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Welcome to our feature interview for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Seminary. I am William Greenway, editor of Insights and Professor of Philosophical Theology here at Austin Seminary. The author of our lead essay for the fall 2024 issue of Insights is Dr. Songmi Suzy Park, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Austin Seminary.

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Professor Park received her BA from Amherst College and her PhD from Harvard University's Department of Nearest Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Professor Park is a prolific writer who has published three books on Second Kings, on Hezekiah, and on First Samuel. as well as The Flawed Family of God: Stories About the Imperfect Families in Genesis, co-authored with Austin Seminary's professor of preaching, Carolyn Helsel, and most recently, a book entitled Love in the Hebrew Bible. She has written dozens of articles, book reviews, and book chapters, and she sits on the editorial boards of Horizons in Biblical Literature, the Biblical Theology Bulletin,

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and a flagship journal in the area of biblical studies, the Journal of Biblical Literature. Let me note that an abbreviated written version of this discussion will appear in this issue of Insights, which was on the topic that Professor Park chose, Love on and in Scriptures. The title of Professor Park's essay, which we will discuss today, is Love in the Scriptures. Welcome, Professor Park.

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We look forward to learning from you. Thank you. Now, to begin, let me start with the book. What made you decide to write a book on love in the Hebrew Bible?

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so this was an old idea that I had that I only recently got a chance to write on. So I had this nifty idea as a graduate student. When I was doing my doctorate, I thought, you know, what would be cool is to write about love in the Hebrew Bible as my dissertation. So I wanted to, because, you know, the first reason is because there was actually not a lot of books on the subject matter.

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And so I thought, hey, here is a kind of a missing, something missing in the discipline. I'm young, I can do this. And then I talked to a very senior scholar in Israel about possibly doing this topic. So I went over to Israel and I said, well, what do you think about me doing this topic as my dissertation?

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And she she was very, firm but kind, and she said, in other words, in a nicer way, she said, I was perhaps too young to do this. So I hadn't, that you really needed to have a good mastery over the entirety of the scriptures. You had to have looked at it, all of it in general, and that takes time.

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and certainly more publications than I had. And so she advised me against it. And she said, maybe hold off on it. And as anyone who's done a dissertation knows, the problem with dissertation is that it's really a committee affair, right?

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You're not really writing for yourself even, you're writing for the committee who is going to judge you as to whether you are going to get this doctorate that you worked many years for or not. And so as a result, the common thinking is you don't write your dissertation on your favorite topic, right? That's a way to ruin that topic for you, right?

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It's to write it for a committee who's going to judge you about whether you're going to get this degree. And so I dropped it and wrote about Hezekiah, and sort of a topic that is, for which I've done a lot of research, but which is much more, almost a typical subject that you would write about when you have a Hebrew Bible degree. So that's where the idea began.

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But the idea, of course, percolated. It still sat in my brain as a possible topic. And though it's been, what is it, at least over a decade since I wrote my dissertation, still there hasn't been a lot of work on the topic. There is one nice book that I use a lot by a former teacher of mine, John Levinson, on God's love in the Bible.

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I think it's called Divine Love in the Hebrew Bible. And that's nifty, although the topic is much more centered on divine love, which is interesting. So kind of almost more similar to maybe the topic of this article. But otherwise, still there is not a lot of books on the subject matter of love.

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And when I started writing it, I realized why, because it's kind of not an easy topic to write about. And so I was like, maybe that's what she meant when she tried to discourage me, this older scholar, about writing about this topic. So that's where the idea began, and that's how we end up here with this book.

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It's kind of a fruition of an idea I had much earlier, but did not really get a chance to execute until now. And what's the relationship between the book and then this article that you've written for the journal? so this article itself has an earlier kind of edition. So I had been working on, so I agreed to write this book with a particular publisher.

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So this is the Westminster John Knox Press. However, the contract was, you know, kind of five years in front. Okay. So, and within those five years, I had to give a convocation speech.

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And so as a way to kind of begin work on the book, I wrote this speech. And in the midst of writing the book, I kind of dropped the speech. So the book in some ways is quite different from what happened when I wrote the speech. However, this article for insights is kind of a redoing of that speech.

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So I went back to the speech when they needed to write a much more succinct article on love and realize that the topics cover were kind of were kind of different actually from what I covered in the book. Is it I'm just is it the case that the In the book, you ended up covering love in the Hebrew scriptures, but then all occurrences of love among people in particular.

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Whereas in the article in the convocation address, you were focused more like your old teacher on the love of God in the Hebrew scriptures. Is that right? Okay. Yeah, I think that's right.

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And does his article, his thought remain influential for you? I'm trying to remember if he was cited in the essay. I don't remember you citing love in some. Somewhat, but not in some ways directly.

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So he traces divine love, and he looks at a course of scriptures, and really it's the book that was more influenced by his writings. But he does this kind of interesting turn where he starts talking about love and Judaism, and in particular later Jewish writers. Right. So that's where his book kind of turns, right?

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So it's really, the book is really about divine love in Judaism and Jewish thought in particular. And so, of course, this article is not on that. So that's where it kind of deviated. You stay focused on scripture itself, and in particular on the one use, the one word, you distinguish between, you tell me how to say the Hebrew, Hesed and Ahav.

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And it's the latter one. How did you say it? Aha, that you focus on. Okay.

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And the article is a bit more speculative. I mean, so the book is a lot more, typical of what you'll find in biblical studies. I felt I could be a little bit more speculative in this format. Let me ask you this question.

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Is love then, it's interesting how he In his book, which was on love in the Hebrew scriptures, you say in the end, he doesn't actually do love in the Hebrew scriptures. He does love in later Jewish thought. And then when you go to look for love in the Hebrew scriptures, you don't find a lot of material, which is interesting.

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What made you, with that initial thought you had, maybe it was just an initial impulse, but what made you think it was such an important category to pursue love in the Hebrew scriptures? So his book was written, I think, a couple of years ago, I want to say two years ago. So when I was writing a dissertation, this was not, neither of the books existed. I think the reason is because, of course, love is a topic that most of us are interested in.

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It's a big sounding word. It's a big concept. right? And initially, I was interested in it because, like I said, there was nothing on it.

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There was very, very little on it, And especially, of course, not scriptures. there probably is books on things like particular kinds of love in the New Testament. So by the time you get to later materials, I believe, especially in the New Testament materials, although I'm not 100% on that.

