Lester del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People!"

There are an awful lot of SF stories about religion out there, and any individual person's ability to read them all is improbable. The occasional story has slipped through the cracks of my reading lists, but, as one reviewer recently pointed out, I really, really ought to look into Lester del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People!", originally published in 1954. So I did.

The first few chapters of "For I Am a Jealous People!" detail the Job-like sufferings of Reverend Amos Strong, whose family members are killed one by one during an alien invasion. Amos struggles to see the hand of God in the tragedies that befall him and humankind in general: is the conquering alien fleet a divine test? a punishment? proof of God's nonexistence? It doesn't help that the aliens themselves claim that they conquer by divine decree, and late in the story a mystical revelation cnovinces Amos of the truth of their brutal theology. Braking into the aliens' temple, he finds that they have carried an ark into the battle for Earth, and he sees a mystical translation of the words written on it:

"I AM THAT I AM, who brought those out of bondage from Egypt and who wrote upon the wall before Belshazzar, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, as it shall be writ large upon the Earth, from this day forth. For I have said unto the seed of Mikhtchah, thou art my chosen people and I shall exalt thee above all the races under the heavens!" ... The seed of Mikhtchah. The seed that was the aliens...

From here the story changes tack, turning from an SFnal adaptation of Job to a humanist critique of covenantal theology. Del Rey characterizes the relationship between God and humankind as one of conflict, an approach summed up by Amos's atheist friend Doc Miller:

"Man," he said, "has one virtue which is impossible to any omnipotent force like your God. He can be brave. He can be brave beyond sanity for another man or for an idea. Amos, I pity your God if man ever makes war on Him!"

There's a big theological gap in this approach: there's a lot more to Biblical theology than the idea of covenant. Five of the novella's six chapters open with Biblical epigraphs, and the sources of these quotes underscore the missing link. Quotes from Ecclesiastes and two Psalms all describe frustration at a world where the wicked prosper, a few verses of Lamentations describe God's fury with an unrepentant nation, and a line from Revelation suggests that divine justice is inherently violent. Del Rey ignores the New Testament almost entirely, to the extent that I found myself questioning the appropriateness of the story's hero being a Christian at all—there's no Christ in this story's theology at all. Thankfully, Doc Miller acknowledges this gap, even offering an explanation for the story's exclusion of the New Testament:

You've always thought exclusively in terms of the Old Testament and a few snatches of Revelation—like a lot of men who become evangelists. I've never really thought about God—I couldn't accept him, so I dismissed Him. Maybe that's why we got the view of Him we did. I wish I knew where Jesus fits in, for instance. There's too much missing. Too many imponderables and hiatuses. We have only two facts, and we can't understand either. There is a manifestation of God which has touched both Mikhtchah and mankind; and He has stated now that He plans to wipe out mankind. We'll have to stick to that.

Fair enough, but the idea that evangelists think "exclusively in terms of the Old Testament and a few snatches of Revelation" is either dated (forgivable, since the story is over 50 years old) or flat-out incorrect. Less forgivable is the exclusion of Biblical responses to the apparent injustice of the world—God's response to Job being but one such. Covenantal theology is certainly important in the Old Testament, but just as important is its focus on injustice. In context, the point of those quotations from Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and Lamentations is to show that, even though we experience injustice, God is just. In other words, much of the Bible (and religion in general) is a reaction to the problem of evil that is one of the primary concerns of this story. In making the case for its theology, "For I Am a Jealous People!" throws out vast regions of religious thought. In a way, that's the point; the whole story is based on a what-if about a single religious idea. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that the story hinges on a less-than-robust approach to the relationship between God and humankind.

Comments

[anonymous]

Artistic license, my friend. Besides, it's not impossible for God to lie.