How best to evaluate biblical characters?

When I was teaching Old Testament in Bible college/seminary, some of my students interpreted biblical characters in a very black-and-white fashion. Either they decided that someone was praiseworthy and played up the good in them while ignoring the shady side or condemned a person out of hand and could only see their negative traits. Samson, whose story we have been reading for the last few weeks, is a controversial character so it is quite common even among commentators to typecast Samson as the utter baddie. It is a habit that didactic preachers can easily fall into as well since they often want to hammer home a point. I am convinced, however, that this approach is unhelpful and here is why.

The danger of distorting the Word of God

First, pigeonholing people in this categorical style does not do justice to the biblical stories because Scripture tends to present central characters in their real-life complexity with good and bad traits rather than as unattainably saintly or out-and-out villains. [1] In other words, a black-and-white interpretation distorts the portrayal of the Word of God. For instance, Sunday School enthusiasm about certain judges as models of faith are a whitewashing of their darker side and goes against the message of Judges.[2] The book overall makes clear that what we worship will affect how we live and a society that turns away from God will gradually disintegrate into moral chaos. Thus, Israel’s unfaithfulness to God and rampant idolatry lead into ever-increasing violence, brutality, and sin in Judges (see the equivalent principle described in Rom 1:18-32). What is reflected in society at large also leaves its mark on individual leaders so that there is a progressive deterioration in the quality of the judges. Samson, the last judge mentioned in the book, for instance, is much less admirable than Deborah or even Gideon. Nevertheless, writing off individual judges like Samson as entirely immoral, faithless, and corrupt falls into the opposite error and likewise makes biblical characters into one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs.

Becoming disengaged from characters

A second drawback of such a black-and-white approach is that readers become disengaged from the characters. Who can relate to an utter saint or villain? The power of telling someone’s story is that we are drawn into it, identify with certain aspects, wonder how we might behave in similar circumstances and in so doing the narrative shapes our thinking, emotions, and character. We may be repelled by sin in a person, drawn by their flashes of insight and moments of sacrificial love, feel pity at someone’s downfall or be uplifted in their triumph of faith. In my posts on Samson, I tried to capture those aspects that we can identify with and learn from. I am convinced that we do ourselves a disfavour when we distance ourselves from biblical characters because we lessen the impact they have on our thinking and heart.

Arrogance: we are not like them!

Thirdly, there is also a certain arrogance about vilifying biblical characters as if we were better and could never behave like THAT while we fail to acknowledge that there, but for the grace of God, go we. It is like the old joke about the Bible study discussing the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee that ended in the study group’s prayer, ‘Thank you, Lord, that we are not like the Pharisee!’. Biblical interpretation is a measure of our character: do we have the humility to recognise ourselves in some less than flattering portrayals, can we enter into biblical characters’ experience and understand what motivates them, are we willing to give them the benefit of the doubt like we would like to have it when our actions are evaluated? This does not mean that we condone what is wrong or never pass judgment, but we need to do so knowing our own propensity to fail God and sin.

Recognising universal behaviour patterns

Sometimes, of course, it is hard for us to see ourselves in biblical narratives because Scripture often tells the story of people who led extraordinary lives in circumstances that may be very different from our modern contexts, and which are more difficult to connect with our mundane reality. Nevertheless, human nature has not changed that much and when we discover those universal patterns of behaviour, we can identify points of contact.

Reading the clues in the narrative

Finally, it is important that we look out for clues to gauge Scripture’s take on a character not only in terms of a biblical book but also in the details of an episode. Since there is a gap between our world and the ancient Israelite one, we may misread what is going on when we only rely on our contemporary experience to guide our evaluation. Narrators in biblical stories are often reticent and rarely make an outright value judgment (e.g. Gen 25:34). Instead, they mostly use an approach that is known as ‘show, rather than tell’. It could be as subtle as how God’s name is used (Yahweh/LORD or Elohim/God), what is repeated or left out in a dialogue, how certain actions reflect a person’s inner state (see examples of these, for instance, in Truly hearing what God is saying, An important prerequisite to hearing God, Learning to see God’s involvement). The value of this somewhat elusive approach is that interpretation is not entirely closed down. We are pointed in a particular direction, but we inevitably bring our background, experiences, and burning questions to the task of interpretation, so that certain things will stand out for us more than others. The beauty of this is that within the boundaries set by the narrator of how to understand events, a well-told story will reveal different facets to the truth and force us to ponder the implications long after we finished reading.

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[1] An obvious exception is Noah who is portrayed rather one-dimensionally in the flood story. He is described as blameless, obeys God unquestioningly and is exemplary in offering sacrifice to Him post-flood. He is difficult to get as a character, however, because we know nothing about how he felt about all that was happening. Did he feel distress or pity for all those people who were going to die? Did he do anything about it (e.g. warn people of the coming disaster, as some post-biblical traditions assert)? This highlights for us that the narrator’s focus is not on Noah, his is merely a supporting role to the main storyline. Generally, those in a supporting role in a story are drawn with only one or two traits that stand out, so that they are often a foil for the main characters or plot. Thus, Uriah’s one trait is faithfulness: he fights in the war against Israel’s enemies and, when called home, sleeps alongside the soldiers rather than takes his ease with his wife, Bathsheba, at home (2 Sam 11:11). This highlights David’s unfaithfulness in not going to war and using that opportunity to sleep with Uriah’s wife (2 Sam 11:1-4).

[2] It is inevitable that teaching children will involve simplifications and make it necessary to focus on a central feature in a biblical story in order to inculcate key principles. However, when such an approach is taken into an adult context, it becomes problematic.

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