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So I have discussed with a New Testament colleague, I said, you know what's interesting is there are books on things like agape, but there is no book, as I know of, now I'm not the scholar of New Testament material, so, you know, take this with a grain of salt, you know, there is not really a book on love in the New Testament as a broad category. So I mentioned this as like, you know, Picking a book topic to my New Testament colleague. Who finish their dissertations and can do this sort of thing.

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Yeah, exactly. Here's another topic for you. But you know, the same reason, a similar reason undergirds, you know, the reason why I wrote on this, which was that there's, you know, though love is an important concept for all of us, you know, there really is not a book on the topic. at least in the Hebrew Bible, and probably not in the New Testament, as far as I know.

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Okay. You do speak of 1 influential article on love that it actually made a big splash by Moran. Is that how you say it? Moran.

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Moran. Moran. And you said in that, he observed that people were in the ancient Near East, not just the ancient Hebrews, but multitudes of ancient peoples were commanded commonly to love their rulers.

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And then he argues that since this is a call, which is a command, and you can't command in an emotion, that really it's a call to obedience, not a call to an emotional love. And you say that this for a long time, you saw it about an influential role and you find it in some ways interesting, but you also say that you think it maybe reflects an unconscious religious bias. So could you kind of explain all of that, the significance of the article and then where you think it might have manifested, not something he was doing intentionally, but nonetheless some sort of an unconscious bias or an intentional bias?

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Yes, so this is really, when you start looking at love in the Hebrew Bible, what you encounter is this very, very, very, very influential article, okay? And it's by William Moran. And, you know, it's really, and this article, basically what it says is that it looks at, you know, occurrences of love in the Hebrew Bible in particular, right? And what it says is, isn't it interesting that one of the books that have the most occurrences of the word ahav or love is in Deuteronomy.

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Okay, now Deuteronomy is not most people's favorite reading, but it's a very, very important book in the Hebrew scriptures because within Deuteronomy, you know, Deuteronomy, one way to think about it is that it's one long covenant code. Okay, a covenant is simply a fancy word. foreign agreement. It's a political document, a political agreement, a treaty.

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What Moran noticed was that not only is there lots of occurrences of love, usually this command by God to the people of Israel that they should love Him. But when he started looking at ancient Near Eastern treaties, right, between not Israel, but all these other neighboring states, he also found that there's actually a good repetition of the word love in these treaties as well. So you got, in some ways, 2 treaty-like things, both of which use the word love quite a bit. So what he concludes from all of that is that love, as though we think of it kind of in the modern age as an emotional, this, love is this emotional concept, okay?

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He argued looking at the evidence from ancient Near Eastern treaties as well as the Hebrew Bible or in Deuteronomy in particular, and he said, aha, in the Hebrew scriptures, love is not what we mean by love. Okay? Rather, love is kind of this other word, and it has to do with covenant fidelity. Okay?

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When God says, you should love me, what God is really saying is, you obey me, you follow my covenant. Okay? From this, he gets the conclusion that therefore love is really entails in the Hebrew Bible action, not necessarily emotion. Okay, because of course, how can you command someone to feel a certain way?

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Well, you can't, but you can command them to act a certain way, which is what happens in Deuteronomy. So he concludes, aha, must be a kind of action work. Okay, so from this, which was, and it was highly, highly influential, okay, and he had good evidence for it. And indeed, if you look at Deuteronomy, you know, his argument is still very much supportable.

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You know, you look at So in Deuteronomy, you will find occurrences of God commanding Israel to love him, right, closely aligned with them obeying the covenant, okay, or being true to the covenant, okay? You do have some language, I want to say 5 or 6 occurrences, I have it up somewhere, where God also says that he loves Israel. We can talk about that.

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in a moment or later. But in either case, it seems that all of the love language, most of it occurs within this context of the two groups, God and Israel, making a covenant together and agreeing to a covenant together. So Moran was correct. The problem was that this article was very, very influential.

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And as a result, people kind of almost over-applied Moran's conclusion. And by overapplying, what I mean is, they started to kind of, the thought was, by love in the Hebrew scriptures, they always mean action. It must be devoid of emotion. Right?

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So there was this kind of hard split between action and emotion. Okay? So every time you saw the word love in the Hebrew scriptures, some Hebrew scholars would say, this is an action word. This is about only politics.

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Okay? When other scholars, and I named some of them in the book, they started to kind of push back against this idea. Because the problem with this idea, aside from its over-application, the kind of oversimplification, really is that it can lapse into this stereotype of, oh, this kind of, the old covenant, this religion of the Jews where what they really care about is the law. okay, versus unstated Christianity or this new covenant where they care about emotions and feelings, okay, or grace, however you want to think about it, right?

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The grace and the law, you know, this dichotomy, it seems to have been that there was something like that implied in this over-application. So other scholars started pushing back and they said, though Moran is correct, right, let's not go too far. It's not clear whether, just because love entails action in the Hebrew scriptures, it doesn't seem like it implied that it did not entail any emotional or affective aspect. Okay, that actually, if you look at Judaism,

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there's not this clear separation between action and emotion. Indeed, one is said to be influential on the other. So your action will influence your emotion and vice versa. Your emotion will affect your action.

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So therefore, sort of the new thinking about it is, of course, love has both affective elements as well as action elements. And so, however, because of the influence of Moran's work and this idea, especially in biblical studies, I spent kind of the first chapter on the book going over really this history of scholarship and the starting points of it within at least the study in the guild. You list many places where love is used to describe relationships among humans. Some of them romantic and healthy, others obsessive or even abusive.

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And it strikes me that we use love in all these contexts as well, right? So we'll talk about he loved his drink. She loved her daughter. They loved their wife.

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They loved the sound of their own voice. He loved putting her down. And we understand that we are using the same word to signify very different sorts of phenomena. At the same time, when we refer to the love of God, it seems safe to assume that we are all referring to a relatively univocal subset of meanings.

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So caring, concerned, not erotic, not abusive. Now there's considerable ambiguity then, even in how we use love today. But at the same time, there's a relative clarity that when I'm talking about God's love or even about, real love, good love among humans, I have a certain sort of love in mind. Could it have been like that within ancient Jewish context when they thought about God's love for Israel?

