Table Of ContentTHE RIGHT HAND OF GOD
A Dissertertation
presented to
the Faculty of
Claremont School of Theology
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Susan Clare Slusher Bell
I|l4;ay 2007
@ zoot
Susan Clare Slusher Bell
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
I 88t
This dissertation completed by
Sus¡.N Cr-¡.Rn Sr.usrruR BELL
has been presented to and accepted by the
faculty of Claremont School of Theology in
partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
DOCTOn OF PHILOSOPHY
Faculty Committee
Gregory J. Riley, Chairperson
Kristin De Troyer
John Quiring
Dean of the Faculty
Susan L. Nelson
May 2007
Table of Contents
Page
Introduction ... .1
Chapter
1.
Culturcs of Influence to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. .4
Canaan .4
Egypt... 9
Greece. ... t3
2.
Hebrew Bible.... ,,,..,,..28
The Relationship betweenthe HumanKing and Yahweh.. .28
Yahweh' s Development and Adaptation ,30
The Throne of Yahweh ,t2
The RightHand in HebrewBible..... 82
3.
New Test¿ment... ... .. 98
Judgment. .100
lntercession. .........11,2
Power 11,3
The Nature of God in the New Testament... 144
.
4.
Christian Creeds 151
Conclusion 174
Addendum A, Glory. .. .182
Addendum B, The Role of Mary .......184
Bibliography... ... 185
ll
lntroduction
All images are insufftcient to speak of the great God of Christianity. No language
can describe God, yet we must speak. We must preach and write and sing of God who
has so captivated our minds and hearts. To best speak about God, we sort through our
images and draw upon our pitiful language to flrnd metaphors for God, always knowing
that each is incomplete. The image, metaphor, symbol, or abstraction which speaks of
God to one generation will not describe God adequately to another generation, We run
into trouble with biblical images, because these are ones that we can not discard. They
arise in our texts, or become lyrics in our hymns. They are best explained not discarded.
This dissertation constructs a Biblical, historical, and linguistic explanation of the
metaphor "right hand of God."
The picture of God seated on a throne arises as a legitimate biblical image. Yet,
we can safely say that the enthroned divine is an image that does not speak to our time.
In the middle of the last century, Henry Emerson Fosdick included in his sermon these
words, "This, I ask of you, to start with, th¿t when I use the word'God' you will not have
in your imagination some human picture of him, like a king seated on a throne. Let us
begin with something more realistic and indubitable than tltat!-r Why is God on a throne
an unacceptable representation of the divine? First the anthropomorphic image is too
limiting. God's abilities are much broaderthan human beings' physical abilities. The
creator of the universe made the spectrum of light much broader than a human can see or
detect, sound in decibels much higher and lower than a human can hear, and the
remaining human senses are able to perceive only limited amounts of what is present in
t
Hu.ry Emerson Fosdicþ "Why is God Silenf While Evil Rages?" inA Great Time to Be Alive; Sermons
on Christianity in llartíme (New York and London: tlarper & Brothers 1944>, 164.
I
the world and universe. Second, God seated on a heavenly throne gives us an image of a
God far removed from our world. This is an image of an immobile God, whose distance
and inactivity we would flrnd far too transcendent to aid our world of turmoil, and
tragedy. Third, a king's throne is an archaic symbol of power. Any single authority of
our world, whether secular or ecclesiastic, shares power with parliaments, assemblies and
congresses. Even though thrones still exis! they are rarely secn as positive symbols and
are usually muted in some fashion. God enthroned is inadequate for our modern era that
knows scientiflrc facts about the universe that the ancients could not have comprehended
and is inadequate in a time that denounces emperors and kings with their thrones as
tyrannical.
If the enthroned God is a metaphorical image that is not useful today, it must have
been very powerful in early Christianity. Many pieces of New Testament Scripture
placed the resunected Jesus Christ in a seated position at the right hand of God. Though
the throne is not always mentioned, it is often implied by the seated position. Why was
the image of Christ seated atthe right hand of God such an important symbol to early
Christians? Why do we call this Session of Christ his exaltation and gloriflrcation? To
approach these questions and others, we will look at what "the right- meant in ancient
and pre-biblical literature, in the sacred texts of Qumran, in the Hebrew Bible, and in the
New Testament. We will look at figures, often "the Son of Man" seated at God's right.
We will look through the lens of Psalm 110, which is the Hebrew Bible text behind the
New Testament passages of Christ seated at God's right and the making of his enemies
his footstool. The New Testament writings drew most heavily on the first and fourth
verses of Psalm 110
2
*The
1 Lord says to my [ord:
'Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool."'
o'The
4 Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind,
'You are a priest for ever
after the order ofMelchizedek"'
3
Chapter
1
Cultures of Influence on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
In the Middle East gods of one nation were consistently adopted and worshiped in
other lands. These foreign gods were introduced by soldiers, governors, traders, foreign
spouses? and groups that migrated into another nation's territory looking for food or
work. People all over the Mediteûanean, Egypt, and TVestern Asia began the worship of
new foreign gods. Often they equated a foreign god with one from their own nation,
when the two gods had similar functions.2 In other circumstances, one culture had a god
with characteristics and a theology superior or more appealing than the god of an
indigenous people. The people would take the characteristics of the foreign god and give
them to their national god, excising the foreign god from their pantheon. These systems
expanded the number of gods in a pantheon by adding foreign gods, identifîed the god of
one culture with the god of another culture which both had the same function, or one
culture merely adapted the ch¿racteristics of a foreign god to their own god.
