core testimony, pointing to God's hiddenness, the ambiguity of divine action, and the occasionally overt aggression of God toward the created order. Brueggemann's abiding interest in homiletics infuses his understanding of theology in the Old Testament, which for him must be based on speech as witness. Brueggemann sees Old Testament theology as the apprehension of a dialectical movement between biblical testimony and countertestimony, between iconic and aniconic ways of understanding ancient Israelite religion, between conservative cultic and social views that establish norms and prophetic views that seek to challenge or transform those norms. While his position is certainly not without its vulnerabilities,17 the sheer creativity of this hermeneutical move is hard to overstate. Brueggemann's focus on the rhetorics of intertextuality has engendered a theology of simple themes beautifully stated, broad claims passionately defended, and acute observations about what is at stake in liberal and postliberal hermeneutics. Brueggemann finds himself in sympathy with key developments in postmodern theories of reading, among them the emphasis on the agency and commitment of the reader. He underlines the polyphony of the biblical text, arguing that the intra-biblical phenomenon of rereading older traditions in light of new contexts is not an accident of historical composition but, rather, constitutes an essential quality of scriptural meaning-making to which the discerning reader must attend. Brueggemann urges the importance of engaging biblical texts precisely at those sites of conflict of traditional ("centrist") interpretations and more radical ("marginated") readings. As is characteristic of Brueggemann's work, however, his compelling rhetoric strangely fails to engage biblical texts closely as the invested ideological utterances of embodied real peoples in ancient times. Brueggemann sees the exile as a paradigmatic metaphor within Israel's testimony, as numerous references to it in his Theology indicate. But his view is, paradoxically enough, merely a variation on the standard, simplistic historical-critical view that has prevailed for many decades. This view can be summed up in two statements of his, that "the crisis of displacement looms as definitive in the self-understanding of Judaism that emerged in the exile and thereafter," and that "the exile is a moment of enormous literary generativity, when a variety of daring articulations of faith were undertaken."1 Brueggemann's chief contribution is in the area of
Many critiques of Brueggemann's work have been offered. References to two critics shall have to suffice here. For a polemical assessment of Brueggemann's dismissal of historical criticism and effusive style of writing, see James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 541-62. For an epistemologica! critique grounded in homiletical theology and contemporary rhetorical philosophy, see David J. Lose, Confessing Jesus Christ: Preaching in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 147-56. 18 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 75.

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theological hermeneutics. He suggests: that biblical writers' interest in the exile should require us to practice "double reading," acknowledging the layering of exilic and postexilic resonances on earlier biblical traditions;19 that creation themes may be being articulated in exilic and postexilic literature for reasons having to do with political and theological powerlessness rather than abstract musings on the Creator of the cosmos; and that promises of God's presence may arise out of the exilic situation of deprivation as a strategy for transformation ofthat isolation into viable new life.2 Hostile though he is to the historicalcritical endeavor, Brueggemann relies on it at many points in his thinking; yet he never adequately engages the political and ideological struggles engendered thereby in any detail. Also characteristically, he does not work closely with literary features of the biblical texts beyond mining them for the stirring exhortation or the evocative image. What we see driving Brueggemann's eloquent and dangerous work is a sweeping move toward a holistic, aestheticized notion of rhetoric. He manages barely to skim the surface of the particular brutalities and joys of ancient conflicts, failing to acknowledge through close textual work the embodied ideological conflicts that empowered and silenced ancient Israelites.22 Brueggemann's theological picture is a persuasive sermon uttered somehow apart from the brutal subjugation, degradation, despair, tenuous hope, and pervasive fear that marked ancient lives both at the hands of enemies and within the Israelite community itself. This finally does not yield an understanding of exile that honors the incarnational suffering and joys of real people. It yields, instead, breathtaking but manipulative essays that extol the beauty of biblical language while avoiding the difficult work of reading complicated, fragmented biblical discourses carefully. Brueggemann does not help us to see discursive disjunctures in narratives smoothed over by biblical writers who silence their opponents; he does not help us to parse out the specifics of semantic conflicts informing text-critical variants and theopolitical disagreements visible in heavily redacted texts; he does not help us to apprehend with exegetical precision the incisive ironies that subvert the ostensible claims of many biblical discourses. Brueggemann's distinction between core testimony and countertestimony, so promising as a hermeneutical model, in his hands becomes an overly simplistic polarization that often proves unusable for truly attentive exegesis.

Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 75. In his massive oeuvre, he has balked repeatedly and polemically at naming this as redaction criticism, preferring an aestheticized rhetorics that tries to speak of biblical voices dislocated from concrete social and political contexts. 20 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 149-50. 2 brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 171. 22 Poststructuralist criticism has shown us that the violence of texts is real, something that Brueggemann largely avoids acknowledging in the practice of his rhetorical exegesis. In the words of The Bible and Culture Collective, poststructuralist critique of ancient texts is concerned with "the question of who was invested with the power to speak and who was deprived of it, a question that is linked in turn to the issue of deviance.... The naming of the 'other' is what enables the manufacture of identity, and that naming is always violent" (The Postmodern Bible [New Haven; Yale University Press, 1995], 143).

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Fortunately, a recent development in biblical studies has the potential to correct the sort of persuasive, dangerous aestheticization of biblical language and ideologies that remains so popular with seminary students and so inimical to close engagement with the literary complexities of the Bible. Interest is growing in analysis of "exile" from the position of the outsider in diaspora studies, a relatively new branch of critical inquiry shaped by postcolonial studies. Here we can learn from Daniel Smith-Christopher, whose book, A Biblical Theology of Exile (2002), underlines the point that the exile was a real, traumatic event in the lives of ancient people. The vast biblical material generated in the exilic and postexilic periods must be read with a sophisticated anthropological awareness of subtle literary indicators involved in the production of texts under duress. Smith-Christopher rightly notes that the presence of literary elaborations of exile as trope in the Bible does not mean real historical trauma was not spurring the imaginations of the biblical writers.23 In the Old Testament, he sees a complex and conflicted congeries of representations of what cultural trauma can do to a people's sense of identity and understanding of their God. He argues for a multi-dimensional hermeneutics that moves significantly beyond objectivist historical criticism, simplistic theological analogizing, and irresponsible rhetorical aestheticism.24 He probes ideological motivations for priestly confidence in the temple in the face of its having already been destroyed ("as an exilic construct, it is clear that the temple is part of the architecture of exilic identity and is part of the postexilic theology of recovery and identity").25 He looks at the florid incoherence of EzekiePs prophecies as evidence of posttraumatic stress disorder resulting from the experience of forceful colonization. He argues cogently against our taking at face value the biblical suggestion that Persian overlords were relatively benign, suggesting that Ezra-Nehemiah and Daniel, among other texts, encode subtle strategies of resistance in the face of Persian dominance against which overt rebellion would have been suicidal. He examines the functions of shaming, for example in penitential prayers and historiographical revisionism within biblical texts, as one of many diverse reactions to the experience of wholesale military destruction and political disempowerment. He suggests that contemporary readers might better understand the xenophobia of Ezra anthropologically with reference to the need to guard community purity and defend insider boundaries in "the context of minority and refugee behaviors in circumstances of subordination."26

Smith-Christopher's transparently logical point is often lost in intemperate debates among staunch historical critics, minimalist skeptics, and literary critics: "that 'exile' becomes a central myth in biblical literature is clear, but what I believe must also be clear is that there is not necessarily afictional,contrived, or exaggerated event behind the use of such influential literary motifs" (A Biblical Theology of Exile [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002], 104). 24 Per Smith-Christopher, any competent "assessment of the impact of the Babylonian exile must make far more use of nonbiblical documents, archaeological reports, and a far more imaginative use of biblical texts read in light of what we know about refugee studies, disaster studies, postcolonialist reflections, and sociologies of trauma" (A Biblical Theology of Exile, 33). 25 Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile, 114-15. 26 Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology ofExile, 146.

