Sweeney, M. A., Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah
Written 01 December 2009
Published By Minneapolis: Fortress 2008
The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah (meaning “destruction”), has raised questions of theodicy more acutely than any other human event. Or so we might think! Marvin Sweeney shows how Israel and Judaism knew several Shoahs: the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in the 6th century BCE, the proscription of Jewish practices by Antiochus Epiphanes in the 2nd century BCE, the destruction of the second temple in 66-70 CE, the quelling of the revolt of Bar Kochba in 132-135 CE. He guides the reader systematically through the Hebrew Bible, with a short survey of the Christian Gospels and Rabbinic Literature at the end, pointing to the ways in which the Scriptural texts addressed questions about God’s fidelity, absence, love and power in the light of experience of disaster. The book’s focus has its own integrity, and the author, with some cogency, challenges various contemporary, and often Christian, interpretations, eg that Ezra-Nehemiah was inimical to Gentiles and that Ruth was written as a corrective to such a view. However, as a prelude to his main concern, he offers very useful summaries of the key contentions and movements in the books. And he always has the Nazis’ “Final Solution” in his sights, suggesting that in the face of apparent divine absence, real or imagined, human beings need to rise to their full stature as co-partners with God and take responsibility for the future. One of the most challenging of Sweeney’s assertions is his view that the gospels align the development of Christianity with the victory of Roman oppression over Judea and Jerusalem: as had happened before in Ancient Israel, it was all too convenient to blame the victims for their victimisation. A shuddering conclusion indeed, to contemplate in Holy Week, but more to the point, in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust.
Reviewed By Richard Bryant
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