Canaanite Literature and Iconography
Ba¿l is the most prominent god ofthe Ugaritic narrative poems. The ancient city
ofUgarit @as Shamra) was located a half mile inland from the Syrian coast and opposite
the eastern tip of Cyprus. Ugarit flourished in the Late Bronze age and had its own
language, which has been classified as Northwest Semitic. The Ugaritic language was
similar to the Syria-Palestine languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenicia and linked to
these other Northwest Semitic languages by an ancient hypothetical precursor language.
2 James Pritcha¡d, Ancient Near fu,stern Texts: Reløing to the Otd Testament(Princeton; Princeton
University Press, 1955), 249. The Egyptian god Seth appeared to be one of the most conflated gods. An
Egyptian-Hittite treaty in the time of R¿mses II equated Søh to the storm god of Hatti. From the end of the
Eighteenth Dynasty Baal-Shamaim corresponded to Seth.
4
Ugaritic texts were written in thify cuneiform signs, each representing a consonant
(except for three signs which represented the same consonant with three distinct vowels).
The interchange between the two religions may have been probably oral, but the written
texts of Ugarit give us the ability to compare them with the written texts of Israel.
The Ugaritic texts were precursors to the Hebrew Bible. Characteristics of poetry
found in the Canaanite Mythology found at Ras Shamra can be found in Hebrew poetry.
The rather unusual parallelism of hand and right hand appeared both in the Ugaritic
poetry and the canonical poetry of the Hebrew Bible. In the parallel of hand and right
hand, "the hand" stood for the left hand. As in this passage from Judges 5, Jael must
have held the tent peg in her left hand in order to strike it with the mallet held in her right
hand:
"She put her hand to the tent peg
and her right hand to the workmen's matlet;
she struck Sisera a blow." (Judges 5:26)
By excluding the adjective for the left hand, it became a nondescript hand. It might be
called only a hand. The right hand was accentuated by including the adjective. The right
hand was believed to be the more powerftrl and forceful of the two hands. In the above
passage, the left hand was stationary holding the peg, while the right hand yielded the
mallet. The right hand was the h¿nd th¿t struck the blow that took the action that made it
the forceful hand.
In the following verse of the "BaalCycle", Baal struck the messengers of Yamm.
Baal had a weapon in both his left and right hand, two different weapons. Baal showed
his aggression, that even the messengers of his enemy Yamm would not be received, but
slain.
5
38"The Prince Ba¿l is shaken [He seize]s with his hand a striker,
In his right hand a slayer,
The lads he st[rikes.l"'
[8. CAT 1.2 Column II (CAT col. I) vs. 38]
In the following verses from the Baal cycle, hand and right hand are in parallel.
The verses described a routine life situation, an ordinary way of departing. These verses
tell of Baal with the bow in his (left) hand, while the right hand holds the arrows:
"He (Baal) did take (his) bow in this hand and his arrows in his right hand; then
he set his face toward the brink of Shamak teeming with wild oxen"4 (15. CAT
1.10 Column II vs. 6-9).
In this section of poetry, Baal used the cedar tree in his right hand as a weapon,
By looking at the iconography of Baal found in the Louwe, Venel found that Baal held
'tree lightning" in his hand.5 This branch-like lightning may represent a visual idea of
cefiNew
the text that reads "the cedar in his right hand.t> Kingdom Egyptian text states
that 'Baal smites thee with the cedar tree which is in his hand."ó Baal presents a
frightening picture. The highest places of the earth are shaking and Baal's enemies go
into hiding in the woods and the mountains.
37 "And Mightiest Baal speaks:
'O Enemies ofHadad, why do you quake?
Why quake, O'Weapon-*wielders ofthe Warrior?'
40 Baal eyes the East; His hand indeed shakes,
+r With a cedar in his right hand.-t (10. CAT 1.4 Column WI vs. 37- 41)
3
Simon B. Parker, ed. flgaritic Narrarive Poetry,*The Baal Cycle" trans. Mark Smith (Scholars press;
Society of Biblical Literature: 1997), rc3.
n G. R. Driver, CanaaniteÀþths and t egenas@dinburgh, T. & T. Clark: 1956), I17. When Simon parker
translates the poem (p. I S3), he sees 'Tladad' as a name for Baal not the god El. He translates "El" as the
general word for god. He translates vs. 5 "Hadd the god, in his palace". I did not use his translation,
because he translates the right hand as the other hand, which is not helpful to my purpose. The French
translation also uses right hand for vs 7-8 in Andre Caquot, et als eds. Textes Ouþøríttques Tome I: Mythes
et Legendes (Paris: Les Editions Du Cer{ 1974),283. 'Il apris son arc dans sa main, ses dards dans sã
droite,..."
5 A. Vanel, L'iconogrryhìe du dieu I'orage (paris: Gabal da,1965),g4.
M$
] S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 340. Smith quoted from the Papyrus
Leiden 345.
7
Simon B. Parker, ed. "The Baal Cycld' trans. Mark Smith in Ugaritic Natative Poetry(Scholars press;
Society of Biblical Literature: 1997), 137. Note 142 gives another translation for vs. 4ti-¿t 'l.enfroe
6
