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THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD A Dissertertation presented to the Faculty of Claremont School of Theology In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Susan Clare Slusher Bell I|l4;ay 2007 @ zoot Susan Clare Slusher Bell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 88t This dissertation completed by Sus¡.N Cr-¡.Rn Sr.usrruR BELL has been presented to and accepted by the faculty of Claremont School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the DOCTOn OF PHILOSOPHY Faculty Committee Gregory J. Riley, Chairperson Kristin De Troyer John Quiring Dean of the Faculty Susan L. Nelson May 2007 Table of Contents Page Introduction ... .1 Chapter 1. Culturcs of Influence to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. .4 Canaan .4 Egypt... 9 Greece. ... t3 2. Hebrew Bible.... ,,,..,,..28 The Relationship betweenthe HumanKing and Yahweh.. .28 Yahweh' s Development and Adaptation ,30 The Throne of Yahweh ,t2 The RightHand in HebrewBible..... 82 3. New Test¿ment... ... .. 98 Judgment. .100 lntercession. .........11,2 Power 11,3 The Nature of God in the New Testament... 144 . 4. Christian Creeds 151 Conclusion 174 Addendum A, Glory. .. .182 Addendum B, The Role of Mary .......184 Bibliography... ... 185 ll lntroduction All images are insufftcient to speak of the great God of Christianity. No language can describe God, yet we must speak. We must preach and write and sing of God who has so captivated our minds and hearts. To best speak about God, we sort through our images and draw upon our pitiful language to flrnd metaphors for God, always knowing that each is incomplete. The image, metaphor, symbol, or abstraction which speaks of God to one generation will not describe God adequately to another generation, We run into trouble with biblical images, because these are ones that we can not discard. They arise in our texts, or become lyrics in our hymns. They are best explained not discarded. This dissertation constructs a Biblical, historical, and linguistic explanation of the metaphor "right hand of God." The picture of God seated on a throne arises as a legitimate biblical image. Yet, we can safely say that the enthroned divine is an image that does not speak to our time. In the middle of the last century, Henry Emerson Fosdick included in his sermon these words, "This, I ask of you, to start with, th¿t when I use the word'God' you will not have in your imagination some human picture of him, like a king seated on a throne. Let us begin with something more realistic and indubitable than tltat!-r Why is God on a throne an unacceptable representation of the divine? First the anthropomorphic image is too limiting. God's abilities are much broaderthan human beings' physical abilities. The creator of the universe made the spectrum of light much broader than a human can see or detect, sound in decibels much higher and lower than a human can hear, and the remaining human senses are able to perceive only limited amounts of what is present in t Hu.ry Emerson Fosdicþ "Why is God Silenf While Evil Rages?" inA Great Time to Be Alive; Sermons on Christianity in llartíme (New York and London: tlarper & Brothers 1944>, 164. I the world and universe. Second, God seated on a heavenly throne gives us an image of a God far removed from our world. This is an image of an immobile God, whose distance and inactivity we would flrnd far too transcendent to aid our world of turmoil, and tragedy. Third, a king's throne is an archaic symbol of power. Any single authority of our world, whether secular or ecclesiastic, shares power with parliaments, assemblies and congresses. Even though thrones still exis! they are rarely secn as positive symbols and are usually muted in some fashion. God enthroned is inadequate for our modern era that knows scientiflrc facts about the universe that the ancients could not have comprehended and is inadequate in a time that denounces emperors and kings with their thrones as tyrannical. If the enthroned God is a metaphorical image that is not useful today, it must have been very powerful in early Christianity. Many pieces of New Testament Scripture placed the resunected Jesus Christ in a seated position at the right hand of God. Though the throne is not always mentioned, it is often implied by the seated position. Why was the image of Christ seated atthe right hand of God such an important symbol to early Christians? Why do we call this Session of Christ his exaltation and gloriflrcation? To approach these questions and others, we will look at what "the right- meant in ancient and pre-biblical literature, in the sacred texts of Qumran, in the Hebrew Bible, and in the New Testament. We will look at figures, often "the Son of Man" seated at God's right. We will look through the lens of Psalm 110, which is the Hebrew Bible text behind the New Testament passages of Christ seated at God's right and the making of his enemies his footstool. The New Testament writings drew most heavily on the first and fourth verses of Psalm 110 2 *The 1 Lord says to my [ord: 'Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."' o'The 4 Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, 'You are a priest for ever after the order ofMelchizedek"' 3 Chapter 1 Cultures of Influence on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament In the Middle East gods of one nation were consistently adopted and worshiped in other lands. These foreign gods were introduced by soldiers, governors, traders, foreign spouses? and groups that migrated into another nation's territory looking for food or work. People all over the Mediteûanean, Egypt, and TVestern Asia began the worship of new foreign gods. Often they equated a foreign god with one from their own