Reading the Bible Year with Alex Carpenter - 2

Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua: Art and Communal Magic

Photo by Ryan Arnst on Unsplash

Keisha and Alex began reading through the Bible on January 1. Read their first Bible Year reflection on Genesis, Job, and Exodus and find the books they refer to on Bookshop. 

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K: *taps mic* Hey Alex! The world went even more upside down over the last few weeks—how’re you doing? Still reading? 

A: Oh, hi there, Keisha! I was just pondering the Pentateuch. We’re deep in it and I can’t say that I’m spiritually fed, but I guess I’m learning more about cleanliness codes. How’s it going for you?

K: I’ve started the second volume of Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible. The first volume covers Genesis to Deuteronomy. This volume, Prophets, opens with the book Joshua. What’s been different in the books you’ve read since last time? 

A: I’m jealous! I literally have the Alter three volume set sitting on my office desk. I keep dreaming of having the time to read them, but I keep telling myself, only after I finish my original idea of reading the KJV. 

I’m embarrassed to say this but I need something good for my soul so I will confess: I use the box set as a stand for my Zoom sessions. I really am not worthy of this whole project! 

K: *laughs* Zoom call staging is the bane of my life now. And I guess the books are thick enough if you stack them!

A: It’s a good thing we’re on opposite sides of the continent for when the lightning strikes me! 

Since Alter’s work is brilliant and lucid, you’re clearly learning more than me. Teach me your ways. 

K: You’re right that it’s beautiful work. And in terms of the material, you’re probably where I was last month in Exodus, with Egyptian army chariots chasing the Israelites and getting stuck in the Red Sea. I expected to get bogged down there too, especially by the time I got to Numbers and Leviticus and the lists of families, clans, tribe heads, and sanctuary roles. 

But, surprisingly, I didn’t. 

Instead I started noticing how carefully the authors wanted to document the design, construction, and workplan for the wilderness sanctuary. Each element is intentional, and every material a sign: “This is something special.”

In the part that describes the sanctuary layout, the narrator lays out the raw materials and personnel that each tribe donated to the build: the fabric, the metals, the wood, the priests. And as the translator, Alter repeats a few phrases like a refrain in that section. “Designer’s work,” “embroiderer’s work,” “weaver’s work.” Whatever else it is, that whole section is like a three-part litany to artists. 

It made me think of my childhood church when the community pooled money to change out the old red carpet in the worship space. At the same time they commissioned a fine artist to refresh the fabric coverings for the pulpit and lectern. So we ended up with some gorgeous pieces: embroidered lettering and braiding, crimson, purple, gold. Absolutely beautiful work, just like in the sanctuary Moses and Aaron oversaw.

That was the first time I’d watched art or creatives respected at church. We had a lovely Gothic-style building, trefoils carved into the pews, high arches, stained glass. But we’d also inherited all of that from another denomination—they were Anglicans, I think. Whatever beauty was in the structure was there before we were; the beauty was about their intentions and sensibilities, not ours. 

So I have to admit I felt a little longing while reading about the sanctuary tunics and diadems, rods and panels, cords and rings. Where do we put that much effort into craftsmanship in congregations now? How often do we recognize the Spirit in artists in our communities in the unambiguous way the Exodus community recognizes Bezalel, Oholiab and the “wise-hearted” souls who work with them?   

Joanna Darby, co-editor of Manifest: Our Call to Faithful Creativity, talks about realizing that she had a dual call to chaplaincy and fine art. But during her college years, she doubted that that second call to art was valid. Eventually she figured out how to reconcile, but not everyone does, and not everyone has a community around them to help them make sense of how, sometimes, dual calls are really just one vocation.

What’s it like for artists in the Adventist diaspora these days? How do you understand art and spirituality yourself? To put it even more directly, what do you think art’s for? 

A: Love your focus on the role of the arts in the cultic or ritual power of religion. It’s rough for artists in Adventism. We’re still fighting for the right to have rhythm in music and abstraction in the visual arts. I was just admiring the logo for Middle Church in NYC. I love how the panes of color partly lie outside the lines of the gothic window frame. What a great way of visually communicating its values of openness, boldness and embrace for all. 

Speaking of, when I read Exodus 20, the Sabbath commandment there seemed more about defining community: “We all do this” and that “we” includes visitors and animals.¹ There’s equity in there that needs more attention in Sabbath sermons! Every person and animal gets treated equally at least one day a week. With some homiletical artistry, we might form communities that can feed us all spiritually. 

