Sometimes a single word helps put a name to something you have been struggling to understand. For me recently such a word has been šeqer (pronounced shéqer), biblical Hebrew for “falsehood,” “a lie”). I came upon šeqer in the best possible way—by accident. I was rummaging around in my library looking for books on Jeremiah. I preached this weekend, and one of the lectionary passages was Jeremiah 20:7-13, the passage that begins, quite remarkably, with Jeremiah saying to Yhwh God: “You played me for a fool, and fool I am.” Does not every preacher at some time just before or after delivering a sermon think that way? I often have. Alas, I decided for my message that I had to pass over Jeremiah and focus on Matthew, but on my way, as I said, while rummaging through my library, I happened on a little book by Thomas W. Overholt: The Threat of Falsehood: A Study in the Theology of the Book of Jeremiah.
By the standards of contemporary scholarship, Threat of Falsehood is old, published in 1970 as part of the Studies in Biblical Theology series (Second Series, no. 16). I’ve had it in my library for a long time. The book began even earlier as Overholt’s dissertation, a small study of the idea of falsehood (šeqer) in Jeremiah.
Šeqer is not quite like our words for falsehood or lying. Our words tend to focus on what someone says, on speaking falsely. Šeqer is broader than that. It’s a breach of faith, whether that is something you say or something you do. As Overholt points out in his little book, šeqer is “the correlative of ʾemet, often translated “truth,” but again broader than our ordinary idea of truth. The standard Biblical Hebrew lexicon (HALOT) glosses ʾemet with “trustworthiness,” whether of statements or persons.
Surrounding ʾemet are a constellation of other important biblical words, framing what trustworthiness means. There are the other words from the same verbal root, from like ʾāmēn (amen) “may it so be, and ‘əmûnâ, “faithfulness.” Along with those are words like mišpaṭ, “justice; ṣədāqâ, “rightness,” and ḥesed, “loyalty.” All of these are community virtues. Overholt calls the whole complex a “system of expectations.” These are the sorts of things that should be expected of oneself and can expected of others, whether divine or human.
Šeqer is the violation of this system of expectations. Instead of keeping faith with the divine-human community, a lie had come to live at the center of the society, distorting what it meant to be the people of God. At the time of Jeremiah, the lie was that God would always protect them. This God-on-our-side theology was a subtle but powerful distortion of covenant truth. The leaders of Jerusalem and Judah were fond of saying that Yhwh God would never let them down. They pointed to the presence of the temple in Jerusalem as evidence that God would not, in fact, could not, abandon them. “God lives here,” they were in effect saying, “Why should we worry?”
This notion in late 7th century BCE Israel is the ancient counterpart to our idea of American exceptionalism. The problem is not in the idea of exceptionalism itself. Or, in ancient Israel, the idea of chosenness, which comes to the same thing. The problem is that the idea gets misplaced. What makes the US exceptional is not what we as a nation have been and are at present, but the ideal toward which we, the US, in our best moments have reached for, the ideal voiced in the Declaration of Independence as the self-evident truth: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And,, along with that, what comes next in the Declaration: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . ..” A nation, in other words, held together not by a prior ethnicity or a religious faith or a single language but by an idea, the idea that people of various sorts from various places and with various histories can live together as one. Apart from this idea, the US is not exceptional. We are not smarter, kinder, morally superior, stronger—whatever other qualities one might name; we are exceptional only in service of this idea.
For ancient Israel, the same was true. What made them Israel was perhaps best captured in what, in the Torah, constitutes their own declaration of independence. Yhwh is speaking:
Now, therefore, if you obey my [Yhwh’s] voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ (Exodus 19:5-6; NRSVue)
What often was forgotten in the history of Israel was the “if” clause at the beginning: “If you obey my [Yhwh’s] voice and keep my covenant. . ..” What exactly the “if” entailed was, at this point in the narrative, about to be further specified, but think of the words I mentioned earlier: “truth” (ʾemet), “faith(fulness)” (‘əmûnâ), “justice” (mišpaṭ), “rightness” (ṣədāqâ), and “loyalty” (ḥesed). Without these ideas threaded through the life of Israel, there was nothing much to separate them from the Babylonians except that they were smaller and weaker.
And, what’s more, these ideas about what made Israel Israel were related to the purpose to which it was called: to be “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” They were to act as a priestly presence in the world, a sort of living temple, in their worship and way of life and the way they named their God providing a living place where God was manifested for all to see. Their call was in this way to bring God to the world. And, along with this, to perform the other priestly task: to bring the suffering of the world to God. To stand, in that priestly sense, between God and God’s world.