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Smith-Christopher reminds us that theology must be practiced as ethical reflection on the lives of actual people who suffered and rejoiced, who aided and harmed each other, who adopted and resisted a wide variety of social norms in specific ways in different cultural contexts. He concludes that a diaspora ethics is necessary for theology to comprehend and explicate the many representations of exile in biblical texts. This ethics must be attentive to strategies of survival and to indicators of the suppression of voices of resistance. Sophisticated ideological criticism and sociologically refined analysis are required to interpret the ways in which literature represents dominant colonial cultures and the subcultures of subjugated peoples. The primary weakness in Smith-Christopher's valuable work is his tendency to romanticize the Israelite exiles as a conceptually unitary group trying to cope with disaster. In this he enjoys the company of many other scholars, among them James Brenneman, who acknowledges the potentially coercive nature of literary production in one breath but romanticizes the exile in the next:
The making of canons, biblical and otherwise, has been described as an act of power that can easily become coercive and oppressive. Any canon authorized as such by its community of interpreters has the potential to demand conformity and silence debate. Any canon that does not contain within it the seeds of its own deconstruction will become a tool of ideological and political brutality. . . . For Israel to survive, it relied on the only indestructible element left to it: a story. This story, a book of words reconstituted as canon by a disarmed, dispossessed community in exile, became the paradigm judging all forms of coercive power, including those described by its own content.27

Postmodernist insights into the situatedness and particularity of every reading should help us see that there is no single story of the exile. The "exiles" were no monolithic community in which every member was equally disarmed and dispossessed, all fighting in conceptually seamless solidarity against outside oppressors who were equally monolithically inhumane. Biblical intertextuality does not necessarily constitute a constraint on the abuse of power, although it may perhaps serve that function in particular cases.28 The ferocious internecine strife narrated in the prose of Jeremiah alone should be ample evidence of the conflicting views of insiders and outsiders within a number of kinds of diasporasexiles outside the land of Judah and within it, Israelite voices amplified or marginalized within the Babylonian diaspora community itself, and so on.29 Gerstenberger's insistence on the plurality and incompatibility of theologies within the Old Testament is salutary in this
James E. Brenneman, Canons in Conflict: Negotiating Texts in True and False Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139. 28 Brenneman reads Isa 2:2-4 against Joel 4:9-12's reworking ofthat tradition and claims that the literary and political dynamics of canon itself authorize, indeed require, the contemporary interpreter to take a stand with one prophet (in this case, the one for peace) against the other prophet (Canons in Conflict, 139). 29 Many scholars have explored the brutal partisan politics expressed in texts shaped by Jeremiah traditionists. See my Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose (New York: T&T Clark, 2003).

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regard, and competent sociological analysis will keep this complexity continually in mind.

The Displacement of Old Testament Theology

The significant changes over the past thirty-five years in the way in which "exile" has been understood theologically have helped us to track a paradigm shift in Old Testament studies. Of course, older methods of approaching the biblical text theologically are never supplanted by newer methods in a clean and unambiguous way, nor are older attitudes toward meaning-making ever entirely silenced. Rather, it happens that newer voices insistently speak new questions into the shifting and incomplete dialogues of biblical interpretation until the conversation becomes more polyphonic and can no longer exclude those questions easily. What happens in the best practices of biblical interpretationthose practices shaped by rigorous hermeneutical sophistication, deep insight into the contributions of past thinkers, and creative responsiveness to new contextual understandingsis that expression is given to a more richly multidimensional appreciation of what is at stake in the biblical texts themselves and their interpretation. The default view in critical biblical scholarship since the Enlightenment has been historically grounded, as seen in Peter Ackroyd's exemplary work. Exile was an event in the life of an ancient Israel writ fairly monolithically, dominant scriptural voices being allowed to speak for far larger and more diverse groups, quite often without comment by biblical scholars. From ideologically nave historicism and the assumption of literature's transparent representationalism, the interpretive move was often readily made to contemporary theological appropriation, as the work of Klein demonstrates. But deconstruction and ideological criticism have emphasized that writing, editing, preserving traditions, and reading are culturally freighted operations inevitably concerned with power. The important process-oriented rhetorical work of Brueggemann recognizes this in theory, even if often falling far short of actualization in his exegetical practice with texts. Diaspora studies have pressed further the point that literature of trauma is generated not in an aesthetic vacuum but in the real lives of real people. Ancient colonialist narratives and the narratives of subjugated peoples must be read with close attentiveness to subtle indicators of power and powerlessness. What, then, are the implications of our study of "exile" s trope for more sophisticated and responsible practices of Old Testament theology in the future? Our growing clarity about ideologies need not leave us thinking that intelligent reading is a practice somehow hostile to theological interests in the biblical text or to faithful appropriation by the interpreter. This is crucially important for the church to understand. Rather, the discernment of identity and power issues in texts and in the act of interpretation is absolutely essential to an honoring of sacred Scripture as an incarnational divine Word spoken into the passions and conflicts of human life. We have before us an unprecedented opportunity for the construction of a diaspora Old Testament theology that embraces both the provisionality of interpretation and the incomparable worth of particular, embodied life in the

