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Prophecy is history /29 – It is in defeat, when a story ends, that we discover the truth and strength of God
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  22/12/2019
"Why did you take my children away, why did you have them killed by the sword and left them at the mercy of the enemies? And then the supreme God was moved with compassion and said: «For you Rachel, for you I will bring the children of Israel back to their land»"
Louis Ginzberg, The legends of the Jews
We have reached the end of the commentary on the Books of Kings, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. But even within exile, a paradoxical sort of can be found hidden
«On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon» (2 Kings 25,8-11). With this, the end of the history of Jerusalem, occupied, destroyed, set on fire and with part of the people deported to Babylon, our commentary on the Second Book of Kings also come to an end. And that story that started in Genesis, in shapeless chaos, also ends vivified and ordered by the Spirit. There, Adam makes his appearance in the story, the centre of that creation that culminates in the Shabbat, in the act / non-act with which Elohim, on the seventh day, "stops" (Shabbat) and separates himself from his creation. A pause and a separation that are also the beginning of the story, that is, that intertwining of life and death, of virtue and sin, of the words of God and the words of men and women, of which the Bible is composed. Shabbat (not man) is the culmination of creation, and it is also its destiny and eskaton. Creation ends with Shabbat telling us that the story will end when everything is Shabbat, when the same law will apply to all men and women without the distinctions of the many statuses of the other six days, and when human fraternity will embrace earth and the cosmos. We will never find a possible relationship capable of a future with creation, if we do not give life to a new culture of Shabbat, if we do not learn to "stop" or pause again.

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The "story" of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, the patriarchs, Egypt, Moses and the liberation from slavery, the promised land, and then Samuel, Saul, David and the monarchy up to the last king of Judah, Jehoiachin, with whom the Second Book of Kings ends, ends today: «In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Awel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison. He did this on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month. He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honour higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table. Day by day the king gave Jehoiachin a regular allowance as long as he lived» (2 Kings 25,27-30). Here, we find ourselves thirty-seven years after the deportation (in 561), and we discern a note of hope: Jehoiachin, the king considered by part of the people (and by the editor) as the legitimate heir of David, is freed, and a place is especially reserved for him in the court of the new king of Babylon, the son of Nebuchadnezzar - a fact that we also find mentioned in Jeremiah (Jeremiah 52,31-34), also indirectly confirmed by some ancient texts found in Babylon. Israel's history ends with the hope that exile will not be the last word spoken. Here, perhaps, we find an echo of the great and constant teachings of the prophet Jeremiah: a story comes to an end, but the story is not over, because a remnant will return. The editor of these last terrible chapters sees in the rehabilitation of the last king of Judah a sign and an announcement that that story which began in the great silence of creation will still be able to continue. Because in the biblical canvas reaching all the way from Genesis to the last Davidic king, the warp that intertwines with the plot of historical events, is represented by the words and actions of the prophets. The words and actions of those prophets that we find mentioned in historical books (Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, the prophetess Huldah, Samuel and many others, with a name or who remain nameless, that we have met in the last couple of months), but also the words and actions of other prophets who contributed directly to the interpretation of that story being told.
In fact, we would have a very different story, another sense of the facts and another kind of salvation without Ezekiel, Jeremiah and the second Isaiah, and without the other non-false prophets, almost always unknown and nameless. These prophets saw, prophesied and lived the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile, they provided first and essential words to understand the huge tragedy that was happening before their eyes. The exile was also, despite the immense pain, a favourable time of blessing for the people of Judah also thanks to the presence of the prophets in that great Shoah (devastating storm). As long as there is a prophet next to us sharing our very own hell, we are able to discern a sliver of paradise. The oracles and sings of Ezekiel, the burning words of Jeremiah, the chants of the servant of YHWH of the second Isaiah, were that very loophole that from hell reached heaven, from which they were able to see a shalom possible even in exile; this helped them not to forget the Covenant and the promise, and continue to dream of their different God without confusing him with the attractive Babylonian gods. We will always have the hope to return home, as long as we never stop dreaming about it while in exile. Those marvellous and immense prophets, whom we have been able to get to know a little in these last years of Sunday commentaries, kept YHWH's dream alive, and were able to keep him "alive" and living although he had been defeated (all faith continues to live in the middle of our crises if we just decide to keep it alive, making it resurrect, and not forgetting it under the weight of the immense pain of our defeats and disappointments). And so, after the exile, "YHWH the Lord of armies" became "YHWH the Lord of the heavenly hosts": political defeat was essential in order to understand that the Kingdom of God and his oikonomia are not those of power but of weakness, and that the place where God lives is "heaven" and therefore it was possible to pray to Him and have Him along the rivers of Babylon as well, even without that wonderful temple now sacked, destroyed and burned. The death of the ancient idea of ​​YHWH generated a higher, more spiritual and universal one while in exile, which is the great theological and ethical gift left to us by humanism and biblical history.
Exile was the time when some of the most beautiful and important books in the Bible were written. Many of the psalms flourished from those tears, the immense prophetic texts were generated there, the founding tales of Genesis and Exodus were written there, all being children of the greatest of collective pains. While everything collapsed, while the destruction was most radical, while the holy city of David and the temple of Solomon were devastated and set on fire, that same injured land produced some of the greatest literature masterpieces of all time. In that exile, without a temple and without a homeland, those writers were able to "review" the temple reborn from Solomon's wisdom, as beautiful and pure as the first day when everything was bright and uncontaminated. They revised Abraham's faith and, as they shared it with us, they once again believed the promise of a land that had now become a pile of rubble; they were able to understand and narrate the alliance with YHWH with splendid words while the covenant and choice were being swept away by Nebuchadnezzar and his empire. They believed, saw and wrote wonderful words about God, because they had already been able to believe in them before in the darkest night of faith: the Burning Bush, Jacob’s battle, Miriam’s song and her dancing with the tambourine, the great words of the Sinai all arose from that generative darkness...; in the midst of that devastation they told us about the liberation from Egyptian slavery as they themselves were being led into Babylonian slavery, and that same slavery made the story of the parting sea wonderful.
What if this today, in this time of the destruction of our temples, when a story has clearly ended, could be the right time to write the best books? All this would not have been possible without the prophets, who acted as the new Moses, capable of indicating a land risen once again in the time of its holy Shabbat: «However, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be said, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but it will be said, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ For I will restore them to the land I gave their ancestors!"» (Jeremiah 16,14-15). A new promise, a new alliance, a new land. Only prophets can do these things. Sometimes we know how to do them a little, too. When we are able to say sublime words about love and marriage to a friend from above the rubble of our love story; or when we sincerely say beautiful and true words about faith and a God who has not spoken to us for many years, abandoned in an exile that seems to never end; or when we want paradise to exist even if we are convinced that it is not meant for us. Herein lies much of the meaning of one of the most beautiful human-divine words there are: gratuity. The Bible is many things all at once, but it is also and above all a great song to gratuity. Here, everything is grace. Gratuitousness is also another name for Shabbat. Because if in a land without a temple, Shabbat became the temple of time in Babylon, exile became the Shabbat of history, that time when everything paused, everything "stopped". Worship stopped, sacrifices stopped, religion stopped, choice stopped, promise stopped, God stopped too. And after that collective and epochal stop, nothing was ever the same again. It is while finding ourselves in exile that we truly learn about time.
And once again we have reached the end. Once again, as every time, what remains is the joy of the journey, of the encounters, and above all of the surprises; and every time that deep melancholy remains for something that ends, which is (in part) is taken care of by the Bible itself: «The end of a matter is better than its beginning» (Ecclesiastes 7,8). And the impression remains that you have written many words but not those that should have been written – maybe this impotent awareness is the gratuitousness of this profession? Once again, thanks to Avvenire, to its director, Marco Tarquinio, who continues to believe, ever since Christmas six years ago, in the work of an economist who insists on commenting on the Bible. And, as always, thanks to you readers, for the many letters, for your kind friendship. Finally, after these six months spent in the company of the Books of Kings, the "oikonomia of smallness" remains: that of David, the youngest of the children, chosen not by merit but by grace; that of Bethlehem, the smallest of the cities of Judah. The wait remains, the desire remains to dream of God and not forget him in the long time of exile.
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    [text] => 
Prophecy is history /29 – It is in defeat, when a story ends, that we discover the truth and strength of God
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  22/12/2019
"Why did you take my children away, why did you have them killed by the sword and left them at the mercy of the enemies? And then the supreme God was moved with compassion and said: «For you Rachel, for you I will bring the children of Israel back to their land»"
Louis Ginzberg, The legends of the Jews
We have reached the end of the commentary on the Books of Kings, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. But even within exile, a paradoxical sort of can be found hidden
«On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon» (2 Kings 25,8-11). With this, the end of the history of Jerusalem, occupied, destroyed, set on fire and with part of the people deported to Babylon, our commentary on the Second Book of Kings also come to an end. And that story that started in Genesis, in shapeless chaos, also ends vivified and ordered by the Spirit. There, Adam makes his appearance in the story, the centre of that creation that culminates in the Shabbat, in the act / non-act with which Elohim, on the seventh day, "stops" (Shabbat) and separates himself from his creation. A pause and a separation that are also the beginning of the story, that is, that intertwining of life and death, of virtue and sin, of the words of God and the words of men and women, of which the Bible is composed. Shabbat (not man) is the culmination of creation, and it is also its destiny and eskaton. Creation ends with Shabbat telling us that the story will end when everything is Shabbat, when the same law will apply to all men and women without the distinctions of the many statuses of the other six days, and when human fraternity will embrace earth and the cosmos. We will never find a possible relationship capable of a future with creation, if we do not give life to a new culture of Shabbat, if we do not learn to "stop" or pause again.