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Yes, although it's a little, I would say, and of course, you know, so definitely we also use love the reason why love is a hard concept to study, in part, is because we mean all sorts of stuff by it, right? And of course, the reality is that ancient writers probably meant all sorts of stuff by it, right? And some of the way they thought about it gets stuck in this very limited text called the Hebrew Bible, okay?

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So within it, you are going to have a variety of different meanings, okay? That being said, in some ways, the Hebrew scripture is much, more limited than that. And so what I mean by that is, it's, though it looks long, it's a relatively succinct script or body of literature, okay?

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And the words are chosen somewhat, almost deliberately, right? It's because, of course, it's passed down. it's reworked and edited, and there's heavy disagreements about how much reworking happened, when, by whom, blah, blah, blah. But it's a text that's been in some ways edited and winnowed.

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Okay, so as a result, the occurrences of love, you know, it's not just two random people having a conversation, right? It's much more diluted, you know, I'm sorry, it's much more narrow than that. right? So that's why in the Hebrew scriptures, it is a little bit more surprising, both that you would have God's love mentioned a little bit more directly.

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So there is mention of God's love. It's almost always, so I think, like I said, there's at least five or six that I found in Deuteronomy, but it's almost always in the context of Israel's election or chosenness or the special relationship God and Israel have up together. And therefore, because of its kind of very succinct nature of the Hebrew, winnowed down nature of the Hebrew scriptures, it is odd when you do find the word love in some of these more harrowing stories, like for example, you know, the two that I talk about that's very odd is you find it in the stories of rape.

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so the two instances of rape will use love. And, the weird thing about it is, you sit there and you're like, so some editor or writer could have changed the word here. Right? So why are they using a hav in this particular context?

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Right? When there were other words, so for example, you never hear of the biblical writer saying that, he loved, drinks, and wine and stuff is mentioned, or he, so you don't really have the same comparable uses, okay? It seems to be much more.

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Even in English, to use the word in the context of rape would, I mean, I think that's one of the, that's part of the power of your example in that case is it's not something we'd use in English either. without interrogating, why are you using that term? Because it seems like such a misuse. So anyway, so it would make it, again, in some ways, there's still a parallel there, but the parallel actually drives the question, why did they retain it?

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That's exactly right. Yeah. And in some ways, of course, you know, what you get with Hebrew scriptures is very, in some, you know, in some ways it's very strange, right? So it's reflective of reality.

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right? But it's a much, it's an edited transmitted reality, right? So in some ways, you're only getting a very particular snippet of what's happening, whatever reality it reflects, right? And of course, it's been, it's been highly, highly refined.

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It's hard not to think that every word there is a kind of deliberate choice that have passed through lots of scribal hands. So, but I like the example of how love still now means a variety of different things, and of course, in some ways, that's what makes it such a hard concept, or hard thing to think about. and just as an aside, as a philosopher, what's interesting to me is there's not more. So in Greek, I mean, as is well known, you've got, you know, Philia and Eros and Agape and several others.

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And the same happens in Latin. so in, and I don't know about other ancient Near Eastern texts, but in other ancient literature, love and varieties of love and friendship and all these sorts of things are unpacked in some detail. So when you talk about the paucity of this in the Hebrew scriptures, it's quite striking. And because it doesn't seem just normal among ancient authors and texts and philosophers.

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So it's very interesting. And if I, if we had infinite time and I could do, I was interviewing more, I would ask, well, why do you think, you know, that word was retained in the usage with these rape scenes? Because in all of those sorts of contexts in in Greek thought there would be more of an obsessive quality to that.

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Of course, sometimes what we would consider rape, they did not. So there you would have another variant coming into play. So anyway, but very, very interesting. But I can't we can't go into that now.

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We keep moving ahead here and kind of scanning the topic. Let me ask because in the ancient world, so you talk about the command for the people to love their rulers and in the Moran article, which is about that, it was kind of that way. Do we also hear about God loving God's people?

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Are those sorts of things? And is this an ideal? And do we also hear that also in the other ancient Near Eastern texts? And then how is, as well as in the Hebrew scriptures, did Mehran find that going both ways as well?

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And what do we make of the use of that word there, because we would maybe, maybe God's faithful to God's promises, but it's odd to think of God being obedient in the terms of being commanded to love. So anyway, does it go, what happens the other way around when it's not about the people loving God, being commanded to love God, but discourse about God loving the people? And is that,

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Is that also across these ancient Near Eastern texts? And what does love mean in that context? Yeah, so you, like I said, so I looked at some of the treaties very briefly, and you don't have, you don't have a lot of mention about the rulers loving their people, okay? You know, so Moran's article, the other part of Moran's article that one should keep in mind is that what Moran's,

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indicated was that love, because it meant covenant fidelity and obedience, right? Usually it's something that somebody who is of higher power will command from a lower power. So you as the higher being will command your vassal or your lower, you know, to love you. Okay, because it's a power, it's, you know, it's a word with

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power connotations, okay? So, which explains why you have a lot more instances of the Israelites being commanded to love God, okay, than the other way around, okay? Now, however, it's not lacking. So in Deuteronomy, like I said, I think,

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So you find an instance of that in Deuteronomy 4, 37, 5, 10, Deuteronomy 7, 9, is it 7, 13, Deuteronomy 10, 15, and, you know, let's see. kind of 1018 where he's talking about the foreigner, where God loves a foreigner. Okay, so just in Deuteronomy, which again is one of the books with the most occurrences of this word, right? You have, what is that, 6 occurrences of God kind of loving Israel.

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Okay, usually Israel. What's interesting about that is, again, it's very hard to break out of Moran's mode. right? Where what he discovered that love is something highly connected to the covenant, that it has, that it involves, issues of power, that this is really a treaty.

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It's really hard to break out of that because when you look at, these instances of God's love to Israel, Almost all of them, if not all of them, have to do with God loves Israel and therefore have chosen Israel to have a covenant with and to have a special relationship with. So you'll see, you know, so this is not to say, you know, when you look at God's love in the Hebrew Bible, it seems to be heavily, intimately intertwined with Israel's chosenness or election. But one of the, one of the, you quoted 6, one of them was God's love of the foreigner.

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Yes, so that's one. So there's one instance where, you know, let's see, he defends, you know, the cause of the fatherless and what loves the foreigner residing among you. So that's one instance where God loves the foreigner, but that one's the only one and I don't know what to make out of that. You know,

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And I guess the other question I have is, and I kind of what you mean by chosenness, you mean, is this a preferential or a favoritism that you're speaking of with Israel or? Kind of, although it's in some ways election. is a little bit more complicated than just simply favoritism, right? Because if it was favoritism, what you would expect is that things just go well for the Israelites, right?

