Analogies are funny things. They are often said to provide insight into a less familiar object or relationship by comparing it to a more familiar one. But I wonder if it might not work as well to compare a less threatening object or relationship to a more threatening one. The “less familiar” of the two is now recategorized as the more difficult of the two. There is no need to specify just how it came to be more difficult.

You will see, I believe, how relevant this is when I describe an analogy I ran across just recently. Bernhard W. Anderson, in his history of the Old Testament, [1] is making the point that the “information” we are given about Israel’s exodus from Egypt is not intended to meet modern standards of history. It is crafted—and re-crafted and re-crafted yet again—to make a point about the people Israel and their God, Yahweh.

To Anderson, that does not mean that some seminal event did not occur. It is more plausible that some event did occur than that it did not and the accounts we have were created out of whole cloth. What is does mean is that we cannot tell just what kind of an event it was by reading the re-written accounts of “what really happened.”

Of course, “what really happened” is what we really want to know. We will decide what “it” means when we know what kind of event “it” was. But the biblical material doesn’t come to us that way. The writers to whom we have access (writers of documents within the canon) have a goal for their writing and they pursue it in callous disregard of the different goals of later readers. For instance, us.

Williams says, (p.) that trying to understand “what really happened” in the event we call “the Exodus” by reading the biblical accounts is like trying to understand “what really happened” in the Civil War by reading Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. There is your analogy! I read that and just put the book down for a little bit.

I am completely familiar with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and better than moderately familiar with the events of the Civil War as they have been described by historians oriented toward the Union cause and also by some oriented toward the Confederate cause. I am in a very good place, in other words to feel the power of Anderson’s analogy. It is hard, in fact, even to try to read the Second Inaugural as if it were a historical account. I encourage you to try it for yourself. Experience the turbulence yourself. Then we should talk.

Here are a two examples.

1. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged.

2. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether

Example #1 isn’t that hard, at least as far as the first sentence. The rest of the point is done in the subjunctive mood, so it is hard to be too critical. But “It may seem strange” said by this person in this setting means “it IS strange” On the other hand, “Let us not judge” is a throwaway line, as the rest of the speech shows. [2]

In #2, the brutality of Southern slavery becomes the single measure against which all the bloodshed of the Civil War is to be judged. We get that from “every drop of blood drawn by the lash,..” and the conclusion is that this massive outpouring of blood by both sides is the just judgment of a righteous God.

Neither of those is “historical” in the sense that it gives us a feeling for what the war was about or how it was conducted. It is very good at saying “They brought it on themselves.” And the war was not even over at the time Lincoln delivered this. There was a lot of bloodshed for both sides still to come.

I have no wish to re-argue the Civil War or even the historical interpretations of the Civil War. I am offering only this analogy as Bernard Williams has crafted it. When you read Lincoln as a way of finding out what the war was about and how it was carried out, you are having the same experience you have when you read Exodus as a way of finding out what the escape from Egypt was about. And when it occurred. And where.

What I referred to as the “turbulence” above is as available if you invest yourself deeply in reading about the Exodus as it is when you try to read the Second Inaugural as history. It is not history. It is a powerful thematic statement of the “real meaning of the war,” that is, the meaning it has in God’s eyes.

Reading it with that in mind was a very powerful experience for me. I offer the same experience to you. And now, if you will excuse me, I must return to my study of Exodus and particularly to where the Sea of Reeds is.

[1] Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 4th Edition, pp. 25-26
[2] Unless he had the Radical Republicans in Congress in mind as he spoke them.