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presence of God. Such a diaspora theology would be neither abstract nor naively historicist. It would be ignorant neither of the sophisticated rhetorical dynamics of complex texts nor of the real-life social and political struggles (to the extent that we can know them) that have shaped the witnesses of Scripture. Such a diaspora theology would invite into the scope of interpretation the teeming differences of creation and cultures in history, the scandalous particularity of conflicting ancient Israelite views of identity and power, and the uncontrollable risk of being open to othernessto the foreignness of other peoples ancient and contemporary, and to the otherness of Godin the act of reading Scripture.30 Difference would be explored as not only scandalous and alien but fruitful, as not only threatening but wildly generative. Such a way of reading would, in short, begin to practice a diasporic responsiveness in its provisional interpretations in multiple cultural contexts, seeing the countless wounds and joys and misunderstandings and life-giving changes at stake each time we turn to the complicated stories of Scripture. Such reading might even be characterized as trinitarian in its practice of discerning the divine Word spoken into an infinitely differentiated creation by the Creator, spoken into scandalous incarnational presence by the Son, and spoken into the breathtaking risk of transformation by the Holy Spirit. I suggest that it is precisely in such diaspora reading practices that Christians can begin to claim our own fundamentally diasporic identities, grafted as we are into Israel through the grace of Jesus Christ. In this postmodern age, thinking theologically about the Old Testament should no longer be a process of identifying broad, hegemonic themes, however convenient that might be for introductory seminary lectures and hour-long parish Bible studies. What is lost in those harmonizing, simplifying moves nothing less than the character of Scripture itself as complex witnessis almost incalculable. Thinking theologically about the Old Testament should no longer be a process of declaring as normative the "sameness" of the ancient Israelites so that we can domesticate them by analogy to our own lives, or worse, use our own flawed monolithic construction as a foil for Christian proclamation. (How often have we heard sermons that speak of "Israel" with no qualifiers, treating unique and dynamic witnesses from diverse Semitic communities over centuries
30 Here I am troubled by the suggestion of Brueggemann that diaspora identity rightly requires staunch resistance to assimilation. He characterizes the intertextual character of the Old Testament as an insider-only conversation: "This community [ancient Israel] that attends so vigilantly to its characteristic phrasing knows that to host other rhetorics is, in the long run, to give up its identity and its odd way of being in the world . . . knows that when it yields its characteristic utterance and seeks a community outside its own idiom, it quickly ends up in oppression and at risk Thus the practice of intertextuality is in the end a political acta sustained public insistence about identity, freedom, power, and responsibility, which argues against and refuses alternative insistences about the shape of public reality" (Theology, 80). It is just this sort of reductionism in practice despite the theoretical fluidity of his hermeneutical model that worries me about Brueggemann's work. It is true that some voices of Scripture strongly affirm isolationism and protection of boundaries. But other biblical witnesses exhibit clear engagement with Egyptian, Canaanite, and Mesopotamian cultures with varying degrees of trepidation or appreciation, deep irony or overt enthusiasm. The phenomenon of intertextuality as such is far too multifarious in its goals and character to be constrained by Brueggemann's summary statement.