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favoritism usually means that God, helps you out more or behaves much more favorably towards you. And it's not quite what's happening when you look at the text, right? It seems to indicate merely that they have a special relationship, okay?

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And that they are, therefore, have a special agreement. Sometimes this relationship and the covenant is a kind of analogized to a marriage covenant. Okay. And all the interesting emotional aspects that entails.

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Okay. So it's not quite favoritism, but it means a kind of special relationship. And it seems that love between God and Israel is intertwined with that notion of being special, of being chosen.

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That Yahweh, this particular God of the Israelites, really is their God and their overlord in some ways. And the Israelites, kind of the vassal, the lesser power state that has this kind of agreement with this very particular God. It's that kind of very, almost foreign notion.

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Yeah. It's interesting because when we say, when we talk of God's love for them, it becomes hard. But it almost feels like, and you say we're back to Mehran, but it almost feels like we're back to the bias that had Mehran, as if the same kind of systemic understanding of covenant in a legalistic sense, which in some ways we might see as Modern.

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That's where marriage covenant becomes interesting. Because if you think of marriage covenant and you think that somehow this is a legal matter only, you've missed the fact, which actually goes back to what you said before is, well, no, it's both. This is the formalization of a relationship that has legal dimensions, but it also has inherently emotional dimensions, which point we don't need something extra in terms of preference. What we need is naming this other dimension of the relationship

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You know, I was talking in my class today about professional relationships of nurses with their patients and how proximity in that relationship creates a duty to care. not an ethical relationship. However, your hope is that any nurse has gone into this because they want to help people and they're your nurse and you're their patient. And so they are not just doing what they're doing for you out of fidelity to a legal job requirement because actually they care.

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And so you have both those dimensions in there together. And the problem actually happens in the modern understanding where in a business sense, what the a nurse is doing is understood as only a business relationship, a legal relationship, and then she's paid, evaluated, considered as a tool in that way by an industry, when in fact, the essence of what she's doing, even though it needs the legal overlay, the essence of what she's doing has another dimension. And you, as a patient at some level, you can tell a nurse who's doing their job, from a nurse who's doing their job, but also really cares about you.

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It's a difference. So I wonder if it's I don't know when we end up backing into needing something more than that with, you know, so if that's, you know, that would then it seems to me that would cover God's the not just the Hebrew God, but other God's love down. That's where actually they're not so exclusive.

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They have that intermingling. They're not as exactly harmed me like modern categorizations that split these concepts. I don't know. I'm just thinking.

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I think that's exactly right. And that's in some ways one of the critiques of Moran a little bit, right? You know, it's easy to fall into this kind of stereotype where you say, oh, the covenant is this kind of law, legalistic, you know, obedience kind of a thing. But what, you know, people have criticized Moran for is actually a better way to imagine the covenant is as a marriage covenant or as kind of an adoption agreement, right?

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You know, Israel is being adopted really by this God. And indeed, even in the covenant and in the treaties, what's interesting is how everything is put into the language of family. This is like kinship language, right?

00:35:06.160 - 00:35:22.960

So when you sign an agreement together, when you sign a treaty together, it's, you know, on the one hand, it's a treaty. On the other hand, the language being used is the language of kinship. You know, oh, this is a brother or this is a son. Right.

00:35:22.960 - 00:35:33.840

They're always so everything is filtered through the lens of the family. Right. And how can you remove emotions from family? Yeah, it's almost as if it's backwards.

00:35:33.840 - 00:35:55.720

Like we start out thinking of it as legal and then figure out how to add into the emotional, whereas they're presuming. the emotional element, and then putting on the legal overlay, which gives it formal contour and defines the character relationship in a public way, like you would need for a community. It's really, that's, yeah. Okay, we got to keep going.

00:35:55.720 - 00:36:27.920

I did what I said I wasn't going to do and started to actually engage. So you say the ancient writers only used love analogously when speaking of God. because love is so intimately connected to humanity. And I had the sense that the ancient Hebrew writers were so incredibly impressed by the otherness of God that they pretty much understand anything attributed, predicated of God would apply only analogically or analogously.

00:36:28.480 - 00:37:01.480

And in theology, so that's what I do, theology, you know, it's standing to say all predicates used of God are analogous at best. So when you make a point about this being used only analogously, it made me wonder, are there other attributes which are thought of vocally or is there a distinction here? Could you clarify what you were trying to say with this contrast by specifying that with love it's used only analogously? so that's where it gets a little bit more speculative.

00:37:01.480 - 00:37:28.960

And I know, I mean, I talk about it in the book a little bit, kind of on the final chapter when I talk about the Song of Songs. So on the one hand, yes, so it's, and so when I talk about God in the Hebrew scriptures, of course, Hebrew scriptures come from different sources, from different time periods. And what you do find is that in some materials, God is described as much more anthropomorphic, much more like a human being,

00:37:31.080 - 00:38:16.720

And so most Hebrew scholars will tell you, take a look at the difference between the two creation accounts, one of which begins at Genesis 1:1 and goes through 2:4, and then you take a look at the God after Genesis 2:4, and this is a very different, much more anthropomorphic, human-like God. He walks around the garden, creates like a, makes, forms human beings almost like a clay, like a potter would, much more hands-on. So there are different, there's a lot to say, there are different images of God within the Hebrew scriptures, because of course, this is coming from a variety of time periods that mentioned, you know, and thought about God in much, in kind of different ways.

00:38:17.720 - 00:38:48.480

That being said, so there are points where the analogy, is much more striking, I guess, right? And so, or seems to be beyond, beyond this always what you would expect. And one of the ways is, for example, one of the more common metaphors, like I said, of the relationship between God and Israel in which love is mentioned.

00:38:49.320 - 00:39:13.200

okay, is as a kind of marriage or, you know, yeah, an erotic relationship that's gone awry. Okay, so you see this in the prophets, right? Israel is this lover who constantly is cheating on God or doing him wrong, okay? And God is this kind of scorned lover, okay?