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Prophecy is history / 27 - The powerful, if they can't stay like everyone else, they will remain inhuman.
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 08/12/2019
«But how can Josiah ignore Jeremiah and send emissaries to Huldah? The wise men replied: Because women are more compassionate, and so he hoped that what he would say to them would not be too harsh»
Talmud,  Megillah 14b
The discovery of a book in the temple becomes the basis of a great religious reform, where we meet the prophetess Huldah who reminds us of the meaning of women and of prophecy.
A just father and a great miracle are no guarantee that children will continue to write a good and just story. After Hezekiah, a good and faithful king who saved Jerusalem thanks to his faith in God, two evil kings follow one another in Judah, Manasseh and Amon (2 Kings 21), who rebuild the altars to foreign gods, resume and reactivate the ancient Canaanite popular cults that had never really died out among the people. After the beautiful interlude of Hezekiah, idolatry returns, the ancient disease of Israel - and of all men, who are tireless builders of idols whom they can worship: we are consumers of many commodities, but first and above all we are consumers of idols .
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In the cycle of alternating between good and evil, after Amon comes Josiah, the new David, a beloved character in the Bible, at least as much as his ancestor Hezekiah: «When he became king, Josiah was eight years old; he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem ... He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord» (2 Kings 22: 1-2). Josiah presents himself as a restorer of the temple. The text describes the works with words very similar to those that Chapter 12 had previously used for the restoration of King Joash. Again the silver, collected by the "keepers of the threshold" is melted, turned into coins and given to carpenters and masons. The description of the temple factory closes with the same words used for Joash’s restoration: «But they need not account for the money entrusted to them, because they are honest in their dealings» (2 Kings 22,7). Good words about the honesty and loyalty of workers should never be silenced, especially when we encounter them in the Bible; and above all today, when before the jobs we need good words about workers, ari that was older than their faith, on which a group of reformers, in a time of religious corruption founded their reform.
It is not uncommon for a prophetic minority that wants a radical reform to base its actions on something more ancient, because it often contains something pure and genuine that over time has become contaminated and has fallen. Sometimes this "something" is a forgotten tradition, some words of the founder erased in time; other times it is a text, a book, a letter, a "gospel" lost or considered by most apocryphal, while instead it contained an authentic message to the reformers. In the ancient world, including the Bible, what was older was even truer. In that culture there was a conviction that the beginning contained the ideal principle, the real promise before our compromises arrived, the original pact before our infidelities. There was the certainty that to get out of the present crisis the main and perhaps the only resource was a different past, that pristine and still fertile land to generate a future - "in the beginning it was not so". Just like when plunged into a darkened horizon, we feel that in order to give new life to our relationship we must return to the days of first love, to those different words capable of pronouncing an infinite hope. We understand that we must try to review the heart of the other and ours as we have known him or her in that first covenant or alliance, and then make sure that the past resurrects the present that now appears dead. It is not nostalgia, it is in fact the opposite: in the Bible it’s called memory. In fact, in these acts one does not look back, but only ahead. Like Moses, who from Mount Nebo did not look towards Egypt but at the Jordan. Sometimes that ancient text is found while working on a "restoration", it emerges as a gift from working on the foundations. At other times the book "creates" itself, born out of listening to people's pain. History can be "produced" today by a greater love, because the book can be generated from the flesh and blood of those who believe that that origin is not lost forever and can really be resurrected. Identities, individual and collective, are always creations of the present, even when they start from the past.
The righteous king Josiah started from the discovery of an ancient book and reformed the cult: he destroyed the pagan altars that populated his region, eliminated the sacred prostitutes from the temple, drove out the Canaanite priests and also destroyed the ancient sacred altar of Bethel (2 Kings 23,4-14). Furthermore, «Josiah he desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire to Molek» (2 Kings 23,10). Every good reform begins by not killing the children anymore, not offering them to the fire anymore to offer them to various Molocs.
Josiah's reform was an essential passage in the history of salvation. Because it marked the passage from the temple to the book, which became the centre and "place" of faith. An operation that proved decisive for the period of exile that would soon arrive. Israel managed to survive seventy years without a temple, because Josiah and that school of scribes and priests had moved the axis from the temple to the book. The Torah became the mobile temple, the new Ark of the Covenant that followed the caravan in the world and in time, in the thousand Diasporas and destruction. That destruction by Josiah became a possibility to preserve the faith amidst further devastation and total destruction.
The strength of Josiah's creative destruction is especially striking in these verses: «The king ordered … to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts … He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem … and those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts» (2 Kings 23,4-5). Without the courage of destruction, no serious reform can be carried out, because corruption almost always consists in the accumulation - progressive, continuous, unintentional - of things, ideas-ideologies-idols, practices, traditions, which gradually enter into the "temple" of the city and the soul; and so that place in which at the beginning there was "only one voice", that speaking nakedness of infinity where we once had touched the sky, becomes filled with artefacts, to the point of making the sound of that first voice imperceptible and impossible to hear. But the evacuating the premises comes at a very high cost - we and our friends get too attached to these sacred artefacts - and so almost all reforms fail because of the inability to sustain the inevitable pain of destruction. Because a reform is really an operation of emptying in order to return to the bare temple, and then pray and hope that that original voice returns to speak to us. The voice however does not always come back, because the time of the voices is often that of youth; but an empty and silent temple is preferable to a temple filled with fake voices, because as long as the space remains uninhabited we can always hope to hear a different voice within that silence, even if it were the voice of the very last angel.
One of the prophetesses mentioned specifically in the Bible: Huldah, entering this scene is also very important in this fundamental chapter. Josiah is shocked by the words of the rediscovered book (those that announce the misfortunes of the people due to their unfaithfulness), and he wants proof of the authenticity of that book. In the Bible the "certifiers" of the true word of YHWH were the prophets: «Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam, Akbor, Shaphan and Asaiah went to speak to the prophet Huldah, who was the wife of Shallum… they spoke with her» (2 Kings 22,14). The prophetess Hulda validates and confirms those words as the words of the Lord, and prophesies that Josiah will be spared from the destruction of Jerusalem. Huldah prophesies with words very similar to those of Jeremiah, who is not named here, although in that period (around 620-622) he was already active in the city.
Why is a prophetess, a woman, consulted and for an opinion of such an extreme importance? A question that many have asked themselves, even in ancient times, making various assumptions as to what the answer might be. We do not really have any further elements or details regarding Huldah from the Bible. From Ezekiel we know of the activity of the prophetesses in Jerusalem, whom he condemned for having «dishonoured the Lord» (Ezekiel 13,19). According to some scholars it is possible that a conflict of sorts between prophets began in that difficult time of the pre-Exile and then of the Exile, and that Huldah was excluded from the official narrative because she was overcome by more powerful and famous prophets. According to a recent and controversial study by Preston Kavanagh (Huldah: The Prophet Who Wrote Hebrew Scripture, 2012), Huldah was instead a fundamental figure in the Bible (she even wrote or influenced a third of the Hebrew Scriptures). The anagram of her name appears 1.773 times in the Bible, since, according to Kavanagh, «biblical writers used the anagram as modern writers use italics to underline a point» (p.12). An extreme thesis, difficult to defend (for example: the biblical names in the Bible that can be formed as an anagram of Huldah are many), which however reminds us of the importance of prophetesses and women in biblical humanism; an importance that was greater than the already remarkable one that the Bible attests to. Because we all know that there is a great affinity between woman and prophecy.
Hulda in Hebrew means weasel (or marten), a name which, according to the Talmud, she deserved for having dared to call the king simply a "man" («Tell the man who sent you to me» 2 Kings 22,15). The prophetesses manage to call the kings by name. Women, more than males, know that the powerful are men, like everyone else. They remind them of it, they remind us of it, starting from the domestic walls. This is an immense gift for the powerful and for everyone. A gift of women, a gift of prophets, the gift of prophecy. Without prophecy leaders make themselves kings always and everywhere. They never experience reciprocity between equals, so they don't know real happiness. They live in sadness in their golden solitude, surrounded by flatterers and admirers. And in the long run, failing to be men like everyone else, they become inhuman. This is also why prophecy is an essential resource of the world and earth.
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Prophecy is history / 27 - The powerful, if they can't stay like everyone else, they will remain inhuman.
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 08/12/2019
«But how can Josiah ignore Jeremiah and send emissaries to Huldah? The wise men replied: Because women are more compassionate, and so he hoped that what he would say to them would not be too harsh»
Talmud,  Megillah 14b
The discovery of a book in the temple becomes the basis of a great religious reform, where we meet the prophetess Huldah who reminds us of the meaning of women and of prophecy.
A just father and a great miracle are no guarantee that children will continue to write a good and just story. After Hezekiah, a good and faithful king who saved Jerusalem thanks to his faith in God, two evil kings follow one another in Judah, Manasseh and Amon (2 Kings 21), who rebuild the altars to foreign gods, resume and reactivate the ancient Canaanite popular cults that had never really died out among the people. After the beautiful interlude of Hezekiah, idolatry returns, the ancient disease of Israel - and of all men, who are tireless builders of idols whom they can worship: we are consumers of many commodities, but first and above all we are consumers of idols .
