Reflections on Outwit: Biblical Stories of Regular People Taking Down Tyrants

At the beginning of November, just a week or so before I started facilitating the On Earth Peace (OEP) version of a study I call Outwit: Biblical Stories of Regular People Taking Down Tyrants, the US Congress’ failure to pass a federal budget led to an unprecedented pause in SNAP benefits. It was the first time in nearly sixty years that federal food assistance had been ripped away from families in this way, leaving 42 million Americans unsure about where their next meal might come from.

Poster of Upcoming Outwit Event Series

In our first gathering, the Outwit group learned about Pharaoh in Exodus, the biblical template for all tyrants before and since. Pharaoh was terrified of the Israelites, who kept growing in number under his oppressive rule. He was scared that the Israelites would rise up against his tyrannical leadership and did everything in his power to prevent it from happening. Starving people was one of his tactics: Pharaoh hoarded all the grain in Egypt, kept the Israelites from accessing it, sending them to the brink of starvation. He even went so far as to force the Israelites to build the storehouses in which he stockpiled everything for himself and his loyal Egyptian subjects.

Reading that story from Exodus felt eerily relevant as we watched and worked to make sure our own neighbors, suffering under a modern-day tyrant’s cruel policies, had enough to eat.

Every time I facilitate this study about tyrants in scripture and the many ways that people managed to resist them, that eerie feeling of recognition grows. The 2025 headlines echo the plotlines of ancient scripture so clearly that I sometimes wonder if every tyrant receives their own personal copy of the Tyrant’s Playbook.

For instance: the ancient historian Josephus wrote this about King Herod (the one in the Christmas story) in the first century, but I doubt you’d be surprised if I told you it had been written last week:

[Herod was] a man who was cruel to all alike and one who easily gave in to anger and was contemptuous of justice. The king was ruthless and paranoid, slaying his own family members when he felt threatened; greedy, levying heavy taxes on his people; and vain, concerned with his physical appearance and graying hair.

I’m not the first to recognize these repeating patterns of despots’ behavior, of course. Walter Brueggemann, scholar of the Hebrew Bible, wrote in his book “Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture” that the story of Pharaoh and the Israelites in the book of Exodus is a key to understanding all of human history. “It provides for us,” he writes, “the essential characters and the recurring plot that is always being performed and reperformed in the world."

If this story about tyrants and the regular people who find ways to defeat them is, in fact, a historically recurring plot, then one way we might begin to understand our own time and our own roles in the drama is to ask ourselves some specific questions. Brueggemann suggests four: Who are the tyrants, today? When do we hear the cries rising up from the oppressed, the poor, the exploited? Where do we see human agents acting against them? How is God’s divine power of liberation showing up?

I’ve had the honor of reflecting on these questions alongside powerful passages of scripture with dozens of people this year, and every conversation leaves me both more terrified about what is to come in our own performance of this recurring drama AND more confident that we have access to many, many more tools for resisting the tyrants in our midst than we realize.

It turns out, a whole bunch of tools for resistance are described for us in intimate detail, complete with user manuals and training documents, right there in the pages of ancient scripture. OEP is hosting another round of Outwit in the new year; I hope you’ll join me in filling our modern-day toolboxes with some of these ancient, biblical, tried and true tactics for resisting tyranny.

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