00:39:14.680 - 00:39:46.400

And they have a fairly, you know, seemingly a pretty dysfunctional relationship, okay? And so, but in our, and so on the one hand, you can say, so it seems that for the Israelite writers, depending on when you date some of the materials, there comes a point where, of course, we're human beings, so we're only going to understand God through what makes sense to us as human beings, right? So of course, God will be analogized, right?

00:39:46.960 - 00:40:07.120

So that's almost a given, right? Because how else are we going to think about God? That being said, some of the analogies are pretty strange, though. And so that's the other part of it, where I'm, on the one hand, yes, we are definitely going to think about God in relationship to how we think about each other.

00:40:07.360 - 00:40:45.680

On the other hand, imagining God as the sworn marriage partner is very, very, very striking. And so that's kind of what I was getting at, when I stated, you don't have a lot of direct mentions of God loving. and could it be, and this is a question for myself, especially in the Song of Songs, which again is another text, much, it's quite late, that does use the word love A lot.

00:40:45.760 - 00:41:10.560

And it's striking because God is not really mentioned in the Song of Songs. but it talks about love A lot. Okay, certainly erotic love quite a bit, And so the speculative part was me wondering, why is there not more clear instances of God and love? Okay, especially in

00:41:12.000 - 00:41:34.320

the Song of Songs, which is the book of love, really, it's a book that describes erotic love. It can't be that they had, you know, biblical writers had difficulty imagining God in an erotic relationship. They've been doing that since the prophets. You know, so it's not that, something else is stopping some of the analogy from kind of full fruition.

00:41:34.560 - 00:42:06.080

So that's why Then I wonder, I look at a very specific portion of the Song of Songs where love and death are juxtaposed. Again, this is much more speculative. I did wonder whether you don't have as much direct mention of God and love because love at least hints in the Song of Songs and the writers of the Song of Songs, that love is something very connected to

00:42:06.440 - 00:42:42.400

a mortality, or death. and when you're talking about God who at some point is imagined as immortal, okay, that something about love, something that only mortals can really experience, that, you know, love which gives, which death gives meaning to, or maybe a, maybe kind of a, intimately linked to, is that why God is not imagined as related to love as much as you would expect in the human beings? But I don't know.

00:42:42.400 - 00:43:03.360

I'm playing with a lot of texts coming from different time periods, you know, and so it has to kind of remain speculative because of that. I don't know if I explained it, more so. Hopefully I did.

00:43:03.360 - 00:43:44.720

Yeah, and I'm interested, and this will be speculative, I think, on your part, because you spend a good bit of time talking about mortality and immortality and this connection between love and death and how that might limit God's ability to love even or understand love. And you talk about Adam and Eve being driven from the garden after they'd eaten the fruit and become like gods. So they wouldn't also learn about, or also gain immortality and actually become gods. And so there's a big,

00:43:46.720 - 00:44:05.920

the difference between mortality and mortality is clearly a big deal. But I must say, I still, I don't quite understand the connection in your thought between love and death, which makes them so tightly connected. And it feels to me like you have a hunch here.

00:44:07.040 - 00:44:29.160

And could you just say a little more, maybe? And this is going to be really speculative on your part, more than I know you're accustomed to doing your professional work. But it does feel to me like there's something here which has captured your imagination on this relationship between death and love and immortality. Yes.

00:44:29.160 - 00:44:53.360

So it's a lot of it is coming from, again, me wondering about the particular instance where love and death are juxtaposed in the Song of Songs. Okay. So when you're talking about love in the Hebrew Bible, Like I said, talking about Deuteronomy because it mentions love A lot.

00:44:53.360 - 00:45:18.240

And you're also talking about the Song of Songs because it has the frequent mentions of the word aha. And some would say the densest mention of the word aha. So really, I'm looking at, you know, it's a Song of Songs that seems to make that connection, but in a very poetic form between love and death. Okay.

00:45:18.240 - 00:45:44.160

And what I try to do is more so in the book, I try to tease out, you know, what's happening when they're making when they're putting juxtaposing love and death together. And and in the midst of doing that, what I you know, I don't know if I clarify or I come to a complete conclusion. Right. As you say, instead of just mere speculation.

00:45:44.520 - 00:46:17.680

which is that, and I believe I use the work of a philosopher who argue that in some ways it's the fact that we are temporary or it's the fact that we die that gives love its true kind of resonance. Okay. If you don't die, love in some ways, it's not necessarily that you cannot love per se, but love is a very different thing there.

00:46:18.800 - 00:46:46.000

You're talking about a very different kind of thing, if you can imagine never being able to die. Okay. And so, you know, his, so I use kind of his speculation and I say, you know, I wonder if that something similar is also occurring in the Hebrew scriptures.

00:46:46.560 - 00:47:04.880

That love is seen as in some ways very much a human aspect. Okay. And by human, I mean, you know, something particular to creatures that are limited. Okay.

00:47:05.120 - 00:47:41.120

And so, you know, that we experience love because we die, okay? And it's the temporality, or the fact that we don't exist forever, that the fact that our friends and our family and our loved ones, the fact that they will also die, that there is something about the separation that gives a resonance to love that cannot be experienced or pertain to something that's immoral, okay?

00:47:41.520 - 00:48:16.240

And maybe that's why, at least in the article, which is a bit more speculative even than the book, that's why God is not set to love as frequently as we would expect in the Hebrew scriptures, right? This would also make sense. I mean, I'm getting like very speculative now. why when you come to the New Testament materials where God is, you know, you're dealing with a culture where there's lots of gods, much more anthropomorphic, right?

00:48:16.240 - 00:48:48.640

Or, you know, kind of much more, I guess, keen to cross that divine human line, more boundary, why you all of a sudden have, you know, the gods, you know, love being spelled out in much more specificity. Can I ask another question? And this is again, I don't need to get us back on this so we can close this up and get time. But the other thing that happens to my knowledge in the New Testament is death is not always about physical death.

00:48:49.120 - 00:48:57.520

Yeah. So a lot of times death is a form of life. Yes. And is it possible there would be a connection there?

00:48:58.080 - 00:49:26.960

with love, where living life without love is a form of death, or where that would be associated, or is death always in the Hebrew scriptures more literal? And so death is always to be a cessation of being. Death is never kind of in that existential sense of living without something that's essential to life. Yes, so that's interesting.