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Prophecy is history / 25 - Authentic justice is also preventing the past from killing the future
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  24/11/2019
"The bronze serpent at the time of Hezekiah no longer provided healing, indeed instead it caused damage: the values ​​of the past can do this, because no guarantee is given by God as to the things he has made use of from time to time".
Paolo De Benedetti, Hezekiah and the Bronze Serpent  
The art of any reform is to be able to understand which elements of the origins are to be saved and which are to be destroyed. Just like King Hezekiah knew what to do with the Ark and the Bronze Serpent.
The past, the origin and the roots of a story and a life are often essential resources to understanding how and where to continue that story and that life. Sometimes, however, in some rare and crucial phases of communities and institutions, the reference to the beginning can turn out to be a downright deadly trap. There are times when we would need to view the spirits of the past in the light of present experience; as often happens in families, where the sense of a painful event experienced by the grandfather reveals, three generations later, the luminous story of a nephew. A past is alive and life-giving if it also knows how to change, die and rise again in the present. In human affairs, sometimes the fruits contribute to regenerating the roots. During a process of reform in a community, institution or organization for example, the origin of a tradition, a rule, or a principle, is often not enough to understand its present and future purpose and meaning. We also need to look at today, at the current use made of it. When ethical reform is needed in a community or an institution, it is necessary to know which traditions of its origin are to be preserved and which would do better to be forgotten.
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The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians. And that superpower now also threatened the kingdom of the South, Judah, and the capital Jerusalem. In the meantime Hezekiah ascended the throne: «He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done» (2 Kings 18,3). Finally, after a long series of more or less corrupt and idolatrous kings, a just king arrives. His rectitude is manifested in his fight against idolatry and in the affirmation of the monotheism of YHWH, a subject very dear to the author of these historical books. In fact, «He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles» (2 Kings 18,4). Destroyed the "high places", that is the altars in ode to the various foreign gods placed in the high places (the infamous bamot, hated by all the prophets), and that the various predecessors, even the best, had failed to eliminate, evidently because they were revered and loved by the people (the people of the Mediterranean and the Middle East have always loved the "altarin", and still love them). Along with these, he also eliminated the ritual stelae (the massebot) and the sacred piles (the asere), symbols of fertility associated with the female divinity Asherah / Ishtar / Astarte, a very popular and venerated goddess in the area. But the most original element of Hezekiah's religious reform is another. Hezekiah «broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made» (2 Kings 18,4). The religious zeal of this king led him to destroy a relic, a sacred object that even went back to Moses, the icon of the Law and the Covenant with YHWH. Perhaps no name more than Moses evoked the name of YHWH on earth, no one was more of a symbol of cultural purity, of anti-idolatrous struggle (the golden calf), of the only true and different God than he was. Why then did Hezekiah destroy a documented object that directly evoked the memory of Moses, also linked to an important episode of the Exodus, part of the tradition and history of the liberation from Egypt?
That bronze serpent first made its appearance during a crisis of faith among the people, which had begun to murmur and miss the good food they received while in slavery. God punished them («Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died»). The people asked Moses to intervene and obtain forgiveness. Moses prayed and «the Lord said to Moses: "Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live"... Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived» (Numbers 21,6-9). Therefore, that bronze serpent was built by Moses following a precise word from God, it was a "sacrament" of a theophany and memory of an important stage in the history of salvation. An episode that has remained alive for centuries in the Jewish tradition, and which we also find in the New Testament, as an image of the crucifix: «Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him» (John 3,14-15). Yet Hezekiah, a just and faithful king, decides to destroy that serpent of Moses, extending his "creative destruction" of idols even to that blessed object, souvenir and memory of a blessed passage of history, built by the greatest prophet, shaped by his holy hands. We can imagine how much that snake was loved, how much the people worshiped it, how many prayers were recited at its feet by simple people in search of help and mercy. And in fact, the text also adds: «For up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. It was called Nehushtan» (2 Kings 18.4). And it is precisely in this veneration, in this burning incense and in giving it a name, that we find the explanation as to why Hezekiah eliminated it. When incense is burned in reverence to an object and, above all, a name is given to it, that object is no longer just a mere symbol, a memorial, an icon; that object with incense and a name has in fact become an idol. That bronze serpent had in time moved away from its original purpose and meaning, and its use had become, in fact, idolatrous.
The very origin of that serpent already had archaic elements that bordered on shamanic and magical practices. Healing - or trying to heal – people from evil, while using the image of the same evil as a medium (snake bite with the eyes of a snake) is an expression of a very ancient magic technique, called homeopathic (it takes one to cure one). That snake therefore had a complex and partly hybrid origin, perhaps learned in Egypt, where magical and divinatory practices were widely spread and of common use. We know that in the ancient history of Israel, the prophets (Samuel, Ezekiel) still retained some traces of archaic prophetism, the novelty of biblical prophecy had become intertwined with the practices of the soothsayers and the haruspex Canaanites, Assyrians and Babylonians. This object of Moses, the serpent, had therefore undergone an evolution over time, and as a relic of liberation, of Sinai and Exodus, it had since begun to live its own life. The bond with Moses, strong at the beginning, had given way to contamination with the Canaanite cults. And when Hezekiah arrived in the eighth century its transmutation turning into an idol was already complete. The greatness of this king was exceptional in actually finding the courage to associate that serpent of Moses with the stelae of Astarte and the altars of the other pagan gods. He would have met strong resistance among his own people, but if the text has wished to leave a small trace of this inconvenient fact for the editors (a king who destroys a relic of Moses), it is because this episode hides something important in the economy of biblical history - and in our "economy".
Moses had also had the Ark of the Covenant built, which in the time of Hezekiah was still kept in the temple of Jerusalem. The serpent of Moses was destroyed, but the Ark was not. Because, we deduce, the Ark had actually preserved its original meaning and use, it was both the memory and sacrament of the Covenant. According to tradition, it contained the Tablets of the Law, but these objects, unlike the serpent, had not become idols. And so, in Hezekiah's religious reformation, the Ark instead had to be preserved to keep the memory alive. The Ark was a symbol that spoke of just things, which correctly linked past and present, while constituting in essence a sign indicating the right way to go in that time of ethical and spiritual turning points. Not so the serpent. Although it had the same origin, its present could not reconnected in good conscience with the past. During the eighth century, the Moses of the serpent was altogether different from the Moses of the Ark, and Hezekiah had the wisdom and intelligence to understand it. This is a fundamental fact, which can tell us many things in times of reform and renewal of communities. In these crucial phases, everything depends on knowing how to distinguish the snake from the ark. A very difficult operation indeed, because both the ark to be preserved and the serpent to be destroyed were created by Moses himself; their origins are written in the same sacred books, they are both part of the history and words of the prophets. Communities begin a slow but inexorable decline when they become too attached to their origins without looking at the current meaning of their realities and their own people. A tradition should not be saved merely because it was created by the founder or a prophet. Because if the origin was excellent, but the use has become perverse, no reform is possible without the courage to destroy these traditions, objects, rules and values ​​from their holy origin, and remove those people who, while good in the beginning, have eventually lost themselves along the way.
The history of communities and movements in this regard, often show us rather dark scenarios. The most common cases are those in which, by absolutizing the origin, the communities end up keeping both the ark and the snake, and so with time the serpent devours the ark. This outcome is very common because the origin of the snake is guarded, together with the ark, as part of the intimate history of the community, and destroying them would be seen by the majority as a betrayal of their inheritance. Probably quite a few scribes and scholars would have reminded and read the passage of the writings of the miracle of Moses in the desert to Hezekiah, when he first communicated his decision to destroy the serpent. He was a just king because he prevented the past from killing the future. Other times, both the snake and the ark are destroyed instead. We feel the risk of idolatry as it has become a part of the origin, but not knowing exactly how or where, failing to distinguish it, we end up destroying all the past. Hence, losing contact even with the good origin (the Ark), leading to a slow death, like a plant without roots. But the worst death is that which occurs when communities, while reforming, end up keeping the snake and destroying the Ark. In this case we die believing that we are alive, because the community is not extinguished but is transformed into a community of worshipers of the serpent Nehushtan, convinced, often in good faith, that they are still worshiping the same God of their origin. In telling us the story of Hezekiah, the Bible tells us that another outcome is possible as well: we can save the Ark and destroy the snake. This is the most precious aspect in any reform process, the crucial talent of every true reformer. Hezekiah was a much loved king: «Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him; he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses» (2 Kings 18, 5-7). He was "faithful to the decrees of Moses" also because he had the strength to destroy his bronze serpent while keeping his Ark.
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Prophecy is history / 25 - Authentic justice is also preventing the past from killing the future
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  24/11/2019
"The bronze serpent at the time of Hezekiah no longer provided healing, indeed instead it caused damage: the values ​​of the past can do this, because no guarantee is given by God as to the things he has made use of from time to time".
Paolo De Benedetti, Hezekiah and the Bronze Serpent  
The art of any reform is to be able to understand which elements of the origins are to be saved and which are to be destroyed. Just like King Hezekiah knew what to do with the Ark and the Bronze Serpent.