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of time as a single object to be manipulated by our discourse?) A diaspora theology will press us to scrutinize the relations of power that form and deform our imaginative writings and readings of "home," of journeys of displacement, and of journeys of return. In view of postmodernism's persistent challenges to the notions of master text, foundationalist claims, uncomplicated normative subjects, and innocent hermeneutics, we are left with the act of reading Scripture theologically as longing for Goda particular, embodied longing for God that bears witness to others who long for God.31 This longing for God is no abstract doctrine, no decontextualized view of history, no reductive summary of themes. It is, rather, an act of witness in community that is all the more courageous because it cannot issue in certainties: for we walk by faith and not by sight.

Performing Diaspora Hermeneutics

What might it look like to perform a sophisticated theological reading of Old Testament texts that acknowledges diaspora as texture, context, and ideological force in one's hermeneutics? Such a reading could build on Ackroyd's sensitivity to the biblical interest in the "purposes of God," while bringing ideological criticism to bear on the claims and counterclaims of texts. Such a reading might dare to draw theologically formed analogies to contemporary contexts as Klein has done, while with Brueggemann acknowledging the continual pressure of countertestimonies, reading inner-biblical dynamics of conflict and complications in the analogizing endeavor as themselves meaningful. Such a reading would require engagement with both the persuasive power of biblical rhetorics and the tangled particulars of this literature that presents huge technical difficulties for the act of reading. Rhetorical and technical skill would be brought into conversation with sociological analysis of the realities of the life of ancient Israel, as Smith-Christopher has urged. A diaspora theology might raise questions not unlike the following, which are offered simply as provisional illustrations of the hermeneutical task. 1. In Gen 15, Abram hears in the midst of the extravagant promises of God the notice that his offspring will be slaves for 400 years. What "home" is to be theirs, then? For so many generations living enslaved in a foreign land, the "return" to Canaan will amount to a new exile, for there will be nothing familiar in the land to which they will come. Genesis 15:13-16 writes alien status into the very origin of the identity of the people of Abraham. And appeal to the land will not solve the identity crisis, for this land is teeming with others: Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites (Gen 15:19-20). How might a diaspora theology respond to the detailed list of native peoples here, embedded and embodied as stubbornly in this text as they are in the promised land itself? This is not transparently conquest material, and we cannot assume that Deuteronomistic

Here I affirm what David Lose has articulated in slightly different terms as a rhetoric of confession that is both invitational and responsive (Confessing, 200-206).

31

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conquest ideology is at work here. The list includes standard references to peoples obliterated by the rhetoric of Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges, true. But it also includes the more mysterious Rephaim and, most troubling for simplistic colonialist theology, the Kenites: related to Moses himself through the righteous Jethro (Exod 18), valorized obliquely through the heroism of outsider Jael, the wife of a Kenite (Judg 4-5), and perhaps even connected to a paradigmatically upright Israelite ethnic group, the Rechabites (reading 1 Chron 2:55 through the lens of Jer 35). There is no unambiguous call for slaughter here. Instead, Gen 15 makes the remarkable claim that Abram's people will be in diaspora in a foreign land, and then they will come "home" as strangers into a foreign land inhabited by many others, some of whom prove later to be crucial allies of Israel. Such are the complications of the divine promise to Abram, and a competent diaspora theology will be deeply attentive to those complications. 2. Displacement of one group yields to displacement of another group; return of exiles yields to the return of new exiles that displace the older returnees. The struggle for identity as a faithful people is never solved by simplistic appeal to "home" or return, however one constructs those notions. Ezekiel 11 understands this. The presence of God is what defines Israel as people of faith, and the presence of God is thunderously, dangerously mobile. For Ezekiel, "home" is now hopelessly corrupt: the abominable practices of those in charge of the Jerusalem temple and local government have changed the core of "home" identity into a loathsome thing. For Ezekiel, origins have always been untrustworthy, even as far back as the exodus (Ezek 20): complacent traditions of abundant divine blessing are re-narrated by this diaspora prophet as hairsbreadth escapes from God's wrath. The only secure home, for Ezekiel, is in acknowledging that God is the LORD. Only that acknowledgement can construct an abiding homenamed "The LORD is There"and old notions of exile will finally be understood to be as meaningless as old notions of home in the presence of God. But this prophetic promise comes at a cost. How might a diaspora theology wrestle with the formidable challenge that Ezekiel presents to our own cherished narratives of "home," those stories of origin upon which we base our own identities as Christian believers and believing communities? 3. In Ruth, we see reversal upon reversal for a community identifying itself by means of separation from home and return to a home that in the meantime has itself become a kind of diaspora. Naomi speaks a bitter irony that slices, razor-sharp, through simpler biblical notions of return: "I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty" (Ruth 1:21). Her anger is palpable: exile and return are not supposed to work this way. Marvelously ironic purposes of God may be being served in the genealogy that results in King David. A shocking degree of foreignness lies at the very heart of the Israelite monarchy: the glorious David will trace his lineage back to this widowed Moabite woman who makes herself sexually available to an Israelite male at midnight in a notorious public place. The ghosts of Lot's daughters and Tamar watch intently as we negotiate the intertextual possibilities. A diaspora theology might grapple

