The following is another adapted portion of my study on dust in scripture. It’s a little more academic in tone than a lot of my other writing, but I hope you’ll persevere through it!.
The scattering effects of the fall and Adam and Eve’s exile and return to dust are seen clearly throughout the Old Testament books of prophecy and the psalms. Passages from these portions of scripture can be greatly informative regarding what scripture teaches is the appropriate response to man’s creation from dust, and the resulting relationship with his creator. The image of dust is closely tied to judgement, either the means of judgement or the result, depending on the context. This becomes particularly clear when one observes that the use of “dust” is often paired with the word “chaff” in descriptions of judgement in the Old Testament.
Psalm 83 serves as a good example of how chaff relates to the image of dust. The psalmist is crying out to God to bring judgement to evildoers. In the last several stanzas of the psalm he calls for God to “make them like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind. As fire consumes the forest…so may you pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your hurricane. Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O LORD. Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever…that they may know that you alone, whose name is the LORD, are the Most High over all the earth.”[1]
The psalmist wants his enemies to be filled with shame and fear, driven like chaff by a wind. What stands out to me is the disparity of power. Chaff and dust are utterly at the whim of the “hurricane.” Man, specifically those who do not seek God’s name, could be like dust, not held together in one being, but driven before the wind. The use of shame here reveals a similarity to the account of the fall, and the association of shame with judgement, exile, and scattering, a hint that the evildoers in this passage were not properly relating to God. The reader’s attention is first drawn back to Genesis 3 from Psalm 83 by mention of shame, which is a reminder of Adam and Eve’s shame after eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were not just banished, but God “drove out the man” from the garden in exile.[2]Adam and Eve, then, were like dust driven before the wind in judgement for their fall into sin. The pattern of images, connecting the scattering of dust and chaff to shame, like Adam and Eve’s, continues throughout the Old and New Testaments.[3]
For Prideful Worship
We see that the judgement for pride in Isaiah 17:7–14 also connects the fate of dust to that of chaff. Here, judgement is tied to the pride intrinsic in worshipping man-made things instead of God. In this passage, Isaiah is prophesying against Damascus: “In that day,” Isaiah prophesies, “man will look to his Maker, and his eyes will look on the Holy One of Israel. He will not look to the altars, the work of his hands, and he will not look on what his own fingers have made, either the [idols] or the altars of incense.”[4]He continues a few verses later, “The nations will roar like the roaring of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far away, chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind and whirling dust before the storm.”[5]
In this passage, scattering and driving away is the consequence for having “forgotten the God of your salvation and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge.”[6]The contrast between God and dust is great, and the power of God inimitable. Dust and chaff are driven easily before the wind, and it does not bode well for those receiving judgement as chaff. But Isaiah includes an important dimension of this contrast that we have not yet discussed. It was God who created the ones who are “like chaff.” And even though he is the one who drives them away in judgement, he is also, as we saw in Genesis, their provider, the God of their salvation, a Rock. We now have two pictures for God, the Wind driving the chaff in judgement, and the Rock.[7]We can also see that when chaff strays from the Rock, it is driven before the wind. This was also evident in the account of the Fall, and is an important framework to keep in mind as we continue: when man strays from his creator through pride, judgement and scattering follows him.
Isaiah 17 sets up an apt contrast to the Israelites in the account of the Golden Calf, found in Exodus 32 and Deuteronomy 9. These passages are a good narrative pairing to Isaiah 17 because they tell the story of a people who chose to worship the work of their hands, in contrast to those mentioned in Isaiah 17. The Israelites, recently freed from slavery in Egypt, had turned their back on their rescuer and creator, and instead began worshipping an idol of a golden calf. In their pride, they worshipped “the work of [their] hands,” an idol. Moses returned from his forty days with God on the mountain to find that the people had, like Adam and Eve, rejected their creator and sustainer. God shared his plans to destroy them with Moses.[8]Moses pled with God to spare the people.[9]In this case, God does so, and Moses returns down the mountain. When Moses made his way back to the people, he was angry; fearful of the judgement of Yahweh. His action, however, was a display of the humility the Israelite people lacked. He “lay prostrate before the LORD…for forty days and forty nights.”[10]The author of Deuteronomy tells us that Moses then “took the sinful thing, the calf…, and burned it with fire and crushed it, grinding it very small, until it was as fine as dust. And [Moses] threw the dust of it into the brook that ran down from the mountain.”[11]The Exodus account shares that Moses scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.[12]In this event, it is as if God delegated a share of his wrath to Moses to give a reminder of their composition of dust as a statement against their pride. As this dust was incorporated into their bodies, they received a tangible sign that they were made of dust,[13]and were subject to the winds of judgement.
Moses’ work reenacted the work of God in Eden in scattering and reminded the people of their origin. God’s judgement came in yet another way, however. He sent the people away from the mountain where they had nearness to God. Here, after the Exodus, the people were already wandering, homeless for the time. After they worshipped the work of their own hands, God commanded them to leave the mountain. God would remain faithful to fulfill his promise and lead them to the Promised Land, but he would no longer be among them. Not only was their relationship fundamentally changed, but they were reminded, painfully, of their humble stature before their God. The consequence for their prideful idolatry, the act of trusting in their own work instead of the work of the true creator, was like that enacted in Eden—a geographic, bodily, and relational return to dust. They were scattered like dust, driven away and humbled, from the mountain where God their Rock had been near them. When their pride caused them to forget that they were but dust, formed and held together by God the Rock, they rediscovered their true nature through the judgement of God.
[1]Ps 83:13–18
[2]Gen 3:24
[3]This isn’t to indicate that the prophets or psalmists were intentionally reminding their readers of the Fall, only that there is a pattern to the way these events are described.
[4]Isa 17:8
[5]Isa 17:13
[6]Isa 17:10
[7]It is interesting to consider the Rock as creator of dust. Humans become “a chip off the old block” in a literal sense—made of dust, but bearing the image of our creator.
[8]Note the similarity to Genesis 18, when God shares his plans to destroy Sodom with Abraham.
[9]Augustine says in a sermon on Exodus that his prayer was maternal: “What sure maternal and paternal instincts, how sure his reliance…on the justice and mercy of God!” This interpretation implies similarities to Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 1, which we will discuss later (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, ed. Joseph T. Lienhard in vol 3 of Ancient Christian Commentary: Old Testament, ed. Thomas C. Oden [Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press], 142).
[10]Deut 9:18
[11]Deut 9:21
[12]Ex 32:20
[13]One should not miss the similarity of this event to the eucharist here.
