God as “father”?

By Dr. Sandra Richter

As a professor of Old Testament, I am often asked to address the idea of God as “male.” The questions run along a similar vein: “Why does the image of ‘father’ dominate the portrayal of God throughout the Bible? Don’t you as a woman find the ‘maleness’ of the OT troubling? What do you think of the female images of God? Do you think we should liberate ourselves from these male images and language, and if so, how?”

As an exegete who takes context seriously, I have a fairly consistent set of answers for these questions. And these answers are the same for any topic of biblical interpretation. In sum, I ask: “What was originally intended by the communique at hand,” and “what did the original audience hear?” Once those questions are answered with integrity, reinterpreting to a modern context is not nearly so great a challenge.

So why does the image of ‘father’ dominate the portrayal of God throughout the Bible? To answer this question first we must realize that the God of Christian faith is a god whose practice is to reveal himself in real space and time. In many ways this is the uniqueness of the Christian story. Our God did not simply watch Abraham, Moses, and David from the security of a throne in heaven, waiting to see what decisions would be made. Rather, God entered into their reality, came along side, and altered the course of human history in His quest to ransom a people. Hence, the Story of Redemption, with all of its facets and sub-stories is a story about real people, who lived in real space and time. And real people always come with real cultural norms.

Culture is one of those things people rarely think about. We live in the midst of our own culture assuming that everyone else lives basically the same way we do, until a a missions trip or vacation plops us into someone else’s culture and we are stunned to find out how different life can be in someone else’s space. And if you are a student of history, you quickly learn that ev en within the same people group cultural norms shift over time, and different values and morés are established and valued as the years go by. In sum, every people group on the planet, and every phase of human history has a culture that attends it.

So if our God were to successfully reveal himself to humanity, he would have to pick time- and space-bound, culturally relevant avenues for communication. And so he did. To the patriarchs, an ancestral and tribal people, he came as “the god of our fathers.” To the early settlers of Israel—also a tribal and kinship-based culture—God revealed himself as the great “kinsman-redeemer” of his extended tribe. To David’s generation struggling to establish hegemony in a hostile world he became “Lord Sabbaoth” (the captain of armies). To the prophets he was the “one enthroned above the cherubim,” who as the great monarch of the heavens was sending his complaint against his vassal nation in the hands of his diplomat (i.e. his prophet). These culture-bound communiques continue until, as the Book of Hebrews tells us, “God after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son.” And in this climax of covenant God’s inclination toward incarnation took its ultimate form. God took on the human experience in its entirety in one small town in northern, post-exilic, Romanized Israel. Hence, as a trained exegete, my approach to biblical interpretation always involves the question of cultural and historical context. Thus, the question is not so much what does patriarchy or redemption or monarchy mean to me, rather, the question is what did it mean to them.
So what did patriarchy mean to these people? As I discuss at length in my book The Epic of Eden (IVP 2008), Israel was a tribal nation. And by tribal, I mean tribal. If you are thinking the Sioux and Cherokee, or the Muntafiq and Anaza you are thinking right. Within such a society, kinship relations are paramount, and blood defines one’s place in society. In Israel’s patriarchal, tribal society the legal system and the economy, one’s vocation and inheritance, where you lived and with whom, all harkened back to three questions: “Who is your father; what is your gender; and what is your place in the birthorder?” The people who held the highest status, the most responsibility, the most far-reaching authority were the patriarchs. Their most immediate realm of influence was their bêt ‘ab (the family compound), and those deemed to be the oldest living males of the clan and tribe wielded greater and greater authority. But they also carried greater and greater responsibility. As a result, in Israel’s world it was the patriarch who made the life and death decisions of warfare, migration, finance, and legal intervention. It was the patriarch who answered to the community for the welfare of each and every member of his family, his clan, and his tribe. If a kinsman lost his land due to debt, or a widow went uncared for, or an orphan went hungry, it was the patriarch’s problem to solve. And typically the resolution would come from his resources. This is where the whole concept of “redemption” was birthed in the first place. This concept was not originally a theological idea—rather, it was a vehicle of tribal civic law. If a family member lost his land, the patriarch must help him buy it back (Lev 25:25). If a young woman was widowed before she was able to bear a child, the patriarch must ensure that her brother-in-law take her in as his own wife (Deut 25:5; cf. Judah and Tamar in Gen 38). If a kinsman was captured in war, the patriarch must go after him and either ransom or rescue him from his oppressor (Gen 14). Of additional interest is the fact that the patriarch spent much of his life training his replacement, his firstborn son, in order to ensure that the well-being of the clan continued into the next generation.

So in the mind of the ancient Israelite, the “father” was a larger than life figure, who carried the well-being and security of the family on his shoulders. This one was required to lead in such a fashion that the family was safe, and each member was deployed for the well-being of the whole. The patriarch distributed resources such that each was fed, clothed, and housed. He exercised the highest level of civic authority, even wielding the power of life and death when a family member broke the law. And if circumstances required it, the patriarch’s very life would be the price of his position.

Thus, to return to the original question, we need to ask not what does “father” mean to a modern audience, but what did “father” mean to the biblical audience. And therefore, why might God choose to reveal himself as “father”? The answer is obvious. By means of this image the Bible’s first audience was educated in the idea that the Almighty was not a distant deity who was unaware of the rigours and complexities of their daily lives. Rather, they were introduced to one who had stepped into the mud and muck of everyday life by adopting for himself a role recongized by all. This was the role of caretaker, authority figure, redeemer, and guide. And this was a deity who was also claiming the role of parent. A patriarch who knew the members of his own clan, and would not rest until he had brought each one safely home (Ezek 37:24-27; John 14:2). Unlike so much we see in our modern world, the “father” image of God in the Old Testament is not abusive or neglectful, proud or inflexible, he does not exclude. He is neither rapist nor explosive, addicted parent. Rather, this “father,” like the father of the prodigal son, leads his family with wisdom, and he walks the floors until his lost sons of Adam and daughters of Eve come home. Indeed, the God of the Bible was portrayed as a kinsman who would pay whatever ransom was demanded, even if the price required is His own life.

So when I am asked how I feel about God as “father” in the OT, rather than disparaging or even attempting to “rehabilitate” these male images, I instead attempt to teach my students their original content. And then we begin the task of reinterpreting them to our present reality. Very interesting to me is that in approaching this question in this fashion, I find that those who have not struggled with male figures in their past are challenged to see their God more fully, and those who have struggled often find their negative images, at least partly, healed.