Pace David M. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 163-66.

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with the implications of this scandalous story for our own ecclesial power structures and authoritative genealogies, first conceding the inadequacy of theological readings of Ruth that murmur blandly about God working through unexpected means. Matthew 1 invites us to recognize that much more is at stake here.

Epilogue: Letter to the Exiles

The enormous theological, sociological, political, rhetorical, and literary complexities of biblical texts that employ exile as trope have not yet been adequately accounted for in Old Testament theology. Do we need another theology of the Old Testament, given the theological tomes written in recent years by Leo Perdue, Brevard Childs, James Barr, and several others in addition to the volumes by Walter Brueggemann, Bernhard Anderson, and Erhard Gerstenberger discussed above?33 Yes. We urgently need a multivocal Old Testament theology written by a diverse team of contributors with full recognition of the power dynamics that play out in the writing, rewriting, reading, and rereading of scriptural tropes of identity, home, displacement, and diaspora.34 Such a diaspora theology should be a collaborative work that lifts up a variety of theological visions in a radically responsive weave of hermeneutics and contextual perspectives. Such a theology would name and honor hermeneutical and exegetical tensions, arguing passionately against itself within its own pages so as to destabilize its own unanticipated rigidities and inadvertent claims to normativity. Such a diaspora theology might employ not a single academic diction but a variety of forms: scholarly chapters to be sure, but also poetry, epistles to churches real or imagined, art, short stories, homiletical essays or sermons, perhaps liturgiesall responding to each other through the various stages of formation of the book. The theological volume I envision would, through its radically collaborative authorial working style, its multidimensional methodologies and dictions, and its highly contextual witnesses to the living Word, strive to create openness to dialogue within its own pages about Who God can be for all of us struggling to read Scripture faithfully in unfamiliar landscapes. Here, then, is an invitation to believers who have been shaped by commitments to diverse ethnic and cultural heritages, who have been formed by various issues of gender and class and race and sexual identity, who worship as the body of Christ in liturgical traditions of many different configurations and
Leo G. Perdue, The Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Barr, Concept. 34 Shorter studies of diaspora in biblical studies have helped prepare the way for the fuller Old Testament diaspora theology that I envision. See the important contributions of Fernando F. Segovia, including: "Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement," in Reading From This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (eds. FernandoSegovia and Mary A. Tolbert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 57-73 and "Interpreting Beyond Borders: Postcolonial Studies and Diasporic Studies in Biblical Criticism," in Interpreting Beyond Borders (ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 11-34.

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political structures. Might there be those among us who would dare to collaborate in the writing of an interdisciplinary diaspora theology? The witness of the Christian church to the power of God's Word in the Old Testament may depend in no small part on our creativity as biblical scholars, artists, liturgists, and preachers in precisely this kind of theological endeavor. The exiles are waiting.

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