The past, the origin and the roots of a story and a life are often essential resources to understanding how and where to continue that story and that life. Sometimes, however, in some rare and crucial phases of communities and institutions, the reference to the beginning can turn out to be a downright deadly trap. There are times when we would need to view the spirits of the past in the light of present experience; as often happens in families, where the sense of a painful event experienced by the grandfather reveals, three generations later, the luminous story of a nephew. A past is alive and life-giving if it also knows how to change, die and rise again in the present. In human affairs, sometimes the fruits contribute to regenerating the roots. During a process of reform in a community, institution or organization for example, the origin of a tradition, a rule, or a principle, is often not enough to understand its present and future purpose and meaning. We also need to look at today, at the current use made of it. When ethical reform is needed in a community or an institution, it is necessary to know which traditions of its origin are to be preserved and which would do better to be forgotten.
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    [title] => The name of the Ark is made of silver
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Prophecy is history / 23 - The same biblical word is used for both "chest" and the Ark of the Covenant
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 10/11/2019
In the words of Rabbi Schmelke: "The poor give the rich more than what the rich do not give to the poor. And more than a case of the poor needing the rich man, it is the rich man who needs the poor"
Martin Buber, Hasidic stories and legends.
There is no conflict between the act of giving a gift and drawing up a contract, money that has been invested, earned and spent honestly is no less noble than the offers in the temple. Only gifts and contracts together can begin to save us.
Trust in the honesty of the people around us is an essential resource of every economy and society. When the hypothesis of the honesty of others - which in the words of jurists is called good faith - inspires our relationships, the economy improves along with our well-being. Without this premise of honesty, anthropological mistrust and pessimism slowly begins to infest our workplaces and lives. No management can be subsidiary and delegate - that is, entrust the responsibility for the choices to be made to those who are closest to the actual work being carried out - if we are not able to think well of others until seeing evident (and repeated) proof to the contrary. Benevolence, thinking well of others, is the root of trust. It values ​​workers, makes them feel appreciated, strengthens trust in organizations and thus improves the effectiveness and efficiency of management.
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Once Athaliah was killed, Joash became king and proceeded to reign in Jerusalem for forty years. For the Bible, Joash was a just king and a reformer. He is presented to us as a restorer and reconstructor of the temple of Solomon: «Joash told the priests: “Let every priest receive the money from one of the treasurers, then use it to repair whatever damage is found in the temple"» (2 Re 12,5-6). Years go by, and despite the indications of Joash the temple is not repaired: «Therefore King Joash summoned Jehoiada the priest and the other priests and asked them, “Why aren’t you repairing the damage done to the temple? Take no more money from your treasurers, but hand it over for repairing the temple”. The priests agreed that they would not collect any more money from the people and that they would not repair the temple themselves"» (2 Kings 12,8).
A good management of an organizations understands, if possible in time before it is too late, when there is a conflict of interest among workers, and when individual incentives are not compatible with common goals. Due to their mentality and task (to manage the religious cult), those priests were objectively in a condition that led them to misuse the money they managed. The king, who proves that he is a wise man, does not continue to insist on a moral level by asking the priests to change; instead the organization changes, revisiting the objective and formal structure of the financing and the management of the repairing of the temple. Because when there is an objective incompatibility between the role and the incentive, continuing to insist on the moral aspect never proves to be effective and only serves to create frustration and conflict. What we need to do is to immediately change the objective organizational structure and remove people from inappropriate roles and tasks. Thus a cash reserve was created in the temple where the offerings were delivered, and the collection and administration of the funds passed under the concerted responsibility of the king and the high priest: «Jehoiada the priest took a chest and bored a hole in its lid. He placed it beside the altar, on the right side as one enters the temple of the Lord» (2 Kings 12,10). It is interesting to note that when the king's scribe and the high priest collected the silver deposited in the box (because it was full), "they melted the money found in the temple" (2 Kings 12:11). Here we find a reference to the economic functions of temples in antique times. The temple was not only the centre of the tax and welfare system; in certain historical periods metals were also fused in the temple to mint coins, thus acting as proto-banks.
In this passage we are hence treated to a live view of a certain level of laicization of the "temple factory" of Jerusalem. While it used to be entrusted directly to the priests, now it passes to those who directly carry out the work: the scribe and the high priest «gave the money to the men appointed to supervise the work on the temple» (2 Kings 12,12). The failure of the first solution - the priests used the offers of the people for urgencies and for the management of the religious cult and sacrifices - produced a "secular" reform where the workers and the technicians began manage the work on the temple: a first application of the principle of economic and managerial subsidiarity or delegation: «They distributed it to the carpenters and builders who worked in the temple of the Lord, to the masons, to the stonemasons, to purchase lumber and cut stones, to repair the damaged parts of the temple and for all that was necessary to repair the temple» (2 Kings 12,12-13). In this way they also avoided "tax" revenues to be used for improper purposes: «The money brought into the temple was not spent for making silver basins, wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, trumpets or any other articles of gold or silver for the temple of the Lord; it was paid to the workers, who used it to repair the temple» (2 Kings 12,13-15).
It is interesting to note the ethical evaluation that the text gives of this change: «They did not require an accounting from those to whom they gave the money to pay the workers, because they acted with complete honesty» (2 Kings 12,16). Very beautiful, this honesty. Delegating and bringing money management closer to those who use it for its specific purpose lead to reducing the costs of supervision («They did not require an accounting...») and thus improved the overall efficiency of that money. But first the king changed something essential in the organizational structure: for trust and honesty to be born and last, they must first be possible and sustainable. Too many relationships of trust and loyalty go awry for lack of organizational reforms. It is also significant that the word 'aron that the text uses to mean the chest placed in the temple to collect the offerings is the same word used for the Ark (of the Covenant), the most precious artefact of all, the one that contained the Tables of the Law, kept in the most intimate and sacred part of the temple, because it is a symbol of the pact with their different God. That case containing silver was placed inside the temple. This silver, made up of taxes and gifts (the offerings were also free), is not deemed unclean, it can enter the temple. The Bible knows that there is money that is "mammon", not because it in itself is a kind of idol (that would be too trivial), but because it gives the possessor the illusion of being a god (every sort of idolatry constitutes an illusion). The most terrible idol of all is actually our “I”. This money must not enter temples, because it is not a friend of God, nor is it a friend of man or of the poor.
But there is also another different kind of money. Money that has been donated, of course, but also the silver one has earned honestly. The silver of gifts is a friend of the silver of many merchants, because the fact that a contract is drawn up does not necessarily mean “killing” the gift. Many times, gifts and contracts go together hand in hand. When the Samaritan paid the hotel owner the two denarii to "take care" of the half-dead man, he was performing an act no less noble and spiritual than those who offered silver in the temple. And even the money we donate today in philanthropy is no more noble and spiritual than the money paid by an entrepreneur to a worker within a just and fair job contract. Civilizations flourish when the gift becomes an ally of the contract, and wither when those who give see those who work and produce wealth with disdain, even hatred, and rivalry. The Ark of the Covenant is not a bank vault, their essence is very different; but they come very close if that silver is born in honesty and is administered and invested ethically. Herein lies the secularity of faith and the spirituality of the economy. The last part of Joash's reign is marked by the Assyrian threat to Jerusalem. Joash, the new Solomon, had placed the restoration and care of the temple at the centre of his mission; now he is forced to carry out an act that seems to deny the meaning of his whole life: «Joash king of Judah took all the sacred objects dedicated by his predecessors—Jehoshaphat, Jehoram and Ahaziah, the kings of Judah - and the gifts he himself had dedicated and all the gold found in the treasuries of the temple of the Lord and of the royal palace, and he sent them to Hazael king of Aram, who then withdrew from Jerusalem» (2 Kings 12,18).
The temple is emptied of all the treasures accumulated by him and his predecessors. The Bible speaks to us of Joash almost exclusively in relation to the temple - he repaired it, as a child, he was consecrated king there, he was protected and educated there. His life, entirely devoted to the temple, ends with an empty temple. Another message about gratuitousness and the incompleteness of life, which we find in many pages of the Bible. A life is spent at the service of a specific work or deed which, by vocation and task, becomes the sense of our existence. And then, one day, that treasure kept and accumulated must be given away, and life seems to lose its meaning. A great metaphor of human existence, where the accumulated and cared for treasures must, bit by bit, eventually be returned to become free and poor; it is also a metaphor for every founder or community leader, who spends a first, long, part of his life repairing and increasing the treasure of the community, up to a day when he will have to restore everything, and finally live in chastity. But the story also tells us something else: that treasure saved Jerusalem from the Syrians, who satisfied by the treasure got up and left. Because, perhaps, the treasures that we guard and care for actually perform their best function not while accumulated and stored away, but when they are used to save someone else. If Joash had not kept those treasures he would not have been able to save his city at that decisive moment of his reign. We often see capital resources accumulated while making great sacrifices disappear in a short period of time devoured by lawyers, banks and suppliers; but, from a different and true perspective, maybe while disappearing those funds are really somehow saving us.
While the vicissitudes of Joash, king of Judah are taking place, the prophet Elisha returns to the scene in the northern kingdom one last time: «Elisha died and they buried him» (2 Kings 13,20). We had first met him as a young man leading twelve pairs of oxen. He was a wealthy young man. He was called upon by Elijah who threw his cloak over him. He became the first disciple of a prophet, then a prophet himself. He followed his calling to the end. Unlike Elijah, Elisha is not swept away into the heavens but dies, just like us, just like everyone else. But the Bible gives us a last scene to tell us that the prophets never die completely: «While some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet» (2 Kings 13,21). The bones of the prophets can make us rise again. Not always, and not all of us, have living prophets next to us to save us from our deaths. The Bible, however, has preserved the different words and the "bones" of the prophets alive. They are there, for everyone, for us. All you need to do is touch them to live again.
