Repairing God's Reputation
The Hebrew Bible Portrays God Following Universal Honor and Shame Rules
In much of the ancient Near East, and in several cultures around the world today, a person’s social worth is not a function of their private feelings, of pride or embarrassment, but of their public, social position. Honor is the value a community grants and shame the loss of it, a social economy in which a person’s reputation, set and adjusted by the people around them rather than by the individual, decides how others treat them.1 The Hebrew Bible operates completely in this social environment, even to the point that it portrays God as subject to and following these culturally universal rules about honor and shame, often describing the divine will as motivated to protect his own honor just as anyone else would.
When these texts speak of God’s name, they rarely mean a label but a reputation, the sum of what other people think and say about him. In the world of the Hebrew Bible that reputation is bound up with the fortunes of his people, the way a patron’s honor depends on the people under his protection. A god who keeps his people safe and prosperous looks strong, while a god whose people are beaten and scattered looks weak. When Israel is conquered and marched into exile, the disaster falls on God as well, since the surrounding nations read the defeat as proof that he could not protect his own, and his good name suffers for it.2 In the prophets this damage becomes a problem God means to solve, and its repair the stated reason behind the rescue they announce.
I was concerned for my holy reputation, which the house of Israel profaned among the nations where they went. Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake that I am about to act, O house of Israel, but for the sake of my holy reputation, which you profaned among the nations where you went. I will magnify my great name that has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned among them. The nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I magnify myself among you in their sight.’ (Ezekiel 36:21-23)3
The text sets aside any thought that the coming rescue is for Israel’s benefit, the motivation instead being solely God’s desire to repair his damaged reputation. Honor of this kind lives only in public, so the repair, like the damage before it, is something God must carry out in full view of the nations. The rescue reads less as a private mercy than as something done to be seen, returning again and again to its stated aim, that the nations will know who he is. The prophet states all of this without apology or hesitation, untroubled that the engine of Israel’s salvation turns out to be God’s concern for his own name.4
You did not hear, you do not know, you were not told beforehand. For I know that you are very deceitful; you were labeled a rebel from birth. For the sake of my reputation I hold back my anger; for the sake of my prestige I restrain myself from destroying you. Look, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have purified you in the furnace of misery. For my sake alone I will act, for how can I allow my name to be defiled? I will not share my glory with anyone else! Listen to me, O Jacob, Israel, whom I summoned. I am the one; I am present at the very beginning and at the very end. (Isaiah 48:8-12)5
Isaiah presses the same point, where the concern for the name does not only move God to act but moves him to hold back, his anger checked because destroying the people outright would drag his own reputation down with them.6 The text adds a competitive edge that Ezekiel leaves implicit, with God refusing to let his glory pass to anyone else, as though his honor were a possession a rival might carry off. This reasoning is not confined to the current crisis of exile. The same motive is also retroactively applied to Israel’s earlier history, with Ezekiel 20 and Psalm 1067recounting even the exodus from Egypt as something God did for the sake of his reputation rather than because the people had earned it.8
Do not hold us accountable for the sins of earlier generations. Quickly send your compassion our way, for we are in serious trouble. Help us, O God, our deliverer! For the sake of your glorious reputation, rescue us. Forgive our sins for the sake of your reputation. Why should the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’ Before our very eyes may the shed blood of your servants be avenged among the nations. (Psalm 79:8-10)9
In the Psalms the same reasoning comes from the people rather than from God. Living inside the honor and shame economy themselves, the people are fearful for their own reputation before the watching nations and assume that God guards his in just the same way. They appeal to that assumption directly, pressing his worry over his own name as their reason for rescue, repeating the enemy’s mockery back to him in the question ‘Where is their God?’, and, in Psalm 74, asking him outright to rise up and defend his honor.10 The people show the very concern the prophets attribute to God, treating his stake in his reputation as no different from their own.
A God whose reputation can be damaged by what outsiders think, and who acts to repair it, is difficult to harmonize with a God uniquely transcendent, beyond the reach of anything outside himself.11 The Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel builds a notable reading of the prophets on this point, describing a God who “does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world,” one who is “moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly.”12 The usual way around this difficulty is to treat the language as a figure of speech, a human way of describing a God who does not really feel such things. That interpretive choice, however, comes with the cost of undermining the motive that the text centers and the redemptive narrative is left with no reason or motivation at all.
It was only when these texts and traditions were taken out of the ancient Near East and entered cultural environments with different cultural and theological perspectives that a God motivated to repair his damaged reputation became a theological problem.
Matthews, Victor H., and Don C. Benjamin, eds. Honor and Shame in the World of the Bible (p. 51) Society of Biblical Literature, 1994
Clark, Terry R. “I Will Be King Over You!” The Rhetoric of Divine Kingship in the Book of Ezekiel (p. 184) Gorgias Press, 2014
Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (p. 108) InterVarsity Press, 2006
Milgrom, Jacob Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul (p. 74) Eisenbrauns, 2008
Thigpen, J. Michael Divine Motive in the Hebrew Bible: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis (pp. 65-66) Gorgias Press, 2015
Sanders, Paul “Argumenta ad Deum in the Plague Prayers of Mursili II and in the Book of Psalms,” in Psalms and Prayers (p. 196) Brill, 2007
Wu, Daniel Y. Honor, Shame, and Guilt: Social-Scientific Approaches to the Book of Ezekiel (p. 116) Eisenbrauns, 2016
Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets (p. 288) Harper & Row, 1962