00:49:27.440 - 00:49:51.200

No, I don't know if it's literal in the Hebrew scripture. So, the idea was that there's a kind of metaphysical definitely tilt towards it, right? So death was seen as kind of being away from the presence of God. Okay, so for example, in the Hebrew text, you know, you're dead,

00:49:52.840 - 00:50:44.240

when you are, when you, so when you're sick, right, or when you were in, away from God's presence, right, you're marching towards death. Okay, and there's this analogy between, you know, being in the presence of God, God healing you and life, and then otherwise you're kind of, you know, if you're out of sorts with God, that's more akin to death. right? So there is a kind of theological imagining of death, which is then, as you say, it's kind of interesting, put into it, or putting that all back into the Song of Songs, link between death and love, right?

00:50:46.160 - 00:51:14.960

Yeah, you can definitely see it as, you can read it kind of metaphorically as, death is kind of being away from the presence of God and therefore where you don't experience love or something like that. And certainly it's, for later interpreters of the Song of Songs, who were troubled by the lack of mention of God, in this book.

00:51:15.760 - 00:51:38.240

The, so Song of Songs is, reinterpreted as a very theologized, very metaphorized, right? This is about the love relationship between God and Israel again, you know, or God and the church, you know, depending on who, which interpreters are reading on the, on this, on this book. Yeah. Interesting.

00:51:39.920 - 00:52:01.680

Now, your final paragraph was not what I expected when I started the essay. So I I dreamed of a closing paragraph about the love of God and Hebrew Scriptures. But you point us back to all the stories of human beings loving each other in all their messy, terrible and glorious ways.

00:52:03.040 - 00:52:24.000

And now when I think of the ancient Greek gods, their loves too were messy and terrible and glorious. I mean, there's all that variety. And I think the same could be said of other gods of the ancient Near East. Do you think that in accord with the Hebrew understanding of God's love might be understood to be

00:52:24.480 - 00:53:00.400

messy, terrible, and glorious in the diverse ways the stories you cite describe love in all these ways. In other words, you know, we move from a polytheism to a monotheism, but there's no editing that goes on in the move to monotheism. monotheistic God is capable of all this sort of love, including forms of love we would find coercive, abusive, and very problematic. I mean, do you think the ancient Hebrews understood, I mean, is that what you're finding and saying, this is how the ancient Hebrews understood the love of God?

00:53:01.680 - 00:53:38.720

And in some ways, this is very consistent with understanding of the love of the gods in these other ancient texts. Yeah, so that's a good question. So, yes, I mean, I, in some ways, it's the reason why it ends the way that it does is when you look at the, it's hard to know what to do with the lack of mention of God's love, or very frequent mention of God's love, right?

00:53:38.720 - 00:54:04.440

So like I said, you do have God's love mentioned in relation to the election, right? Or the special relationship between God and Israel. And you do have God's love mentioned, for example, in the prophets, as a kind of analogy, again, of a kind of love affair or, a marriage gone awry between Israel and God in the prophets.

00:54:04.440 - 00:54:43.200

So, but because you don't have any direct mentions without, these caveats in place, it's in some ways was easier to conclude that you were supposed to understand, love as well as divine love via analogies to the kind of, you know, complicated human relationship stories that are, you know, that fill up most of the text. You know, is this like other religions? I'm not sure.

00:54:43.360 - 00:54:58.760

Do you know what I mean? You know, it's, I would say, you know, as with everything in the Hebrew text, definitely for some texts, yes. Right. It's just that it's a compilation of text, right?

00:54:58.760 - 00:55:26.320

And so it's and. And so it's hard to say anything definitive about it in general, right? So the problem with the Hebrew text is that there's no center, right? And so anything I say, you know, if I'm being a good Bible scholar, there's always a kind of, well, you know, yes, but, you know, there are disagreements that are in, you know, within the text, right?

00:55:27.600 - 00:55:53.760

and the fact that it's very hard to make an argument from nothing, right? So the lack of evidence is deeply problematic because without being able to point to scripture directly, what you have is really just speculation, right? And so that's the other problem with, if you're trying to be a good biblicist, right? You can't really,

00:55:54.240 - 00:56:30.800

come to a very adamant conclusion, I suppose. In Levinson's book that you talked about, does he, I mean, so it's my understanding, and my hunch is this is what his book would say when he moves to Jewish thoughts, so not just the Hebrew text, but then, which, but Hebrew thought, which, you know, of course, in Jewish thought that, text doesn't stand independent in the same way it can be understood to be in Christian thought, right? So he's not making as big a break as it sounds like, but then he focuses on later thought where the notions of love are more developed.

00:56:31.280 - 00:57:00.720

My hunch is at that point, the love of God is not, could not be described in the more obsessive, abusive, or hostile ways, but it's become the more, and at the same time, in the, you know, what are the Christian scriptures? which are written, Jesus is Jewish, doesn't think of himself as anything else. Paul is Jewish, a Pharisee among Pharisees. So there too, you have much more developed ideas of God's love, which are edited down.

00:57:01.040 - 00:57:40.080

So it'd be fair to say, well, you know, one of the conclusions here is, you know, there is something to that old distinction between the ambiguity about God not being this God of gracious love and care in these ancient texts. But this is not now a Christian-Jewish distinction. It turns out that within Judaism and then within what then becomes Christianity, which is also a stream of Judaism, these notions of love and God's love over the course of time now stretching beyond this cluster of texts, which are the Hebrew canon, it does become refined in a different way.

00:57:40.400 - 00:57:57.040

But when we go back, as you've done, and look for it there, we can't find it. Well, you can find the beginnings of it, right? So, yeah, of course the beginnings, but that's what I mean is it's not, it's something that's developed over time.

00:57:58.720 - 00:58:08.480

Again, this is not a Jewish-Christian contrast. That's the problematic contrast. It's not that. It's a temporal contrast within both traditions.

00:58:09.240 - 00:58:29.360

And it's kind of concurrent in some ways. If Levinson's reading later Jewish thought, by which I take it you mean also in the, before the Common Era period, even. So anyway, just a thought.

00:58:29.640 - 00:58:57.960

Yeah, so I mean, I guess, yes, to some degree, in some ways, everyone's playing with the same, well, the shared text is the Hebrew text, right? And the Hebrew text is never as clear as you want it to be. Although I would say in the Hebrew text, love in some ways is perhaps different from something that's called grace per se, right?