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Prophecy is history / 23 - The same biblical word is used for both "chest" and the Ark of the Covenant
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 10/11/2019
In the words of Rabbi Schmelke: "The poor give the rich more than what the rich do not give to the poor. And more than a case of the poor needing the rich man, it is the rich man who needs the poor"
Martin Buber, Hasidic stories and legends.
There is no conflict between the act of giving a gift and drawing up a contract, money that has been invested, earned and spent honestly is no less noble than the offers in the temple. Only gifts and contracts together can begin to save us.
Trust in the honesty of the people around us is an essential resource of every economy and society. When the hypothesis of the honesty of others - which in the words of jurists is called good faith - inspires our relationships, the economy improves along with our well-being. Without this premise of honesty, anthropological mistrust and pessimism slowly begins to infest our workplaces and lives. No management can be subsidiary and delegate - that is, entrust the responsibility for the choices to be made to those who are closest to the actual work being carried out - if we are not able to think well of others until seeing evident (and repeated) proof to the contrary. Benevolence, thinking well of others, is the root of trust. It values ​​workers, makes them feel appreciated, strengthens trust in organizations and thus improves the effectiveness and efficiency of management.
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Prophecy is history / 21 - No one can force God to be less human than the best fathers and mothers
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 27/10/2019
«A purely sacrificial theory of the gospels must be based on the epistle to the Jews. But the Epistle does not succeed, I believe, in grasping the true singularity of Christ's passion, and the absolute specificity of Christianity remains veiled in shadows»
René Girard, The scapegoat
The relationship between religion and violence is a great theme of the Bible and of life, which touches on extremely topical subjects such as meritocracy and the theology of atonement.
The ideology of merit is also an ideology of demerit, the systems that reward the deserving must by definition also punish those who are undeserving or with no merit, and every merit-based creed is also fundamentally a demerit-phobia. Without punishing those who deserve to be punished, it is impossible to reward those who have earned the reward. But since we are much more capable of finding faults (in others) than merits, meritocratic systems tend to overflow with penalties and punishment, because at the base of every merit system there is a deep anthropological pessimism, even when masked by beautiful words about virtues and awards. Because by rewarding only the "winners" and those who reach the summit of the mountain (meritocracy is hierarchical and positional by default), we forget that we are all deserving in different ways, that every person can have, and has, a way of excellence that cannot and must not be compared hierarchically with those of others nor measured with the same unique indicators for all.
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It is certainly no coincidence that the growth of the culture of business, the first vehicle of meritocracy, is today accompanied by a new season of justicialism and harsher penalties. «And Elisha the prophet called one of the children of the prophets, and said unto him, Gird up thy loins, and take this box of oil in thine hand, and go to Ramothgilead: And when thou comest thither, look out there Jehu the son of Jehoshaphat (…) Then take the box of oil, and pour it on his head, and say, Thus saith the Lord, I have anointed thee king over Israel"» (2 Kings 9,1-3).
Joram reigned over Israel. Elisha recognizes and legitimizes an insurrection, and consecrates and encourages what we would call a coup d'état today, which the text presents as a Yahwist and anti-idolatrous religious reform. The saga of Jehu, marked by scenes of brutal violence, forces us to reflect on a great theme that runs through the whole Bible: the relationship between religion and violence; and the paradox of a God who seems to use the violence of men to carry out his plan of salvation. In order to fulfil one of Elijah’s prophecies (1 Kings 19,16), Elisha sends his disciple to consecrate one of Israel's most cynical and bloodthirsty kings, giving his blessing to a man who, in order to restore the purity of the worship of YHWH in Israel, is prepared to stain himself with monstrous crimes, in "the name of the Lord". The radical need for divine justice that marks the whole Bible - YHWH is a different and true God because for he is just - brings with it a symmetrical law of retaliation where everyone receives what they deserve, for better or for worse. God is just because he rewards the good and punishes the bad.
This is how men began to form that sense of justice which eventually led to the writing of codes and constitutions that went on to supersede the humanity in many of the laws written in the Bible and in other sacred books. The Bible has been used to justify the holy and genocidal wars of infidels and idolaters, there are many biblical pages that lend themselves perfectly to this end. And so at the end of the Jehu saga we read: «The Lord said to Jehu, “Because you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all I had in mind to do, your descendants will sit on the throne of Israel to the fourth generation”» (2 Kings 10,30). Doing what is right in my eyes: that is, the murder of Joram, of Ahaziah king of Judah, of Queen Jezebel, the seventy beheaded children of Ahab, the extermination of all the relatives of Ahaziah, of all the faithful in Joram in Samaria, of all the faithful of Baal.
There are two other themes that intersect these terrible chapters: shalom and erroneous loyalty. In chapter nine, the word shalom appears repeatedly. When Jehu leaves to visit King Joram, who at that time was in Israel to get treatment for his wounds. As soon as the king sees him, he asks him: «Have you come in peace, Jehu?» That is: Jehu, do you bring shalom? Jehu answered him «How can there be peace, as long as all the idolatry and witchcraft of your mother Jezebel abound?» (2 Kings 9,22). What was shalom in biblical culture? In Hebrew shalom is a very rich and meaningful word. The first and most immediate meaning is peace, well-being, prosperity, good. But the word also refers to balance, to re-establishing a broken order, so that some variants (shulam and meshulam) also recall the act of paying. Peace and paying have a common root. Paying comes from pacifying, from making peace, bringing quiet - the receipt is the act that attests that the creditor has been fully satisfied. Indeed, shalom incorporates an idea of ​​justice as repairing, as the repayment and extinction of a debt and its inherit imbalance. There can be no shalom as long as one side feels an imbalance to his or her disadvantage. That is why contracts, the extinctions of debts, are signed with a handshake of peace, of shalom.
The blood stained story of Jehu runs along this line and meaning of shalom: he was chosen by YHWH and his prophets to restore balance in Israel, to make the idolatrous kings and their families "pay" for their sins, and hence do shalom. To the question of shalom, Jehu must answer: how can there be shalom as long as the king's mother, Jezebel, continues her idolatry? To have shalom we need to restore the balance broken by religious corruption. It is this shalom of the economic-retributive religion that characterizes many biblical pages: debts and credits, payments and collections, put on record and then registered as settled by an accountant God who records everything, for more than a thousand generations. And it is within this logic that we need to read the grim episode of the assassination of Queen Jezebel as well. We already met her before in the episode about her persecution of the prophets of YHWH and about the vineyard of Naboth. It is no coincidence that, after having killed Joram with an arrow, Jehu orders his soldier: «Lift him up and throw him into the field that belonged to Naboth the Jezreelite» (2 Kings 9,25). Justice to Naboth is done, shalom is restored. In order for Naboth to have justice a price needs to be paid, which can only be in the shape of more blood, this time flowing in the opposite direction. The same goes for the execution of Queen Jezebel, the true author of that crime: «Then Jehu went to Jezreel. When Jezebel heard about it, she put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked out of a window (…) Jehu looked up at the window and called out, “Who is on my side? Who?” Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. “Throw her down!” Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot» (2 Kings 9,30-33). Naboth's bloodshed is appeased (shalom) by the blood of the queen who had had him unjustly killed. As if, today or in the past, the blood of an unjust man could wash away the one spilled by an innocent.
This episode, sad and full of pietas - the detail regarding the queen, no longer young, who applies make-up to prepare for the meeting that she knows to be decisive, as if she wanted to arrive still beautiful and pleasing to the appointment with death, is touching: we see it many times, in homes and hospitals, and they are always very human images -, enables us enter, albeit quickly, into the other theme of this narrative cycle: erroneous loyalty. Those two or three courtiers realise that the political winds are changing. They are the very image of the sycophant collaborators, who have no qualms about throwing the queen out of the window, and making their horses trample on who they had been flattering up to mere seconds before. The same theme returns in Jehu’s other tremendous gesture. «Now there were in Samaria seventy sons of the house of Ahab. So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria: to the officials of Jezreel, to the elders and to the guardians of Ahab’s children» (2 Kings 10,1). In the second letter, Jehu wrote: «If you are on my side and will obey me, take the heads of your master’s sons and come to me in Jezreel by this time tomorrow» (2 Kings 10,6). The Hebrew word for "chief" is the same word that used for "head". In their uncertainty, instead of interpreting the words in the most human way and bringing those seventy child princes to the new king, those chiefs of Samaria chose to do the opposite «When the letter arrived, these men took the princes and slaughtered all seventy of them. They put their heads in baskets and sent them to Jehu in Jezreel» (2 Kings 10,7). Another example of a rotten sort of loyalty: to please their new cruel ruler, his words are interpreted in their cruellest sense. This excess in malice is seen as a sign of loyalty and devotion, with the hope of creating a debt of gratitude within him to be used to their benefit - even when he seems to be acting for the benefit of his boss, a sycophant really always acts in his own interest. But Jehu does not understand this excessive and extreme gesture of theirs: "Who killed all these?" (2 Kings 10,9). Sycophants are not even truly valued by the leaders they worship; they use and make use of them, but they neither love nor value them.
