Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Honor/Shame 02

24 March 2024

R/OB advance the warning that our usage -- our pool of meaning -- for the words "honor" and "shame" are not the same as they are for collective cultures. Shame indicates you know how to behave; that's a good thing. However, shaming someone is a negative. In a footnote, they refer to Saul's conversation with Jonathan about siding with David (1 Samuel 20), using shame instead of asking him to search his heart for the right answer. We might call that cowardly by our values, but it's precisely what you would expect in a collective society such as the Covenant generates.

At any rate, when someone asks, "Have you no shame?" -- the real issue is they are trying to spark guilt, which is a different thing altogether. We lack the words for dealing with honor and shame because we don't have the moral structure that would call for more words to deal with something that would be important in our culture. Remember: Jesus wasn't railroaded into execution for His preaching about high morals, but for bringing shame to the Sanhedrin.

I've been teaching it for years, and it's a common core distinctive of the Radix Fidem community, that western notions are injected into our reading of the Bible. The mainstream is entirely western and quite unbiblical. We keep skipping over the part where Paul considered his life blameless until the Damascus Road experience. There was no hidden guilt for Christ to uncover. For Paul, the experience was simply a matter of recognizing that he was captive and had no choice but to exchange his feudal loyalty from Judaism to Christ. Christ was the rightful King of Israel. Paul might feel shame about being wrong all his life, but there was no internal guilt in our sense of the word.

R/OB won't write it this way, but a proper covenant life requires overcoming that sense of internal guilt. Westerners suffer tremendously for that massive lie from Hell. It has consumed vast hours of my counseling work over the years. It's the fleshly psyche that operates by guilt, looking for some kind of penance and payment options. It seeks to displace God as the final arbiter. This deafens us to the voice of the Holy Spirit. It's the heart that learns to walk away from all of that and seek honor for the Lord's name.

It was not that David stubbornly refused to repent from having Uriah killed. Westerners are introspective in this obsessive way, but David probably never gave it another thought. The whole narrative of David and Bathsheba is awash in the language of honor and shame, not internal guilt. David did not do the honorable thing of going out to battle at the head of his troops. Neither Uriah nor Bathsheba were Israeli, so her choice to bathe on the roof was hardly something a Hebrew woman would do. Yes, I believe she was hoping to be seen, if not by David, then some other bigshot man on his staff. She was simply looking for an Alpha male opportunity while her husband was out of town.

Even the servant's answer to David's query is typical of honor-drive societies. It's not cool to know something the king doesn't, so the servant responds with a question, as if he weren't that sure. That way David can act like he simply forgot, and everyone saves face. David's behavior throughout is a matter of saving face like that. He wasn't trying to cover up a crime as if he felt guilty; he was trying to save face. Thus, his request for Uriah to appear was a subtle way of asking Uriah to let him off the hook, but the warrior wouldn't do it. It's virtually impossible that Uriah didn't know about the adultery. His actions show that he wouldn't play ball by accepting David's gift.

Uriah was making a public statement; he knew David would be told he didn't go home. For a mercenary, a second interview with the king was a not so subtle hint. Uriah's response was meant to shame the king. With the army and the Ark in the field, where was David? He also noted that Joab was leading the battle, not David. Here's a mercenary being faithful to his nation's honor serving with valor, while David sat in his palace poaching foreign wives. He signals he knows exactly what David wants, and will not go home to his wife for a romp in the hay.

Even getting Uriah drunk didn't work, as the Hittite avoided drinking enough to pass out. As a king, David could have seized Bathsheba and forced Uriah to accept some form of payment, but it wasn't his way of doing things. So, he takes the low road and has him killed subtly to save face, and it cost him some of his own troops. Joab knew what was going on, too.

As far as David was concerned, he had made a fair offer, and Uriah had refused all the options. This is not the place to dig into the Hittite honor code, but Uriah probably knew what was coming. He shamed the King of Israel and paid with his life. There is no evidence at all that Bathsheba was unhappy with the outcome; the baby could officially be David's. You can bet David had a clean conscience at that point. He had fulfilled the customs of his time and place. The problem was that God's honor had been soiled.

If it were a matter of internal guilt, we would expect the Lord to approach from that angle. However, God used a prophet. Now, there's no way Nathan could broach the subject openly in that culture. Instead, he used a parable that touched on honor and shame. David's response (Psalm 51) has moved millions. Notice that David is not troubled by the thought of breaking any common laws or customs because he didn't. Everyone was ready to forget and go on with life, except God. What David had done was break fealty to his Lord by coveting Bathsheba. Against God alone did he sin, not against anyone else. David wrote that by inspiration, not by arrogance.

R/OB insist that God can work through a guilt-oriented culture like ours. That may be true, but He isn't content to leave us there. God built the honor/shame system, not the guilt-oriented culture of the West. The Bible is loaded with the overriding central issue of God's glory (AKA, honor). When we enlarge or make His honor more prominent, we are allowed to stand within it. Moses interceded on behalf of the nation in the wilderness by pointing to God's honor. It had nothing to do with some imaginary objective standard of what was right, but the whole issue was God's reputation among other nations.


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