Tell It Slant: Sarcasm, Duplicity and Trickery in the Old Testament

My readers have been a little surprised by the old man who recurs in many of my stories, namely by his way of delivering truth by turning it on its head in the form of deceit.

In “The Worst of All Lies,” he sits at a table at the market claiming to sell, first, the finest beef in all of Israel, then, venison hunted in the Negeb. In reality, he’s peddling rotten flesh from one of his donkeys, Joanna, who had sadly passed away the day before. When Amos asks him to account for his behavior, the old man shrugs off his concerns and explains that he has to tell “obvious lies” to get people’s attention.

In “The Helpless Man,” the wily old prophet is at it again, this time misleading a group of men he meets in a tavern by giving them the impression that the rest of his party has been murdered by a strange man he encountered on the Sheba pass. Moments later, the men are astonished when the old man’s former traveling companions burst through the door, alive and well, and confiscate him angrily.

Readers want to know why the old man is so duplicitous. If he is a prophet, which he seems to be, why does he tell lies? Aren’t men of God devoted to the truth? If he speaks deceit, is he not a false prophet and therefore unfit to be one of God’s messengers?

The same readers may be surprised to find similar ambiguities from the prophets of the Old Testament. Rarely did they use straight language to reach their audiences. The people were too far gone down the road of indulgence and rebellion to hear lectures and sermons. The Old Testament prophets relied upon strange object lessons, poetry, sarcasm, and cunning to cut through deaf ears dulled by sin and selfishness.

Their approach could be described by the following lines from Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

By “telling it slant,” the prophets broke through the prejudices, assumptions, and thought patterns of their audiences to bring truth against all odds to a people that had grown too dull-witted to hear it delivered in a straightforward manner.

Sarcasm

Oscar Wilde once called sarcasm the lowest form of wit, which in itself may have been sarcastic, seeing as how Wilde was known for his biting irony.

The word “sarcasm” comes from a Greek term (sarkazo) meaning “to tear flesh” and refers to a cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound those who are within its range.

Elijah poked fun at the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (1 Kgs. 18:27), and Isaiah shined a light on the truth about idols, mocking the ironsmiths and carpenters who constructed idols from raw materials, burned the leftovers for fuel, and fell down to worship the work of their own hands (Is. 44:12-17).

Even Jesus was known to use irony. Who could forget his saying about the man with a beam in his eye trying to help someone else who was afflicted with nothing more than a splinter? (Mt. 7:3-5).

Perhaps no one used sarcasm more than the apostle Paul. Notice how he addresses the pride of some of his converts in this excerpt from 1 Corinthians:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! (4:8).

Paul then begins to describe the sacrifices he and the other apostles had made on behalf of Christians like those in Corinth. While they had assumed a position of wisdom and strength and honor, the ones who had brought them to Christ had undergone great sacrifices and had been treated as second-class citizens. Paul ends this tirade, saying, “We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things” (1 Cor. 4:14).

Duplicity

When Israel and Judah prepared for war against Syria, their respective kings gathered about 400 prophets to inquire for the word of the Lord on their behalf. When the prophets returned with a unanimous word that the kings should prepare for battle, Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, sensed a problem. It was too easy. “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord of whom we may inquire?” he asked.

Ahab, the evil king of Israel, answered that there was one other, Micaiah, but he hated him because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil.

At Jehoshaphat’s insistence, Micaiah was called, and when the kings asked whether they should go to battle against the Syrians, the prophet said, “Go up and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king” (1 Kings 22:15).

On the surface, it might have seemed that Micaiah was playing along with the other prophets, but we read a subtler message in Ahab’s reaction: “How many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?” Then he turned to Jehoshaphat and said, “Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?”

Micaiah said one thing with his words, but he delivered a very different message through subtleties – his demeanor, the look on his face, his past record of prophecy. Ahab knew full well that the prophet was being duplicitous, which made an even more striking impression upon the wicked king.

Trickery

Jacob’s name literally meant “one who takes by the heel” because he entered the world clutching his twin brother’s heel at birth. However, it became a fitting name for his character because Jacob was known as one who would “trip” others up through cunning and deceit. His craftiness was not always commended. (Who can forget the callous way he deceived his blind father by impersonating his brother Esau?) But it was Jacob in the end who received the birthright and blessing of Abraham’s family and became the father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Direct communication is not always the best way to deliver truth. In “The Worst of All Lies,” the old man explains to Amos,

Some people lie to deceive. I lie to wake the sleeping masses. I tell the obvious lies….The truth is always there right in front of us. We just don’t see it because we are focused on other things. So truth sometimes has to stand on its head to get our attention.

Any characterization of the prophet who tells everything straight is not only unfaithful to the examples of the prophets in the Old Testament, it’s boring.

Besides, is deceit a lie if it’s obvious? I’m not sure what the answer is. We could get into a discussion of the degrees of lies, white lies, harmful untruths, jokes, flattery, etc.

But the bottom line is that sometimes uncertainty is the only tool a prophet has left to shake the nodding heads of a slumbering audience. If a lie is the only thing that will wake them up to the truth, should he not tell it?