Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible by Dalit Rom-Shiloni

Abstract

Reviewed by: Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible by Dalit Rom-Shiloni Joel S. Kaminsky Dalit Rom-Shiloni. Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021. xvii + 562 pp. This substantial tome contains 470 pages of main text and footnotes and 90 pages of end matter, including an extensive bibliography and several useful indices. The book consists of thirteen chapters divided into two major parts. The first chapter gives an overview of "Justification, Doubt, and Protest in Sixth-Century Biblical Literature." This is followed by three chapters covering methodological concerns surrounding the study of ancient Israelite theological thinking that describe various approaches to critical academic biblical theology. Chapters 5–12 discuss specific biblical texts in detail under the following rubrics: "God as King"; "God as Warrior"; "God Is Called upon to Fight for His People"; "God Summons the Enemy"; "God as the Enemy"; a terse ten-page chapter entitled "God as Judge and Divine Justice"; a chapter exploring intergenerational retribution; a final substantive chapter titled "God and the Attribute of Mercy"; and ending with her "Summary and Conclusions." In this study Rom-Shiloni homes in on "Hebrew Bible compositions that explicitly deal with the events of the destruction and dislocations" (95) surrounding the Babylonian exile, which include texts in Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Lamentations, and seventeen Psalms (Psalms 9–10, 42–43, 44, 74, 77, 79, 80, 89, 90, 94, 102, 103, 106, 123, and 137). The decision to examine only texts that we can place historically in this era and that explicitly address the traumatic events of the exile results in a narrower portrait of these issues than one might wish. Essentially the reader is presented with a study of the Hebrew Bible's protest literature against God and the variety of attempts to defend God in the face of innocent or disproportionate suffering that excludes texts such as Genesis 18, Job, and 2nd Isaiah, the latter because supposedly the speaking persona in Isaiah 40–55 does not explicitly engage the complex of events surrounding the trauma of the Babylonian exile (see her explanation on pp. 86–87). It also sidelines Edward Greenstein's extensive work on Job as well as Jon Levenson's book Creation and the Persistence of Evil, [End Page 159] which may be among the most important recent Jewish reflections on this biblical theological conundrum (even while some of Levenson's other work is discussed in this book). One of the great strengths of this book is that Rom-Shiloni is particularly adept at carefully teasing out the variety of responses in the literature she surveys to the theological problems raised by the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of much of Judah's populace. For example, Rom-Shiloni charts out three models of divine/human roles in warfare: A human agent fights alone; God summons a human agent; God fights alone. In each case "God or the human agents may function as either saviors or enemies" (180), producing seven distinct options (six plus a seventh option that cuts across her schema) mapped out in a useful diagram that she argues is "valid for all reflections on war in the Hebrew Bible" (180). She wisely notes that a single text might espouse more than one operative model, at times due to the principle of double causality, with an event involving both divine and human activity (180–82). Rom-Shiloni also discusses several distinct but often-intertwined understandings of individual, communal, transgenerational, and immediate conceptions of divine retribution (344–421). Rather than attempting to systematize and resolve tensions within certain texts like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, she prefers to see them as reflecting the difficult struggle to make sense of the trauma of the exile and the challenge it presented to the notions that God protects Israel, rewards the righteous, and punishes the wicked. Rom-Shiloni is to be lauded for arguing that discussions of various "theological, sociological, and functional distinctions" need "to be released from hierarchical and chronological paradigms that too often govern the scholarship of Hebrew Bible theology and ideology" (193). In short, she rejects linear...