K: Yes, I do think art can be a spiritual technology, if you choose to engage it that way. It can be something like meditation. Or teaching. Or worship. Or prayer. There’s something about the quality of attention you have to pay, inside and out, to make art that really moves you or other people and to build communities that hold all of you. 

Balaam’s story in Numbers plays with the themes of sight and attention. Balaam is a seer, a prophet, and he only shows up in Numbers because local leaders ask him to curse the Israelites on their way through the wilderness (Numbers 22-31). He isn’t an Israelite himself but his contemporaries don’t seem surprised that God knows and talks to him too.²

In the story, God stops Balaam from cursing the people, but a later tradition blames Balaam for tricking Israelites into disloyalty and idolatry. A punishing plague puts them back in line, and after a few more chapters, Balaam turns up in a list of people the Israelites kill in a revenge battle. It’s not a great character arc!

Anyway, Balaam stands out in these stories because he has foresight, first-class spiritual awareness, and at the same time he’s clueless about dynamics right in front of his face. 

This regionally renowned seer can have several matter-of-fact chit-chats with God, just as smoothly as Abraham and Jacob and Moses do in Genesis and Exodus. But he doesn’t notice his area leaders are setting him up, and he doesn’t realize his donkey has a really good reason for going off course. 

I figure the authors wanted us to find the story at least a little bit funny: so much for all that magic Balaam can do and all the spells he has at his disposal. He’s outwitted by an ass. *laughs*

A: Haha. By the way, “regionally renowned seer” is a beautiful term of phrase. If you ever preach a whole Balaam-based homily I’ll be in the pew shouting amens! Give me more, pastor! 

K: Well, thank you, Alex, because a thing I saw here is that a seer needs friends. Part of what’s happening in Numbers is that Balaam doesn’t have friends in the writer’s room or on the ground.

When priests discover the book of Deuteronomy during the reign of King Josiah (2 Kings 22), they’re in the midst of social and religious reform and setting up firm lines of separation between the Israelites and other nations.

They’re strongly resisting the idea that other people’s spiritual practices might also connect them with the Israelites’ God in ways the priestly writers might not approve. In Deuteronomy, foreign priests like Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law) are a little suspicious so don’t get named as they did back in Numbers. Foreign magicians or diviners like Balaam are very much out of bounds.

What role do you think communities should have for artists and how we learn to cultivate our “spiritual sight”? Nothing about these stories seems to recommend solo spiritual practice or communication. The priests had the Urim and Thummim, some sort of divination system they used together, and the people had other leaders like Moses and Joshua who talked with God in dramatic ways. We don’t have spiritual technology like that now—or do we?

A: It sounds like we both got a message from this series of texts about the individual and the communal. Over and over I found myself reflecting on all these laws and stories as reinforcing the identity of the group. Toward the end of the month’s reading I got to Numbers which starts, with yes, God telling Moses to count the Israelites. 

Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls… And they assembled all the congregation together on the first day of the second month, and they declared their pedigrees after their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, by their polls. As the Lord commanded Moses, so he numbered them in the wilderness of Sinai.

Beyond the problematic patriarchy and that this was for war, it seems like there’s a little lesson for me on the power of the community: something about being connected to the whole as being more than the sum of its parts. Maybe there is something spiritually profound in that.

To your great question about “solo spiritual practice” I wonder if the proliferation of simple online meeting technologies is a modern blessing. Yeah, work Zoom can be tedious, but I recently spent about six hours on a Sabbath in four different online meetings on topics like ecumenism and listening to dynamic, progressive, and witty female Adventist pastors in China and Kenya. I was blessed by connecting with these groups beyond the borders of space and time zones. 

I’ll always love connecting to something beyond me by standing alone in front of a Rothko. But reflecting on our reading thus far I’m also becoming open to the wholly Other-connecting spiritual power of Zoom.

Can’t wait for Joshua, Judges, and Ruth!

Keisha: Intense, and awesome. Thanks for this, Alex! Looking forward to checking in with you again next month.

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Alex and Keisha are trading monthly responses on their previous month’s reading in 2022. Follow along here at On Tomorrow’s Edge and join in broader conversation at Spectrum Magazine.

1. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg also reflects on the Sabbath command in a recent Substack, “Rest is a Justice Issue”: “Everybody in the household rests,” she writes. “Rest and be like God.”

2. Going back to Genesis, the Israelites and the Midianites and Moabites who hire Balaam are basically cousins via their common ancestor Abraham, but the history of humanity is that relation doesn’t seem to matter much during seasons of war and conquest.