Deserted: Retelling Bible Stories Without an Angry God

By Nathan Roberts and Alxndr Jones

What would the earliest stories of the Bible be like without an angry God smiting humans with floods, fire, frogs, and brimstone? They might become the story of a mother surviving a snake bite and a dangerous pregnancy. Architects and dreamers building towers and boats to save themselves from the harsh desert. A doctor who obsessively cleans. Young gay lovers seeking refuge in the sanctuary cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Estranged brothers planning ten terrorist attacks to free their people from slavery. Without an angry God, the Bible might become a fictional collection of stories about deeply human men, women, and children from a small nomadic tribe deserted in an ancient Hebrew desert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532682308

Nathan Roberts

Nathan Roberts graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Christian Life College in Stockton, California. Raised in a pastor’s home, he started in ministry in his mid-twenties and was ordained in 2015 after preaching and teaching the Gospel in multiple countries. He and his wife of thirty-nine years have two children.

Book preview

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Deserted

Retelling Bible Stories Without an Angry God

Nathan Roberts

Illustrations by alxndr jones

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Deserted

Retelling Bible Stories Without an Angry God

Copyright ©

2019

Nathan Roberts. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

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8

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97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-8228-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-8229-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-8230-8

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

October 15, 2019

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Cain and the Snake

Naameh and the Ark

The Unplanned City of Babel

Isaac and the Sanctuary Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah

Doctor Leviticus

Aaron and the Burning Bush

Moses and the Terrorist Attacks

Roberts’ reimagining of these well-known Biblical stories is nothing short of masterful. The stories are as bright and fantastical as they are dark and powerful. There is a profound humanness in these stories that invite you to reconsider your own place in a world fraught by groans of anguish and songs of hope.

—Michael Vazquez

founder of Brave Commons, an LGBTQ+ Christian advocacy organization

Nathan Roberts is a gifted-storyteller, a writer of great imagination, and a brilliant Biblical interpreter! They will provoke you to think deeply and consider the connections to twenty-first century life that he weaves through them.

—Karen Gonzalez

author of The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong

"Deserted’s reimagining of classic Bible stories without God as the centerpiece offers us a glimpse of the truest essence of the human condition when we only have to be accountable to ourselves and each other and not an almighty, judgmental God."

—Ulysses Burley III

founder of UBtheCURE, a faith, health, and human rights organization

Ingeniously reworking some of the most familiar Biblical tales. These men and women face recognizable moral dilemmas both large and small, striving to do what’s right, and in the process, the Bible once more emerges as a living text that offers guidance in moments of doubt.

—Keith Harris

City Pages magazine

If you have never met the characters in the Bible or if you have read about them a thousand times, I promise you will be drawn into Roberts’ vivid, engaging, and artfully troubling retellings. With deft insight and good humor. Read this book to ignite your imagination.

—Debbie Blue

author of Consider the Women: a Provocative Guide to Three Matriarchs of the Bible

Reading these short stories sent me back to my Bible (and my farm roots) with fresh eyes on ancient stories of faith. While God is not an out loud actor in these stories, they expand my imagination of God at work in the world.

—Rev. Bonnie Wilcox

Senior Pastor, First Lutheran Church, Columbia Heights, MN

Acknowledgments

I want to begin by thanking my wife, Emilie. Her continued love, support, inspiration, conversations, and hospitality make my writing, and my life, possible.

Thank you to Ben Barnhart for combing out the snarls in my sentences. To alxndr jones for making the illustrations so beautiful and profound. To the team at Wipf and Stock for believing in this book. To everyone who listened to me tell and retell these stories at the School House and over cups of coffee. To everyone who read and reread drafts of this book, especially Jeremiah, Rev. Lawrence, Rev. Bonnie, Luke, Gina, Andrew, Sarah, Jimmy, Michael, Rozella, Dr. Ulysses, Suzanne, Karen, and Keith. To Walter for giving me a chance to be on the radio. To Rev. Debbie, Rev. Russell, and the House of Mercy for introducing me to the Midrash and reteaching me to read the Bible. To my First Lutheran family, my Minneapolis UCC family, the Salt Collective writers, the Kimpurs, and my Kenyan family for so many wonderful years of reading the Bible in community together.

And finally to you. I sincerely appreciate you sharing your time with us, and I hope you continue to retell and rearrange these beautiful stories.

Introduction

I remember being a little kid and lying on the carpet as I stared at the pictures in the illustrated children’s Bible while adults read me the stories about Moses and Pharoah, Noah, and Eve. The characters were all drawn as doe-eyed white people with washed hair and long, clean robes. They didn’t look like the people who lived under a hot sun in the middle of the desert. They looked more like adults from my church playing dress-up. My Sunday School teacher had sang to us, Father Abraham, had many sons. And I am one of them and so are you, so I assumed pale skin was a family trait that went all the way back.

When I was in 3rd grade I was given my own copy of the full Bible, the adult Bible. I eagerly reread all my favorite stories and I found, much to my delight, that there were many salacious details that my picture Bible had conveniently omitted. There was sex and violence on practically every page. I was in possession of a book I would have never been allowed to read if it didn’t have the word Holy on the cover. By the time I graduated high school, I had read the full Bible cover to cover four times.