nation, when the two gods had similar functions.2 In other circumstances, one culture had a god with characteristics and a theology superior or more appealing than the god of an indigenous people. The people would take the characteristics of the foreign god and give them to their national god, excising the foreign god from their pantheon. These systems expanded the number of gods in a pantheon by adding foreign gods, identifîed the god of one culture with the god of another culture which both had the same function, or one culture merely adapted the ch¿racteristics of a foreign god to their own god. Canaanite Literature and Iconography Ba¿l is the most prominent god ofthe Ugaritic narrative poems. The ancient city ofUgarit @as Shamra) was located a half mile inland from the Syrian coast and opposite the eastern tip of Cyprus. Ugarit flourished in the Late Bronze age and had its own language, which has been classified as Northwest Semitic. The Ugaritic language was similar to the Syria-Palestine languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenicia and linked to these other Northwest Semitic languages by an ancient hypothetical precursor language. 2 James Pritcha¡d, Ancient Near fu,stern Texts: Reløing to the Otd Testament(Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1955), 249. The Egyptian god Seth appeared to be one of the most conflated gods. An Egyptian-Hittite treaty in the time of R¿mses II equated Søh to the storm god of Hatti. From the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty Baal-Shamaim corresponded to Seth. 4 Ugaritic texts were written in thify cuneiform signs, each representing a consonant (except for three signs which represented the same consonant with three distinct vowels). The interchange between the two religions may have been probably oral, but the written texts of Ugarit give us the ability to compare them with the written texts of Israel. The Ugaritic texts were precursors to the Hebrew Bible. Characteristics of poetry found in the Canaanite Mythology found at Ras Shamra can be found in Hebrew poetry. The rather unusual parallelism of hand and right hand appeared both in the Ugaritic poetry and the canonical poetry of the Hebrew Bible. In the parallel of hand and right hand, "the hand" stood for the left hand. As in this passage from Judges 5, Jael must have held the tent peg in her left hand in order to strike it with the mallet held in her right hand: "She put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen's matlet; she struck Sisera a blow." (Judges 5:26) By excluding the adjective for the left hand, it became a nondescript hand. It might be called only a hand. The right hand was accentuated by including the adjective. The right hand was believed to be the more powerftrl and forceful of the two hands. In the above passage, the left hand was stationary holding the peg, while the right hand yielded the mallet. The right hand was the h¿nd th¿t struck the blow that took the action that made it the forceful hand. In the following verse of the "BaalCycle", Baal struck the messengers of Yamm. Baal had a weapon in both his left and right hand, two different weapons. Baal showed his aggression, that even the messengers of his enemy Yamm would not be received, but slain. 5 38"The Prince Ba¿l is shaken [He seize]s with his hand a striker, In his right hand a slayer, The lads he st[rikes.l"' [8. CAT 1.2 Column II (CAT col. I) vs. 38] In the following verses from the Baal cycle, hand and right hand are in parallel. The verses described a routine life situation, an ordinary way of departing. These verses tell of Baal with the bow in his (left) hand, while the right hand holds the arrows: "He (Baal) did take (his) bow in this hand and his arrows in his right hand; then he set his face toward the brink of Shamak teeming with wild oxen"4 (15. CAT 1.10 Column II vs. 6-9). In this section of poetry, Baal used the cedar tree in his right hand as a weapon, By looking at the iconography of Baal found in the Louwe, Venel found that Baal held 'tree lightning" in his hand.5 This branch-like lightning may represent a visual idea of cefiNew the text that reads "the cedar in his right hand.t> Kingdom Egyptian text states that 'Baal smites thee with the cedar tree which is in his hand."ó Baal presents a frightening picture. The highest places of the earth are shaking and Baal's enemies go into hiding in the woods and the mountains. 37 "And Mightiest Baal speaks: 'O Enemies ofHadad, why do you quake? Why quake, O'Weapon-*wielders ofthe Warrior?' 40 Baal eyes the East; His hand indeed shakes, +r With a cedar in his right hand.-t (10. CAT 1.4 Column WI vs. 37- 41) 3 Simon B. Parker, ed. flgaritic Narrarive Poetry,*The Baal Cycle" trans. Mark Smith (Scholars press; Society of Biblical Literature: 1997), rc3. n G. R. Driver, CanaaniteÀþths and t egenas@dinburgh, T. & T. Clark: 1956), I17. When Simon parker translates the poem (p. I S3), he sees 'Tladad' as a name for Baal not the god El. He translates "El" as the general word for god. He translates vs. 5 "Hadd the god, in his palace". I did not use his translation, because he translates the right hand as the other hand, which is not helpful to my purpose. The French translation also uses right hand for vs 7-8 in Andre Caquot, et als eds. Textes Ouþøríttques Tome I: Mythes et Legendes (Paris: Les Editions Du Cer{ 1974),283. 'Il apris son arc dans sa main, ses dards dans sã droite,..." 5 A. Vanel, L'iconogrryhìe du dieu I'orage (paris: Gabal da,1965),g4. M$ ] S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 340. Smith quoted from the Papyrus Leiden 345. 7 Simon B. Parker, ed. "The Baal Cycld' trans. Mark Smith in Ugaritic Natative Poetry(Scholars press; Society of Biblical Literature: 1997), 137. Note 142 gives another translation for vs. 4ti-¿t 'l.enfroe 6