God’s Responsibility: Narrative Choice and Providential History in Mather’s Biblia Americana Commentary on Ezra

Abstract

God's Responsibility:Narrative Choice and Providential History in Mather's Biblia Americana Commentary on Ezra Harry Clark Madux (bio) Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. —Matthew 10.34–36 And Ezra the priest stood up, and said unto them, Ye have transgressed, and have taken strange wives, to increase the trespass of Israel. Now therefore make confession unto the Lord God of your fathers, and do his pleasure, and separate yourselves from the people of the land, and from the strange wives. Then all the congregation answered and said with a loud voice, As thou hast said, so must we do. —Ezra 10.10–12 Cotton Mather's remarks on the canonical book of Ezra in his massive but never-published Biblia Americana appear straightforward enough at first. Ezra was, after all, a text that Mather took to be fairly historical. Moreover, because critics have tended to concentrate on his biographical approach to history, especially as evidenced in the more readily accessible Magnalia Christi Americana, it is tempting to read his annotations on Ezra in that same vein. Mather's own advertisement for the Biblia in the Magnalia (104–6) seems positively calculated to encourage facile comparison of the two. Such comparison, though, is ultimately misleading: a particular idea of history is central to Mather's understanding of Ezra, but seeing his commentary in that primary way does not disclose well the other aims of this portion of the American Bible. [End Page 305] Mather's reflections on Ezra deserve to be understood as notes that could be assembled into a sermon or sermon-cycle in what was already by his lifetime a long tradition of practical theology. From this vantage point, the commentary is a ministerial or devotional aid.1 As Mather writes it, or, more accurately, extracts it from the 1727 A Commentary upon the Historical Books of the Old Testament, by Simon Patrick, Ezra is a story of how personal identity is revealed in pious actions, actions emphasized by the larger pattern of history that overlays the text.2 The method of demonstration is one of example and counter-example, the thematic weight of which collectively proves that reformation is not a single passive event, but a clear and continuous choice. The story, though not quite the commentary, ends in the climactic scene of the returned Jews divorcing their "strange," foreign wives, and so implicitly poses the question of whether the reader, or the auditor, will promote or impede the providential plan of God. The overall effect is startling, and is no doubt meant to be, because the narrative direction of Ezra is at once radical and paradoxically conservative. An account of individual decision-making, Ezra is also intended to display the eternal continuity of God's providence. Through the combination of the two, Mather weighs the exceptionalism of Jewish history against the singularity of events in New England during his own lifetime, including the effects of the Restoration and the requirements of the new charter, even as he balances the divine story of Ezra with the lamentably consistent, half-hearted attempts of humans to re-create their own fallen selves. The crucial point of Ezra is that God keeps his own counsel, regardless of what humans do. The inescapable consequence is that redeemed humans can only act as God leads them to. However painful the breaking of conjugal bonds surely was, and Mather does not attempt to disguise this reality, the final decision was God's responsibility, for if God does not provide reasonable evidence of his will, then humanity can only haphazardly abide by it. Chance, rather than God, becomes the arbiter of history, a possibility that Mather could never bring himself to concede (Middlekauf 287). The separation of at least some of the Jews from other cultural groups was in this sense blessedly, albeit terribly, predetermined. The action...