It wasn’t until my mid 20s that I began to read theses stories in the original Hebrew language. The stories felt very different. The verses in English had felt smooth and reliable. The tone and vocabulary was even and polished. But when I read these same verses in Hebrew, they felt stilted. The story of Noah and the ark bore the scars of being edited. The sentences had been broken and mended. The tone and phrasing shifted sometimes in the middle of a story. As I reread Genesis it happened in story after story. The whole book of Genesis felt collaged together from different writers. All this had been polished over by the English translators.

I began to research. That’s when I discovered the Source Theory. I learned that the stories I had grown up reading in the Bible, were actually retellings of stories. Hebrew fathers told their sons about Isaac and the goat as they wandered the hills in search of fresh grazing land. Mothers told their daughters about Eve and a talking snake around the cooking fire. These were family stories told and retold across the desert for hundreds of years. And like so many family stories, they changed and grew with each retelling.

Then around 1000 B.C. Hebrew priests in Jerusalem began collecting these stories, and for 500 years they filled scroll after scroll. Until 587 B.C. when Israel lost a long, brutal war with the Babylonian empire and the capital city of Jerusalem was destroyed. The Hebrew people were enslaved, children were separated from their parents, scrolls were burned, and for the first time Hebrew stories fell under threat of being lost and forgotten.

So the Hebrew priests decided to collect their people’s stories, poems, and songs, and place them alongside laws and rituals. These enslaved priests become the editors of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible.

The original Hebrew text still bears the scars of their editing. Over the centuries different versions had emerged in different villages. And when there were two treasured versions of a story, the editors sometimes chose to catalog them side-by-side in the text. The starkest example of this is the two creation stories—the story of the all-powerful creator of the universe, placed beside the very emotional Yahweh walking next to Adam and Eve in a small garden. Sometimes they wove two versions together, as in the story of Noah and the ark. If you read closely you can see that everything happens twice. The animals are loaded on the ark twice, earth is flooded twice, Noah sends out a raven first, then a dove. And in the Hebrew these couplets make the text feel stilted. Broken and mended.

When I learned this, I felt, well, shocked. I felt lied to by the English translators and tricked by the pastors who told me over and over again that the Bible was a historical account. These stories were what really happened, they’d told me.

But it was around this same time that I met a village elder from the Pokot tribe of northern Kenya. Michael Kimpur grew up in a nomadic community. He herded cows and listened to his village elders retell stories around campfires. When I asked him if there was a written collection of the stories of his people, he told me something that changed my perspective on the Bible. There are no official versions of our stories, he said. It is the responsibility of the elders in each generation to retell these stories in a way that meets the needs of the next generation.

Shortly after this exchange, I was in the religion section of an old bookstore, my head tilted sideways reading book titles. I stumbled across a collection of Jewish folk retellings of Biblical stories called midrash. The collection contained wild and fantastic retellings that had been told and retold by rabbis over thousands of years. These rabbis played with the details. In one retelling of Adam and the garden, Adam is created as a giant, so big he can barely fit on the earth, his head reaches all the way to the stars. And when this oversized and overconfident Adam begins to question the judgment of the angels, he is shrunk down to normal human size. The story ends with Adam sleeping, dreaming of being a giant and walking among the stars.

In comic books they call these types of stories an Elseworld story. A story set in a world where things are just a little different. A great example of an Elseworld story is Superman Red Son by Mark Millar. In Red Son baby Superman’s alien shuttle flies from the exploding planet of Krypton through space, but it doesn’t land in the Kent family farm in Kansas. Instead, his shuttle lands in the Soviet Union on a collective farm with a Ukrainian family. Changing this one detail about Superman’s story, changes so much.

Superman still has the power of flight and super strength. But he doesn’t fight for Truth, justice, and the American Way. Instead Superman is heralded on Soviet radio broadcasts as the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact. And readers are suddenly faced with the harsh reality of how terrifying Superman’s power is when he is working for Stalin.

Sometimes all it takes is changing one detail to see a familiar story in a whole new light.

The book you are holding is a collection of reimagined stories from Genesis and Exodus set in a Biblical Elseworld. If you grew up with Bible stories, I suspect the setting and characters will feel familiar, but I did change one little detail–in these stories the Hebrew God, Yahweh, doesn’t exist. Why take Yahweh out of the Bible you ask? Because I wanted to see what would happen next.

I hope my stories inspire you to play with the Biblical details so that we can meet the needs of this and the next generation.

Nathan Roberts

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Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

—Genesis 1:20

Cain and the Snake

W hat should we name it? Adam asked holding a small brown snake by the tail. His two young sons, Cain and Abel, watched as its scaly body wriggled back and forth, its red tongue flickering in and out like a sword.

What about calling it a dirt snake? Abel shouted, his four-year-old fingers petting the very end of the tail.

Hm . . . dirt snake you say? He smiled turning the snake as he rubbed his long graying beard.