Building a Case for Righteous Jealousy: Part Two

Building a Case for Righteous Jealousy: Part Two.  Jealousy, as discussed, can be legitimate or illegitimate (envy) depending upon the nature of the relationship between the subject who desires and the object desired. Even within relationships where legitimate jealousy might be proper when disloyalty occurs, abuse and deception are still possible in the human sphere. However, examples of wrongly applied jealousy do not make all forms of jealousy wrong. 

It was wise and good that Moses appointed seventy elders to help him lead Israel. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel’ … ‘I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it alone’” (Num. 11:16, 17). When two of those seventy, Eldad and Medad, began to prophesy in the camp—something which only Moses had done up to that point—Joshua assumed that Moses could, would, and should “stop them” (Num. 11:28). Joshua was indirectly jealous for Moses’ sake. But jealousy doesn’t work indirectly. “But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them” (Num. 11:29). God uses whomever he wills to use.

It was recorded but not explained how Saul “sought to strike [the Gibeonites] down in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah” (2 Sam. 21:2). The Gibeonites were Canaanites who tricked Joshua into making a covenant with them at the time of the Conquest (Josh. 9:3, 17), even though God repeatedly told Israel not to make any covenants with the Canaanites (Exo. 23:32; 34:12, 15). Although they operated through deceit, God still honored centuries later the covenant that the Gibeonites secured with Joshua. Saul, however, postured himself as zealous for purity in Israel (jealous and zealous are the same word in both Hebrew and Greek) and interrupted their covenant-relationship with God when he butchered the covenant-protected Gibeonites. But Saul was merely bloodthirsty. God was not fooled by Saul’s pretended zeal. Jehu also pretended zeal for the Lord to cover his bloodlust (2 Kings 10:16).

Another potential misuse of legitimate jealousy, highly prone to misapplication, was the mysterious ordeal of the “water of bitterness” (Num. 5:11-31). Although the New Testament made it clear that confession and forgiveness form the better way forward, in the Law if a wife’s adultery was suspected but not proved, then the husband could initiate a ritual which called upon God as the witness to guilt or innocence. (Humanly, it is troubling that the wife had no avenue to accuse the husband of suspected infidelity.) The priest would concoct a potion of water and dust that the wife must drink. If guilty, then she would visibly swell, and all would know in public what happened in secret. But if innocent, then she would maintain her current state of health, thus forcing the husband as well as the entire community to accept the Lord’s declaration of the wife’s innocence, case closed. Curiously, in other ancient Ordeals by Trial, the accused was assumed guilty unless she survived a highly lethal ordeal, but in the Law of Moses, the accused was assumed innocent unless God demonstrated otherwise through a normally harmless ordeal. In the Law, unproved jealousy was insufficient to break a covenant relationship. Proved jealousy (two or three witnesses) was grounds for severance.