Men have always tried to associate God with their economic calculations, with their shalom of costs and rewards. He has been called the "Lord of armies" many times, and we continue to call him that, even when that god no longer lives in heaven but has just become a person or idea. We have an immeasurable need for symmetry, for penalties that can help to recreate the broken order. We need it, but our need has produced theologies and religions that have forced God to become less human than the best men and women. One day, however, that same biblical humanism generated a different man, who taught us a different kind of shalom, no longer linked to payments and costs, a kingdom where peace is not born out of balance but of imbalance, where those who are wronged do not seek vengeance but instead forgive seventy seven times over, where love does not compensate debts and credits but always creates new ones. A different shalom, a different kingdom, a different agape-love. We, however, did everything we could to bring them back into the realm and rules of our balances and payments, to the point of recounting that his death was the price paid by that different Son to a Father who could only be satisfied by that precious blood, as only the blood of a child can be. Theologies of atonement that have forgotten that on earth no father wants the blood of his children, and that heaven is at least as beautiful a place as earth if the heavenly father is no less good than we are. When Jesus allowed us to call God "Our Father" he was also telling us that in order to understand and know God we must learn to look at our mothers and fathers.
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Prophecy is history / 21 - No one can force God to be less human than the best fathers and mothers
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 27/10/2019
«A purely sacrificial theory of the gospels must be based on the epistle to the Jews. But the Epistle does not succeed, I believe, in grasping the true singularity of Christ's passion, and the absolute specificity of Christianity remains veiled in shadows»
René Girard, The scapegoat
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Prophecy is history/19 - True prophets and masters carry the heavy loads to save others from having to bear them
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 13/10/2019
"And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed - only Naaman the Syrian"
 Luke 4, 27
This blessing of a stranger with leprosy leaves us with important words regarding the logic of gifts but also regarding the choices made by those who live "in the land of exile". But the story of the "salvation granted to the Syrians" now in our world today also becomes a prayer...
Servant. Servus, that is, a slave. We read about and encounter many servants also in the Bible. For ancient-time writers these words were just ordinary words of life, because servants and slaves were a normal part of their world. But not so for us. We cannot just come upon these words and move on. Like the Samaritan we must stop and feel mercy and then bow down. We are witnesses and the heirs of millennia of love and pain trying to eliminate these words from our vocabulary and our heart - but we have not yet succeeded, not completely and not everywhere. And the Bible has helped us to erase them, these words that it wrote itself.
«Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy» (2 Re 5,1). With the story of Naaman, a prominent man among the Syrian people, we encounter one of the passages in which the Bible surpasses itself. YHWH had granted salvation to the Syrians, to a different people and an enemy of Israel. In a historical period still dominated by the idea of ​​national gods, by ethnic religion, pages were being written in Israel announcing a universal and inclusive religion. Its people began to understand that their prayers could become true if they also became the prayers of others; that their God could be "our Father" only if that "our" reached out and included everyone.
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Naaman is a sick man, he is a leper. When we encounter a leper in the Bible, our heart immediately leaps to the Gospels, and then resumes its way all the way to the Sanctuary of Rivotorto in Assisi. There it finds Francis and his kiss for the leper, which marks a decisive stage in his life and in the spiritual history of Europe. This is the Bible: an ethical and spiritual journey through time and within man, which begins and begins once again on each and every page. «Now bands of raiders from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy”» (2 Kings 5,2-3). Naaman believes his servant and speaks of it to his king, who writes him a letter of introduction to the king of Israel. And Naaman departs with the letter in his hand: «The King of Israel tore his robes and said, “Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!”» (2 Kings 5, 6-7). The two kings do not understand each other. The logic of the powerful was not able to intercept the conversation between a servant girl, a sick person and a prophet - how many wars and sources of pain would we have been spared if we reasoned more like girls, like the sick and like the prophets!
But Elisha sent word to the king: «“Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel”» (2 Kings 5,8). Naaman the Syrian goes to Elisha, who sends him an assistant who tells him: « “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed”» (2 Kings 5,10). But Naaman considers this solution too simple. Had he made that whole journey just to dive into a river? Where are the healer's rites, gestures, words and hands? Naaman protests against this too simple a solution. On the basis of what happened with the healers of his country, he had his own idea of ​​the procedure to be followed for his healing, and he refused the one offered by Elisha because it just seemed too ordinary. It is not rare that we refuse to solve a problem because it seems too simple. We do not see the solution because we are too busy looking for it in special effects and extraordinary phenomena (2 Kings 5,11). But here too, other servants bring a blessing: «Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!”» (2 Kings 5,12-13). It is the common sense of the humble, who know how to see easy solutions when the "great" look for complicated non-existent solutions. Naaman heals: «So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy» (2 Kings 5,14). It is from this healing that he begins his religious conversion: «Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel. So please accept a gift from your servant”» (2 Kings 5,15).
Naaman, a rich man, wishes to give Elisha a gift as a sign of gratitude and blessing: «The prophet answered, “As surely as the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will not accept a thing.” And even though Naaman urged him, he refused» (2 Kings 5,16). In another different river (the Jabbok), the (not healed) wound generated a blessing (berakà). Here the wound is healed, but the healer does not accept the blessing. Why this rejection? Elisha marks the beginning of a new form of prophecy, a spiritual one, in a Middle Eastern context where prophetism was a trade, intertwined with earnings and trade. Here Elisha clearly wishes to stand out from the commercial prophecy practiced by the "sons of the prophets". His prophecy is all about grace, charis and gratuitousness. He did not heal others for personal interests, but because of his calling. Like all gifts, even prophecy exists in relationships characterised by reciprocity. However, especially in the beginning, when a discontinuity needs to be marked (the beginning of a calling, the birth of a new relationship, a new reality being founded ...) reciprocity, which is necessary in any ordinary relationship, can turn out to be an obstacle, because, although different, its giving-and-receiving nature makes it seem too much like a commercial contract. Thus, in certain foundational and extraordinary moments, the gift tells itself by saying no to the normal reciprocity that almost always accompanies it. It says "no" in order to then say "yes" to something deeper; because if there can be true gifts even without reciprocity, there can be no true gift without gratuitousness. Like when we give our first gift to someone that we care a lot for and we don't want any other reward than the joy in their eyes when they look at us gratefully, because “anything else” would reduce the purity and beauty of that gift of ours. Hence, in order to express that his prophecy is everything and only grace Elisha renounces reciprocity.
«“If you will not,” said Naaman, “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the Lord» (2 Kings 5,17). That "no" to that gift generated other gifts. With an interesting and unexpected detail: Naaman gets a refusal from Elisha, and that refusal still makes him ask for something else (earth: the adamah). Here a gift without reciprocity produces another gift from those who were already "creditors". And not just for reasons of worship (to build an altar). These strange things are common in the social dynamics of giving, where the "debt" created by a gift is not returned with a counter-gift but with a new gift from those who had already given. If this were not the case, life would be too much like a market, and we would miss some of the most beautiful moral accomplishments of men and women. This logic behind the concept of gifts completely escapes Gehazi, Elisha's servant, who ends up pursuing Naaman in order to, through deceit, obtain part of the gifts that were refused by Elisha (2 Kings 5,20-27). Before taking leave of Elisha, Naaman tells him something that opens up a new horizon for us: «When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I have to bow there also» (2 Kings 5,18). Naaman was a senior official in Syria and in order to carry out his work he had to accompany the king to the temple of the god Rimmon. Now that he has converted, can he carry on with this duty? How can he reconcile his new faith with his old craft? Naaman feels he is trapped in a game of double loyalty: on the one hand that of his work, his ordinary life and his homeland, and loyalty to his new faith on the other. Now that he knows that Rimmon is not the true God, he wants to honour only YHWH and YHWH alone; but his life continues to unfold in the same social context as before.
Through history there have been several different solutions to this conflict. Some feel that the second new loyalty is not compatible with the first. They leave jobs, countries, families, and completely change their religious and civil life. The two different loyalties are reduced into a single one. Here Elisha instead give a surprising answer: «Shalom, go in peace,” Elisha said» (2 Kings 5,19). What? Is the prophet, the champion of extreme coherence at all cost, really telling this new convert not to worry about his double loyalty? The more a person is consistent with his or her values ​​and principles, the more tolerant he is to the choices of others. Their own coherence does not become a yoke to put onto others. Instead, it is often the self-appointed "experts of the law" and "scribes" who impose burdens onto others that they would never carry themselves. True prophets are masters of mercy, of humanity, of compassion, and gladly carry the heavy load so as not to have it brought onto others. They drag the cross themselves, while expressing words of love to other crucifixes and crucified.
Prophets do not give in an inch to compromises in their own lives, but they also know that the men and women who work because they have to send their children to school, must live among many double loyalties in their lives. They have to work in banks, in offices and in companies that are not always as their God would like them to be, and sometimes they have to bow down to false gods along with their bosses and leaders. While wondering every day: how to live as a faithful in a "foreign land"? Men and women who know that what they do is not the life they want and should lead, maybe they are looking for new jobs, which almost never arrive; and as long as they have to work in those banks and in those companies they can only try to work well, as best as they can, while meekly offering their "masters" their arm. Yet, they carry on every day in the name of that spiritual loyalty which is the same loyalty they harbour for that family that they must take care of with their wages. To all these people who do not have the possibility to choose the banks and companies they work for, to all these faithful in exile, Elisha and the Bible repeat again and again: "Shalom, go in peace", inhabit this double loyalty. Finally, it is particularly beautiful and moving that our commentary on the Book of Kings led us to encounter the blessing of a Syrian today, to read that God «granted salvation to the Syrians». May this phrase become a prayer.