00:58:57.960 - 00:59:25.840

And so I think, so, if you were to press me, would I say, did the, ancient Israelites have a vision of a loving God? Yes. what they meant by love might be much more special relationship, covenant-centered, certainly emotional, family-centric, really family-centric, than we might think about it now, you know. But insofar as you're talking about Judaism, now I am by no means an expert in Judaism, right?

00:59:27.200 - 00:59:53.520

Yeah, the reality, in Judaism, the Hebrew scriptures is only a part of the canon. This is the, this is a written Torah. You also have the Oral Torah, you know, so you have, you know, I'm, in that tradition, you have a whole body of interpretation and other stories that will help to fill in, right, from a variety of time periods that really adds to what you have in the Hebrew scriptures, right?

00:59:54.080 - 01:00:14.200

So it's not surprising that therefore, if you're looking at it in, you know, Jewish thought, you will find, you know, you'll have much more materials, you get a loving God, do you know what I mean? You don't have the same kind of strange rules that I'm playing with by only looking at the Hebrew scriptures, right? Only really part of Judaism.

01:00:14.640 - 01:00:30.240

And same thing probably with Christianity too, with its own development. Yeah. Now, if I can, this is kind of a personal privilege thing. So I wrote a book with the subtitle, The Story of Grace in Genesis.

01:00:31.040 - 01:00:55.600

Actually, my proposed title was The Story of Grace and the Prime Primeval History, but that got mixed for sales reasons. Where grace names a love which is unconditional and consumed with concern for the well-being of the other. So very much of a traditional notion of the other. I attended a historical and grammatical analyses, but I read the primeval history and the modality of existential philosophy

01:00:56.080 - 01:01:19.600

and argue that the heart of the primeval history is awakening to God as gracious love, or actually the birth of the idea of God as gracious love. And my reading is not connected to any overt proclamation or analytic description of love in the text. I'm not even sure, I don't think any word for love occurs in the text.

01:01:20.480 - 01:01:50.800

It's more invoked through the reactions I think the text depends upon in the reading. So again, in the mode of existentialist philosophers, you know, like a Sartre or others, or Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, who are talking in a reality not like traditional philosophical or analytic exegetical discourse, but in a very different way. What do you think about using such an interpretive approach to scripture?

01:01:51.680 - 01:02:14.400

Yeah, so I think the thing is, so, you know, in some ways it's quite different from how biblicists are taught to approach the scriptures. I think that's, and I think that's where in some ways you can find very different conclusions. So what I mean by that with like Bible scholars is, and in particular the notion of kind of grace, right?

01:02:14.400 - 01:02:39.600

So what Bible scholars are taught is, well, if you're interested in grace, you look at the Hebrew word for grace and you look at where it occurs. Okay? And then only by looking at, it, in the different places, the different contexts that occurs, can you really find an understanding, right, about what it means, right? And then if you are going to posit a progression, right, a change in thought, right?

01:02:40.080 - 01:02:54.240

So, positing a progression is always really dicey, right? Because at least among biblicists, when to date the material? right? is very fraught.

01:02:54.240 - 01:03:16.000

It's very, very fraught, right? So there are, so for example, the primeval history, right? what most people says begin with is a primeval history is coming from a variety of sources that span a couple of centuries, right? So Genesis 1, 1,

01:03:16.400 - 01:03:40.360

is coming from, I think most people posit, a late source. While right afterwards, in Genesis 2.4 and following, it may be from a very early source, right? So if your vision of the text is already that this is text from different time periods put together, it's very hard to make an argument about progression. right?

01:03:40.360 - 01:04:16.000

Because progression entails that you be able to align the text in some kind of chronological order, right? Something that is a very difficult exercise, right? And then when you're arguing about sort of a particular characteristic, like, for example, grace, it kind of depends on So what we have is a text, which is put into some, where the stories are put into some kind of order, right?

01:04:16.720 - 01:04:42.160

And where you begin the reading of a particular story and where you end that is going to radically change your thesis. Okay, does that make sense? So for example, let's say you're not going to worry about dating, but you're going to begin in Genesis 1 and you're going to end at the end of, let's say you're going to end at the end of the primeval history, which is Genesis 11, right?

01:04:42.480 - 01:04:57.440

There's not a lot of room there, right? Because, of course, the Noah story is 6 through 9, right? And then, you know, you have in 10, you know, you have a genealogy, right?

01:04:57.520 - 01:05:33.680

The Noah story also doesn't ingrate with Noah and the curse of Ham. Very strange, right? So in short, it becomes, right, if you ended at the primeval history, to make the argument of God's grace, you have to not only play with texts of very different time periods, but you have to show how a very particular figure moves throughout text data from a different time period, but it ends at Genesis 11 with him being, or God being ultimately graceful, right?

01:05:34.000 - 01:05:51.680

But Genesis 11 doesn't give you that, right? It ends with the Tower of Babel, which a lot of people say is misplaced, right? So you can argue that. But the Tower of Babel, and you can do lots of different readings, but one reading says that this was a positive event.

01:05:52.000 - 01:06:05.800

Another reading says this was a very negative event. Here, God is jealous of humanity again, right? If you... If you push it to Genesis, right, the challenges grow, right?

01:06:05.800 - 01:06:22.160

And what I mean by that is when you start the patriarchal narratives in Genesis 12, all of a sudden the entire, the shift is just like radically different, right? God is now dealing with a very particular family, right? Almost as if he's given up. right?

01:06:22.160 - 01:06:40.320

Dealing with humanity because they were just annoying the hell out of him. and instead, he's going to focus all his attention on this very special family. And in the midst of the patriarchal narratives, one of the stories that you get is the utter destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, right? And so you're like, right?

01:06:40.320 - 01:07:03.680

So when you expand it to Genesis, the grace thing becomes harder to maintain, right? So it all depends on where you put the beginning starting point of progression and where you put the end point. Okay. So, and it's just, that's the difficulties of playing with biblical, the Hebrew scriptures are just so very limited, right?

01:07:03.680 - 01:07:22.560

So, for example, I read a book where they were trying to, this author was trying to make a claim that a particular character in the Hebrew scriptures, Bathsheba, undergoes a kind of transformation or progresses. right? And on the one hand, the argument is good, right? I can see that, right?

01:07:22.880 - 01:07:42.320

On the other hand, we have like two stories about her, right? And so you're like, can you posit anything with such a paucity of material? right? All texts that are run through a variety of times, the thing is very fraught, right?