The lie, the Jeremiah-named šeqer, was a sort of national narcissism among at least the upper class, the notion that it was all about them, that Yhwh God had favored them because, well, they were God’s favorites. It’s this national narcissism that Jeremiah addresses early in the book while standing at the gate of the temple in Jerusalem:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” (7:3-4)
Here you are, trusting in deceptive [šeqer] words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!” (7:8-10)
Overholt says of this:
In this kind of context [šeqer] transcends the everyday notion of prevarication and becomes descriptive of an insidious destructive force at work among the people. This is true first of all because šeqer points us to the empty centre of the communal life. The inner harmony was gone, and in its place was a hollowness which prepared the way for collapse.
And, indeed, the kingdom of Judah did collapse in a series of disastrous decisions driven by religious narcissism which led, paradoxically, to the destruction of Jerusalem and the demolition of the Solomonic temple in 586 BCE. Jeremiah was proven right.
The United States of America is not Israel, of course, although often enough in our history it’s been so claimed. We are the chosen. Nor is Russia, which claims the same thing. Nor the modern state of Israel. But the Jeremiah’s critique applies equally to these modern states, not because they are chosen but because what Jeremiah says of ancient Israel of every society is true of every society: when šeqer, the lie, has slipped into the center of national life, that society is on its way to collapse.
Go back to what Overholt says about society as “a system of expectations.” He quotes Johannes Pederson (Israel: Its Life and Culture; Danish 1920, English translation 1926):
All life is common life, and so peace and covenant are really denominations of life itself. One is born of a covenant and into a covenant, and wherever one moves in life, one makes a covenant or acts on the basis of a covenant. If everything that comes under the term of covenant were dissolved, existence would fall to pieces, because no soul can live an isolated life. . ..
“Covenant” is a biblical word, but Pederson and Overholt don’t have in mind anything that formal or legal or theological. What they have in mind is mutual trust. Societies are built on trust. If we couldn’t trust our neighbors, we wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without worrying that we would be assaulted. Nor could we turn on the tap. Nor pay the grocer. Our system of money is built on trust. I place my phone on a scanning device in Croatia, and I trust the proper amount will be subtracted from my account. It mostly is.
In every society there are places where trust cannot be readily given, where one must be wary. Those are places where we hope that law enforcement is at work. But where trust breaks down fundamentally, a society becomes unlivable. Good societies are high trust societies (on this see the sociologist Robert Putnam). You mostly don’t have to worry or work to protect yourself. Or, at least, you didn’t before now. Low trust societies, societies in which it’s assumed that everyone is trying to scam everyone else, are not only difficult societies in which to live but societies that are forced to waste a great deal of time and money on protection. In their pursuit of short-term gain, such societies court their own dissolution.
Recently, at the encouragement and the example of our current president, we have moved from the one to the other: from high trust to low trust. We have over a short time changed from a society in which trustworthiness is expected to a society of brute selfishness.
We are being told that trust is for losers. We are told that our institutions of government are ripping us off. We are told that the courts are crooked. We are told that the news is fake. We are told that other countries are ripping us off. We are told that people crossing our borders are coming only to steal jobs and inflict violence on us. We are told that the only one we can trust is the president himself. We are told. . ..
All this is šeqer, the lie, in the deep sense that šeqer has in Jeremiah and the rest of the Old Testament. When the power of the lie is unleashed it destroys the fabric of society. What we are as America is coming apart. We can no longer trust, and so, increasingly, we can no longer be trusted.
The lie always wants us to stand alone. Alone we are weak. Prey to the powerful and the privileged. What threatens the lie is faith, faith in the full biblical sense of faithfulness to each other, to ourselves, and to God. Šeqer fears ʾemet; the lie fears truth.
When the lie collapses, as it always does in the end, truth reemerges. When the machinations of the late 7th century and early 6th century rulers of Judah cost them Jerusalem itself, along with the Solomonic temple, when it all lay in ruins, Jeremiah did a simple faithful thing: he bought a field in Anathoth, his hometown. He reinvested in the nation he loved.
We are saved by faith, we’re told in Ephesians and elsewhere in the New Testament. That statement has been given a mostly theological meaning: saved by espousing the right theology. But there is a deeper secular truth here: we are saved by keeping faith with each other, with the past, and with future. With God. Buying a field, as it were.
We buy a field when we embrace the diversity of our neighborhood, the layered history of our nation, the rich variety of our world. We belong to this. We own it. We buy a field when we embrace the diversity of our congregations, the layered history of our Christian faith, the rich spiritual variety of our world. We own these things and are owned by them. So where you are, buy the field. Be faithful and expect faithfulness in return. It is the divine way.
The lie, the šeqer, wins battles; the truth, ʾemet, wins the war, for, as the New Testament reminds us, the lie belongs to what is passing away; the truth to that which is emerging.
Clay