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Prophecy is history/19 - True prophets and masters carry the heavy loads to save others from having to bear them
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 13/10/2019
"And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed - only Naaman the Syrian"
 Luke 4, 27
This blessing of a stranger with leprosy leaves us with important words regarding the logic of gifts but also regarding the choices made by those who live "in the land of exile". But the story of the "salvation granted to the Syrians" now in our world today also becomes a prayer...
Servant. Servus, that is, a slave. We read about and encounter many servants also in the Bible. For ancient-time writers these words were just ordinary words of life, because servants and slaves were a normal part of their world. But not so for us. We cannot just come upon these words and move on. Like the Samaritan we must stop and feel mercy and then bow down. We are witnesses and the heirs of millennia of love and pain trying to eliminate these words from our vocabulary and our heart - but we have not yet succeeded, not completely and not everywhere. And the Bible has helped us to erase them, these words that it wrote itself.
«Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy» (2 Re 5,1). With the story of Naaman, a prominent man among the Syrian people, we encounter one of the passages in which the Bible surpasses itself. YHWH had granted salvation to the Syrians, to a different people and an enemy of Israel. In a historical period still dominated by the idea of ​​national gods, by ethnic religion, pages were being written in Israel announcing a universal and inclusive religion. Its people began to understand that their prayers could become true if they also became the prayers of others; that their God could be "our Father" only if that "our" reached out and included everyone.
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Prophecy is history/17 - A firstborn is not enough, spiritual legacy requires a whole community
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 29/09/2019
«The angel of death complained to the Lord, because the translation of Elijah would unleash protests from all other human beings who cannot defeat death/em>»
Zohar, The book of splendor (Il libro dello splendore)
The disappearance of Elijah on the chariot of fire and the beginning of the cycle of Elisha reveals an essential dimension of prophecy and of its continuity: everyone is a gift, father and disciple alike.
The calling of a prophet is a mysterious event. Generally the prophet is called upon directly by God, his calling takes place within a theophany, sometimes accompanied by visions of angels and voices. This is, however, not always the case. There are authentic prophets who never heard the voice of God calling them by name, who never saw the angels. They merely heard a "whisper of silence", or the cry of the poor - and got up and got on their way. Other times, it’s another prophet who calls to them. There they were by the shores of the Sea of ​​Galilee, bringing in their nets. A different kind of man passed by, perhaps a prophet, and called to them, and they left the sea to become travellers on land. Elisha was also called upon by Elijah. Unlike Isaiah and Ezekiel, the disciples of the Nazarene and Elisha did not see the open skies. They saw a man, they heard only the voice of a man, and that human voice contained everything they needed to compel them to get up and leave everything behind. These are the typical callings of the prophets to the disciples, where the calling begins with a human voice. Sometimes the voice of God is added to the voice of the prophet; other times not, there is nothing but the voice of a man, of a woman. Elisha knew that Elijah was a prophet of the Lord, he knew that by following Elijah he would also follow God, but Elijah was the one who called him, not Elijah’s God. Elisha needed that human voice in order to be able to leave everything and start a new life. A calling that has been repeated many times through history, a calling that is renewed every day, when faith takes the form of trust in a human voice.
«So Elijah went from there [from Mount Horeb], and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah» (1 Kings, 19-20). Prophetic sequelae are fast. Elisha is called upon while he is ploughing, hence while he is all dusty, sweaty, with muddy feet. That’s where his calling reaches him. As an economist, and therefore an observer and lover of work and business, I always feel a thrill when I come across one of the many biblical scenes where the calling happens in a workplace. "While in the boat they were repairing the nets", "Word of Amos, who was a breeder of sheep". In the Bible there is no more "religious" place for callings than a ploughed field, there are no more sacred objects than a yoke of oxen, because in vocational liturgies even the smell of manure can be sweet incense. Herein lies one of the deepest roots of biblical humanism, which freed the voice of Elohim from the boundaries of the mere sacred and religious. And so, on 10 September 1946, that same freed voice was able to call out to Anjezë on a train between Calcutta and Darjeeling. In that dusty and profane means of transport "Mother Teresa" was born: that voice did not wait for the young nun to arrive at the spiritual retreat where she was going; it did not see the chapel of that centre as a more suitable place than a train car in order call out to her.
Elijah passes by Elisha and throws his cloak over him. In that world, the cloak or mantle was the first sign of a prophet, but it was also something more. At the beginning of the Second Book of Kings, Elijah is also recognized by Ahaziah, Ahab’s successor, from his mantle: «“What kind of man was it who came to meet you and told you this?” They replied, “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.” The king said, “That was Elijah the Tishbite”» (2 Kings 1,7-8).
There are many stories involving cloaks in the Bible. The sons of Noah covered their drunken father’s state of undress with his cloak; the Law of Moses demands that an insolvent debtor’s cloak, taken from him as a token, should be restored to him before the evening; David finds Saul and instead of killing him he only cuts off a corner of his cloak; and it was a scarlet mantle that was thrown over Jesus in front of Pilate, at the beginning of his passion: Ecce Homo not only had a tunic, he also had the cloak - both received, both donated. «When the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; the Lord has sent me to Bethel.” But Elisha said, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you”» (2 Kings 2,1-2). Elijah tries to leave Elisha three times (in Jericho and by the Jordan), but Elisha stops him. In these lines we seem to re-read the wonderful dialogue between Naomi and Ruth or between Jesus and Peter on love and the flock.
During his first ventures into the desert, Elijah had managed to be by himself. When he took refuge, tired and frightened, in the shade of the broom tree, before leaving he had left his "servant" in Beersheba, and he was left on his own (1 Kings 19). Now, as he inches closer to his "death", Elisha does not leave him alone. Here we have a decisive difference between a servant and a disciple. The servant obeys, he does not argue, he does not protest. Not so the disciple, he cannot: «As surely as the Lord lives and as you live». In certain decisive tests - like this last one - the prophets would like to be alone. They are pulled within their souls into a mysterious whirlwind of pain and love. In some journeys we all seek solitude, but our natural affections often work as the precious antidote needed to prevent us from sinking indefinitely into solitude. The prophets do not have these natural antidotes-gifts. But the disciples can become one, as long as they remain disciples and do not become servants. If a prophet is only surrounded by "servants", he will find himself facing these nights without any real fraternity or companionship, immersed in a non-necessary pain that adds to the considerable inevitable pain. The disciple also brings this kind of extreme companionship to the prophet, a tenacious presence that follows the prophet in places where no one else could go. That is why, if the prophet is a great gift for the disciple, perhaps the greatest on earth, the disciple is also a gift to the prophet, perhaps the greatest one there is.
In this strange flight of Elijah’s, in this last mile of his in companionship, a company of mysterious "sons of the prophets" make their appearance and speak with Elisha: «The company of the prophets at Bethel came out to Elisha and asked, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?” “Yes, I know,” Elisha replied, “so be quiet!”» (2 Kings 2,3).
These "sons of prophets" were communities of prophets, who lived on the outskirts of the cities, often in sanctuaries. It is probable that Elisha also lived in one of these communities and was one of the "sons". He too therefore "knows" what awaits him, but Elisha does not want to listen to the information or the tale: "be quiet". Perhaps the sons of the prophets suggested that he should respect Elijah’s desire-command to be left alone. But Elisha is different. He too was part of a community of sons, but while remaining a son and therefore a brother, Elisha is also the disciple and the heir. And indeed, «Fifty men from the company of the prophets went and stood at a distance, facing the place where Elijah and Elisha had stopped at the Jordan» (2 Kings 2,7). The sons of the prophets stop at the threshold, the disciple continues the journey. And the last meeting between Elijah and Elisha unfolds around on the concept of legacy. «When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?” “Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,” Elisha replied"» (2 Kings 2,9). The double portion was the part of the inheritance that passed from a father to his firstborn. Elisha is asking to be Elijah’s heir - no less! Elijah answers: «“You have asked a difficult thing,” Elijah said, “yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours - otherwise, it will not”» (2 Kings 2,10). It is a difficult thing, but possible if he is able to look Elijah in the eyes as he fades away. The possibility of becoming Elijah's first-born heir depends on Elisha's ability to hold his gaze to the very end, his ability to resist in the face of his passing.
«As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”» (2 Kings 2,11-12). Elisha sees this and cries out, “My father!” Elisha is the son, the heir. He watched and saw to the end. The heir must know how to face the passing of the prophet. And then become the father, collect the inheritance. In the ancient world, an inheritance only became effective after the death of the father. Elisha can become Elijah’s heir if he accepts his "death". He must accept that the father will disappear, become an adult, and continue the race. Every prophetic calling in adult age begins by accepting the death of the father. Elisha becomes the heir and prophet himself in the very same moment in which he succeeds looking straight into the face of Elijah’s disappearance, until the very end. But the first and perhaps the only effort of the disciple-son of a prophet is to become a father and a prophet himself, while always remaining a disciple and a son as well. And here we discover something important in the relationship between prophet-disciple-heir. Elisha asks to become the heir. Sometimes a prophetic inheritance can be asked and given, it can be the fruit of an interior calling within the heir - it is what often happens in the case of reformers of communities. But what matters most is that the inheritance regards the spirit. Elisha does not ask for Elijah’s cloak: he asks for his spirit. The cloak does not make the prophet; it is the spirit that makes him the heir of the prophet and therefore a prophet himself. What we are seeing here is a revolution of biblical prophecy. After Elisha, prophecy continued to exist as a profession, as a social status marked by wearing a mantle. But now, alongside institutional prophecy a new prophecy begins, one centred on the spirit, which will mark a new and extraordinary season, that of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
There is one last thing, however. The whole spirit does not pass to the heir. The inheritance is only two thirds of the whole. In the age of spiritual prophecy, the firstborn who picks up the mantle of the prophet does not inherit the full spirit of the founder. He may receive a double portion, but not the full price. The heir of the prophet no longer has the whole spirit. He has a part, a good sizeable part, but not the whole, because part of the inheritance passes to other heirs, to the other "sons" or "children" of the prophet. The heir of the prophets is firstborn, but he is not an only child. After the passing of the prophet, no man alone can possess the whole spirit. The whole community is needed to inherit all three thirds.