01:07:43.080 - 01:08:09.040

And so I think the idea, I like the idea, right? And of course, theologically, the idea is good, right? Because another reading of the primeval history through Genesis is that God, or the entire Hebrew scriptures is really God and Israel in particular, kind of, you know, altering, adapting to each other, right?

01:08:09.040 - 01:08:22.080

They're learning how to be in a relationship together. Okay. Doesn't end super well, but there is the restoration. So maybe, you know, there can be a positive spin.

01:08:25.920 - 01:08:38.040

You know, so theologically, I like the idea right? Textually, it's very challenging, right? Just because, again, the text is very, very challenging a material to work with.

01:08:38.080 - 01:09:02.680

Yeah, Of course, I know what you're talking about. It's the, that's when they shift to existentialist interpretation, which also would be the response criticism. It's background notions of what's authoritative in how you read a text, which means that your response remains essentially historical critical. where I'm utilizing the historical critical data.

01:09:02.680 - 01:09:09.160

I, of course, take account of all that. But in the end I'm not. I don't mean to be. I don't.

01:09:09.360 - 01:09:17.920

I don't find it to be determinative. And so it's so anyway, but it it it interesting. So thank you. But this is again a personal privilege.

01:09:19.000 - 01:09:35.280

what you said. But let's get back to you, specifically you and your ideas here. Are there any major conclusions or questions that you were not able to fit into the essay that when you were done, you think, boy, I wish I'd been able to say this or ask this.

01:09:36.560 - 01:10:03.360

Yeah, so I, not just the essay, but in the book, you know, there were sort of grounds that I could not cover. So certainly this question about what divine love looks like in the Hebrew Bible, I don't in no ways do I fully answer that. I speculate on it, but I don't quite get there, right?

01:10:03.920 - 01:10:21.600

Same thing in the book. I don't talk about it, as much as I want to. So even in the book, that part is missing. The other part that's missing is, it might be that, like I said, in the book and in the essay, I focus on aha, right?

01:10:21.600 - 01:10:39.600

Some people have argued that When you're talking about the kind of conceptual idea of love, it's not enough to just look at ahav, right? You have to look at all these words that are related to it, such as hesed. Hesed is usually translated as loving kindness, okay?

01:10:41.760 - 01:11:13.120

But it's an untranslatable Hebrew word, and it seems to be used almost as another word for something like love. Okay, I don't talk about Hesed because that would be a different, and indeed there are dissertations on Hesed, right? So it's a whole other, term and concept. But, you could argue if you were critiquing both the essay and the book, that I've taken a subsection of what is a larger concept.

01:11:13.440 - 01:11:25.520

And to understand the concept more fully, you have to look at probably Hesed. and maybe even sana, which means to hate, right? It's opposite. Okay.

01:11:27.920 - 01:12:01.600

Another thing that I didn't get to cover is, as I kind of indicated in this interview, love in the Hebrew Bible seems to be intimately connected with the election of Israel. Okay, it's hard to detangle the two, actually, and especially God's love. okay, seems to be very, very closely tied to Israel's election or chosenness, this idea of what it means to be elect, right, and the different concepts of it. And I don't go into that in the book very much, nor do I go into it at all in the essay.

01:12:02.160 - 01:12:45.760

And to do a kind of full study, you would have to, I cannot imagine a full study without dipping one's toes also by involving what it means to be elect. because the two seem to be very, very tight together. So there's lots of things I did not get to cover in the essay, certainly, but in the book, and really, I guess the main conclusion I would draw out of it, the conclusion of the book was that love in the Hebrew Bible, is connected to lots of different things, it like, issues of power and covenant, certainly, but also does have very emotional aspects to it.

01:12:46.320 - 01:13:09.920

And it's also connected to, I think, things like suffering, and death. so those are the things I go, I, want people to walk away from the book with. But, that being said, there were, huge areas that I could not cover.

01:13:11.360 - 01:13:33.120

And so I have the beginnings of some ideas about what this term means, but I certainly do not, have not exhausted it. And there's a lot of work to be done. And that's what's mentioned in the interview. And this is not even talking about the way that love

01:13:33.760 - 01:14:00.240

gets formulated in the traditions that emerge out of this text, namely Judaism, Christianity. That's an entirely different subject, which has something to do with that, but needs, in some ways, more work. So here are many book ideas for scholars, you know what I mean, who want to research this further. Are there one or two central, and this is my final question.

01:14:01.120 - 01:14:32.640

Are there one or two central insights you hope that readers will take away from your essay? Yeah. Yes, you know, I think the first thing is in some ways this idea that love is not just, you know, the biblical writers were very realistic about the, you know, the glory and then also the suffering that is entailed in love.

01:14:33.400 - 01:15:00.360

And I think it comes through their stories, right? That love is not seen as just a positive thing, but a lot of times are put into or mentioned in these very complicated stories where things don't turn out very well for a lot of the participants. And so you can say that they had a very realistic vision of love and that it's very modern, and again, it's me doing the interpreting.

01:15:00.360 - 01:15:33.800

So, it's hard always to know where the interpreter stops and, where the text begins and so forth. But what's always striking is, in some ways, how, because we think of the Hebrew text as canonical, the usual understanding is that, this will have some kind of very clear statement about how God loves you so much and, it's great, or it's kind of a positive end message. And a lot of times the Hebrew Bible doesn't play by the same rule, right?

01:15:33.800 - 01:16:07.360

And especially with love, you know, what you get instead are these very complicated, very ambivalent and ambiguous stories. that do mention love, but with unexpected results, the unexpected result being that it doesn't work out a lot of times for its characters. And this includes maybe God, right? That the story of the relationship of God and God's people in, at least, the Hebrew scriptures is not, in some ways, a very fun tale, right?

01:16:07.360 - 01:16:25.760

It's a very fraught tale. It's a complicated tale. And that, I think, more accurately reflects not only life as we live it now, but also in some ways, most of our relationships with God, which are also, I think, fraught. It's not as pretty as we want it to be.

01:16:26.320 - 01:16:46.840

There's a lot of real actual emotions and not knowing and questioning, I think, happening. So I guess that's what I would like people to walk away from, both the essay to some degree and the book with. All right. Well, thank you, Professor Park, for the stimulating and interesting discussion.

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I'm sure people are going to really enjoy reflecting on it. And it was a lot of fun having this conversation. So thanks so much.