One place our education begins is with the Iliad and the “wrath of Achilles.” Of all the countless places where the poet might begin his story, he chooses this incident of rage, an apt place in a warrior society dominated by notions of honor. Every noble warrior has the right to be touchy and to take any slight seriously. A life without honor is worthless and both sides of the Trojan War are brimming with worthies who are eager and willing to give their lives up for what might seem to be a dubious quarrel about a flighty woman. No matter. The reader is faced immediately with the enormity of bad feeling that Achilles engenders. The gods who stage manage various moments in the lives of the Greek and Trojan protagonists are prone to degrees of wrath, too. One of the mainstays of polytheism is competition among the gods: one wrath going up against another wrath. However open-ended polytheism seems, the many gods do not form one big, happy family. Power is hard to share and although Zeus stands at the top of the power structure, a god’s ego is a god’s ego – no small thing. As a demigod, Achilles has a proportionate ego that he is more than ready to indulge. War, though undertaken for various causes, is bound to have its share of wrath, be it about honor or revenge. What did Dean Acheson say? “Prestige is the shadow cast by power.”
Monotheism narrowed the god outlook but retained the wrath. Both the Old and New Testaments brim with evocations of raging retribution. One awesome scene – God’s opening up the earth so that the rebels against Moses and Aaron fall into it and perish – can serve for many. God is more than entitled to His wrath because of human disobedience. The wrath goes along with God’s compassion and mercy, which is to say God will not be trifled with as some kind of Divine Nice Guy. Omnipotence is a power beyond any power known to humans. In a sense, Christ is understandable as a bridge between the human and that omnipotence, a bridge between sinful humans and divine wrath. He bears God’s wrath. It is, so to speak, his genius.
Wrath is frightening. Although the Bible goes to some lengths to make God’s wrath understandable, we can feel how terrible it would be to be among those who are swallowed up by the earth. We might ask: Why does obedience matter so much? Could there not be a tribe if too many were disobedient? Must obedience be the price we pay for any sort of cohesion and meaning to our days? Does obedience exist to keep us in our place, whatever that place may be? How many clergymen have blessed slavery and the obedience slavery enforces? How many have blessed the obedience a wife was supposed to owe to her husband? Does an imbalance of power create the grounds for automatic wrath? At times – and the Bible, like the Iliad, exists in time – the great cannot bear the less than great. If God could be said to have a dilemma, which of course such omnipotence could not have, it might be said to be this, though humankind, understandably, has gone to great lengths to rationalize the imbalance. When we think of many slave owners and husbands, overlords and lords, we have every right to shudder.
Recent events in Israel highlight this wrath and make the Old Testament, in particular, seem almost unbearably current. Wrath is visited upon the Israelis and wrath in turn is visited upon the Palestinians who point to the state-controlled, daily wrath that has become their anguished lot. The wrath can be viewed through a purely political lens but Israel is far from a purely political state. A religion underlies the state, one that is thousands of years old. So much has passed out of history’s purview yet Judaism remains, a testament (the word inevitably suggests itself) to Jehovah’s omnipotence. One form of power is staying power, though such power may assert itself at whatever cost it deems necessary. Since God has not spoken recently (except to false prophets), His words, for a long time, have been subject to close exegesis. Each generation eagerly takes up the charge, but it’s fair to ask after the millennia of obedience whether various groups of humankind are God’s chosen or whether God is their chosen, a codependent relationship that tradition has sanctified. Are the chosen nothing so much as captives?
As the Bible shows, God murders people (as has the State in God’s name). We are to understand that this is part of His righteousness. I have to say that I, as a mere person, find murder a hard crime to excuse, though, again criminality does not enter into discussions of omnipotence and is reserved, accordingly, for people. Murder can arise for many so-called reasons but wrath is definitely one, the feeling that something is unbearable – humiliation or subservience, for instance – and must be addressed in the direst fashion. The need to avenge murders occasions more murders. These are scenarios that are hardly unique to present-day Israel, although they are clearly applicable. They bring up the same issue over and over: which side are you on? As long as you are willing to choose, any answer will suffice. Also, any answer will fail since the operative phrase is “over and over,” a suffocating, no-exit feeling. Historical circumstances and God both make a person feel that a person must choose.
Whether the one God or many, godhead is distinguished by partiality. The Greek gods had their favorites and the one God of the Hebrews had a chosen tribe. Apparently, no one wants a pacific, impartial god. It goes against the theistic grain and, since people are defined in countless ways by their partial nature – I am this but not that – the notion of the Potent One or Ones forcefully asserting themselves and keeping humankind in some kind of order makes sense. God’s wrath relates to human wrath; God understands humankind that way. God has no use for humanity in the sense of some universal, aspiring, live-and-let-live spirit. God wants obedience, be it in following commandments or offering sacrifices. People still are offering sacrifices – one another.
Your last words “one another” in terms of the sacrifice we humans offer to God points to the unholy nature of that sacrifice since it costs us nothing but instead reifies, makes an idol of our own interests.
Not for nothing, but Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism rejects both supernaturalism and the notion of choseness or chosen people.