God Is Perfect or Angry. Choose One.

Most Bible commentators choose perfect. I think they misread the Bible.

Photo by Letizia Bordoni on Unsplash

A speaker once started his talk as follows: “Before I begin, I’d like to say a few words.” So, a few words.

1. In this post, I again approach the Bible as literature. God is a character who appears in the story. The Biblical character of God may or may not accurately reflect your beliefs. That’s up to you to decide.

2. When writing about God, I use the word “God” as a pronoun. This allows me to avoid ascribing gender to God.

3. If you enjoy these posts, consider hitting the heart at the bottom of the post indicating that you like it. Doing so makes it easier for other people to find their way here.

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Of all the characters in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the one most prone to anger is God. There are 714 times that anger is expressed in the Hebrew Bible. 518 of those are expressions of God’s anger.¹

In my last post, I wrote:

I start with the view that when God gets angry, this tells us something about the character of God in the Bible. For starters, it tells us what God cares about. And as we’ll see, it also tells us that for God, learning how to handle anger and disappointment is an area for growth.

So, what does God care about?

In the first Biblical story after Eden, Cain kills his brother Abel. In a beautiful expression of both anger and care, God says to Cain “What have you done! The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!” (Genesis 4:10)

In the Hebrew text, this language is even stronger as the words for “blood” and “cries out” are both in the plural. It’s as if every drop of blood has a voice, and the cry of each drop is heard by God.

Sit with that image for a moment.

God cares that Cain behaved immorally (What have you done!). And God cares that Abel is dead (The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!).

God’s response to the murder is to turn Cain from a settled farmer into a wanderer. Cain is afraid people will want to kill him butGod protects him. People can argue over whether God treated Cain correctly, but the response appears measured rather than purely vindictive.

God has regrets

The next time God expresses displeasure with human behavior the response is far from measured. God sees that human beings are filled with negative thoughts and plans. God “…was sorry God had made humans on earth and God’s heart was sad.” (Genesis 6:5-6)

God regrets having created humans. God’s response is to kill virtually every living thing on earth. God brings a flood as a way of getting a fresh start.

In this story, God’s anger is out of control.

After the flood, God’s expectations adjust to meet reality. God says that “…the imaginations of humans’ hearts are evil from their youth²; I will never again strike out at every living thing as I have done.” (Genesis 8:21)

The first part of the statement, “the imaginations of humans’ hearts are evil from their youth” is a reality to which God needs to adjust. After the flood, humans haven’t changed. The second part of the statement, “I will never again strike out at every living thing as I have done” shows that to co-exist with human beings, God will change.

Because God wants to have a relationship with people, God adjusts divine expectations. But God wants something in return. God places rules on how animals can be treated and instructs that murder is a capital offense.³ The relationship is a two-way street. God will change, but God wants people to behave with some measure of restraint and compassion as well, or at least to try.

I’m against capital punishment. But I can still see these instructions as an effort by the God character to figure out how to live with humans.

I also see these instructions as God taking a second look at the fact that God just killed virtually every living thing on earth. Before the flood, God regretted having created humans. After the flood, it seems that God may regret having destroyed them. “I will never again strike out at every living thing as I have done.”

Humans…can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

God doesn’t promise to never get angry. God promises to moderate God’s responses.

For God, living with human beings is challenging. And God doesn’t always handle it well. Luckily, God gets assistance from an unlikely source. Human beings.

God gets help

Several Biblical passages could be cited to illustrate how humans help God moderate God’s anger. My personal favorite occurs in chapter 32 of the book of Exodus.

Shortly after God gives the people the Ten Commandments, the people break them. They worship a golden calf. God gets enraged. God suggests that Moses begin again with a different group of people. God says to Moses:

I have seen this people, and they are stubborn. Now let me be, and my anger will burn against them and devour them, and I’ll make of you a great nation. (Ex. 32:9-10)

Moses responds:

Why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought up out of Egypt?... Turn from your anger and give up this evil against your people! (Ex. 32:11-12)

God listens to Moses and gives up on the planned punishment (Ex. 32:14).

In this exchange, I am struck by God saying to Moses “Now let me be.” It reminds me of a young boy saying to a friend “Let me at him!” Ironically those words are actually uttered to encourage your friend to restrain you. It’s somehow more satisfying to imagine that someone else is doing the restraining rather than taking personal responsibility for standing down.