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Prophecy is history/17 - A firstborn is not enough, spiritual legacy requires a whole community
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 29/09/2019
«The angel of death complained to the Lord, because the translation of Elijah would unleash protests from all other human beings who cannot defeat death/em>»
Zohar, The book of splendor (Il libro dello splendore)
The disappearance of Elijah on the chariot of fire and the beginning of the cycle of Elisha reveals an essential dimension of prophecy and of its continuity: everyone is a gift, father and disciple alike.
The calling of a prophet is a mysterious event. Generally the prophet is called upon directly by God, his calling takes place within a theophany, sometimes accompanied by visions of angels and voices. This is, however, not always the case. There are authentic prophets who never heard the voice of God calling them by name, who never saw the angels. They merely heard a "whisper of silence", or the cry of the poor - and got up and got on their way. Other times, it’s another prophet who calls to them. There they were by the shores of the Sea of ​​Galilee, bringing in their nets. A different kind of man passed by, perhaps a prophet, and called to them, and they left the sea to become travellers on land. Elisha was also called upon by Elijah. Unlike Isaiah and Ezekiel, the disciples of the Nazarene and Elisha did not see the open skies. They saw a man, they heard only the voice of a man, and that human voice contained everything they needed to compel them to get up and leave everything behind. These are the typical callings of the prophets to the disciples, where the calling begins with a human voice. Sometimes the voice of God is added to the voice of the prophet; other times not, there is nothing but the voice of a man, of a woman. Elisha knew that Elijah was a prophet of the Lord, he knew that by following Elijah he would also follow God, but Elijah was the one who called him, not Elijah’s God. Elisha needed that human voice in order to be able to leave everything and start a new life. A calling that has been repeated many times through history, a calling that is renewed every day, when faith takes the form of trust in a human voice.
«So Elijah went from there [from Mount Horeb], and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah» (1 Kings, 19-20). Prophetic sequelae are fast. Elisha is called upon while he is ploughing, hence while he is all dusty, sweaty, with muddy feet. That’s where his calling reaches him. As an economist, and therefore an observer and lover of work and business, I always feel a thrill when I come across one of the many biblical scenes where the calling happens in a workplace. "While in the boat they were repairing the nets", "Word of Amos, who was a breeder of sheep". In the Bible there is no more "religious" place for callings than a ploughed field, there are no more sacred objects than a yoke of oxen, because in vocational liturgies even the smell of manure can be sweet incense. Herein lies one of the deepest roots of biblical humanism, which freed the voice of Elohim from the boundaries of the mere sacred and religious. And so, on 10 September 1946, that same freed voice was able to call out to Anjezë on a train between Calcutta and Darjeeling. In that dusty and profane means of transport "Mother Teresa" was born: that voice did not wait for the young nun to arrive at the spiritual retreat where she was going; it did not see the chapel of that centre as a more suitable place than a train car in order call out to her.
Elijah passes by Elisha and throws his cloak over him. In that world, the cloak or mantle was the first sign of a prophet, but it was also something more. At the beginning of the Second Book of Kings, Elijah is also recognized by Ahaziah, Ahab’s successor, from his mantle: «“What kind of man was it who came to meet you and told you this?” They replied, “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.” The king said, “That was Elijah the Tishbite”» (2 Kings 1,7-8).
There are many stories involving cloaks in the Bible. The sons of Noah covered their drunken father’s state of undress with his cloak; the Law of Moses demands that an insolvent debtor’s cloak, taken from him as a token, should be restored to him before the evening; David finds Saul and instead of killing him he only cuts off a corner of his cloak; and it was a scarlet mantle that was thrown over Jesus in front of Pilate, at the beginning of his passion: Ecce Homo not only had a tunic, he also had the cloak - both received, both donated. «When the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; the Lord has sent me to Bethel.” But Elisha said, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you”» (2 Kings 2,1-2). Elijah tries to leave Elisha three times (in Jericho and by the Jordan), but Elisha stops him. In these lines we seem to re-read the wonderful dialogue between Naomi and Ruth or between Jesus and Peter on love and the flock.
During his first ventures into the desert, Elijah had managed to be by himself. When he took refuge, tired and frightened, in the shade of the broom tree, before leaving he had left his "servant" in Beersheba, and he was left on his own (1 Kings 19). Now, as he inches closer to his "death", Elisha does not leave him alone. Here we have a decisive difference between a servant and a disciple. The servant obeys, he does not argue, he does not protest. Not so the disciple, he cannot: «As surely as the Lord lives and as you live». In certain decisive tests - like this last one - the prophets would like to be alone. They are pulled within their souls into a mysterious whirlwind of pain and love. In some journeys we all seek solitude, but our natural affections often work as the precious antidote needed to prevent us from sinking indefinitely into solitude. The prophets do not have these natural antidotes-gifts. But the disciples can become one, as long as they remain disciples and do not become servants. If a prophet is only surrounded by "servants", he will find himself facing these nights without any real fraternity or companionship, immersed in a non-necessary pain that adds to the considerable inevitable pain. The disciple also brings this kind of extreme companionship to the prophet, a tenacious presence that follows the prophet in places where no one else could go. That is why, if the prophet is a great gift for the disciple, perhaps the greatest on earth, the disciple is also a gift to the prophet, perhaps the greatest one there is.
In this strange flight of Elijah’s, in this last mile of his in companionship, a company of mysterious "sons of the prophets" make their appearance and speak with Elisha: «The company of the prophets at Bethel came out to Elisha and asked, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?” “Yes, I know,” Elisha replied, “so be quiet!”» (2 Kings 2,3).
These "sons of prophets" were communities of prophets, who lived on the outskirts of the cities, often in sanctuaries. It is probable that Elisha also lived in one of these communities and was one of the "sons". He too therefore "knows" what awaits him, but Elisha does not want to listen to the information or the tale: "be quiet". Perhaps the sons of the prophets suggested that he should respect Elijah’s desire-command to be left alone. But Elisha is different. He too was part of a community of sons, but while remaining a son and therefore a brother, Elisha is also the disciple and the heir. And indeed, «Fifty men from the company of the prophets went and stood at a distance, facing the place where Elijah and Elisha had stopped at the Jordan» (2 Kings 2,7). The sons of the prophets stop at the threshold, the disciple continues the journey. And the last meeting between Elijah and Elisha unfolds around on the concept of legacy. «When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?” “Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,” Elisha replied"» (2 Kings 2,9). The double portion was the part of the inheritance that passed from a father to his firstborn. Elisha is asking to be Elijah’s heir - no less! Elijah answers: «“You have asked a difficult thing,” Elijah said, “yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours - otherwise, it will not”» (2 Kings 2,10). It is a difficult thing, but possible if he is able to look Elijah in the eyes as he fades away. The possibility of becoming Elijah's first-born heir depends on Elisha's ability to hold his gaze to the very end, his ability to resist in the face of his passing.
«As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”» (2 Kings 2,11-12). Elisha sees this and cries out, “My father!” Elisha is the son, the heir. He watched and saw to the end. The heir must know how to face the passing of the prophet. And then become the father, collect the inheritance. In the ancient world, an inheritance only became effective after the death of the father. Elisha can become Elijah’s heir if he accepts his "death". He must accept that the father will disappear, become an adult, and continue the race. Every prophetic calling in adult age begins by accepting the death of the father. Elisha becomes the heir and prophet himself in the very same moment in which he succeeds looking straight into the face of Elijah’s disappearance, until the very end. But the first and perhaps the only effort of the disciple-son of a prophet is to become a father and a prophet himself, while always remaining a disciple and a son as well. And here we discover something important in the relationship between prophet-disciple-heir. Elisha asks to become the heir. Sometimes a prophetic inheritance can be asked and given, it can be the fruit of an interior calling within the heir - it is what often happens in the case of reformers of communities. But what matters most is that the inheritance regards the spirit. Elisha does not ask for Elijah’s cloak: he asks for his spirit. The cloak does not make the prophet; it is the spirit that makes him the heir of the prophet and therefore a prophet himself. What we are seeing here is a revolution of biblical prophecy. After Elisha, prophecy continued to exist as a profession, as a social status marked by wearing a mantle. But now, alongside institutional prophecy a new prophecy begins, one centred on the spirit, which will mark a new and extraordinary season, that of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
There is one last thing, however. The whole spirit does not pass to the heir. The inheritance is only two thirds of the whole. In the age of spiritual prophecy, the firstborn who picks up the mantle of the prophet does not inherit the full spirit of the founder. He may receive a double portion, but not the full price. The heir of the prophet no longer has the whole spirit. He has a part, a good sizeable part, but not the whole, because part of the inheritance passes to other heirs, to the other "sons" or "children" of the prophet. The heir of the prophets is firstborn, but he is not an only child. After the passing of the prophet, no man alone can possess the whole spirit. The whole community is needed to inherit all three thirds.
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