Here's a GIF from the Lion King that brings out the humor of this trope.

I don’t know if the Biblical authors intended this passage to be humorous. I suspect they didn’t. But that doesn’t stop me from seeing the humor in it.

Unlike Pumba holding back Timon, Moses couldn’t physically hold God back. God takes advantage of Moses’s presence to help enforce the restraint that God already desires. Moses’s presence helps God manage God’s anger.

What does God care about?

The stories of Cain and Abel and the flood show us that God cares how human beings treat one another. God cares about humans’ welfare and their moral behavior. Those stories also show us that although God is capable of exercising restraint (Cain’s punishment is reasonable) God is also capable of overreacting (the flood).

The story of Moses moderating God’s anger reveals more aspects of God’s character. In the story, God is angry because the people worship a golden calf. This act causes God to contemplate killing the entire people.

Worshipping a golden calf can be criticized as ill-conceived. And a case can be made that it’s harmful to venerate objects that shouldn’t be venerated. But although worshipping a golden calf might be misguided, it’s not immoral. The intensity of God’s anger seems out of proportion to the crime.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum sums up the situation well:

…the [Bible] text is suffused with very standard payback thoughts about the status-injury that either the other gods or the unfaithful people inflict upon God, and the gruesome comeuppance they will soon get…There are however, times when God focuses more purely on the intrinsic wrongfulness of harmful acts…These offenses are taken to be wrongful in themselves and not only as offenses against the status of God. In such cases, God is angry not because of a status injury, but because what humans do and suffer is of deep and intrinsic concern to God.⁴

Worshipping the golden calf is an example of a status injury inflicted upon God. As I have written about previously, status injuries are rarely worth the anger they provoke. They may reveal bad behavior (e.g. people worshipping the golden calf) but ideally, a person should be able to easily let go of a status injury.

In this story, Moses helps God manage God’s anger. When venting to Moses, God refers to “this people.” In his response to God, Moses emphasizes that they are “your people.” Moses reminds God that God’s care for the people is more important to God than the status injury. God stands down.

The Bible stresses relationships rather than perfection

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are unusual, and possibly unique, in positing a God who is both exemplary and angry. As I wrote about in a previous post, Biblical commentators have typically managed this strange combination through interpretations that diminish or disappear God’s anger.

I am suggesting a different approach. I don’t think the Biblical authors thought a lot about whether God was perfect. That concern arose later. The Biblical authors were interested in depicting a God who had an intimate relationship with people.

In the Hebrew Bible, the relationship between God and the people is modeled on human relationships. Metaphors describing this relationship include God as a monarch, parent, lover, spouse, and friend. These human relationships include occasional status injuries. Monarchs and parents are sometimes disrespected. Lovers, spouses, and friends, occasionally offend or betray.

The status injury of the golden calf signifies to God that the people are willing to have their intimate relationship needs met by other deities. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes:

When someone you love harms you…there is really no place to go, except into your own heart—and what you find there is likely to be pretty unpleasant. So there is something lonely and isolating about these harms; they involve a profound helplessness. Once again, this helplessness can easily be deflected into anger, which gives the illusion of agency and control.⁵

As a reader, when God gets angry due to human suffering and immoral behavior, I experience God as more powerful and more capable. When God’s anger leads to disproportionate punishment, or when God experiences status injuries, I see God as less powerful and less effective. The quote from Martha Nussbaum above suggests that in the case of the golden calf, God’s anger is helplessness deflected into anger to give God the illusion of agency and control.

The God of the Hebrew Bible isn’t perfect. Like us, God gets angry and sometimes handles that anger poorly. Like us, God needs to learn how to relate to anger productively. Like us, God works on this challenge; because, like us, the God of the Hebrew Bible cares about people.

1. This count is from a lecture by the Bible scholar Dr. Amy Kalmanofsky.

2. Notice that it says, “evil from their youth,” not from their birth.

3. “Do not eat flesh with its life-blood still in it. For your own life-blood I will require a reckoning…Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” (Genesis 9:4-6)

4. Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness, Oxford University Press, 2016, P. 41

5. Nussbaum, pp. 94-95